My #RPGDNA
Over the last week there has been a hashtag going around on Twitter—#RPGDNA—where people have been posting pictures of the RPGs that have been integral to their roleplaying histories. Sometimes it varies between four or six games, sometimes the focus is on the games that got them into RPGs in the first place, while with others it is the biggest influences across the board that have shaped them into the gamer that they are today. For myself, I want to focus on the latter and look at the RPGs that have been formative to my roleplaying over the years and shaped me into the gamer, GM and designer that I am today.
The reason I am putting this up as a blog post rather than just a simple series of pictures is because of something that @thedicemechanic tweeted—what's interesting isn't the list by the WHY. So, here's my #RPGDNA and here is why those games have been such an influence on me.
Dungeons and Dragons
I'm going to cheat a little bit here with D&D, because it isn't just one edition but several that have influenced me over the years. I'm going to focus on the main ones and why, and those are BECMI, AD&D Second Edition and Fifth Edition.
The Basic through Immortals sets for Dungeons and Dragons were what got me into roleplaying games in the first place. I think at the time I'd just become interested in Warhammer 40K because I'd seen an older kid at the youth orchestra I played with reading through Codex Angels of Death and I remember sitting at the back of this church reading through it like it was a window into another world. I also know I'd started playing the Old Fighting Fantasy books too, and later Lone Wolf, because I'd picked up Forest of Doom on holiday around the age of eight or nine and had discovered upon coming home that the second hand books stall run by the local church was selling tonnes of them. They were like 20p each, so I just ended up dropping all my pocket money on them, picking a new one up each week and playing through it voraciously before moving on to the next. Somehow I amassed a collection of 20-25 of them, plus the first 5-6 Lone Wolf game books.
My new found obsession was obviously noticed, because one day the vicar's wife stopped by and gifted me all five boxed sets of the BECMI editions of D&D. Turns out all those Fighting Fantasy books had belonged to one of her sons and the fact I'd been snapping them up made her believe that I'd probably enjoy D&D too. She wasn't wrong. I remember seeing those Larry Elmore covers for the first time and the sense of wonder about what these books contained. I read those rulebooks over and over, creating characters and running them through adventures, playing through the solo game in the basic set again and again. At the time, there weren't any other people in the tiny rural village where I lived that also played, so it just tended to be me and my brother playing, him taking the role of Dungeon Master and me running a party of six through ridiculous dungeon after ridiculous dungeon. I remember the party leader, a Fighter creatively named Beowulf Dragon Slayer, who eventually ascended to immortality. We didn't play beyond that because the Immortal set rules went way over my head as a kid.
I was still playing BECMI when I transferred to high school. There they had a gaming club, inventively named "Da Klub", which met every Friday night after school. I remember nervously going to check it out one week and being amazed at just how many people were there playing wargames and D&D. Eventually, as Magic the Gathering and Pokemon because bigger, TCGs joined the list of games being run too. However, the kids there weren't playing BECMI like me, they played AD&D. Thus, Second Edition AD&D entered the stage...
I remember picking up the revised 2e AD&D books from Travelling Man in Leeds. One of my new friends regularly went over and so I had my first visit to a real game store. The rulebooks were expensive though, so eventually I traded in my complete BECMI sets for store credit and picked up all three AD&D core rulebooks there. Trading away those sets is possibly one of the bigger regrets I have in my RPG life. But I remember seeing the Jeff Easley's cover for those Player's Handbook and being blown away by the image. It felt like BECMI was the little kids game and AD&D was the game for the big kids.
AD&D is probably the biggest influence for me out of all the editions of D&D that I have played and that's because it was the edition that made me a DM. I think I ran one BECMI game at school—I'm almost certain it was Palace of the Silver Princess—and after that it was all AD&D. If I wanted to play, I had to run, because no one else my age would. The older kids in the club had their own clique and played their own campaigns, so I ran games for those my age. Pretty much everything was homebrewed and featured all the ridiculous tropes. But AD&D was also the reason why I picked up computer games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment, which introduced me to the concepts of overarching storylines and how adventures could be tied together into an overarching whole, rather than just being one random dungeon after another in search of ever increasing loot. Another of the greatest regrets I have is not picking up the Planescape boxed set from Travelling Man. Still, it was an expensive product at the time and I didn't have a whole lot of pocket money.
I continued running D&D, transitioning to 3rd edition along the way, and a few other games right up until I was about 17. And then I stopped. Things change—I got a girlfriend, was playing in a band and university was right around the corner. RPGs slid off my radar. It wasn't until six years later, in the first year of my PhD in 2009, that RPGs re-entered my life. I had been introduced to the world of modern boardgames by some friends and I got bitten by that bug hard. It was a chance to go back to all the things I'd loved as a kid. I started buying more and more of them, discovered that there was a games society at the university and joined up. There I found people playing RPGs and just fell back into it. Fourth edition D&D had just been released around then and I ended up heavily investing in that, but when I played it the game just didn't feel like the D&D that I'd known and loved. I kept on playing other RPGs, but I only ever played 4e once. But when the D&D Next playtest came around and promised a melding of the old and the new and that Wizards wanted to listen to the voices of their customers, I signed up and took part, running a group through the Caves of Chaos. It felt like it harked back to what I'd grown up with. Different, but at its core there were some definite similarities. And that old feeling of wonder resurfaced again.
Fifth edition D&D features here not simply because of nostalgia though. It is simply the game that I run the most and have played in the most. According to RPG Geek, where I've been logging my plays since 2017, 5e D&D tops the list. D&D will most likely have a special place on my shelves for years to come. Fifth edition was also the system used to run Lure of the Mists, the first campaign run for me (and Leonie and Fred) by Kai—a group that I am very thankful to be a part of because it has produced some amazing stories and I have found some great friends amongst them. While D&D is no longer my favourite game, not by a long way, it is certainly the biggest influence on my gaming life. If it wasn't for D&D, I wouldn't be writing this today...
Vampire: The Masquerade
Vampire: The Masquerade was the second RPG I ever bought and opened my eyes to the possibility that RPGs were always about medieval fantasies and knights hunting down dragons. They could be mature and tell complex stories. They could feature social interactions more heavily that combat. I'm not sure whether I grasped all that when I first picked up the revised edition (pictured above), drawn in by the stark marble cover with a single rose (and intrigued by overhearing about it from some of the older kids at our school's games club—as it turned out they had been talking about the LARP at the time).
I don't think that I ever managed to run a game of Vampire that evoked the complexities of the world or the stories that the game promised could be in reach. In part I blame that on my novice GMing abilities, just realising these possibilities, but also my player group being more orientated to hitting things and taking their stuff. We certainly fell into the vampires with super powers problem that often gets raised when Vampire is discussed. I ended up often feeling frustrated that the game never turned out the way I planned and my players were frustrated that everyone ended up being more powerful then them (because, you know, they are fledglings and everyone else was either a neonate or ancilla). But the lore was fascinating!
When I got back into RPGs during my PhD, it was Vampire: The Masquerade's spiritual successor, Vampire: the Requiem, and the New World of Darkness that everyone was playing, and these were some of the first rulebooks I picked up when I started playing again. And that was mostly because of the lore. I was interested and excited to read about that world again. While I may have been disappointed in the changes that Requiem made over Masquerade, I am currently playing in a long running Requiem campaign online that is easily one of the best campaigns I have ever been part of.
Overall, while I might not have fully appreciated Vampire: the Masquerade as a game at the time, its lore and setting instilled in me how an RPG can weave a complex story and how roleplaying games could transcend the simple equation of looting dungeons and killing monsters in order to take their stuff.
Call (and Trail) of Cthulhu
Now we come onto my favourite game, and probably the one that has had the biggest impact on my GMing and RPG career—Call of Cthulhu. I know that many players of Call of Cthulhu arrive that the game first before ever picking up Lovecraft's works. I was the opposite though. I remember picking up a copy of At the Mountains of Madness and Other Stories from the shelves of my high school's library. I can't remember why. It might have been my teacher's recommendation. Or a fellow classmate's. Or maybe I was just intrigued by the cover or blurb. I do remember I spent a lot of time reading through their fantasy section, consuming with abandon everything that was on offer. But that's how I was introduced to Lovecraft, as a teenager, reading about Dyer and Danforth's journey beyond the Antactic peaks into that land of mysteries and horror. So, I was surprised to find out, when I joined my university's games society, that there was a roleplaying game based on Lovecraft's work. And it just so happened that the society was clearing out some old games (because they were being kept in a lockup in the building's basement that kept getting flooded...), which included a copy. And so, I came into possession of a ratty, slightly musty smelling, copy of Call of Cthulhu Sixth Edition.
I remember my first outing with CoC not quite hitting the mark. It was a typical jaunt to a recently risen island in Boston harbour, featuring Deep Ones and a Shoggoth, magical rituals and the like. But the overtones were very much D&D and very pulp. It didn't quite do it for me, because where was the horror? Yes, characters had their sanity eroded, went mad and such, but it didn't feel like Lovecraft. It wasn't until I picked up Trail of Cthulhu that my eyes were opened to what this game could be.
Trail of Cthulhu is fantastic in that it provides an excellent overview of how an investigative horror game should be run, how to string clues together etc. It, and the Gumshoe system, quickly became my go to over Call of Cthulhu for Lovecraftian horror and has been a huge influence in my GMing style, primarily due to its main tenet—give the player's what they need to advance the story. It also massively influence by scenario writing and mood setting in horror games, especially with Graham Walmsley's Final Revelation book. I like my horror bleak and this hit the nail on the head so hard it broke the mould.
While Trail of Cthulhu would become a staple in my collection, even going so far as to encourage me to write my own scenario for the Gumshoe Scenario Competition on RPG Geek (which won!), I still invested heavily in Call of Cthulhu books because converting them was relatively easy. As a result, I have amassed quite a collection—I'd say roughly a fifth of all my RPG books are for Call of Cthulhu or are Cthulhu related.
Since the advent of the 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu, I have found myself pulled pack to the original iteration of Lovecraftian roleplaying games. Seventh edition fixed a lot of niggling little issues with Call of Cthulhu and it has since become the main Lovecraftian game that I run and the game with the second highest logged plays based on my RPG Geek profile. I still love Trail of Cthulhu, but I always felt that the combat in Trail was slightly off and Call of Cthulhu does that aspect of the game better. I've also now written a scenario for Chaosium's annual scenario writing competition (and won that too!), resulting in that scenario being run at conventions like GenCon.
I suppose that if it was not for both Call and Trail of Cthulhu, I wouldn't be writing RPG supplements. I also would not be as good of a GM as I am. Call of Cthulhu (and Trail) taught me about how to construct a scenario, how to tie clues together, how to set moods, to use suspense and a myriad more techniques that have enhanced not only my ability to run horror games but all genres. I can honestly say that, while I wouldn't be a roleplayer full stop without D&D, I definitely wouldn't be the kind of GM I am today without Call of Cthulhu.
Fiasco
Fiasco is an odd game. I can't quite remember how I can across it. Perhaps in passing from a friend, or read about in one of the many lists of games you should play online. Needless to say, I acquired it, read it and shelved it. I found it intriguing—the concept of a GMless games—but never found occasion to try it out. That was until I was invited to join an online Fiasco game by a friend from BoardGameGeek.
During the heady rush of getting back into gaming via the explosion of modern boardgames that was occurring in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I has—like many—come to BoardGameGeek as a repository of suggestions for what to play next. And I found myself actively engaging with that community in many ways. One of those was joining the "Feel the Love" (or FtL) thread, a thread of love bombing and general positivity where gamers came to tell you all about the good in their lives, get support for when things were bad and just indulge in their shared passion for the gaming hobby. And it was a very tight knit community. At some point, the thread really took off and became a huge thing on the site with loads of new posters appearing. It's still going and even has it's own section on the website. But it became difficult to keep up with and quite a few of the old guard pared off to a quieter thread. But it's through the FtL thread that I came to know Leonie and it was her who invited me to take part in my first Fiasco game. After that, I began playing Fiasco once or twice every few months between 2017 and 2018.
Fiasco opened my eyes to the world of both GMless and Indie games. Through it I discovered and invested in systems like FATE and Powered by the Apocalypse. And it is through the group I established with Leonie and Fred, who were always a core part of those Fiasco games, that I got to try some of those games out, like Monster of the Week, or our short-lived but very fun Blades in the Dark game. I also met new gamers through those games, such as Jason (jaspermeer), Sam (Bifford) and ultimately Kai, who has been our GM over a great range of games now since 2018.
Fiasco also opened me up to improvisation in games. To realise that plots don't have to be carefully crafted from the get go and that great gaming experiences can be crafted out of a few notes and relationships carefully strung together. It taught me how to react to another player's dialogue to help draw out a story, to build on facts established through the course of play. It's a fact that Fiasco is one of the few games that has made me a better GM. One that is better able to think on their feet and respond to events in game, to identify what players want and how to give it to them, and to enjoy that fact that going down in a blaze of glory is sometimes better than coming out on top. It's for these reasons that Fiasco makes up a strong component of my RPG DNA.
Old-School Essentials (and the OSR)
Lastly, I loop back round to D&D, albeit it not necessarily in its original form. It's hard to know exactly how I stumbled upon the OSR, but it is the ethos of the movement that spoke to me—do it yourself. It reminded me of those early days playing D&D with my brother and my friends at school. Making up fantastic worlds, homebrewing systems so we could have laser weapons alongside swords like in CRPGs like the Final Fantasy series and so on. It is, in a way, pure nostalgia. But the OSR demonstrates, at least in my opinion, the depth and breadth of innovation that can be applied to games like D&D. While I enjoy playing 5th Edition with my friends, I do feel that the game has become a little stale. Perhaps not for all those fans newly come to it, but the fact that the majority of the modules released over recent years are retreads of some of the most famous from the game's past is telling.
Of all the games released under the banner of the OSR, it is perhaps the least innovative (in terms of rules anyway—the layout on the other hand...) that stands out to me, and that is Old-School Essentials. Essentially a reproduction of the old B/X rules with limited changes, OSE hits this list because of nostalgia. And it is that nostalgia that encouraged me to self publish my first adventure. There are so many other games within the OSR that are more innovative with their rules—The Black Hack's resource dice, Mausritter's inventory system, and so on—but OSE reached me over those because of two things. One is in the way it is presented and that is it's modularity. It feels like a game that can be easily hacked into whatever you want it to be and gives you the tools to do it. And if it doesn't have those tools to hand, you can bet someone in the game's burgeoning community has something that with plug the gap. And that's the second thing—community. The OSE Facebook group is filled with people creating stuff and putting it out into the world and encouraging each other to do likewise. Some of it is excellent, so of it is so-so, but the important point is that it's out there if you want it.
It's that openness of design and community that encouraged me to write up an adventure idea that sprung to mind during 2020's first lockdown and actually publish it. Thus was born Ominous Crypt of the Blood Moss, my first self-published adventure. It's now a silver bestseller over on DrivethruRPG and has received decent reviews, including 4/5 from Antonios S over on RPG.net. Now, I can't say that without OSE I wouldn't have published something anyway, but OSE certainly made it easier to do so that say Chaosium's Miskatonic Repository. And, due to the community's favourable feedback, it is likely that I'll be publishing something else for OSE in the future. In fact, I have something that I am working on in bits and pieces at the moment...
Sequence concluded...
So there you have it, five RPGs that have massively influence me as a gamer, a GM and have influenced my life in general. Without them, I don't think I would be the person that I am today, nor have the experiences and stories to tell. And especially not the friends that I have made along the way.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this post, or at least found some of the insights interesting. It's been a bit of a longwinded post, but I hope that I have shown why these games have meaning to me. Games are designed to tell stories, but the influence that they have on us as players is a story in and of itself. I'd definitely be interested in find out more about why others have selected the games that make up their own #RPGDNA and I am sure there are lots more interesting stories out there to tell...