This is what started the dreaming…
I don’t really know what it was that hooked me on roleplaying games, but it sure as heck wasn’t the rules. Yet, ever since I can remember, I’ve been tinkering with and reading about RPG rules systems.
When I look at the massive pile of RPG books in my room, I am drawn with a desire to play.
A myriad of fantasy and science-fiction worlds cry out to be visited and shared with… well, anyone who’ll come along for the ride. But I don’t really know why I love those books so much.
Memories of Magick
The first roleplaying game that I ever opened and read was RuneQuest. My Dad bought it from the Games Room in Norwich out of curiosity – he was a wargamer who had been reading about these new “roleplaying games” and, from what I can remember, he bought it to give it a try. Dad didn’t like it, but he let me take it away to my room and read it myself.
I can remember asking him to play it, and him saying no. I still remember how it felt to want to enter that fantasy world described in the pages of the rule book. My most enduring memory in all my gaming life is of the cover of that RuneQuest rulebook and the image on the cover of “Apple Lane”. I began to dream new dreams from the day I first opened that game box.
Roleplaying games quickly took over my out-of-school hours. In time, I found a bunch of new friends who would play them – the twin events of discovering roleplaying games and going to High School were formative. But in my heart, I have always been the dreamer. Imagining strange new places and wondrous adventures has been my passion for more than 30 years.
Still Dreaming…
These days, I’m an aging gamer who still can’t get enough of that fantasising about other places, people, and magicks. I’m creative and flighty. And, for some inexplicable reason, I have allowed my hobby to become rather more heavily focused on the rules rather than the fiction.
Today, as I sat around at home slowly overcoming the horrid bout of flu that’s been eating up the last week or so, I found myself starting to dream again. Sure, I’ve been thinking about the game of D&D that I’m running on Saturday night, but this has been a more… visceral dream.
I’ve been feeling a tension between the fantasy and the science-fiction genres for a while now. My instinct has always been to blur the edges: magick in my SF; conspiracy in my fantasy. No publisher of RPG stuff has ever quite managed to get that blend right – the nearest being the work of the team who produced Alternity in the ’90s – and, so, the itch has been itching… and itching…
What makes for a really good science-fantasy story? It’s not the tech, nor really the magick per se. For me, it’s the right characters in the right situations… and letting the magick and the other stuff flow. Not that I really know what that means.
Travelling…
I only have to look at a pair of Traveller dice (d6 with a starburst logo surrounding the numbers) to feel the urge to fly starships and fire lasers; but, ever since I first played that most-favourite of settings, I wanted it to have more magick. Marc Miller’s vision of psionics has always been too limited and tame… too much tied to his at-heart lack of belief in such things.
Magick needs us to believe.
A good story that features magick requires that we allow it to soar and remake the world around it… to challenge the heroes in new ways. If you’re going to claim that there’s a malleable reality then you really need to make it believable… untamable… unreliable… and ultimately exciting.
I find myself back at the roots of my hobby dreams. In Glorantha, there are ducks. That stuff made no real sense but it somehow worked – anything, no matter how much it makes us smile from the silliness, is possible with magick. I am tired of my fantasy making sense – at least, making sense for the sake of fitting into some boring, secular, and nihilistic worldview that in itself denies everything that makes the possibilities magickal.
I want my gaming shit to be weird. Unpredictable and filled with possibilities. Mixed up and magickal.
I’m tired of playing by the rules. I want to play with magick.
Game on!
