Gaming

This section will have home brew rules, campaign stories, character stories, and be used for reference to my novels that were formed in a D&D world.

Origins:

So today (20Feb19) I posted the origin of the gaming world I have used the most, evolved the most and written in the most. You can read that here. The short version is in 1989 I played my first game of D&D, it was using the red and blue boxes. I played a Dwarf and for 10 hours over three days my uncle ran me thought a meandering story where I met some of his characters and I completely fell in love with gaming.

He would then return to the west coast to gather his things before moving back to CT. And when he came back months later he gifted me with a box full of all the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books, and also a massive stack of powerful character sheets from characters both he and some of the men in his unit in the Navy had played. We would play two more games where I upgraded my D&D basic Dwarf to a Dwarf Fighter and his Human Cleric Companion. Both of these sessions would last for hours and would also prove to be the foundation of how I would run games. Mimicking my Uncle who made everything up pn the spot and then later obsessively reading and reading all of the character sheets he’d given me. These sheets were fundamental as many of them were 20 or 30 pages long with magic items and histories of adventures and listings of hireling and titles.

I would memorize the names of cities, and towns from these sheets. The names of PCs, hirelings, npcs, and other notes jotted in margins. The names of monsters and demons, and world spanning plots that they changed or achieved. This was the building block of my mythology.

In the old days when I first started I came with everything pretty much in my head and only wrote notes as I DMed… to this day I still improv a massive amount of my games. But back then I did ZERO prep work. I would have these characters and these worlds in my head constantly and it would just flow at the table with my friends. When I moved away years later and we only got back together for 1 or 2 weekends in the summer my players would expect me to pick up where we left off… over a year ago and just continue on. And we did this. Of course by this time I was beginning to write things down and I had a world in mind and since I didn’t have anyone to role play with from 13-16/17 I spent a LOT of my time buying new systems, reading the rules, making up characters and just creating material.

The Resurgence:

Then came my next phase of gaming. New friends and ending High School… also leaving my own home and moving in with some of these friends and thus going from an only child to suddenly having 4 brothers, 3 of whom I would be role playing still to this day (well only 1 of them now but still we’re all gamers now).

More to Follow…

Gaming: Intro to TORG.

I have been gaming for 33 years, mostly Dungeons and Dragons, but I have played a vast array of games. In August 2018, I was introduced to a game called Torg: Eternity via falling down a YouTube “rabbit-hole.” There is so much to unpack with this game that it is hard for me to think about where to start. First, this game was a hit in the 90’s when it originally published by West End games, and this version is NOT a second edition but a retelling and revision of the previous game, brought to us by Ulisses-Spiel (https://www.ulisses-us.com/). As such the storyline first introduced in the 90’s is happening again, only NOW, and the game has had several of it’s rules streamlined and brought up-to-date with what modern gamers expect. Though the main mechanics have been kept in order to still appeal to the original base.

OK, so that is the origin of the game and the redux, but what is the story, what is it all about? The game is about other realities, called Cosms, invading the Earth. These realities are ruled by “High Lords” who are near immortal beings corrupted by relics called Darkness Devices. Normally a single High Lord would invade a reality and slowly turn that world into their world. Slowly absorbing all the possible futures of the people and the world until it is destroyed and only the invaders reality (and physics) exist. The invasion of Earth is a special case, as it is considered the Core of the Universe and has the greatest amount of Possibility energy. To that end the Gauntman, one of the worse and most powerful of the High Lords, has made a deal with six other Lords to invade as a “team.” So seven wildly different realities have invaded our own, taking over huge swathes of land around the globe and slowly growing across the Earth.

The player characters are called Storm Knights, they are people who have the ability to channel Possibility energy to fight back against the armies of the High Lords. For more information on the setting and background, Ulisses has created a Wiki: https://www.ulisses-us.com/TorgEternityWiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Now that you have an idea of what the game is about, I mentioned I found it while watching a bunch of gaming videos on YouTube. Recently I had played in a D&D game that had come to an end. The game hadn’t been going all that well and the ending was very unsatisfactory. Part of the problem was the game was about an invading realities/planets that would both be destroyed unless one of them pre-emptively destroyed the other. I had not enjoyed how it was handled or how the mechanics of the thing. So when I came across a video talking about Torg (original and Eternity) and about realities over-lapping and overwriting one another… suddenly I was intrigued. At first, I thought the Game Master of the D&D game would be interested in reading up on Torg since he had just run a similar story. Both of us eagerly started reading more articles, watching more videos, and finally I bought the main rulebook for eternity.

I was being slightly selfish, I wanted my GM to run a “better version” of his story. It should be noted at this point that I had not run a game myself in over a decade. All of my world-building and story telling had been invested in a novel that was thrashed and then creating the current novel I’m writing. But a funny thing happened. As I started reading the rules and the background of the game, suddenly I wanted to get behind the screen. I wanted to run a game again.

I set to knocking off the dust and I soon found myself writing every day. As a writer I sometimes find that I will write in spurts. I will write thousands of words over a weekend and then walks away for weeks or months. I might make notes, build characters, plot things out between the writing sessions but I have horrible discipline when it comes to “daily writing goals.” We’ll talk about them more in other blog posts. BUT it is important to make a note here. The more time you actually spend BEING creative, the more ideas will form and flow. I recently started drawing again, and have been making sketches for my game, and since I started working on running a game weekly (at the start it was supposed to be 2 weeks on 2 weeks off, but the players demand weekly) I find that I suddenly have more and more ideas again.

So, this post is the foundation for the weeks to come. I have introduced you to the concept of the game, and told you how I came to be involved with it. My next post will give you the foundation of my storyline, and then we’ll be running narrative posts telling you what my players went through and what’s been happening. I actually record the sessions and one of my players takes extensive notes. So I hope you enjoy the narrative journey with me.