Terror Was Never This Much Fun

From issue #86 (June 1984) of Dragon comes one of the first advertisements for Pacesetter's horror RPG, Chill, that I ever saw. The accompanying artwork, by the late, great Jim Holloway, is quite effective, though it's a bit unclear where the mutton-chopped fellow is standing. Is he standing in an open grave? If so, where's that sinister hand coming from? If he's not, where are the gentleman's legs? So many questions!

Retrospective: Timemaster

That the history of the RPG industry is filled curiosities should come as no surprise. Then, as now, "the industry" largely consists of small operations big on passion but often lacking in the business sense necessary to channel that passion into a lasting enterprise. Pacesetter Ltd is a great example of this from my youth. Founded in 1984 by a number of ex-TSR staffers, the company lasted only two years before disappearing. However, during those two years of existence, Pacesetter managed to publish four different RPGs, three of them in the same year – Chill, Star Ace, and Timemaster. 

Though Chill was by far my favorite of the three games the company published in 1984, Timemaster was a close second. As a kid, I enjoyed watching reruns of the old Irwin Allen television show, The Time Tunnel. Even though it only ran for a single season, I remember thinking that it was a great premise for an ongoing TV show – like Star Trek, except that time, not space, was the final frontier. Consequently, Timemaster was an easy sell for me.

Like all Pacesetter RPGs, Timemaster came in a box, inside of which was a 64-page rulebook (Travelers' Manual), a 32-page Guide to the Continuum, which explained in greater depth of how time travel worked; and a 16-page adventure, Red Ace High, set during World War I. Also included were some cardboard counters and a hex map to use with the adventure, which dealt with the First Battle of Cambrai in 1917. It's a nice little package that very much appealed to my sensibilities as a TSR fanboy. I've long suspected that this was intentional on the part of Pacesetter, whose games always had a "TSR-but-not" vibe to them – no surprise, given that its staff included Mark Acres, Garry Spiegle, Carl Smith, Stephen D. Sullivan, and Michael Williams, all of whom had worked at TSR in the years prior. 

Mechanically, Timemaster is pretty similar to the other RPGs in Pacesetter's roster. It makes use of a color-coded action table of the sort I most strongly associate with Marvel Super Heroes but which would eventually be found in many other games during the mid-80s. Character ability scores are generated randomly, but the player can choose his character's skills and paranormal talent, a psionic power of limited utility, like telepathy. The design is nothing fancy but I recall it working without too much fuss in play, which is precisely what I've generally wanted out of RPG mechanics.

Where Timemaster really shined was in the execution of its basic premise. The game assumes that characters are members of the human Time Corps, a 72nd century organization tasked with protecting the integrity of "the Continuum" from those who would disrupt it for their own ends. The two primary sources of disruption are renegade humans and a race of shapeshifting aliens called the Demoreans. Adventures thus consist in efforts by the characters, as agents of the Time Corps, to ensure that disruption is, if not stopped completely, kept to a minimum.

What I found most intriguing about Timemaster was that the Continuum was more than just a linear progression of time. Instead, it encompasses a wide variety of parallel timelines, some of them very different from the timelines from which the characters come. This gave the game a much wider scope than just traveling up and down the timeline to visit famous historical events – though the game certainly supported and encouraged that. Characters could also visit odd parallel worlds where magic works or dinosaurs evolved to intelligence, for example, or even where literary characters like Sherlock Holmes or the Three Musketeers were real. 

It's all quite ridiculous, of course, but Timemaster made it work, in large part because the game clearly spells out the Laws of Time and then follows through with them in a way that makes game sense if not necessarily scientific sense (assuming such a thing is even possible when talking about time travel). This makes it easier for both the players and the referee (or Continuum Master) to get a solid handle on how the universe of the game works and that's essential. Otherwise, everyone can quickly get tied up in knots over questions of paradox and time loops and so on. Timemaster recognizes this and lays it all out in a way I found quite helpful. You might disagree with its take on certain aspects of time travel – I was never fond of the "literary" parallels, for example – but there's no question that it all hangs together decently, if you're willing to accept the game's premises.

Timemaster is one of those roleplaying games that I occasionally remember exists and then think, "I should play this again some time," because I had fun with it in the past. As I said, the game won't win any prizes for game design, let alone scientific "realism," but, like many of the best RPGs, it's a delightfully open-ended vehicle for exercising your imagination and that's no small thing.

White Dwarf: Issue #72

Issue #72 of White Dwarf (December 1985) features a cover by Lee Gibbons that's striking not just for its style but also its subject matter. Over the course of its run, the subject of most of WD's covers has been fantasy or science fiction, while this one clearly depicts a horror scene, perhaps even one from the Call of Cthulhu game. In any case, I like this cover quite a bit. It's a reminder to me of all the excellent CoC content that appeared in the pages of White Dwarf over the years and kept me reading it for so long.

"Open Box" kicks off with a review of FASA's Doctor Who Role Playing Game, which the reviewer likes a great deal (8 out of 10). Even more favorably reviewed is Chaosium's Pendragon (9 out of 10) and I find it difficult to argue with such an assessment. The final review is the Pacesetter boardgame, Wabbit Wampage (6 out of 10). I had completely forgotten about the existence of this game, but I now recall seeing many advertisements in Dragon for it (and the Chill-related game, Black Morn Manor) during the mid-1980s. I never played either them, though, from the review, it doesn't seem like I missed much.

I'm going to let Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" pass without comment, because, as is so often the case, none of the books he discusses are ones I've read or about which I have anything to say, good or bad. Far more interesting is Alastair Morrison's "The Jewel in the Crown," which is both an overview of Talisman and an expansion of it. Morrison provides several new spell and adventure cards for use with the game, in addition to a new character – the Samurai. All are given new color cards, complete with (I think) John Blanche illustrations that the reader can either cut out or photocopy from the issue. I've long been a big fan of these kinds of articles. I remember a similar one for Dungeon! that appeared in the first volume of The Best of Dragon of whose rules addition I made use. 

"Fear of Flying" by Marcus L. Rowland – there he is again – is a short Call of Cthulhu scenario that takes place aboard a Tarrant Tabor triplane that can carry twelve passengers at a speed of over 100 miles per hour! Naturally, the presence of a carving of Nyarlathotep on board leads to all sorts of Mythos mayhem as the plane makes it way through the air. What makes the scenario memorable is not so much its Lovecraftian elements as its setting, the remarkable aircraft on which the characters are traveling. In my opinion, it's a good use of the 1920s setting, because it highlights the ways that the world of a century ago was both very much like and very much unlike our own. To my mind, that's the best use of any historical seting and one of which I wish we saw more in RPG adventures.

"Scientific Method" by Phil Masters is a brief but interesting look at super-scientists within a superhero setting. What makes the article useful is that Masters looks at both sides of the equation – super-scientist heroes (and sidekicks) as well as villains. Graeme Drysdale's "The Necklace of Brisingamen" is an AD&D scenario for characters of levels 7–10. As its title suggests, it's inspired by Norse mythology, specifically the necklace of the goddess Freya. The adventure concerns a long ago conflict between Freya, Loki, and their followers and how that conflict continues to color contemporary events in and around the village of Stonehelm. This is a lengthy and compelling scenario, one that provides the referee with a lot of material to use, as well as plenty of challenges for the player characters.

"Origin of the PCs" by Peter Tamlyn looks at the virtues and flaws of character generation systems. The article rambles about a number of related topics before coming to the "conclusion" that "character generation is a complex and wide-ranging activity and that different methods will appear best depending on who is using the system, how much time and effort they want and/or need to put into getting results, and what sort of character is to be created." What insight! Much more fun is "Sleigh Wars" by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards, a 2–4 player boardgame of "merry Xmas mayhem" in which four "Santas" – Santa Claus himself, Anti-Claus, General Nicholas B. Claus III Jr., and The Ongoing Spirit of Christmas Where It's At At This Moment in Time – compete with another to deliver all their presents before the others. It's a completely ridiculous game, but it looks like fun.

"Recommended Reading" by Marc Gascoigne offers up a couple of new Mythos tomes for use with Call of Cthulhu. "All Part of Life's Rich Pageant," meanwhile, presents a random events table for use with AD&D. The events include such things as "arrested," "conversion attempt," "friendship," and "witness crime," among many others. Each is described, along with ideas on how to implement them in a game. While I could, of course, quibble with some of the entries or with their particular arrangement, it's difficult to find fault with what is essentially an adventure seed generator to aid the referee. As a proponent of the oracular power of dice, I'm largely in favor of tables like this, though one must still be wary of falling prey to randomness fetishism. It's a fine line to walk and each person will draw it in a different place, which is no knock against the general principle.

"Dioramas" is a new series about gaming miniatures by Joe Dever, the first part of which focuses on planning and preparation. Disappointingly, the color photographs that accompany the article aren't of miniature dioramas at all. I hope that future installments might remedy this, since I admire the hard work that goes into the creation of top-notch miniature scenes. The issue also includes more "Thrud the Barbarian," "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers," the last of which continues its protagonists' playing out of the classic Traveller scenario, Shadows.

As I have written several times previously, this issue is from the period when I was no longer reading White Dwarf regularly but instead only picked up the occasional issue here and there, as I came across them in hobby or book shops. Consequently, my memories of the period are much hazier and I have a lot less affection for these issues. Indeed, it won't be much longer before I'll be in wholly foreign territory: issues I have never seen, let alone read. Once that happens, I'll re-evaluate whether to continue with this series or move on to a different gaming periodical with which I am more familiar, such as Polyhedron.

White Dwarf: Issue #67

Issue #67 of White Dwarf (July 1985) is one I remember very well, largely for a single article with which I became quite enamored after having read it at the time (more on that soon). Featuring a cover by Mark Bromley, this issue is also fixed in my memory because it was the last issue I received by subscription. I still continued to read the magazine for some time after this, but I never again had a subscription to it. Precisely why I ended my subscription I can't recall; it may have been simple laziness on my part. 

Ian Livingstone's editorial notes that, "after nearly ten years of running a poor second to the USA in the creation of fantasy games ... Britain is quickly catching up." Though intended as a boast – and a bit of self-promotional for Games Workshop's products – there's a great deal of truth in this. By the mid-1980s, the industry leader, TSR, felt like a spent force, even to a fanboy such as I. No other American company ever achieved the same level of success or reach until the '90s, leaving an opening for a new top dog. Warhammer, still on the rise at the time, would soon become the juggernaut it remains today. 

The issue's articles begin with the cleverly named "Haunters of the Dark" by Graeme Davis. Over the course of three densely-packed pages, Davis offers up rules and ideas for handling ghosts in Call of Cthulhu. This is the article that made the issue for me in my youth, as I was much impressed not only with the content of the article itself but the possibilities it opened up. In my teen years, CoC was my go-to game for horror. While the game provided some support for non-Mythos adversaries, that was never the focus of the game. This article was a step toward correcting that and I adored it. 

"Open Box" opens with a very fair but largely negative review of Pacesetter's Star Ace (5 out of 10), a science fiction game whose mix of ideas never managed to gel. Also reviewed is Monster Coliseum for the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest, which fares only slightly better (6 out of 10). Finally, there are reviews for three Dragonlance modules: Dragons of Flame (7 out of 10), Dragons of Hope (8 out of 10), and Dragons of Desolation (9 out of 10). In retrospect, it's quite fascinating to be reminded of just how well received Dragonlance was at the time. While the reviews here are not wholly without criticisms, the overall tone is positive. Though I remain convinced that, on balance, Dragonlance was a net negative for the development of D&D, there really was a hunger at the time for what the Hickman Revolution was offering.

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" laments the pace at which fantasy and science fiction books are being published – and his own inability to keep pace with reviewing them. Consequently, he decides not even to try, focusing instead on longer reviews of fewer books than one lots of rapid fire bullet point reviews of everything that comes across his desk. Even so, Langford still manages to review slightly more than a half-dozen books in this month's column, which is nothing to sneeze at. The standout is his review of Brian Aldiss's Helliconia Summer, the final book in what Langford calls "an impressive trilogy." I couldn't agree more.

"Loam Wolves" by Barry Atkins is a fun little article that introduces "barbarian" magic to replace standard battle magic in RuneQuest. As its title suggests, the magic takes the form of runes drawn with moist earth upon the body of a barbarian, imbuing him with certain powers for a duration of time. While not mind-blowing by any means, it's a solid, flavorful article of the sort I generally like. "Peking Duck" by Phil Masters is a superhero brawl set in and around a Chinese restaurant, the Fo Yen Wok. Statted for both Champions and Golden Heroes, the article is also notable for the appearance of yet more terrible graphic design choices by the White Dwarf staff. Behold!

"Worldly Wiles" by Anna Price discusses "social customs in Traveller." It's a fairly innocuous examination of how to flesh out the societies and cultures of new worlds by reference to history and science fiction literature – nothing special. "A Murder at Flaxton" by Michael Heaton, meanwhile, is much more interesting. It's a low-level AD&D scenario set in a seaside town beset by smugglers and slavers, filled with lots of hidden secrets and memorable NPCs. Though the situation presented in the scenario is far from innovative, Heaton handles it well. I think it could serve as an enjoyable kick-off of a new campaign.

"Parlour Game" by Stephen Dudley is a terrific article on a topic I loathe: spiders. The article provides lots of information about the hunting practices of spiders, as well as their use of webs to achieve similar goals. Obviously, not every referee will care about this sort of thing, but, in an adventure that heavily features eight-legged baddies, the additional detail might well be useful. "The Vivimancer" by Steve Palmer introduces a strange new "monster," a bodhisattva-like being returned to the land of the living after death to aid "goodly characters in their struggle against evil." The vivimancer is a powerful healer and foe of undead, demons, and devils. As presented, I suppose it'd be useful as an ally to the PCs rather than as a front-line combatant, which I don't mind (too much).

"The Magic Frame" by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk discusses the ins and outs of photographing miniatures. Specifically, the article talks about the best kinds of cameras and equipment for doing so, which is a topic I'd never really considered before. "Traveling Light" describes a collection of special magical and mundane backpacks, like messenger packs, which teleport items from one backpack to another to which it is connected. I appreciate minor magical items of this sort. The issue also includes further installments of "Thrud the Barbarian," "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers," as usual. The last one is noteworthy this month, because it not only concludes a long-running storyline, it also does so by recourse to a random dice roll à la 76 Patrons.

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is an issue I remember well. The issues that follow are hazier in my memory, so it will be fascinating to re-read them. I wonder how much of their content will seem genuinely new to me and how much I'll begin to recall once I've had the chance to peruse them again. 

How Many?

Receiving my POD copy of Metamorphosis Alpha this week got me to wonder: how many old school RPGs are currently available in unadulterated print form? By that I mean original editions that haven't had been altered from when they first appeared. Most of the Fantasy Games Unlimited catalog (the primary exception being Chivalry & Sorcery) is available, as are Starships & Spacemen and Timemaster (both from Goblinoid Games).

Are there any others?

Retrospective: Star Ace

Between 1984 and 1986, there was not one but two roleplaying game companies located in Walworth County, Wisconsin. The more famous of the two was, of course, TSR, publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, whose offices were in Lake Geneva. The other was Pacesetter, which operated out of nearby Delavan, a mere 12 miles away. Geographic proximity wasn't the only thing that united TSR and Pacesetter. Much of Pacesetter's staff consisted of once and future TSR employees and freelancers, such as Mark Acres, Troy Denning, Andria Hayday, Carl Smith, Garry Spiegle, Stephen D. Sullivan, and Michael Williams.

Consequently, Pacesetter's products often had a "TSR-but-not" feel to them, whether that was intentional or not I cannot say. Regardless, Pacesetter's arrival on the RPG scene caused quite a splash, at least in my gaming group, where we gleefully picked up its products with an eye toward adding them to our repertoire of games. What we found is that Pacesetter games fell into two categories: fun-if-not-inspired and clever-but-half-baked. The first category included Chill and Timemaster, while the second category included Sandman and the topic of today's post, Star Ace.

By all rights, we should have loved Star Ace, which was a sci-fi goulash game whose setting seemed determined to answer the question of "what would happen if the Empire and the Federation came to blows?" Set in the 36th century (I believe -- the game's timeline is a little vague), Star Ace postulates two human-descended interstellar states at war with one another: the Empire and the Federal Alliance. The Empire is, as you'd expect, a vast feudal tyranny, while the Alliance is a beleaguered democracy. Player characters are assumed to be members of "Star Teams," which are quasi-independent special operations who travel about an area of space between the two rival states called "the Wilderness Region." There, Star Teams are expected to engage in covert action against the Empire on behalf of the Alliance. It's a decent enough set-up, if somewhat clichéd.

 Star Ace uses the same Action Table system as Chill and other Pacesetter games of the period (which is the same system used in Goblinoid's new Rotworld, too). It's a serviceable enough system but nothing remarkable -- at least we didn't find it so back in the day. Character generation is a mixture random rolls (for ability scores) and choice (for skill and "order" selection). In the basic game, there are four races you can choose to play: humans, crystal clones (Vulcans, more or less), Kleibor (bear men), and Traka (a humanoid trickster species). Players also select an "order" for their character. Orders are occupational specialties within the Star Teams, each named after a suit of the card deck. Spades are weapons specialists, Hearts are tech specialists, Clubs are noetic (i.e. psychic) specialists, and Diamonds are jacks-of-all-trades (i.e. thieves/rogues). As characters gain experience, they gain access to more and higher-level skills appropriate to their order, as well as rank within the Star Team organization, with the pinnacle being (of course) the rank of Ace.

If what I've described above sounds a bit silly, that's because it is. One of the big difficulties Star Ace had was that its various elements didn't quite cohere into a whole. Individually, many of its ideas were quite workable, but, taken together, they felt disparate, like an overly chunky stew made from leftovers. This feeling wasn't helped by the fact that Star Ace's aliens were probably among the least imaginative I've seen in a SF RPG. They make the forehead people of Star Trek seem inspired by comparison. I'm pretty sure, though, that this was by design on Pacesetter's part. The game is quite explicit about the fact that it's intended to be a swashbuckling space opera game rather than a treatise on exobiology and theoretical physics. That's fair enough, but I think, as both Space Opera and Star Frontiers showed, it's possible to shamelessly rip-off literary and cinematic sci-fi with style, a feat Star Ace never quite managed. Still, I sometimes think that, with a little work, Star Ace could be salvaged into something more memorable and as fun to play as Chill was.

The Ads of Dragon: Sandman

Issue #99 (July 1985) of Dragon had an advertisement for a game that I will long remember:

Sandman may not be the strangest game ever published in the annals of the hobby, but it's probably the strangest game I ever purchased. As you might guess based on the ad's description of Sandman as a "game of dramatic entertainment," Sandman presented itself as something different from the average roleplaying game. Each player took on the role of an amnesiac traveler in a surreal world with which they weren't familiar, so there was no need for character generation or world information, which theoretically made it suitable for complete novices. The idea was that the players would learn about the game's weird setting and their characters through play over the course of many adventures, four of which were included in the initial Map of Halaal boxed set.

Had the game line continued, there'd have been several more boxed sets, each of which provided more clues about the nature of the characters, the setting, and the titular Sandman, a mysterious being who seems to know who the characters are and may or may not be responsible for their presence in the game's bizarre world. Discovering the identity of the Sandman was also the goal of a contest offering a $10,000 prize to the winner. So far as I know, no one ever won the prize, but that might have more to do with the fact that Pacesetter went out of business sometime in 1986 or thereabouts.

As I said, I owned Sandman and was very intrigued by its basic premise, but I never actually played it. Part of it was that I found the adventures very railroad-y, a flaw that I fear was inherent in the nature of the game, given its premise. Likewise, there was no way a referee could create his own adventures, since he knew almost as little as the players about the setting, the characters, or the Sandman. This meant continued play depended on buying future Sandman boxed sets, a notion that didn't sit well with me, even before I discovered that no more boxed sets would be forthcoming. In the end, Sandman had the germs of some good ideas, but its execution left much to be desired and so it remains a curiosity of the hobby rather than a well-loved classic.

Retrospective: Chill

For a great many gamers, horror roleplaying begins and ends with Call of Cthulhu and it's not difficult to see why. CoC established itself early as the leader within its genre and, while the game's focus is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, since its initial release in 1981, the game has included plenty of support for more "traditional" horror adventures and campaigns featuring werewolves, mummies, and zombies.

At the same time, there have always been gamers who didn't like Call of Cthulhu for whatever reason -- too "literary," too bleak, too deadly -- which left room in the RPG marketplace for other takes on horror. One such take was Chill: Adventures into the Unknown. Its first edition was published in 1984 by Pacesetter, a gaming company founded and staffed primarily by ex-TSR staffers and whose brief existence (1984-1986) was, in my opinion, a glorious misadventure. Pacesetter's RPGs all possessed a certain zest to them, the kind of enthusiasm that can only be found in the young and naive who truly believe that their ideas can change the world. Nevertheless, they're very hit or miss, both mechanically and esthetically and Chill was no different.

Whereas Call of Cthulhu took its main inspirations from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his disciples and imitators, Chill was, for good and for ill, inspired by monster movies, particularly those produced by Universal Studios and Hammer Films. Player characters were assumed to be professional monster hunters called "envoys" in the service of a secret society known by the faintly ridiculous acronym of S.A.V.E., which stood for Societas Albae Viae Eternitata -- "Eternal Society of the White Way" -- and whose purpose was to protect mankind from the dark forces that lurked in the shadows. As a framing device for an episodic monster hunting game, S.A.V.E. worked well enough, although, even as a younger person, I found it a mite unsophisticated.

The game's rules were unremarkable, being a serviceable, but not inspired, variation on the mid-80s fad for chart-based action resolution pioneered by Marvel Super Heroes. Character generation was a mix of weighted random rolls (for basic abilities) and choice (for skills). Skills all had a chance to succeed based on an average of two to three relevant abilities, with bonuses and penalties assessed to the roll. Combat involved comparing one character's "attack margin" versus another character's defense on the action table to determine both success and damage. Like most of Chill, it worked well enough, but was neither particularly innovative nor flavorful. Characters could also learn disciplines of "the Art," which was a kind of low-level magic appropriate the style of horror the game emulated.

What really made Chill work, though, was its attitude and approach. The game was not a doom-laden meditation on man's insignificance. Neither was it filled with angsty melodrama. Chill was unapologetically -- even gleefully -- a game about kicking monster butt in the name of goodness, just like Peter Cushing did back in the day. To call it a "horror" game is, in many ways, a mistake, because it was "scary" only in the same way that Halloween is scary. Chill was never intended to be soul-shatteringly frightening, a fact many reviewers missed when the game was first released. Its horrors weren't intended to shock or terrify; rather they were meant to be opposed and, ultimately, beaten.

Pacesetter released a slew of modules and supplements for Chill, many of which were quite good, assuming what one wanted was to run a campaign about professional monster hunters. This earned the game a "lightweight" reputation in many circles, which is probably why, when Mayfair produced a second edition in the mid-90s, they -- foolishly in my opinion -- made the game darker and grittier, turning it into a faux Call of Cthulhu by way of White Wolf. It's a shame, because I had a lot of fun with the original Chill and I'd hoped that Mayfair's revival of the game might provide the same kind of fun, "beer and pretzels" monster bashing I remembered so fondly. Alas, it was not to be.