WEG Starwars is back (kinda)!

This Image has nothing to do with roleplaying or Starwars,
but wouldn't it be cool if it did?

WEG Starwars may be my favourite game of all time, followed closely by WEG Ghostbusters.

In these hazy days of old school nostalgia, it was only a matter of time before someone has applied this to the classic (and best!) Star Wars RPG. Its genuinely too bad that someone tattled about the hardcover on Lulu.

Get it while it's hot!

And in the meantime, load up on these free d6 goodies from Drivethru RPG. 

WEG D6

I was poking around Drivethru RPG and came across a bunch of West End Games items available for free.

D6 was probably the system my group played the most. Our classic Star Wars campaing carried us through many, many years. Through it we discovered Ghostbusters and later we even converted a bulk of the RIFTS books into D6 once we grew too fustrated with the Palladium rules (which boil down to most MDC, wins). It actually worked quite well.

I've got a real sweet spot for the simplicity of the system and am happy to see that there are still dedicated fans out there keeping it alive.

The Fez of the Pharoh, Part 1

After the usual technical difficulties and scheduling mix ups, we got everyone skyped in and ready to begin our very first Ghostbusters International Game, tentatively called,

"We are on the threshold of establishing the indispensable defense science of the next decade: professional paranormal investigations and eliminations. The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams." Dr. Peter Venkman
The year is 1985. Crippled and cash-strapped by lawsuits and insurance claims, the Ghostbusters have placed an ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine looking for potential investors interested in opening Ghostbusters International (GBI) franchises. One particularly depressing New Year's party in Ottawa Canada, in a small apartment with a haunted carpet, a group of friends decide to respond.

It was suppose to be a joke…

The night began with character creation and signing the mountain of paperwork supplied on behalf of the GBI by Louis Tully CPA. On hand were:

-Dr. Dirk Mantooth Paranormal investigator
-Dr. Elias Spectre / Astrophysicist and ladies man
-Amanda Jones / Archeology student and owner of the possessed carpet
-Hammer Jones / Her well meaning, if somewhat dim witted brother
-Melly Winston /Paramedic and resident skeptic

After the drive to New York city in their white, GMC van (soon to be named Ecto-A), they receive some preliminary training, sign a lot of releases and insurance forms and are about to head back to Ottawa when one night when the other Ghostbusters are out, there is a phonecall from a reporter by the name of Elaine Jackson, asking for the Ghostbusters' help. If they are the only ones around, they will have to do.

The next evening, the team heads out in plainclothes to the reporter's hotel room only to find it locked and no one answering. After first ascertaining that the hallway carpet is not haunted, the team breaks into an adjacent room. In the alley below, they see a K-Car with two black men and one white, speeding away. The window to the reporter's room is wide open and easily accessible by the fire escape. Mantooth climbs across to the open window while Spectre and Hammer go down to the alley and Amanda and Melly keep watch.

In the alley, Spectre discovered a crushed, black fez next to a garbage can. In the room above, Mantooth is sickened by the scene of horror that greets him. A woman, presumed to be Ms. Jackson, has been brutally mutilated. Her entrails have been pulled out and blood covered the walls. The look of horror on her face suggests she was alive and awake when it occurred. Calling for Melly, the seasoned paramedic discovers a rune carved into her forehead. PKE readings are faint, but definitely present.

After a cursory investigation the police seem uninterested, stating that they had a dozen or so of these murders over the past few years and that, suspecting cult activity, they had turned the matter over to a professor at NYU. They also let the team take a folder of newspaper clipping written containing articles by Ms. Jackson since they are from a tabloid called 'Lurid Tales' and could not possibly contain anything important.

Returning to the firehall, the team pours over their clues. Ms.Jackson had extensively covered, 'The Carter Expedition', a mysterious trip organized by rich, gadabout Richard Carter to deepest, darkest Africa. No one really knows why they went, or what they were looking for, but the story got interesting with the entire expedition, containing six wealthy British and American explorers and scholars, disappeared. Bodies were soon discovered in the jungles of Kenya and shortly thereafter, some local bandits were hanged. To most that seemed the end of it, but Ms. Kennedy's hand scrawled notes in the margins seemed to indicate that it was not the whole story.

Further research discovered a link between the black fez and the symbol carved onto Ms. Kennedy's forehead. Both linked to something called, 'The Bloody Tongue', a gruesome death cult that originated in Africa.

The next day, they went to the university where they spoke to Professor Mel Lemmings, a specialist on tribal cults. She confirmed the Team's findings and said that she suspected the cult has been operating in the city for a number of years now. She also said that she believed that the cult was much more widespread than most, existing in different forms in China, Africa and Australia, though as yet she had no concrete proof. Then she pointed them to a store in Harlem called, 'The JuJu Boutique', which she tough was the headquarters of the Bloody Tongue in NYC.

Returning to the firehouse to suit up and grab their proton packs, the team headed out to Harlem where they found a narrow alleyway that opened up into a filth covered courtyard. The only doorway leads into the JuJu Boutique.

Hammer notices what he first assumes to be a homeless person pulls himself out of a pile of refuse. The hobo shuffles towards Melly and grabs her by the shirt. At this point, more hobos emerge and the team quickly realizes that they weren't homeless, but the walking dead.

The battle was my first experience running the rules-lite d6 version and I had to improve pretty quickly, but it turned out to be a fun and gruesome affair with lots of missed shots hitting piles of rotting garbage, and the zombies exploding in a rain of guts and goo when had taken enough proton hits. Hammer actually engaged one in fisticuffs and knocked its head clear off, which continued to bite at his ankles until he booted it into a nearby dumpster.

Their first official battle as Ghostbusters ending in gorey victory, they girdled their loins and walked towards the door to the JuJu Boutique… but not before scooping up the zombie head from the dumpster

They are gonna call him Harry the Head.
Careful readers may have noticed what adventure I'm running here. If you slightly lower the seriousness of a Chuthulu Adventure and slightly raise the seriousness of a Ghostbusters adventure, (which isn't hard in either case) they meet pretty easily. I find the GBI game as written plays more like the cartoons anyway and it was always my intention to aim for the slightly grittier feel of the first movie.

Through the RIFTS

My first experiences with roleplaying games were at a buddy's house where he would DM completely on the fly, making up NPCs as needed on the spot and flipping through the Monster Manual at random. Sometimes he would combine these, leading to one memorable encounter with a Titan sheriff.

There was never a plot or a dungeon per say, but it kept the dice rolling and the kids entertained for a few hours. Then someone scored a copy of the RIFTS rulebook and things took a turn for the awesomely weird.

This was nothing we'd ever seen before: a weird blend of science, magic and post apocalyptic mayhem. At some point, we'd played a few rounds of Gamma World, but the enthusiastic GM had moved away taking all the books with him. But what set RIFTS apart for us, was the sense of Scale. It was a game where the rule of thumb quite literally was, Anything Goes.

Believe it or not, one of these guys became one of our most feared characters.
Plus, new books appeared were constantly popping up with new critters, new equipment and new lands to explore.

Over the years, we played through an army of characters, explored not only the earth, but other planets and other planes of existence. We stole eagerly and shamelessly from movies, TV and books, even our own campaigns from different games. There was rarely any extended plot arc, but it was glorious while it lasted.

We even devised a spin off game we simpley called "Arena", where we took on the roles of gladiator owners. We each selected a creature or OCC (Occupational Character Class, ie a race or profession, sometimes both) and had a set amount of cash to spend on anything we found in the books. Then we pitted them against each other using a HEX sheet and counters to determine distance.

What killed the campaign in the end was, and this seems to be a common refrain for RIFTS and Palladium, were the rules. I can even remember the specific encounter where we all had a sort of collective WTF moment. One PC, a full-conversion cyborg, was standing six feet from a particularly large mecha and they were simply firing full-bore at each other. There was no finesse, no tactics, simply he who had the better armour and biggest damage roles, would win. Now under other circumstances this might not have been so bad, even made for an interesting gamer story, except that what we all realized was that almost ALL our battles had come to this. All the PCs had the best weapons and armour, and the GMs kept having to put them up against tougher and tougher enemies. Even rebooting the campaign with low level characters did not work as the players already knew all the tricks. It was like replaying a videogame with the cheat codes on.

After a few earnest attempts to revive the enthusiasm we'd had for the game in our earlier days, including a massive, but ultimately abandoned project to convert the whole mess into WEG's d6 system, we let it slip away and the massive library of RIFTS books I'd accumulated were soon collecting dust under my bed. When I moved cross-country, they did not even make the cut and were sold en-masse to a second hand book shop.

Having since gone on to read dozens, if not hundreds of other games, I have to concede that the Palladium rules system is truly dismal. I think when we were younger the rules did not matter so much, we were much more interested in the world and its possibilities. Once we'd played that out to the length of its considerably long tether, the crunch of the system began to intrude and eventually we would be eagerly looking over new books, not for story ideas, but for the biggest gun and most MDC armour.

Next to Star Wars, RIFTS has probably has been the game I've played the most and I still have a great deal of affection for it, but I doubt I'll ever get the urge to play it again.

Which is kind of a shame, really, because some of this stuff was hella cool.

Getting the Band Back Together

So after weeks of back and forth emails, we are finally planning on doing a skype'd RPG session at the end of the month. Once we decided to play, it was up to me to decide whatWHAT we wanted to play.

Playing one of our old campaigns from the glory days seemed, sacrilegious somehow. The only one that holds much interest anyway is our old d6 Star Wars campaign and we've long since taken the characters from New Hope through Return of the Jedi and are now venturing into the murky realms of the expanded universe. Personally, I prefer to stick to the old Marvel Comics timeline, but that is another topic for another time.

I've been collecting and collecting a lot of games lately (older games, old school revivals and new systems). There are a few that stood out, so I gave few suggestions to my players and the hands down winner for what they wanted to play was the game I picked up at a garage sale a few years ago and became THE reason for my renewed interest in roleplaying.

I am honestly surprised that this did not become a bigger hit. Reading through it, then watching the movies and as many of the old cartoons as I could find, plus playing through the recent video game, it would seem to me that this is a perfect set up for a game; a group of misfits teamed up to combat a supernatural threat. Not to mention all the gadgets and monsters!

Which sparked an idea off another game I have taken to collecting, but never really expected to be able to play. What other game has a group of misfits investigating paranormal activites...?

This is going to be awesome…