Games

Ed's Role-Playing Games

How It All Began

It was Election Night, and my 9th Grade Civics/English class was "locked in" overnight to watch the election returns. We had just had a stack of pizzas delivered, and as my best friend and I took place in line with hopes of scoring a couple of slices of pepperoni-and-mushroom, I could overhear him discussing with a couple of other guys as to how they were going to take advantage of the long night to "play a marathon game". (There was no school the next day due to Teacher In-Service.) However, they were short a player as one of the guys couldn't make it. My friend turned to me.

"Hey, Eddie...wanna play D&D?"

"Sure."

That was my first experience with role-playing games. A couple of minutes later, shortly after 7:00 PM on November 4th, 1980, I set down a couple cans of Coke and a paper plate piled with pizza slices and took my place at a couple of shoved-together tables in the corner of a double-sized classroom located in the southwest corner of the second floor of Bayshore Junior High School in Middletown, New Jersey.

Since I was the "new guy", the house rule was that I was stuck playing the cleric.

Thus was born Erik Thorsson, a priest of Thor who owned a drinking horn that would always refill itself upon command and a magic warhammer that would return to his hand if thrown. Oddly enough, he was one of the few characters to survive that night's adventure.

(Three decades later, I still vividly remember that first game experience. In the intervening years, role-playing games have become my primary hobby; nearly everything I do in my spare time can somehow be related to my passion. That doesn't mean that I spend all my time gaming. However, nearly all of my interests -- from reading and writing to hiking and camping to historical reenactments -- can be traced back to having been initially inspired by my gaming hobby. Likewise, most of my best friends were met through gaming. They range from computer professionals to restaurant managers, military senior NCOs to businessmen, high school teachers to college professors.)

A couple of months after being introduced to Dungeons & Dragons, we moved from New Jersey to Wisconsin. I would spend the next year and a half in "gaming limbo", as I was at first too shy to get to know my classmates well enough to learn who the gamers were, and later was too shy to approach them and let them know that I, too, was a gamer and was looking for a game to join.

What I've Done Before

The first full-fledged RPG campaign I played in was during my Junior year in high school. Actually, it started during the summer of 1982, just after my Sophomore year ended and I had moved to Iowa. The DM and the other four players (two of them girls -- one was the DM's sister and the other was his girlfriend) belonged to the same church youth group that I did. Cody (the DM) had created an AD&D campaign called "Sands of Arrakis" that had an Arabian Nights feel to it and was based very loosely upon the book Dune; we began playing it during an extended camping trip that summer (everyone had their own book, character sheet and dice, and we divided the DM's extra stuff among us) and continued it when the school year got underway. We played most Saturday afternoons -- usually in one of the math classrooms at the school -- and on days during which there was no school. The latter sessions were usually played at the DM's house.

I naturally tried my hand at creating a campaign of my own. Like Cody, I based it on a book...in this case The Sword of Shannara. I suppose it is a good thing that we never got around to playing it; looking back at it now, it really sucked. (In my enthusiasm, I had tried to shoehorn pretty much every monster in the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio into the setting, as well as nearly every magic item in the Dungeon Masters Guide.)

"Sands of Arrakis" wrapped up shortly before the end of my Junior year (Cody was a Senior and about to graduate, the preparations for which were beginning to significantly cut into our gaming schedule), which was just as well because I moved back to Wisconsin as soon as school was out for the summer.

As the years passed, my gaming experience broadened -- first a bit of Villains & Vigilantes during my Senior year of high school, then Gamma World and Traveller shortly after I joined the coast Guard. These were rather enthusiastically followed by military/post-apocalypse games such as Twilight 2000, Morrow Project and Aftermath. In college, I played Champions and other Hero System games (Danger International and Justice Incorporated were my favorites), Paranoia, and, of course, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Eventually I discovered GURPS, which quickly began to rival AD&D as my favorite. When AD&D became the d20-based D&D 3e, I began to lose interest in it and GURPS became my game system of choice.

What I Do Now

These days, GURPS is still my system of choice (I tend to favor the 4th Edition of the game), but much of my gaming interest actually lies in the realm of conversion/adaptation -- taking an adventure published for one game system and modifying it for play under a different game system or even genre. Chief among my favorites for this are legendary D&D and AD&D adventure modules such as The Isle of Dread, Castle Amber, and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Of these, Isle of Dread is a particular favorite; I tend to use whenever I want a "lost world" setting and have ultimately adapted it for everything from GURPS to Twilight 2000. I seem to recall tinkering with it a couple of times with an eye towards using it in a Boot Hill or Gangbusters game, but those adaptations never actually saw play.

What I Am Currently Working On

Most of my gaming efforts these days appear to involve the latest incarnation of my old GURPS Spellgate campaign. Currently, I am running a campaign

that I have nicknamed "Spellgate 3.0". (It's the third campaign that I have run in my Spellgate universe, with one of the PCs coming from the old "Spellgate 2.0" campaign to provide continuity.) The six PCs are modern humans shipwrecked on a subtropical island and trying to find a way home. Yes, I know that it is an old plot...but it's a favorite of mine and I have run it (or variations of it) several times over the years.

Actually, I'm having a lot of fun with it. The basic premise is "What if John Barrie got it wrong and Peter Pan was actually the bad guy?" Then I grafted in elements of Shakespeare's The Tempest, a handful of old D&D and AD&D adventures, bits and pieces of LDS legendaria, The Shaver Mystery, Sir Francis Drake's lost "Nova Albion" colony, descendants of survivors from Atlantis, an obscure Hebrew goat-demon and an even more obscure Greek snake-god. Believe it or not, everything fits together if you know and can follow the internal logic.

Between the degenerate dwarf Neanderthals, Gadianton air-pirates and the savagely insane "Lost Ones" that prowl the forest, and, the poor PCs are running for their lives...and loving every minute of it!

My Current Game Inventory

Click here to see what I currently have in my collection of RPGs.

Games I've Played Over The Years

30+ years is a LONG time, and since I'm a die-hard RPG nerd, I'll try just about anything once or twice. After that much time, the titles just kind of add up -- too many to list. (Well, not really...but even I get scared when I look at the list and realize how it got that way!)

Below is a list of those games that I have played and/or have in my library; those in boldface are ones that I have particularly enjoyed or have otherwise stuck in my mind. (The games listed in italics are ones that were either tongue-in-cheek or were less-than-satisfactory.) The list is not all-inclusive...these are just the games that I currently recall having played at one time or another. As I get around to it, I will also include links to pages I have created for various games.

  • 2300 AD

  • Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1e)

    • The World of Greyhawk

  • Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2e)

    • Forgotten Realms

    • Ravenloft

    • Spelljammer

    • Masque of the Red Death

    • Dark Sun

    • Mystera

  • Aftermath!

  • All Flesh Must Be Eaten

  • Alma Mater

  • Alternity

  • Amazing Engine

    • For Faerie Queen and Country

    • Kromosome

    • Magitech

    • Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega

    • Once and Future King

    • Tabloid

    • The Galactos Barrier

  • Amber Diceless Roleplaying

  • Arduin

  • Basic Role-Playing

  • Battletech

  • Big Eyes Small Mouth

  • Boot Hill

  • Bushido

  • Cadillacs & Dinosaurs

  • Call of Cthulhu

  • Colonial Gothic

  • Car Wars

  • Castle Falkenstein

  • Champions

  • Chill

  • Chivalry & Sorcery

  • Crayfish & Crawdads

  • Cyberpunk

  • Cyberpunk 2020

  • CyberSpace

  • Crimson Skies

  • d20 Modern

  • Danger International

  • Dark Conspiracy

  • Dawn Patrol

  • DC Heroes

  • Doctor Who

  • F.A.T.A.L.

  • Forgotten Futures

  • Dungeons & Dragons (Classic)

  • Dungeons & Dragons (3e)

  • Gamma World

  • Gangbusters

  • Ghostbusters

  • Golden Heroes

  • GURPS

  • Hawkmoon

  • Indiana Jones

  • James Bond 007

  • Justice Incorporated

  • Lands of Adventure

  • Mage: The Ascension

  • Man, Myth & Magic

  • Marvel Superheroes

  • Merc: 2000

  • Metamorphosis Alpha

  • Morrow Project

  • Munchkin

  • Mythus

  • Ninjas, Spies & Private Eyes

  • Northern Crown

  • Nyambe

  • Other Suns

  • Paranoia

  • Pendragon

  • Recon

  • Rifts

  • Robot Warriors

  • Rolemaster

  • Runequest

  • Shadowrun

  • Space 1889

  • Spacemaster

  • Star Ace

  • Star Frontiers

  • Star Trek

  • Star Wars

  • Stormbringer

  • Timemaster

  • Toon

  • Top Secret

  • Top Secret / S.I.

  • Torg

  • Traveller

  • Tunnels & Trolls

  • TWERPS

  • Twilight: 2000

  • Valley of Pharaohs

  • Vampire: The Masquerade

  • Villains & Vigilantes

  • Warhammer 40K

  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse

  • Western Hero

  • Woof! Meow!