I just haven’t been feeling like blogging for some time now. I’ve got something like seven partially written articles & reviews, and couldn’t even work up interest in my usual “Worst of” posts this last January.
About all I can work up the gumption for is the occasional short comment. On that score, I should have posted this over at Chizumatic, but it would have constituted topic drift.
Steven was going on about a missed opportunity for a cool nickname in Mai-Otome. Which reminded me….
…best classic nickname from a role-playing session had to go to, what else: TORG. Seems we had a Cyberpapal priest, who was known as “…the Pastor of Disaster, the Minister of Sinister; the Deacon of Darkness, the Bishop of Badness, the Cardinal of Carnage; the Pope of NO Hope!”
If I left any out, I’m sure Dr. Heinous will drop by to remind me.
God, that was a silly game. Loved it. Too bad John Terra couldn’t write a module worth a damn. That’s John “I-can’t-remember-the-rules-of-the-game-so-I’m-going-to-keep-putting-Ords-in-the-wrong-Cosm” Terra. Yes, John “possibility-rated-Cyberpapist-Catholic-high-school-biker-gang-girls-in-trouble-in-Orrorsh” Terra. Logic? We don’t need no steeeeenking logic!
Master Plan and I once discussed the possibility of trying to acquire the rights to TORG and fixing it, but couldn’t see any way of profiting from what would be one hell of a lot of work, and then some company made noises like they were going to resurrect it, but that came to nothing. There’s just no market for a new P&P RPG, unless it’s got a loyal following, such as D&D or Serenity.
You know, if I have any readers left, they’re probably an eclectic bunch. So, survey time! What was your favorite pen and paper RPG other than Dungeons and Dragons? (I’m excluding it, so this won’t be a bunch of the same answers, over and over). Why was it your favorite? World, rules system, the people you played it with? What was your favorite memory playing it?
Car Wars, if it counts — with the supplementary material for playing RPG campaigns of it, I think it does. My friends and I used to play it in cramped bedrooms or in a particularly remote and cold room at school.
I’m not entirely sure why I enjoyed it so much, or why it sticks in my mind. But my theory is that it was its American-ness. Large and powerful cars on long straight roads in a country with fewer rules (or no rules at all, in Car Wars’s setting), people calling petrol ‘gas’ . . . I doubt the glancing impressions about America we received were very accurate, but they made a change from most RPGs.
In the late 1970’s I was part of a group that played “The Fantasy Trip”. That was Steve Jackson’s intermediate step in between Melee/Wizard and GURPS.