I've always loved tabletop roleplaying games (or just roleplaying games, as we called them back in the day). Even the idea of them is something that fills me with excitement and enthusiasm. It is the act of jointly creating a world of amazing places, people, and possibilities using imagination and language that is such a thrill, and such fun. These are games like Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller and Tunnels & Trolls, where usually one person acts as the referee (or Gamemaster or Dungeon Master), and the others are players who take on the roles of characters in the game. The following is a personal account of my involvement in the world of tabletop roleplaying games over the years, taking us back to near the start of it all.
Fighting Fantasy
The first roleplaying game we played was the tabletop version of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I had bought a book about the first tabletop game of all, Dungeons & Dragons, in the early 1980s, which made it sound like great fun. The book mentioned other games, including RuneQuest, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Traveller. These all seemed quite complex to my then twelve-year-old self, which was a little off putting to a novice. I was already familiar with the Fighting Fantasy rules from playing their fantastic gamebooks, such as Forest of Doom and of course Warlock of Firetop Mountain. In retrospect seemingly as a precursor to roleplaying, we often played them as a duo, with one person being the Gamemaster, reading the narrative in the book and rolling the dice for the monsters, whilst the other person played the adventurer who picked which choice to take.
Playing Fighting Fantasy as a tabletop roleplaying was only a little bit different from playing the gamebooks in this way. During the summer of 1984 we had our first gaming sessions when my brother and I were on holiday with our grandparents in their caravan. Virgil, my brother, was a hero called Haro, named after a brand of BMX bikes, and my Nan was a hero called Samantha. My Nan loved card games, fruit machines and games of chance generally, so playing a game involving lots of dice throwing seemed natural to her. We had always played her games, so it was lovely to organise a game where she was a player, entering our world of fun.
RuneQuest
Back at home, I decided this experience had given me the confidence to think of buying Dungeons & Dragons. We didn’t have a lot of money as a family, but luckily, I had just sold a ZX Spectrum computer game called “Splat Superman” to a magazine for the extraordinary sum of £40, an absolute fortune to a now thirteen-year-old. This was in the days when computer magazines would include listings of games programs, which readers would then have to laboriously type into their home computers, only to realise after three hours of doing so that they must have made a mistake somewhere in the two hundred odd lines of code, and often ultimately regret the whole exercise when it wouldn’t work.
With these funds, I thought my goal of buying Dungeons & Dragons was at last in sight. One Saturday morning, my friend Peter and his family picked me up to go out for the day, and we drove into Southampton. Peter and I went into a shop in the East Street Shopping Centre, which was demolished some years ago. We headed for a shop called Pastimes II, which sold all sorts of games, and was famous for its window display of a chess game with a robotic arm that moved the pieces. They also sold roleplaying games, including the one I was so keen to purchase, Dungeons & Dragons.
I scrutinised the roleplaying games that I could see on sale inside but to no avail; D&D (as it is often shortened too) was nowhere to be seen. Instead, my eyes alighted on RuneQuest, another fantasy game I had read about in admiring terms. This looked interesting, not least because of an illustration of a young woman in a chainmail bikini fighting a lizard monster on the front of the box. I couldn’t find D&D anywhere, so RuneQuest it was, I uncharacteristically instantly decided.
I took the RuneQuest box set from Games Workshop up to the counter to buy. I had chosen it from a large selection of roleplaying games that were on shelves that were inside the shop window, in front of you as you walked in. I paid my £12.95, or whatever it was, and was just about to head out of the shop, when I looked to the right of the counter and could see a whole section of the shop dedicated to D&D! If only I had seen that first, everything would have been so different.
I left, and Peter’s Mum and Dad drove us into Woolston, where they wanted to do so some more shopping. I remember that anti-socially, I wanted to stay in their car instead, to read my new purchase with great fascination.
We soon played RuneQuest, or rather, the simpler Basic Roleplaying (BRP) game that came with it, which featured a simpler, introductory version of the rules. Haro, Harold and Armstrong were the names of the adventurers. I had my own player character as well, even though I was the Gamemaster, by the name of Radilion. The Gamemaster having their own player character is not as common now as it was then, but I wanted to be part of the fun too. I converted the Fighting Fantasy scenarios to the BRP rules, and we played them, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it.
Soon, the players were so engrossed that they demanded that we play it, even though I hadn’t had a chance to write anything. My players were always comparing their characters’ statistics, like a game of Top Trumps. It was difficult to get hold of printed adventures in England at the time, which meant I was always writing my own, which could be a challenge. Had I managed to buy D&D as I planned, this would have been rather easier, as there were abundant scenarios and sourcebooks for it compared to RuneQuest, at least in England.
Word
of our game spread, and we soon had a lot of interest. I remember one
particular Saturday afternoon in the mid-eighties when we had fourteen players
taking part in an adventure in the Troll Woods in the amazing fantasy world of
Glorantha in which RuneQuest is usually set. These were happy times,
full of fun and seeing friends.
As the games continued, we added in more and more of the RuneQuest rules. To some extent, the way the rules were set out didn’t help in the learning process. For instance, most of the character creation and experience rules were set out, unannounced, in an Appendix, which meant that until I eventually worked out where the extra rules were, initial player characters had little skill in anything, which meant the games were difficult and deadly. This was symptomatic of the sometimes-amateurish and disorganised approach of many of the publishers at the time, who often didn’t seem to consider how to make it easy for an interested reader to understand or use the rules.
A Plethora of Games!
RuneQuest was always our mainstay in gaming, but we soon bought new games, and I remember purchasing Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game from Keith Pauls toyshop in Woolston, Southampton. This was another roleplaying game where it was difficult to get hold of copies of adventures. Like many roleplaying games at the time, the core rule books didn’t contain a single scenario for new gamers to play, which was always rather frustrating. I bought a book describing episodes of Star Trek that had been written or scripted for the original series but never ultimately produced for TV, and wrote these up as scenarios for our game, which we set at around the time of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. This was exciting as the plots and settings were much more involved and richer than anything my now fifteen-year-old imagination could have produced.
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| Ghostbusters the Roleplaying Game - frightfully good! |
I also bought the Ghostbusters roleplaying game, which was enormous fun, and, thankfully, came with some good scenarios to play immediately. My friends (and my players) also bought their own games. This included the Conan Role-Playing Game, which again had little support in terms of adventures for us to play. This was the first time we bought a game from TSR, the publishers of D&D.
We had grown up reading comics, and so it seemed natural to buy superhero roleplaying games. The first of these was another TSR game, Marvel SuperHeroes which was good fun although a lot of the supplements were just rosters of character statistics, often to be found in other supplements (and hence duplicated) or even in the original rulebooks.
We also bought the DC Heroes game for playing superheroes from that comic world, such as Superman and Batman. This had an interesting system based on exponential numbers, enabling Superman and Jimmy Olsen’s strength to be rated without Superman’s strength being a number dozens of digits long. I devised our own campaign setting for it, based in England, and one adventure involved a parody of Superman named Hyperguy. This was a game I loved and regret not playing more of and would love to run a campaign for now. The lack of scenarios available to purchase in England was another problem here too.
Other games we played included Twilight: 2000, set after a nuclear war in the nineties, and Traveller: 2300, set some 300 or so years later. Traveller: 2300 had a fascinating, hard science fiction setting in comparison to other sci-fi games available. These games often involved a lot of military style combat and tended to focus on statistics for all sorts of guns, grenades, and other weaponry of many kinds.
Another game I played where I wasn’t the Gamemaster was Star Wars: The RoleplayingGame. It’s obvious that Star Wars is a perfect setting for a science fiction game, and the rules from West End Games did a great job of creating the atmosphere and pace of the films.
At one point, I even managed to create my own roleplaying game. This was called 4198 A.D., a free-flowing science fiction game with minimalist rules. It was entirely improvisational, which I loved after being weighed down with lots of rulebooks for other games. Whilst originally it was set in a futuristic version of Orwell’s 1984 with its own version of Newspeak, it quickly slipped into a lightweight parody of Star Wars. It was good fun though, and I especially enjoyed writing the rules for starship combat.
We also had a stint of playing the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game from Ice Crown Enterprises, which I recall being a very detailed game, involving consulting tables from the rulebooks. It has always surprised me that Middle Earth hasn’t made more of a direct impact on tabletop roleplaying, considering that it indirectly is the inspiration of so much fantasy gaming. Presumably the understandable protectiveness of the Tolkien estate played a role. After all, they did famously insist that TSR remove any reference to hobbits or balrogs from D&D, which they did by renaming them with the rather less memorable names of halflings and balors.
Speaking of D&D, it may surprise some that there is not more mention of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Oddly, whilst I set out to buy and play D&D, it was through sheer bad luck that it was to be many years before I played what the company that publishes D&D now, Wizards of the Coast, call “the world’s greatest roleplaying game”. Some schoolfriends had bought it, and so, several years after my first foray into roleplaying, I finally got round to playing D&D.
After years of savouring and delighting in the detail of the RuneQuest system and its setting of Glorantha, D&D in comparison seemed bland, the rules at such a level of abstraction that it drained any encounter of strategic or tactical interest.
The setting for D&D always seemed to be a vague, stereotypical fantasy. The system felt, compared to RuneQuest rather odd and unrealistic and failed to excite, or impress me. At the time, it was the only game I played just to enjoy the company of my friends rather than to enjoy the game itself. I later played it whilst studying in Bristol at the polytechnic.
Looking back, I think a big part of this attitude to D&D was that I have always enjoyed being the Gamemaster more than being a player, and the only times I played D&D during this period was as a player, and not as a Dungeon Master. Rather unfairly then, my view of D&D was influenced by my natural preference for being the referee, rather than anything to do with the game itself.
The RuneQuest Renaissance
From the early to mid-nineties, my gaming group focussed on RuneQuest and for a long time we played it on a weekly basis. I was a student during this period and gaming provided an outlet for imagination and fun that had the added advantage, in my condition of poverty whilst studying, of being largely free of charge.
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| Sun County - a classic RuneQuest supplement from the Renaissance period |
I didn’t know it at the time, but this period has in retrospect been called the RuneQuest Renaissance. RQ (as it is often abbreviated) had gone through a difficult period from the mid-eighties until the start of the Renaissance period. A new publisher had become involved, and a third edition was released in 1984, at a greatly increased price. If I had gone into Pastimes II following the release of this, the third edition, there would have been no way I could have purchased it. Part of RuneQuest’s attraction had always been the extraordinary imaginary world of Glorantha the game was set in, created by Greg Stafford. For whatever reason, the third edition untied RuneQuest from its game world, and the reader was given examples of playing the game in an utterly uninteresting fantasy version of ancient Europe. Somewhat overwhelmed by all these changes, I decided as Gamemaster that we too would have to start playing in this new setting and leave Glorantha behind. It was a huge mistake.
One underrated aspect of Glorantha as a setting was, right from the start, the goal of a player character becoming a Rune Lord (or Rune Priest, although none of my players were interested in that), an exceptional hero of renown who had mastered the powers of the Runes, after which the game is named. To us as young players, this had an excitement all its own, as being a difficult but ultimately, one day, attainable goal. This long held out promise was snatched away from us by these changes.
The change in the rules and the move away from the extraordinary fantasy world of imagination that was Glorantha were unsettling and upsetting, and my brother ended up in tears over it all. Producers of games like this must remember who many of their players are going to be.
Various sets were produced allowing RuneQuest to be played in other settings, including Land of Ninja and Vikings. We bought both, but it was only the latter that we found enjoyable, and that was only because it reminded us of some of what we had loved about Glorantha.
Thankfully, by the start of the nineties, things came full circle and more Glorantha based productions became available. We found ourselves back in Dragon Pass once more, almost like a homecoming, talking about familiar place names such as Pavis, Corflu, Boldholme and Nochet. I was a young adult by that point and, despite being a poor student, was at least able to buy the odd Glorantha fanzine or official book once in a while. It felt like being a lot more part of the gaming scene all over the world and our saturation in the detail of Glorantha increased greatly.
We had some amazing times during this campaign, and the power of the imagination is such that some of the most intense moments almost feel like real memories. The best example of this was a huge sea battle between the Lunar Empire (often depicted as the villains of the Gloranthan setting) and the Wolf Pirates.
The battle was the climax of a series of sea-borne adventures, in which the player characters had from time to time encountered the notorious Wolf Pirates, led by the Rune Lord and legend, Harrek the Berserk. Their meetings often had drastic and unfortunate results. The adventurers later become allied to a company of pirates who were themselves aligned with the Wolf Pirates, albeit not part of their outfit. Gaming in this regular way bult up by accretion a substantial and detailed body of lore and history for the characters, a rich narrative written week after week as the game carried on, interacting between what I wrote as Gamemaster and what the players did during play.
The Lunar Navy had begun operating in and around Corflu, a southern outpost and port, as part of a long-term campaign to attack the freedom loving countries from which the adventurers hailed. The pirates had decided to fight them, to keep the seas free of their rule, and so their assembled ships fought in the Rozgali Sea.
It must be remembered that at this point in Gloranthan history, the oceans and seas had only recently become open again to ships and boats, after a mystical ban had prevented sea travel for centuries. In one RuneQuest sourcebook from the time, sea travel in Glorantha was likened to space travel for us now, exotic, dangerous and very rare. I loved that idea of making something common place and ordinary acquire the trappings of the fantastic. A spell always had to be cast on a ship before it set sail on the open sea to avoid being destroyed by the Ban.
With this in mind, the sea battle that formed the centrepiece of the adventure was unprecedented. The Wolf Pirates already had several large phantom wolves at their disposal, which could be unleashed during the battle, run over the waves, and devour sailors on the decks of enemy ships.
The Wolf Pirates planned to attack the Lunar Navy to prevent the imperial forces having total control of the seas of the south coast of central Genertela. The Wolf Pirates had assembled their own forces, which included the pirates with which the heroes played by my players were allied, and so the adventurers become part of this huge conflict.
Suspense had been building up to this point for many months as it became clear the Lunar Empire was going to keep pressing the attack, being the enemy nations and villains in the world of Glorantha. The Empire of the Red Moon, another name for it, could call upon monstrous terrors drawn from the realms of chaos, such as the Crimson Bat, a monster with a wingspan of ninety metres. In previous adventures, the heroes had heard rumours of one such vile abomination being a demi-god encrusted in ruby-faceted armour, called Carl-Eel. This being could fly faster than any eagle and was stronger than the dinosaurs that still roamed parts of Dragon Pass. Later, they saw Carl-Eel at a distance, as a dark red comet flying high in the sky, far to the north.
The name “Eel” was, in the Lunar Empire of Glorantha, a dynasty featuring some of the most prominent Lunar heroes (or villains might be more apt). We were all comic fans, and I thought it would be fun to have a fantasy equivalent for a Superman-level figure in the game, but that, terrifyingly, he was on the enemy’s side. I couldn’t resist switching Kal-El, Superman’s birth name, to Carl-Eel. Finally, at the beginning of the sea battle, the comet grew closer until resolving into the crimson-clad Lunar superhero, glittering as he flew on the back of his nightmare steed, high over the assembled fleets, a scarlet cloak billowing out behind him. His sudden arrival at the battle was a great shock to the players, heightening the tension.
Further adding to the players’ challenge was the involvement of merfolk in the battle. At great expense, the Lunar Empire had paid a tribe of merfolk to summon an enormous sea-serpent to fight for them. Soon, the sea-serpent was cutting through the waves, head aloft, to attack the ships on which our adventurers stood. It was an intensely dangerous situation, with non-player character pirates flinging themselves into the sea as the serpent approached, to avoid being eaten.
Desperately, one of our adventurers ran up to the arbalest stationed at the prow of the vessel he was on. The serpent was two dozen or so yards away, the adventurer had little chance of success before it would attack, arbalests being difficult to aim in the best of circumstances, let alone on a ship pitching up and down in the swells of the sea.
All seemed lost but then – the player rolled the hit, and, on a D100, rolled “01” – a critical hit!
In the RuneQuest system, this was the very best of all successes. We gasped and shrieked with amazement.
I ruled that the bolt from arbalest directly hit one of the serpent’s eyes, penetrating deeply. This didn’t kill the serpent by any means, but it certainly distracted it from immediately devouring the adventurers and their ships. The battle was ultimately a catastrophe for both sides. The centuries’ long mystical prohibition on sea and ocean sailing had meant everyone had forgotten how dangerous naval combat could be. In decades of gaming, this incident is the most intense experience and, thanks to the exercise of collective imagination of our gaming group, it almost, in all its extraordinary strangeness and vividity, has much of the coherence of a real memory.
This was only one incident in years of generally weekly roleplaying, with the accumulation of so many details giving rise to a richly populated fantasy world of the imagination. Thanks to the RuneQuest Renaissance and having more purchasing power as a young adult, getting hold of Gloranthan material was a lot easier.
I still found time to write my own adventures though, including my own version of Moria, the dwarven subterranean city from Middle Earth. The first half of the nineties was an almost continual rhythm of weekly games and rather wonderfully for some of this time, one of our players kept a chronicle of our adventures, which I still have to this day.
This carried on until, in late 1996, we played our last session of that RuneQuest campaign, setting sail once more, this time for an island in the southern part of the Mirrorsea Bay, to take part in a Gloranthan version of the Olympic Games in the year 1621 S.T. They never arrived, as our last gaming session saw the players board their vessel, and that was it. After an enormous variety of monsters, villains, and dangers of all sorts, it was the Gamemaster starting full time employment as a lawyer that finally brought the adventurers’ Gloranthan wanderings to an end.
An interregnum
If you had told me that this was the last roleplaying game I was going to play for more than twenty years, I would have been shocked and rather sad. There was no announcement or decision about it; we just never got back to it.
Over the following two decades, I sporadically kept in touch with the roleplaying world. RuneQuest seemed to disappear, only to be sustained and then revived through the enthusiasts rather than the companies who had produced it. I think of Peter Maranci and his website as a prime example. Fanzines kept the flame as well, and Tales of the Reaching Moon was a joy to read for Gloranthaphiles.
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| Tales of the Reaching Moon - everything you could dream of from a roleplaying fanzine |
But it seemed the hobby as a whole was in steep decline, and the collapse of TSR had seemed to encapsulate it. All anybody seemed interested in was Magic, a card game, and similar products.
I had no time, I had a more than full-time career and then, as well, a young family. The desire to play still lingered, dormant within.
My son Ben has a serious medical condition, sometimes involving long stays in hospital, and in the late 2010s, as I lay on a camp bed on the ward in hospital next to my little boy, I thought of the fun and escapism we used to enjoy in our worlds of the imagination. The dark nights of such a serious situation weighed heavily on me and I decided I wanted to return to the bright worlds of fantasy and fun, where just the use of words could construct jointly crafted tales of daring and danger that we lived and saw in our minds’ eyes.
The first game I bought following this decision was a second-hand copy of the Buck Rogers game from TSR, which had been published in the early nineties. This was purely on a whim, and I was grateful to my group of friends who humoured me by agreeing to play. It was a lot of fun and allowed me to think that the magic of gaming was still there, despite the passage of so many years.
At last, thirty years later, Dungeons & Dragons
Introducing my daughter, two nephews and two other young family friends would be a good way to get gaming again and enjoy time with my family I decided, and Dungeons & Dragons would be the easiest way for me, as a Dungeon Master, to get playing, due to the enormous number of supplements and sourcebooks available. So, more than thirty years after my failed first attempt, I decided to buy D&D.
Instead of being a stereotypical, bland world, the D&D setting is now like a familiar and well-loved realm we look forward to visiting. Its tone and richness are distinctive at this stage, after so many years, like a welcoming old home. Playing D&D has a unique excitement all of its own.
The system, far from being unplayable and too abstract, is sweetly placed at just the right level to be a thrilling and fast-paced game. I have loved becoming, somewhat to my surprise, a Dungeon Master, especially as it means I can spend time with my family and friends.
We played the Starter Set for D&D, which was fantastic fun and perfect for my junior players. They have really surprised me when playing. I had expected them to be amused by all the traditional D&D activities, such as killing monsters, exploring dungeons, and grabbing treasure, and they certainly have. What I hadn’t anticipated was how keen they would be to participate in creating some of the world of the imagination themselves. The most striking aspect of doing so was establishing themselves in Phandalin, the medieval village in which much of the Starter Set takes place. Soon after settling into rooms in the village inn, they set about purchasing their own premises, which were swiftly refurbished into the Forgotten Realms’ first pizza parlour!
I wasn’t concerned about how incongruous a pizzeria was going to be in a land of orcs, sorcerers and owlbears; we were having too much fun to notice. The Burning Hands spell was put to good use in starting the ovens (an event which they now use to promote their business) and Droop, a down-on-his luck goblin they rescued during an adventure, has been employed as a hardworking, waiter, washer-upper and dogsbody.
It turns out that during the times of the Roman Empire, the ancient Romans had their own equivalent of pizza, so this may not be entirely ahistorical after all. Influences from computer games made themselves felt, with the players exploring options such as wanting to see what difference putting a banner on the side of the building would make to business, varying the menu, and, most excitingly to me, carrying out economic espionage by surreptitiously entering the inn (their only real competitor) to see what their prices were and considering the merits of all out competition or colluding with the inn by price-fixing, or co-ordinating special events at each establishment to maximize incomes.
None of this is in the adventure books as written but has been so much fun to play. They’ve also got involved with local politics and one of the adventurers has thought of running for Mayor. They have been far more imaginative in their approach to the game than I had anticipated.
Doctor Who too
Another game that intrigued me was the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game from Cubicle 7, which proved to be immense fun. The Doctor Who game’s great attraction is allowing the game to be limitless. You can go anywhere, at any time, just like the show. I love, as Gamemaster, having so many diverse roles to play, which have included Mary Queen of Scots, a starship captain from the 38th Century and even the creator of the Daleks himself, Davros. The game system emphasises a fast-paced style, with enough detail to keep the sense of risk and intrigue. I’m hoping to write my own scenario for it soon, based on our fan film, Tyranny of the Daleks.
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| Caught in the act! As Gamemaster for the Who RPG |
With the onset of the pandemic, our great games of D&D, and the wonderful meetings of families that took place as a result, have been curtailed, and so I’ve been playing the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game with a smaller group of players (namely two in number and me as Gamemaster). This has been huge amounts of fun and escapism in such a difficult time.
Fun and Thrills
What’s striking about roleplaying games is how enormously popular they are in present times. Players of earlier decades like myself might be inclined to assume that the glory days were the seventies and eighties, but it is just not true. There are much more people playing tabletop roleplaying games now than ever. Dungeons and Dragons continues to be the most popular and the most played; the most played it has ever been is right now.
It’s the digital age, and you can play online, which has expanded the possibilities enormously. Recently, I’ve been enjoying watching games that have taken place online with players from all over the world. The boon here is that online play allows people to take part even if they don’t have a gaming group near them. Whereas once roleplaying games seemed something of an obscure and esoteric pastime, it is now thoroughly widespread, but, thankfully, without losing that intrigue, that curious and special excitement as a form of entertainment that it has.
Playing a roleplaying game never seems like a routine pastime. Its inherently social aspect always gives it an element of feeling like you are going to a party or an especially intimate and happy get together.
We’ve had so much fun and laughter with roleplaying games over the years. All you really need is your imagination, pencils and paper and a few dice and the company of some good friends, and unlimited adventures await you.
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| RuneQuest III - the game that sustained us for many years |
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