The Olden Days of Yore > OD&D

There was an old Sarna Len campaign that I used to run as a paper-and-pencil role-playing game (RPG) back in 1980 or so.  My brother took over after I left for the military, and then when he did the same, it was run by a family friend.  I took back elements of the campaign for my own use when I returned.  The campaign remained dormant after that but it had about a 10-year total run time.

The initial game engine was derived from a customized version of the original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D).  It incorporated the idea of spell-points from Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) and had a lot more flexibility in how combat was resolved much like T&T encouraged even though it was based upon the mechanics found within OD&D.  I think a lot of old-timers did much of the same; "have fun" versus "have rules".

The Middle Forays > FYBS

At some point I created the FYBS role-playing game. F.Y.B.S. is an acronym for "Eff You BOB System", with myself being B.O.B for "Balance-or-Bust". This was 1992 or so. It was an attempt to incorporate ideas from BRP by Chaosium, GURPS by Steve Jackson Games and elements from my Sarna Len campaign. The key idea was  a style of play I named "adversarial gaming" where the RPG was played as a competitive gaming experience between the players and the game master. 

The BOB mechanism for events was an event generator with seveal dozen tables and these could be raised like a "random monster encounter" or "reason for revenge". The players utilized kibitizing, to provide helpful suggestions to other players and to change the story direction of the game master and BOB. The game therefore encouraged free-form intepretation of the written rules in order to convey the kibitz, especially if it was funny or took the game narrative in a satisfying direction. It worked fine enough and with it, myself and many friends built out several background settings. 

These were all given titles ending with an exclamation point:

• Riot 1999! A police state with some sci-fi elements from Damnation Alley and Escape from New York. Player-characters went underground.

• Deep Fear! Exploration of fear, stress, and psychological game mechanisms. Took from Call of Cthulhu and Chill.

• Apocalyptic Seizure! This was my first full attempt with a friend (Damon Williams) to build an entirely new setting free from even what came before. It was about the machine-intelligences known as New Gods who fought against the Star Gods. The New Gods were huge black spheres which roamed the galaxy and colonized planets for themselves and their derma dwellers whom they've acquired during colonization. The Star Gods were less favorable but they too were huge silicon bio-organic starships which also colonized planets. The Star Gods did things voraciously and without care for other species and were a befitting nemesis to the relatively caring species of the New Gods.

• May Appollonia Yo! Exploration of paratime and parallel universes. The characters are recruited by parallel universe versions of themselves to help the dying earth now ruled by sterile Amazonian women, the Amis Gaens, to push back their extra-terrestrial cross-dimensional alien invaders and restart the human race.

• Sarna Len Camp Pain! For fun, our circle of gamers took some time to build out Sarna Len. This time through I focused on an isolated archipelago outside of the time-stream of the main world's continent. I explored the idea of prophecy as a shtick, and the concept of Weirdness Magnet by introducing leperchauns  (sic) and an in-world pay-for-play underground dungeon adventure. Sort of like a Disneyland for barbarians and other murder-hobos. It went pretty well.