Here is the oft-mentioned Elven Guyver, “The Bionoid” from AD&D 2nd Edition game setting Spelljammer. Created by Newton Ewell, as pretty much all the anime influenced Spelljammer monsters were. Though oddly not drawn by him.

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I play one type of character in role playing games. Gobshites.

Fighting can be fun, shopping less so, but I do enjoying just having a good old chinwag during an RPG session. Why wouldn’t you? After all you can kill monsters, take their stuff and sell it to buy more stuff in a videogame RPG. But thoroughly confusing a disguised Rakshasa by claiming that you are their long lost nephew can only be done in an unscripted game with room for improvisation.

Now I am not nuanced about this. I don’t spend ages building a character history for my PCs any more than I do my NPCs. They are schtick, a mouth and a piece of paper with stats on it. I frequently just play variations on two themes – the smart criminal and the heroic idiot. I’m not alone, I’ve found most people have character types they tend towards.

At one time it used to annoy me, but I embraced it. In my campaigns I now just throw in the same NPCs in again and again even if they’re in different continuities/universes. And I kind of treat player characters as different incarnations of the same characters. You can probably blame Leiji Matsumoto and Michael Moorcock for this.

Here are some examples of characters I’ve enjoyed playing.

1) Rusty Blade, swashbuckler, AD&D 2nd Edition, Spelljammer

Not the first character I played with the main group I’ve played with, that was a hobbit whose name I’ve long forgotten, but this was the first memorable character, in the first memorable game I played with them. In part it was memorable for the module we played, namely the awesome Wildspace, but a lot had to do with the gusto at which I could play the character.  Leaping into action with a quip and his wits to save him. Lots of fun.

Of course, the rules bending Vorpal Sabre he had probably helped on the bravado front.

2) Miguel Manticore, peasant hero, AD&D 2nd Edition, Dragon Mountain

My arch-heroic idiot, Miguel was a charismatic fool who dreamed of spending all the gold the party was hauling from Dragon Mountain on building a statue of himself in his home town. Eventually he carried swords as if they were golf clubs due to the sheer variety of modifiers on them and was responsible for the confusing of the Rakshasa. Based in part on Miguel from Ruin Explorers.

3) Larry, elf, AD&D 2nd Edition

This was a character that I inherited from another player. As I was away at university on and off for 4 years, I frequently ended up playing spare characters others had started. I noticed that his weight had been written down wrong on his character sheet and he apparently weighed 500lbs. Rather than correct the weight, I played him as a morbidly obese elf with appalling dietary habits and an appetite for trying new “foods”.

4) Carter Sharpe, Ragabash Glass Walker, Werewolf the Apocalypse

This character was pretty much my arch-criminal character. A grifter with mob connections he was pretty much the only character in a party of living weapons that could sweet talk our way out of situations. He often needed to given the tendency to smash things in the rest of the group. I was never overly keen on the World of Darkness, I tried to run Mage and had little fun. In what few sessions of Vampire sessions I played very little happened.

But the Werewolf campaign I was part of was a lot of fun, involving planting bombs inside vampires chest cavities, becoming the leaders of a paranoid anti-government survivalist group, using the back cover of the Tricky vs The Gravediggaz EP as a shopping list of vampire hunting equipment and battling Chronos. Yes, Chronos out of Guyver. We also had a homebrewed World of Darkness Guyver in our party.

5) Frederico Rodrigo, gnome illusionist/cleric, AD&D 2nd Edition, Thieves World & other realities

I remember this character less for what he did, and more for what happened to him. 

We had a guy in the group called Barry. Now I got accused of my adventures being weird plenty of times, however I could never compare to Barry. And that’s why I loved playing characters in his games. His Thieves World campaign was the first I was involved with (though I think the presence Sanctuary was the only real nod to the books) and this gnome was my character.

The thing about Barry was that he clearly loved magic items like the Deck of Many Things, but didn’t think they went far enough. So at one point he had a home made list of random magic effects that you rolled on with a d1000. In Frederico’s case the party encountered a room of magic mirrors, Frederico rolled on the chart and all of a sudden I had two characters to play one CG, the other LE. Eventually the LE sacrificed the CG one by pushing him off a magic carpet so he’d be eaten by whatever monster was pursuing the party.

6) “Captain Badger”, fighter/cleric/wizard, AD&D 2nd Edition, Forgotten Realms

I can’t recall the real name of this character, but he was from another Barry campaign. Again, he was an inherited character, so I went with the schtick that he claimed he was a ranger. He’d catch/buy all these animals claiming that he was using his ranger abilities. One was a badger that the party decided to make their honorary ship’s captain. Alas, badgers having low saving throws, he was not long for this world. But that didn’t stop his captaincy. We fashioned him into a glove puppet and his captaincy was stronger than ever as he could now talk.

This character also realised that while he could never tame a lion to be his follower, he could buy a lion cub and just cast haste on it until it was an adult, with the mind of a kitten. The campaign ended with nuclear bombs dropping on Faerun. I can’t recall why, but I think Gnolls were involved and also a crossover with Barry’s Underground campaign.

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Good grief it’s been April since I did one of these, so hopefully you’ve all forgotten that I said I was going to do one post apiece for the 2nd Edition AD&D Gameworlds I’d played. Because I’m not.

Spelljammer

My all time favourite gameworld, all my life. Whizzing around on flying boats in space, the setting could be used to tie the various AD&D gameworlds together or as its own sci-fi tinged fantasy setting. I think it worked better as the latter as it offered a change from the norm in that creatures that would be deadly enemies in other settings could end up as uneasy allies in space. And the excuse of new alien worlds allowed it to amplify the AD&D goofiness tenfold. Hippo-men, space orcs called “Scro”, Space Penguins, Aliens that hatch from eggs that look like gold pieces, Elven Guyver Units and of course, Giant Space Hamsters!

Ravenloft

A fantasy horror setting that span off from the first edition “module” of the same name, the idea of this setting was characters from other gameworlds would find themselves drawn to the world via mystic mists, and then struggle to find their way home as the world itself tried to corrupt them.

Unlike Spelljammer, whose supplements and adventures stood alone, this was one of those settings where the majority of the adventures were IMPORTANT~! to the gameworld, and by the time the first run of adventures were finished, the world was changed and so they could sell the gameworld to you again! As disgustingly mercenary as that was, that campaign did have some great adventures in it, and the final two were suitably epic. And most importantly they were written to make your characters feel like they were important.

Forgotten Realms

Unlike the opening trilogy of adventures that launched the revised Forgotten Realms for 2nd Edition, which often felt you were sitting around while you listened to your mate read out some crappy fantasy. These were full of IMPORTANT~! things happening involving IMPORTANT~! characters, and you occasionally rolled dice, but you often found youself on sidelines while fucking Elminster or some other crappy Ed Greenwood character did something IMPORTANT~!

Anyway, not a big fan of this bogstandard fantasy setting, even in its Baldur’s Gater & Neverwinter Nights computer game forms. However it did have a couple of spin-offs that I enjoyed more…

Al Qadim & Maztica

These were ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms world, but were Arabian Nights and Mayan/Aztec/Incan themed settings respectively. My love of pirates and sea-faring adventure made Al Qadim fun and Maztica was designed by two of my favourite games designers John Nephew and Jonathan Tweet.

Dark Sun

Well this was an odd one. It’s sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy, with characters far more powerful than normal AD&D ones. And buckets full of psionics. The game line had a very distinct look provided mainly from the awesome Brom. So, psychics in bondage gear fighting on a dying desert planet.

The main problem I found is the psionic rules and the sheer abundance of psychics really bogged the thing down. AD&D 2nd edition was never the smoothest flowing rule system, but adding another rule system on top that was deliberately designed to run against the grain of similar powers already in the game, added to the pain.

Mystara

This was an attempt to bring the old D&D gameworld to AD&D as an introductory way into the game. It also tried to use CDs to bring extra atmosphere to the game… This was around beginning of TSR’s death spiral that led to Wizards of the Coast purchasing them, and gimmicky releases abounded. It’s probably more famous now as the setting for the Warriors of The Eternal Sun game on the Megadrive and the D&D arcade games from Capcom.

Red Steel

This was another setting that took place on the Mystara gameworld, but had an usual game mechanic addition that made it a world of its own. Essentially it’s the Gold Rush as a fantasy setting. It took place on the Savage Coast, a land permeated with a magical mineral that as well as making the eponymous Red Steel infused every living thing with superpowers.

Yes, superpowers. It was Dark Sun’s problem all over again. If I remember correctly you’d have to roll up a superpower for everything inhabiting the land, be it cat, horse or tortle (a type of turtle man). It’s a great idea in theory, a whole load of paperwork in practice.

Others

In addition to these TSR created settings, there were various settings from other publishers. I definitely played in a campaign that took place in the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting and there was another that I think started from the Thieves World setting (based on Robert Asprin’s shared universe books).

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So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.

AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80′s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.

Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50′s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.

The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).

The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing – I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.

However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.

Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.

I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.

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The next lot of entries cover a lot of the games I played during secondary school. And there are a lot of them. Some of them I owned for but a few weeks before swapping them for a different game, or selling them. Dungeons and Dragons was probably the beginning of that trend, with most the rulebooks for the system I had I bought off my friend JDG. In fact I didn’t realise that the “Expert” Rules were from an earlier edition and so there were actually number of character levels I didn’t have rules for.

Now Dungeons and Dragons is the prototypical RPG, and I’m probably an anomaly for starting with something else, particularly so for that something else being Paranoia. The game is what spawned the RPG subculture and craze, and it’s an interesting insight of the hobby’s roots. Which is hairy Tolkein loving hippies who played wargames and simulation boardgames.

The “non-advanced” version was apparantly made as a stop-gap for the more popular “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons” but became a game in it’s own right. While it has some stuff that is just plain odd, namely Elf, Dwarf and Halfling as very limited character classes, it holds it’s own as a game quite well. Particularly in the “Companion” and “Master” Rules sets that have the sort of campaign rules still sorely missing from most high level (A)DnD games.

I’m struggling to remember exactly what happened in the campaign I ran with this game. I remember it started in the DnD game world “Mystara” then went to countries that I had invented myself, and ended with the characters becoming gods. The Mystara world was strange in that it seemed to have been made up by TSR as they went along. There’s a tightly packed group of countries, with lots of detail and background all in the corner of one continent. Then as they expanded the world, the details got less and less, and countries bigger and bigger.

Obviously the presence of this game here goes to show that my parents had realised that pretending to be a dwarf wasn’t going to turn me into a satanist and that stuff like “Mazes and Monsters” was scare mongering guff. I’ll discuss the Eighties RPG witchhunt when I get to Dragon Magazine or AD&D second edition, as I want to go into it in a bit more detail and what I think TSR did that crippled the hobby.

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