You Awake...

...with Throbbing Pain in Your Head.

As you try to rise to a sitting position you inhale dust and smoke causing you to cough involuntarily. You notice that you are lying in a depression beside a broken pod and that the air above is cloudy with a red-orange haze. Head throbbing with pain, a wave of nausea overtakes you and you nearly pass out. 

Slowly you begin to clear your mind and assess your surroundings. You search your memory wondering at your strange situation. You find no immediate answer to explain your present condition. Pulling yourself to a standing position, you feel a pain in your leg. Looking down, you are surprised to see fresh blood and a tear in your jump suit just above the knee. 

At this moment your attention is quickly drawn to the red sky above...a familiar mechanical scream of an Imperial fighter streaks overhead, its H silhouette disappears into the dull haze of a giant red sun. As you ponder it all, wondering how you got here...searching your vacant memory for answers, a black orb starts to grow inside the middle of the sun sphere. The black disk grows in size until the entire sun takes on the semblance of a giant, angry red eye. 

As the ground rumbles and shakes beneath your feet you nearly lose your balance and dirt cascades down the sides of the shallow depression in which you stand. Fearing that you will soon be buried, you scramble up the side of what you now can see is a crater with a broken pod lying near its center. Clearing the rim, you take in what appears to be a vast deserted city of brown ruins that lies before you. Black rectangles, which must be the remains of windows and doors, pierce the red-brown facades. Roofs are either flat or missing entirely. The shaking vibrations continue and you are startled to see the building walls begin to crumble and fall. Blinding dust billows forth.

Turning to limp painfully, you make your way toward an open area away from the falling walls and the crumbling crater's edge. Suddenly the ground beneath you gives way and you fall several meters, landing on your back with a metallic clang as rocks and debris shower down from above. Rising to a crouching position, your stinging eyes focus in the dim light filtering down from the hole above revealing that you are now in a hallway or a long rectangular room. A growl of sorts causes you to turn quickly and reach for the mono-filament knife strapped to your thigh. Through the thick haze of dust you think you see movement several meters across the shadowed room. Your thumb presses the activation button on your knife - more a tool than a weapon.

A blinding light, followed by a loud bang that rings painfully in your ears and then total blackness...

You awake again to feel yourself being pulled along a smooth floor by your leg. You quickly roll to one side breaking the hold of whatever is dragging you. As you fumble for your knife, you recall having drawn it before...it must be gone now. Lifting your head from your position lying on a cold metal floor, you see two small humanoid shapes with hair akimbo- one brandishing a thin club or spear. Both are dressed in filthy rags and a pungent smell assaults your nostrils. They look like...human children, but that makes no sense? 

Or does it?

Like many folks my age the original Star Wars film (1977) left quite an impression on me. That summer of its release, I recall making a number of trips to the local cinema to view Star Wars multiple times - unlike some, I don't recall just how many times that I saw SW at the theater, but definitely more than a couple - each time, standing in long lines. The movie had an understandable appeal to this nerdy high school graduate. There was no immediate merchandizing that I can recall however, as that trend had not really taken hold on America yet. There wasn't even a SW role-playing game - I didn't discover the original white box D&D until I started college later that fall. So for me, Star Wars fever came and went. The subsequent movies failed to rekindle the excitement I experienced while viewing that first film and today I consider myself a very luke-warm fan of the franchise.

Many of my friends and fellow gamers however, are very keen on Star Wars and I have occasionally played games built around the famous space opera. It would be a full decade after the release of the first film before West End Games published their Star Wars RPG using the D6 mechanic which had been previously introduced to the RPG community with their Ghostbusters RPG. WEG's D6 dice pool system delivers a fun, cinematic game that fits well within a heroic action movie setting. On the infrequent occasion that I run a Star Wars themed game, D6 is my system of choice. Oh, I have played (and GMed) a few other SW game systems, but for me West End Games got SW right with the first game. I am happy to see that the original SW game is now back in print with a 30th Anniversary Edition (this time published by FFG) that comes in a nice slipcase containing the SW sourcebook as well as the core SW D6 rules book.

And if you are wondering about the opening vignette above, yeah, that is a sampling of how (as referee and otherwise) I tend to mash together ideas that are freely borrowed from a number of sources.

Required Reading

"Appendix N" and the Roots of the Game.

What you bring to the table in terms of background is important to how you play the game. Our understanding of everything is shaped by what we have been exposed to. Each new experience is interpreted in light of all our past experiences. The creators of the world's first role-playing game (1974) shared a common background in the books they read and in the hobby of tabletop miniatures and board wargames. As it turns out, I shared much the same background. The game they created is a good fit for me. Its assumptions and tropes make sense and are relatable and I have enjoyed the game they created for four decades and more.

Nothing remains static, however, and the hobby has evolved since those early days when the three little brown books were the only game available. This has been true since the beginning. It was barely a year after publication of the world's first role-playing game when Flying Buffalo, Inc. started selling Ken St. Andre's Tunnels & Trolls and the folks at TSR released Empire of the Petal Throne - an adaptation of the little brown books for M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel setting.

In 2014 the 5th edition of the world's most popular FRP game was released, and since that time it too has been evolving. Arguably more people are playing than ever before and doing so in ways probably not imagined by the game's original creators. Online play is now the norm as the world-wide pandemic has made sitting around a table playing face-to-face problematic. Virtual tabletop software makes electronic dice rolls, colorful shared mapping and tactical display all very common elements of the game. Video streaming has created a market for watching others role-play as entertainment. The hobby has changed and will continue to do so.

Over the years I have enjoyed many conversations among fellow gamers about "what we are reading". A shared enthusiasm for science fiction and fantasy literature is one of the things which brought many of us into the hobby and gave us some common ground beyond our interest in role-playing, or "adventure gaming" as it was originally termed. The rise in popularity of The Lord Of The Rings novels coincided with that of the world's first role-playing game and the popularity of one seemed to "feed" off the other as fans talked among themselves.

Appendix N - the sources of inspiration author E. Gary Gygax attributes to influencing his thinking in creating the Advanced game (and by backward extension the little brown books and Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement) includes way more than the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Having read a number of the sources listed prior to publication of Appendix N in the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), I delved into Appendix N with a passion almost as soon as I was introduced and have continued to seek out and enjoy reading the authors listed in that document to this day. It goes almost without saying that this has influenced my approach to FRP gaming. Awareness of this has also made me acutely cognoscente that many others playing the game today do not share a background in reading Appendix N sources.

Our view of what the game can and should be is colored by our knowledge and experiences outside of the game. Put simply, people who have little to no grounding in the Appendix N sources bring a much different mind-set to FRP than those who do. The common ground is just not present. I think this explains much of what I am observing in our hobby today.

It is the nature of things to change, to evolve and to often reflect the preferences of those involved with shaping the future. This post is not arguing otherwise. My thoughts today are merely an effort to better understand and enjoy our shared hobby experience and to remind myself that there has never been "one right way to play the game". If you and others at your table are having fun, then that is the right way for you to play the game. I am becoming increasingly aware that playing with others who share a love for the Appendix N authors is how I most enjoy FRP gaming.

Play the right game for you and with those who enjoy playing as you do.