My Role-playing History Part 2

Once the fun and innocent pleasure of Fighting Fantasy began to wear off, my gaming diet went slim, until I spotted a new kid in class, Thomas Ransom, reading what I later found out was the rules for the Fifth Edition of the Tunnels and Trolls role-playing game, in all its beautiful yellow, odd-sized splendor. I asked him what he was reading, and he told me all about Tunnels and Trolls. He did his best to describe to me what a proper role-playing game was all about. I find it funny to think back to it now, and how revolutionary the concept seemed to me, the game was almost limitless and frightening in its permutations. Thomas compared Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to role-playing games in the following way;
“Imagine a room occupied by several orcs with a closed treasure chest in the centre. If this was a regular game book it would give you just two options, open the treasure chest, or fight the orcs. But in a proper role-playing game you could choose other options not listed, such as deciding to talk to the orcs, negotiate with them or try to run away. In short, whatever you wanted to do, you could do it.”
He didn't mention the role of a dungeon master at that point. I was intrigued so he showed me the rulebook, which I thumbed through quickly. The rules had beautiful black and white artwork on the front and throughout by Liz Danforth. Instead of a simple few pages detailed how to roll for combat, here was huge sections dedicated to combat, magic, equipment and character creation. The few sections I initially read I found the writing clever and funny, for instance, how many other role-playing game had spells called “TTYF - Take That You Fiend”. What was different about this game was the rules were more extensive, you had far more statistics, you had a choice of a greater variety of weapons, magic spells and character races and classes. With Fighting Fantasy, you just had a single type of sword, but with Tunnels and Trolls you had many more options to choose. Instead of choosing to fight with just a sword, you got to decide between a bastard sword or a two-handed great sword, a scimitar or falchion. The options were yours to play with, you also decided what armour and shield to use. There was even more statistics that just Strength, Stamina and Luck. Now this was a book I did want to buy. It had illustrations of all the weapons and armour and monsters and spells. It fired my imagination just at the right moment. It had rules, but it didn't have any adventures. It seemed to have that maturity I was looking for and was the perfect game to make the next step up from Fighting Fantasy.​I went round Tom’s house one Saturday afternoon to learn more about this Tunnels and Trolls game and we started playing a couple of the solo books. Although Tunnels and Trolls was a proper role-playing game designed to be run with a group of players and a dungeon master, it worked very well as a solo game too. I'm sure the writers of Tunnels and Trolls never envisaged when they wrote the game that it would become better known as the best set of rules for solo role-playing. In fact, the preface to the very first solo game that Flying Buffalo wrote, Dungeon of the Bear, was a little story about how and why the first solo game came about. Players don't always have the luxury of a regular game group. It was ironic that despite wanting to move away from solo game books, Tunnels and Trolls threw me back into the world of solo gaming. But at least I got to keep my character this time and got to watch him grow in power, levels and wealth. With help from Tom I began to quickly understand the rules better. One thing I did notice about these solo books was the number of paragraphs was considerably smaller than the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but then the Tunnels and Trolls stories were tighter, more focused, and you accomplished a lot more on each paragraph. It also had a lot less fluff too. The reason for this was because each paragraph had more to do before you moved onto the next paragraph, whereas the Fighting Fantasy books would sometimes have you read several paragraphs before giving you a choice. Thomas himself had only ever played solo adventures and never tried a full role-playing game himself.
Later that Saturday, Thomas took me to a small shop hidden away in Ipswich that I'd never heard of before called War and Peace and showed me where I could buy both the rules and solo adventures for Tunnels and Trolls.
I couldn't afford the rules at first, but did have enough pocket money to buy my first solo adventure all for a pound. I remembered the very first Tunnels and Trolls solo adventure I bought, The Abyss. It had very few numbered paragraphs perhaps thirty or so, which was very small compared to the four hundred which was in an average Fighting Fantasy book, but it was my first adventure and Thomas helped me create my first character. In The Abyss, you played an escaped prisoner being chased by hounds across the country-side. I don't remember the specifics but I knew you were trying to outrun demonic hounds, and that death was behind every wrong choice. I must have gone through quite a few characters before one finally survived, and I played him through several of the solo adventures that Thomas owned.

I was lent at a previous school a ton of Conan novels, and slowly was reading them. It was natural then that I named my first surviving Tunnels and Trolls hero Conan. I had several other characters, but Conan was the character I put through the adventure once I knew what I would face. Solo adventures after all were deadly. The next week I went back to War and Peace and bought the full rules myself. I later found out that Penguin Books published Tunnels and Trolls and most of the major solo books in the United Kingdom. But I wanted to know more. I wanted my own rules and my own adventures. While Tunnels and Trolls was a full role-playing game, I never knew anyone who played it as a proper role-playing game with a Dungeon Master and a group of players. By the time I had gotten a little bored with the Tunnels and Trolls rules, I had pretty much played every one of the thirty or so of these solo books that had been released, from short adventures to big city campaigns. I bought both the original Flying Buffalo editions and some of the United Kingdom reprints which usually contained two adventures in one book as the Tunnels and Trolls solo books tended to have more content but less paragraphs. One memorable solo adventure was CityBook, which simulated an entire city for you to explore and have adventures and encounters. I was very dangerous, ambitious and very rewarding. It had many powerful artifacts and life-changing upgrades, for example one of your hands became a crystal which could fire bolts of magic, whilst the other hand could become a bears claw for massive combat damage.

2 Firsts for Deadlands: Hell on Earth.

Well it took me a long time to make it happen, but I'm getting a chance to do two things I didnt think I ever would. But first let me wind the clock back over 15 years ago.

Back in 1998 I was gaming 3 times a week. On Wednesdays I was part of the "Tuesday Role-Playing Group that played on Wednesday" which was a ADND 2nd edition Dragonlance campaign which ran for over 3 glorious years and was very much a high fantasy campaign theme. I also gamed on a Friday and this was a more intimate invitation only group which played a rotating list of games and was decidely low fantasy. And then there was the Sunday group. A group of players who never identified as role-players, but somehow we managed to play some of the most memorable games imaginable. A veritable mix of WHFRP, Shadowrun, In Nomine and...well youll find out.

The Friday group found itself needing a new campaign and I volunteered to run 7th Sea, which you will read about when I get around to posting about the epic campaign on my History notes. 7th Sea was essentially a "road movie" game set on a boat and was progressing nicely in the early sessions. Also at the same time the Sunday group was gearing up for its next campaign Deadlands: Hell on Earth. One of the players in the group really loved the Mad Max post apocalypse setting and we all bought the books and created characters. At the 11th hour the GM pulled out saying he got stage fright. Not wanting to miss the chance I offered to run the game in his stead.

So in a matter of days I found myself running a game on Fridays and a game on Sundays. 2 problems.

1. 7th Sea was a hand written/crafted campaign that was written the night before the game was to be run, it was character focused and very dynamic, and I needed to come up with about 3-4 hours of gameplay each session.
2. Deadlands: Hell on Earth was also hand crafted and made up as I went along but with notes and ideas. Thankfully Deadlands was also turned into a "road movie" game meaning I did cheat and cross-pollinate ideas as in both groups I was the only common player. This biggest issue was the games lasted much longer 5-6 hours of gameplay each session and with each player and character being difficult to deal with it meant for a really hard session each week.

I decided to can one of the games, and it ended up being Deadlands as there was nothing to replace 7th Sea on Friday as yet.

Abandoning Deadlands was a huge regret and is often mentioned even though it ran for a matter of 5 or 6 sessions.

Well this summer I intend to put things right, regroup as many of the original players as possible and finish what we started in 1998. So the 1st First is finishing a campaign I started 15 years ago and the 2nd First is after thinking I would never role-play again (due to family commitments) I am finally going to get the chance again. 

7th Sea gets a 2nd Edition and its on Kickstarter

Those of you who have gamed with me in the past or read this blog know I adore 7th Sea, and despite its demise and abandonment I am really happy to see it return to life with the original author back at the helm, John Wick.

He now holds the record for the fastest backed Kickstarter campaign for a role-playing game, and things just keep getting better.

My Role-playing History Part 1

I’d always been fascinated by fantasy and speculative science-fiction novels, artwork and television programmes. In my pre-teens I had read two of the Scott Saunders near-future space mystery novels written in the 1970s by Patrick Moore and at school I remember loving both of Alice’s (Psychedelic) Adventures in Wonderland. I found most children’s literature to be either mundane or borderline crazy, although I wasn’t aware that they were at the time. The Hungry Caterpillar seemed to be just a drug crazed insect with the munchies. The junior school I attended had a class reading programme which used the space adventures of a group of anamorphic heroes which seemed even to a six year old kid to be extremely LSD influenced and trippy. Looking back on it it must have been of French origin, as that country has a monopoly on the weird and fantastic, you only need to look at their comics and artists, and films.

​

For the first two years of my secondary school life in Chantry in Ipswich, I made a couple of friends who I kept in contact with even after I got transferred to a new better secondary school, Westbourne. I was your typical nerd kid in that I was into fantasy, science fiction novels and had an unhealthy interest in computers, listened to non-mainstream music and failed to connect with most people in my peer groups. When I moved to Westbourne it became a place where a tiny group of us accidentally discovered, and developed a taste, for social gaming and fantasy literature, and a life-long career of reading, writing and playing role-playing games of all kinds. We survived the initial passing fad of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to become adults who couldn't wait to go out on our next bold imaginary adventure.

It wasn't until my third year at Westbourne that all these elements started to fall into place, the music, the books, the TV shows. I was thirteen when the Fighting Fantasy book craze started in 1982. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s released their first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The Fighting Fantasy books took the Choose Your Own Adventure style of books that were popular in America at the time, but were unheard of in the United Kingdom, and added to it a simple set of rules for fighting fantasy monsters, solving puzzles and surviving traps. The rules for Fighting Fantasy were ridiculously simple and took up barely two pages, while the rest of the book had four-hundred numbered paragraphs. You started at paragraph one, read the text, at the end of the paragraph you were given a choice of which paragraph to turn to next. Each choice took you onto a new numbered paragraph, and so on. You never read the book sequentially, but instead jumped around the book to the paragraph number associated with your choice. I would later discover some of the original Choose Your Own Adventure books that were released in America in second hand and remainder bookshops and I found them severely disappointing in comparison with Fighting Fantasy. None of these had any rules or risks at all, just choices which didn't really seem to affect the final outcome. You could easily see how these inspired Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson to create their own line of fantasy adventure gamebooks.

The Fighting Fantasy gamebook concept was an incredibly simple idea and equally very successful. It was like having your own television adventure game show, similar to weird BBC Two programmes that I was watching at the time such as The Adventure Game and The Great Egg Race all inside a book. The Fighting Fantasy craze at our school lasted only six months, but for me it was all the push I needed to investigate these games further. At the time there was nothing else like it. I had never heard of the authors Ian Livingstone or Steve Jackson before, and knew nothing of their pedigree, or of their company, Games Workshop.

The original “holy trinity” of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom, and in my opinion these three books combined have not only stood the test of time, but are the purest form of fantasy gaming. They have in 2014 been released for mobile phones as Apps and still sell very well, even though they are priced at the same price point as the actual book itself. For me it was the starting point of my gaming career which extends to this day.

At our school, there were only a handful of these fantasy books circulating around at the time, and unless you bought one yourself, you had to wait in line for your chance to borrow one as they were extremely popular. Because of their very nature, it was unlikely you ever played through them again once you had finished the adventure, so passing them on once you’d finished them was perfectly natural and the turnover was quite fast. I did try to buy one of these books, looking in the bookshops, but never seemed to find any of them. Their distinctly beautiful covers and unique green spines should have made them easy to spot. I was worried that I would only play them once, and that the adventure would last only a few days, and compared to other books this seemed like poor value for money, two days for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook compared to a regular novel would keep me entertained for weeks. I had to endure weeks of waiting and of people narrating the things they did and the monsters, puzzles and traps they encountered and solved before I could experience one of these books myself. I tried to convince myself it was a silly craze that would pass just like all the other ones, but it didn't work as I was becoming more frustrated to hear of the adventures other people had, the things they had encountered and deeds they had undertaken. I was entranced by the small moments of fame that came with being the first to complete these adventures. I tried to avoid all the stories as I didn't want to have my own game spoiled. I wanted to join these very same ranks, but I think the initial rush had gone by the time it was my turn for glory and I finally got my hands on one of the books.

This is where it all started, with the infamous Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Well for me it didn’t, it actually started with The Forest of Doom. I finally got the book at lunchtime, and sat down and began to read the rules. I learnt all about the statistics, Strength, Stamina and Luck and I was hooked. Looking back now those original trilogy of books were some of the most enjoyable and innocent and pure classic fantasy games I’d ever played. The rules were simple, and all you needed was a pencil and dice. I borrowed the dice from my parent’s Risk board game and off I went. You had a character sheet in the book which you wrote all your statistics on, including gold, weapons and equipment as well as other items of interest to your quest. I felt it was better to write everything on paper, and not in the book itself. The book I got had already been written in and rubbed out so many times the sheet was unusable anyway. The quest was to find three pieces of a legendary dwarven hammer which you needed to defeat a final enemy with. The journey through the Forest of Doom was plagued with danger, riddles and monsters. If you got to the end of the book and didn't have all three pieces, you had to return to the start and begin again. I played it through several times, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I later progressed to Citadel of Chaos and then finally the legendary first gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. By the time I had finished these books, several more had been released. City of Thieves, Starship Traveller, Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King. Every book I read in the Fighting Fantasy series was different and exciting. Although after the sixth book was released, interest in the series began to wane at our school, I now started buying those books I hadn't played, and played through them. I remember being the captain of a starship in Starship Traveller one week, and a leader of a ship full of pirates in Seas of Blood hunting for treasure in a race against another pirate the next, and then a super hero threatened by an international super villain criminal operation, F.E.A.R (An Appointment with F.E.A.R.). While each book would still use the basic Fighting Fantasy rules, they would expand and add extra rules where needed, e.g. rules for your crew or super powers. They even did a Call of Cthulhu-esque horror game which used fear/sanity as a mechanic.

I also enjoyed some of the spin-off copycat books that were published around this time, as they were relatively easy to produce. A lot of these books never sold as well as the publishers had hoped and quickly turned up in remainder book stores within a few months. Book series such as Falcon, which was a science fiction and historical time-travelling game that had a lot of depth and was an ongoing six-book series. Lone Wolf by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk is probably the best known of the spin off books and again with each book you could play as a continuing series or as a stand alone adventure. Then there was the little known The Cretan Chronicles Trilogy of classical Greek mythology and adventure. And finally there was Steve Jackson’s highly regarded epic four-part Sorcery series. I also played the four-part Sagard the Barbarian series by Gary Gygax which was nothing more than a fantasy novel with no substantial choices, only encounters with dice rolls to simulate random combats and the odd optional choices. There were some prototype two-player game books, but sadly I never got to play them in the way they were meant to be played.

I played every one of the the Fighting Fantasy books right up to the seventeenth book, but by then I had stopped because my interest in gaming was beginning to develop and mature as I began to see the limitations or a pre-programmed adventure. For instance your choices were limited, luck was too big an issue, it was easy to cheat, and your initial starting attributes too random. I still have fond memories about these books even years later, and still own several original books. But for all their delight, these books could only let you explore and adventure what was written in the book and was therefore limited in scope. You always started with a new character (or crew ship or spaceship), your choices were narrow and focused to the story you could only choose paragraphs that were offered to you, and of course there was always the option of cheating, even though you were only cheating yourself. I began to look for longevity, and dare I say it a campaign that I had enjoyed with Falcon, Cretan Chronicles, Lone Wolf, Sorcery and suchlike. I wanted a character who would grow and cross over between books. I wanted a character that I could take to the next story and carry on the adventure. There was a limited series of books called Fatemaster which tried to increase the complexity of the rules and introduced the concept of creating your own map as you explored dungeons and the wilderness. Sadly the Fatemaster series never caught on and they published only two books in the series. I later found out that Jamie Thompson wrote a series of six linked books called Fabled Lands which attempted to do just that, and by rights should have been bigger and better than the Sorcery series, but it was released too late and in the role-playing lull of the 1990s. All six books were linked and you could move between each book depending on which island you were currently exploring. You made marks on the paragraph depending on what you did, you could leave items, treasure and notes so other characters could pick it up instead.

As an aside, Iron Crown Enterprises also released three gamebooks based on the Middle Earth Role-Playing game which even had a beautifully simplified set of rules from their Middle Earth Role-Playing game and they were incredible. I did own two of the three books before they were pulled from the shelves because they violated Iron Crown’s book publishing licence with Tolkien Enterprises.