We made it to Day 31 of the RPGaDAY 2024 Challenge. It’s kind of a sad one in a way. The subject is Game or Gamer you miss. Unfortunately no one lives forever and I’ve lost a few friends in my life. Roger, Rex, Richard, Marcus. I miss you guys and I wish I could hear your jokes around the table again. Thankfully there are a lot of gaming buddies that I just haven’t had a chance to play with in a while who are still with us. Jeff, Gibby, Andrew, Jill, Erin, Libby, Kevin and others, if we can get anything arranged, I’d love it. Even if its on a virtual table.
As for a game that I miss, I’d love a chance to play the West End Games D6 Star Wars once again. I have many memories of past games. To try the FASA Star Trek or Doctor Who game once more would be a dream. I’d never turn down almost any variant of Dungeons and Dragons. Especially if it was an older version that I hadn’t played in quite some time. But I’d be willing to play almost any system just to hear the dice rattle on the table again.
Do you have a gamer that you miss? Is there a game you’d love to play again (even as just a one-shot)? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.
And here we are on Day 27 of the RPGaDAY 2024 Challenge and we’ve been asked to talk about Marvelous Miniatures. OK, confession time. I love playing around the table with a battle mat spread out a hand-drawn map and miniatures or standees representing our characters and the bad-guys we were thumping. However I’ve never been a big collector of the miniatures. I’ve got a few that I’ll show photos of in this blog post, but when it came to running a game for my daughter and her friends or GMing at SaltCON, I borrowed the collection of plastic miniatures that my DM friend has been slowly gathering for years. I’m very grateful that he’s been willing to let me use them on an odd-weekend. Another friend who participates in a few Star Trek Adventures games has a done the same thing with various Star Trek miniatures. I really need to get a better collection of my own if I’m going to GM more even if they are used for another genre than what they were created for. There were a few times that the stormtrooper minis stood in for the orcs we were fighting in our past D&D 3.5 campaign.
So for this blog entry I pulled out the two boxes of miniatures that I still had in my collection after many, many moves. I had realized when I was taking the pictures that I hadn’t opened up these boxes in years (and possibly even more than a decade). So it was interesting to look these over and handle the metal pieces again. I don’t think I painted these. I just don’t have the patience or the setup to even attempt painting. But I do admire a very well painted miniature when I see one.
Hmmm… I’m sensing a theme here with these two boxes. Both FASA and West End Games had a large number of miniatures for their respective games. The boxes are battered, but are still intact and not splitting in the corners.
Here are some of the minis that were inside the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan boxed set. It primarily focused on the Regular 1 space station crew. It included both characters and computers. None of them were painted.
When I opened the Star Wars box, I found this miniature still in it’s package. The plastic is brittle and cracked along the top, but still connected to the backing. I believe that I was intending to use this to represent a character in a past Dungeons and Dragons game.
In the Star Wars Bounty Hunters boxed set was these miniatures. As I mentioned above, I don’t think I painted these minis with how shaded some of them are. The big guy with the spikes (in the middle) is obviously from another set and I think the guy in gold and green is also from another manufacturer. All of the figures are loose, but I have them wrapped up in some foamy paper.
If I expand my collection of miniatures to a usable set, I’ll be sure to post about it here. Are there miniatures that you remember from your gaming sessions? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.
Day 29 of the #RPGaDAY2023 Challenge and the topic is “Most Memorable Encounter”. While a few of them popped in my head when I read the question, I’m going to go with this one for the West End Games Star Wars RPG system.
Back in the 90’s I was regularly attending games at a place called The Clubhouse which was next to Comics Utah. There were lots of different games happening in this place. Members of my gaming circle enjoyed playing the Star Wars RPG from West End Games. We played the usual misfit of rebels just after the events of The Empire Strikes Back. We had the smuggler, the pilot, the Jedi, etc.
There was one session where we all discovered an interesting aspect added to the WEG SW RPG. We were flying to some destination when we were spotted by an Imperial patrol. Not a big Star Destroyer, just some patrol along the way.
The captain of the vessel got on the comlink with the Imperials and was starting to talk his way out of them having to board us. Unbeknownst to him, the character of one of the players had an irrational hatred of the empire and immediately ran to one of the gun ports and started firing. He ended up shooting down at least one TIE Fighter. The CO was putting the Imperials on mute, screaming to the other characters about getting him off the guns and then returning to the conversation that they were having a “slight weapons malfunction”.
When asked for the name of the vessel, the CO responded “We are the Fresh Fruit Express” (trying to come up with a name on the fly. The GM tilted his head and asked the player to make a CON roll. Now this wasn’t CON as in Constitution that we normally see in Dungeons and Dragons. This was a skill used to “persuade an NPC to do something that isn’t in the NPC’s best interests.” It could be a distraction or a logical argument. Well the CO had a decent number of dice in the CON skill and rolled very high. High enough that he had been able to fool the Imperials that there was a mechanical issue and that they were carrying fruit.
We did end up having to land on a planet and meet up with the Imperials. The player had his CO character walking down the ramp eating an apple when he stepped out to continue the bluff.
I don’t know if I conveyed how hilarious we had found it at the time, but I still giggle when I think of “This is the Fresh Fruit Express.” Seeing how successful he had been in bluffing the Imperials, a lot of players dumped advancement points into the CON skill for future encounters.
Or was this just nostalgia in my head? It was memorable to me. Do you have a memorable RPG encounter that you’ve experienced? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s I had the opportunity to play several sessions of the Star Wars RPG by WEG at a “clubhouse” next to Comics Utah in Sugarhouse (a suburb of Salt Lake). I believe this was the character that I was playing in the campaign when we all discovered how we could use the Con skill to BS our way through certain scenarios. This also may have been the campaign where our rebel ship faked being a merchant vessel called “The Fresh Fruit Express”.
I’m not certain where I came up with the name Sargoth Silverman. I’m sure that Sargoth sounded Star Warsish and Silverman just rolled off the tongue. The “De Commisar” nickname was inspired by the After the Fire song “der Kommisar“. I’m sure if I were to ask the younger me, he would say that he wanted to play a stealthy character this time around.
I’ve got several more WEG Star Wars RPG characters to post as well. I’ll get to them at a later time.
First there was Dungeons and Dragons, then there was the Star Trek Role Playing Game by FASA. The next big game that influenced my gaming experiences was Star Wars The Roleplaying Game by West End Games. This game was quick and easy to learn and there were a bunch of friends that wanted to play it. I developed a lot of good memories from the different sessions. One night had twenty players participating (probably the largest game I had ever been in). In another game we all discovered the Con (not Constitution, con as in con-job) skill which allowed you to bluff your way out of a tricky situation. I still giggle when I think about the “Fresh Fruit Express”. One player learned that a certain dance turned out to be a mating proposal dance to a Wookie (yikes). I even moved out of town for nine months while on a job and when I returned, the game was still going on. While I was gone I had found one of those old toy Star Wars blasters at a thrift store. I brought it to the game and kept it hidden until we had a combat situation in the game. As luck would have it, we didn’t encounter any Stormtroopers until the very end of the game allowing me to pull out my surprise. So when I decided to take up the Character Creation Challenge, I knew that this game had to be one of my entries.
One final note, when I was pulling books out of boxes and I came across this set, I also found a bunch of computer printed notes that included various prices and availability. I don’t recall if I had pulled them from various sources (I have a lot of books for this game) or if I had homebrewed them. I know that for a local gaming fanzine I had written an article talking about some of the skills seen in supplements but were not in the primary book itself. I know I still have the article, I’ll have to see if I can scan it and post it online sometime soon.
I loved the X-Wing pilots in the original Star Wars trilogy. So I wanted to create a character that was a Rebel pilot. In the Star Wars game you created a character by finding a template close to the type of character you wanted to play (Smuggler, Diplomat, Pilot, etc.) and copy down the template provided. You then have extra options to customize your template to make a character your own by adding 7D to a skill. I selected the appropriate skills that I thought a hot-shot pilot would need. When you roll a skill in a test, you roll the number of dice you have listed for that skill and add any pips (+1 or +2) to get your final result. Even though I wasn’t a force user, I still had one force point.
The template had the character’s starting equipment which I wrote down. I had the credits to buy more equipment (and I probably would just before a game) but in the core rulebook the character creation was quick and simple. It takes me a while to create the characters for these challenges because I’m typing in this blog entry, reading the rules so I can create the character by RAW, and thinking of the details. I was done with this character within minutes. I think this was a decision by the designers to get the players quickly into a session at the start of campaign. The additional books gave players additional options to create a variety of other characters. Here is the character sheet.
Afterthoughts:
Now that I think about it, this game may be what set me on the course for liking various quotes. I remember being amazed that characters could develop a bit of personality by having a quote on the character sheet. Every time a new sourcebook for the game could come out, I remember looking for the character quotes.
I’ve read the D6 rulebooks (the game that was released after the Star Wars license was no longer held by WEG) and I found those rule improvements very well thought out. While I never had any complaints about the original game, there is always room for improvement. I know that fans still love this game. There was an anniversary edition released a year or two ago. Fans are also making homebrewed supplements for this game. I recall seeing a fan-made sourcebook for the TV series Star Wars Rebels. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a fan-made release for The Mandalorian soon.
Additional Notes:
I’ve been having some interesting conversations with other participants of the Character Creation Challenge. I’m also learning about quite a few other games that are out there. Some of the participants are using this challenge to promote games that they have worked on. I’ve been impressed with the amount of creativity that is out there.
