RPGaDay 2023, Day 25

The play's the thing ...

I’m thinking here of two games in particular: Ringworld and Superworld.

Ringworld is based on Larry Niven’s novel of the same name - the titular novel, and at the time of writing its one sequel, The Ringworld Engineers.

The Ringworld itself is an artificial BDO, some 200 light years outside of his Known Space - the equivalent of Traveller’s Charted Space. Ringworld itself is an impossible construct - a ring, one million miles thick, set spinning about its star at high speed, to keep the atmosphere on its inner surface under 1g, with retaining walls 1000 miles high either side.

The Ringworld is a vast biosphere, with a surface area approximately one billion times that of the Earth. And it was built by aliens from the Core, who’d visited Earth and the local region surrounding Sol.

It was a gorgeous game, an exploration of Larry Niven’s Known Space.

And it disappeared off the shelves when the license got pulled. Somebody had convinced Larry that if he withdrew the licenses, there’d be a green light for Ringworld movie. Sadly, it looks as if the movie will never come into being either.

And then there’s Superworld, a long and lavish look at superheroics. Superworld was competing against some stiff competition - Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, and Mutants and Masterminds. Superworld, the late Steve Perrin’s take on the mich-loved superhero genre, did not get much traction.

The next issue of this comic got pulled for numerous violations of the Comics Code Authority.

Neither of these games are played nowadays. And, by modern standards, they are unplayable. But it was nice to read through them and imagine creating adventures for them. The settings were already there - Niven’s Known Space, and the modern world for the superhero game.

I couldn’t really get into these games these days either. I can run Ringworld with M-Space or Comae Engine rules, and The Design Mechanism’s Destined has overtaken Superworld as the d100 Basic Roleplaying superhero game of choice.

I would like to see Berin Kinsman take on a superheroes game. Mostly because I would like to see a Lightspress Media game where the focus of conversation is not an endless debate on the mechanics of superpowers, all numbers, numbers, numbers (a boring topic which seems to have terminally infected the TDM Destined Discord channel) or the unimaginative recreation of licensed superheroes such as DC’s Flash, or Batman, or Marvel’s Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, or Spider-Man (and only those!)

I mean, nobody on the Destined Discord has ever come up with stats for Rorschach, The Comedian, Silk Spectre II, The Silhouette, or Doctor Manhattan, for example.

Destined has seen some play already. I used the rules to create Spiral, a hypnotic super whose slight presence is the topic of much derision among the more flamboyant heroes such as The Bullet, but whose approach to tackling crime lends much to the antics of Columbo or Jessica Fletcher, in that Spiral just shows up and asks questions of people until they finally rattle the crook’s cage so much that they show their hand and incriminate themselves.

Oh, and I created heroes for Destined which have something the boys on Discord never seem to think about. Secret identities. Spiral is Dr Arran Golding, a licensed psychotherapist on retainer from the police department. They are a self-insert in appearance, a non-binary person who just likes to talk to people.

Hint: a lot of my characters are self-inserts like that.

But yes, to go back to the unplayed games. I know that I have shelves of games which I currently do not play - many of the Chronicles of Darkness games; Renegade Games’ licensed Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Hunter: the Reckoning; and a copy of Star Trek Adventures which I deeply regret buying, or the closest thing I feel to regret because at least I know that the feelings I have towards the book are not as bad as the regret of not buying it, and not knowing what its contents are like.

Spoiler: Visually nauseating. That’s what its contents are like.

So, that’s games I’ve never played, games I cannot play, and games I refuse to play. I could finish the post with the one game I won’t even buy, let alone play, but since the post says “unplayed RPG you own,” that’s D&D out of the discussion.

Oh. Quick spoiler. Tomorrow’s post will be, in fact, probably the shortest post of the month. I just looked at it. It’s about favourite character sheets. That is the stupidest question of this year’s crop, hands down.

I can tell you the answer here, today. I have no favourite character sheets. I keep my character’s stats in my head. I use notebooks to remind myself of the character’s abilities, but otherwise I rely on memory.

See you tomorrow. That’s going to be one terse post.