Why I Embrace Random Character Creation in TTRPGs

The Adventures Of Superhero Girl by Faith Erin Hicks

"I didn't pick my superpowers, they picked me"

- Superhero Girl

Careers have been made in the comic book industry by being able to dream up new and imaginative superheroes and villains, yet "point-build" roleplaying games expect players to do this - sometimes at a moment's notice - right there at the games table.

In this article about my general preference for random character generation, I have leaned into superhero RPGs for the most part as this is where I have largely encountered this issue.

The out-the-door epic scale of some comic book heroes, compared to the street-level 'normality' of others, also helps make my point about emulating genres, even if in an exaggerated manner. 

Sometimes a player will arrive with a preconceived idea for a character, but more often than not - especially if, for example, the players are not totally au fait with the superheroic oeuvre - there's be a lot of umming, ahhing and staring off into space before he or she cranks out a thinly veiled clone of an established, popular character.

This mental constipation can also lead to further frustration and ultimately taint a player's opinion of your campaign before the first adventure has even begun.

And this, for me, is what makes Villains & Vigilantes' random superpower generation system so wonderfully appealing.

Anyone can pick up their dice and within 20 minutes to half-an-hour have the outline of a unique character, ready to play.

It's quick and easy, but there also remains an element of choice - so the experience doesn't go to the other extreme and the player feels totally at the mercy of the gods of fate.

Under normal circumstances, that is playing the "rules as written" in the 2nd Edition Villains & Vigilantes of my youth, each player character gets 1d6+2 rolls across his choice of the five tables of superpowers (powers; devices; magic/psionic items; skills; and magic/psionics) plus a random drawback from the "weaknesses" table.

The player must discard one of his rolled powers and if he wants to drop his "weakness" he has to scrub off a second of his random powers.

Now, of course, the observant among you would have realised this can mean a character ending up with only a single superpower.

Back when we were running our superheroes as a play-by-(snail)-mail game at the dawn of time, we addressed this very issue in our introductory material:

"Whenever someone rolls up a character and then moans: 'But I only got one power! What use is flight?' ... stop and think. If you woke up one morning and suddenly found you could fly would your first reaction be: 'ohhh, boring, wish I could fire blasts of super-heated energy and fry people's skin off..."

You just have to look at classic TV shows like Heroes, No Ordinary Family or Misfits or the original X-Men comics to know that people with a single superpower can thrive in a superhero milieu if enough effort is invested by the writer/player into developing the character's personality and backstory.

On the other hand, game-wise, this striving for realism is often more an ideal than a true reflection of the game as it relies on the other players not having rolled up Superman, Dr Manhattan, or Captain Marvel.

Comic book superteams usually represent a broad spectrum of power levels, but there has to be some degree of compatibility and synergy between team members in a game - no one wants to be the Wonder Twin stuck back at Titans Tower, while the team are off facing Deathstroke or Brother Blood.

This, again, ultimately comes down to discussions between the player and the Gamesmaster.

If he genuinely believes his character is unplayable (or unable to gel comfortably with characters generated by the other players), it's quick and easy to start the random generation process again - rather than endure the mathematically complex juggling act of point balancing, min-maxing and optimisation that goes into "points-buy" character builds.

I've played several different supers systems over the years, but the most memorable characters I - and my peers - have created at the table have all come via the random generation process (e.g. my Acrobatic Flea, Steve's Silverfist, Pete's Hurricane & Brutus, and characters from other V&V games, such as Dave's Nightgaunt and Mark's Copernicus).

I guess my issue is with the idea of "wholly designed characters", and this pretty much applies to any genre, probably because I was introduced to gaming via "old school" Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller.

Both of these systems employed - very different, but no less inspirational - random character generations methods.

I really admire the random "story path" method of character creation in Traveller (yes, your character used to be able to die in the process and, no, they no longer can), but also the fantastic 'group' method of random character creation in Beyond The Wall & Other Adventures from Flatland Games.

This clever folk fantasy system sees your party creating its home village as part of the character creation process, as well as weaving meaningful connections between all the player-characters which, in turn, influence their starting statistics and abilities.

Meanwhile, I have friends who draw Tarot cards to stimulate ideas for their character's personalities and I don't see random generation as being any different.

When it comes to superheroes, all the major teams (such as Justice League, Avengers, Watchmen, Teen Titans etc) feature characters with a broad range of power 'levels' and abilities.

It's only certain structured teams - such as the Fantastic Four - who could be seen to have roughly equivalent power levels.

But the FF are the exception, not the rule, as this "style" of team also tends to share a common origin story as well.

Generally I find that point-buy systems, without a degree of randomness, don't gel for my tastes and style of gaming.

The whole idea of artificial balance is ridiculous and fails to simulate either 'real life' (whatever that means to you, of course, in the context of sci-fi, fantasy, and superpowers) or the comics, novels, films, TV shows etc that your games seek to emulate.

Let's strip this down to ridiculous basics: Players A and B each design 100 point characters; Player A just uses the 100 points and takes no weaknesses, but if Player B takes "heavy smoker" for a bonus of 10 points or "terminal illness" for 50 points, why should Player B's character then have more powers and abilities than Player A? It makes no sense.

I'm not saying character's shouldn't have weaknesses (in fact, as with V&V, I like the risk of random character weaknesses), I'm saying I don't see how the 'reward' for taking them in a point-buy system reflects any degree of verisimilitude.

[Footnote: I strongly recommend you check the highly entertaining Adventures Of Superhero Girl, from 2013, by the talented Faith Erin Hicks, for a wry take on the idea of superheroes with real lives. I can't praise it highly enough - just read and enjoy!].

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Patience Is A Virtue

My Brilliant eBay Purchases!

It will come as no shock to many - especially my dear wife - when I say I am not a patient person.

I'm generally not good at waiting and want everything NOW!

But there are times - rare times, I'll admit - when I can be quite zen and chilled.

One such occasion, that paid off splendidly a couple of years ago, was my eBay search for issues of the top gaming magazine Different Worlds.

Waaaaaaaay back in the day, I had a near complete run of the whole magazine (thanks, in part, to my trip to Canada with Nick in the late '80s, where I came home with a suitcase stuffed full of back issues I'd found in a gaming store for around a $1 a pop).

Then, during my many moves and downsizing of collections, I foolishly sold off a large selection, keeping only, maybe, a dozen of my favourite issues.

Of course, I regretted it almost immediately, and over the last couple of decades I have been slowly piecing the collection back together, one issue at a time, courtesy of eBay.

Only these days there are fewer and fewer issues cropping up on the secondary market and this paucity is generally driving prices  up. 

I've pretty much got all the issues I wanted back now, but one has eluded me for decades... and it's the "special superhero issue", featuring a slick Bill Willingham illustration of The X-Men on the cover.

The issue has articles for Villains & Vigilantes, Superhero 2044 (no, really), Supergame, Champions, and Superworld; several - sadly not the V&V segment - featuring adaptations of well-known comic book characters (from Batman and Wonder Woman to The X-Men).

There was a single copy that cycled through the eBay system multiple times in that year or so, without selling, because the trader was asking over £50 (on a 'buy it now') for it.

And there was no way I would ever spend that much on a single issue of a magazine... unless I suddenly won the lottery.

Well, I didn't win the lottery (don't get excited), but the next best thing happened in late 2023: another copy of Different Worlds #23 (The Superhero Special) came up for sale on the site.

As an auction, with a starting price of £1.

I immediately made my bid, well above the starting price, but nowhere near the sum being asked by the other trader... and kept my fingers crossed.

And waited... and waited for the inevitable last minute sniper...

And no one else bid on it!

I got it for a quid!

From the same seller I also bid on an old copy of Autoduel Champions. Not a game I ever pictured us playing, but I wanted it for the pure nostalgia factor.

Back in the '80s (again), Steve - a big fan of Champions, even though V&V was our main superhero system - had the game and we played out several memorably violent scenarios before moving onto the next shiny thing.

The auction copy came with a pouch of counters stapled inside its front cover, which was a nice touch.  

Unlike the Different Worlds auction, I wasn't expecting anyone else to bid on this, as it's a fairly obscure game, but someone did - driving the price up to £2.20!

Both auctions finished at the same time, and the seller gave me a great deal on combined shipping, so my patience had been rewarded.

I have kept my eBay search for copies of Different Worlds active, but I can't think of any missing issues now that I have such a craving for as I did "the superhero special".

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Faking Family History

The brave solider poses with his gorgeous wife before heading off to war

Short of the amazing props made by people like the HP Lovecraft Historical Society and the contributors to the fabulous Propnomicon blog, old photographs are among the best tools to add an air of verisimilitude to role-playing games set sometime during the last century or so.

However, not everyone has a family history full of explorers, gunfighters and soldiers and this is where those rare photographic studios that offer 'olde time' pictures come in handy.

With a range of period props and costumes, you can create a slice of history - in sepia - that your family never knew it had... and then use the pictures as the basis for role-playing characters!

Timmy The Flea

Whenever I come across one of these studios, I like to take the opportunity to get dressed up and pose for an old time picture. Not only do these make for interesting 'conversation' pieces when displayed around the home (I'm beginning to sound like an advert!), but they are unique role-playing props.

It's not cheap (the last one Rachel and I had done cost £32 at the National History Museum of Wales around 20 years ago), but then again you don't find these specialist studios in every High Street or on street corners.

We're not talking about those online apps where your head gets badly Photoshopped into a fake film poster; this is the full works, as you can see from my examples above, and each one conjures up a string of stories and possible scenarios.

And I know these days you can do this via AI, but that can be very hit and miss - as well as being ethically dubious.

There used to be a photographic studio in the Trocadero Centre in London, which was stocked with Wild West and gangster costumes (Pete has a picture of him and some friends as 1920's Chicago gangsters in his stairwell), but that closed many years ago.

If you happen to stumble upon one of these places, and are looking for that special prop for your role-playing game, an 'old time' picture is a worthy investment of cash (obviously it doubles as an actual souvenir as well!)... and who doesn't like dressing up every now and again?

Timmy The Flea's Hole-In-The-Head gang portrait

CAMPAIGN AUTOPSIES: Will I Ever Learn?

Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash

When the Tuesday Knights came into being I was the de facto gamesmaster, running a deliciously vanilla fantasy campaign in my homebrew setting of Tekralh.

However, I don't feel my gamesmastering chops really began to take form until May 2014 when Pete handed me the reins of his nascent Chronicles of Cidri campaign.

Pete had been running this, for a few months, using the old The Fantasy Trip rules, but I updated that to a retroclone of the system, Heroes & Other Worlds.

I have to confess that the mechanics were rather too "dice pooly" for my liking, but they really worked well in the context of our campaign.

I ran Cidri for the better part of three years, building up to a delightfully OTT apocalyptic climax.

This campaign remains my personal gold standard, a target I now wish to aim for again - and hopefully excel - when I'm finally allowed to return to the head of the table.

The Tuesday Knights' membership has changed a lot since those days, we've lost some people and gained more members, which means tastes have changed as well, but I still feel these "revelations" hold water and I really should adhere to them.

I wish I'd had the foresight to conduct an autopsy on our Cidri campaign when it wrapped, dissecting my thoughts on why it worked, but I think I was just basking in the adulation of my players... and so it never crossed my mind to attempt the kind of surprisingly perceptive analysis that I had with these earlier efforts that hadn't worked out.

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights, but this time with a new rules set (Twilight Sword) and a superficially-familiar fantasy setting.

This will actually be my fifth or sixth attempted campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with my previous games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a large dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horses mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY I: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naïve dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s.

Almost from the start things went wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes had changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire!

I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

SHADOWDARK: I only ran this for one session. The players told me afterwards that they loved it, but something about it just didn't click with me.

At the time I was working on my overcomplicated Frankengame monstrosity of assorted houserules all stapled together with my own ideas from decades of gaming.

As it happened, "my" system and Shadowdark shared some similar ideas. It's just Shadowdark did them more elegantly, more streamlined. So I should have been happy!

To this day, I have no idea why I bounced off of Shadowdark so hard, when - upon initially reading the rules - it felt like such a perfect fit for my style of gamesmastering. 

However, I'm glad I didn't drag this game out and euthanised it before people got too invested in the campaign.

MORAL: If you're going to kill off a game, kill it quickly.

KNIGHT CITY II: Last year - before the osteoarthritis in my back knocked me off my feet for more than six months - I started a new V&V campaign (this time with some houserules to avoid some of the issues we'd encountered mechanically last time).

I provided the players with pamphlets before hand introducing the setting and - hopefully - suggesting the style of game I was hoping for.

But, once again, it didn't take long to realise that we had four players all pulling in different directions. This meant, for instance, that the opening scenario - which should have taken one or two sessions to wrap up - was heading into its fourth month when I had to retire from the field.

At its core, the problems with this iteration of Knight City were exactly the same as before, even though the make-up of the group at the table was different.

Superheroes are such a broad genre that they can mean diametrically different things to different players, no matter how well you think you've spelled out your personal vision.

And a central element of that clash of ideologies lies at my own feet. Over the decades (I've been reading comics since I was a wee nipper, and a collector since I was a teenager), my personal beliefs about what makes a good costumed crimefighter have become so embedded in my psyche that I'm not only unable to clearly explain my "vision" (surely everyone else sees superheroes the same way, right?) but I get frustrated when my players don't automatically share the same "vision"!

Just because it's a beloved reading and viewing genre for me doesn't mean I can run it as an open-ended, forever campaign. In fact, I'm probably too emotionally invested in the genre for me to brook any deviation from my perceived "one true way".

To top that off - again ignoring my mistakes from previous failed campaigns - I'd gone full "Game of Thrones" on Knight City and obsessively detailed every borough, with hundreds and hundreds of locations. Most of which, the players bypassed when creating their character backstories. 

It's almost as if I'd totally ignored every single misstep I'd made previously as a gamesmaster and was trying to crash on regardless.

MORAL: Learn from your past mistakes. Pick a game genre that everyone understands.

Isekai? It's Narnia Business!

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界; transl. 'different world', 'another world', or 'other world') is a sub-genre of fiction. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, webtoons, anime, and video games that revolve around a person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe, with or without the possibility of returning to their original world.

Portal fantasy, also called portal-quest fantasy, gateway fantasy or crossworld fantasy, is a plot device in speculative fiction, particularly fantasy fiction and science fiction, in which characters enter a self-contained fantasy world through a portal, typically within a quest-based narrative that focuses on exploring and navigating that world. Portal fantasy works typically feature protagonists who enter alternate realities, explore unfamiliar landscapes, and encounter distinctive characters. Overall, portals in speculative fiction act as catalysts for narrative movement, worldbuilding, and thematic exploration.

With a new vision of C.S. Lewis's Narnia coming to Netflix at the end of the year and the fact that I am listening to the BBC radio play adaptations of The Complete Chronicles of Narnia, I'm entertaining different approaches to hooking players into any future fantasy roleplaying setting I conjure up.

Given that the current hot contender for "game du jour" is the upcoming video game and anime-inspired Twilight Sword, I can't help but be drawn to the concept of isekai (see the definition above if you're not au fait with the term) - although I don't know if it would be appropriate for that particular game (on the other hand it is baked into Break!! as a core character concept).

But, more specifically, my current travels in Narnia have got me wondering about the idea of "child adventurers".

I know these days this is a much more common concept - thanks to the ubiquity of Stranger Things, a whole heap of anime, and RPGs like Tales From The Loop and Kids on Bikes -  but it's an idea that takes me back to the early days of Steve's Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the 1980's, where a core concept was you play "yourself with superpowers".

You didn't roll random numbers to generate your statistics, but rather you and your fellow players 'graded' each other on a scale of three to 18 for the the primary stats of your characters, then you generated random superpowers and bingo! That was how the Acrobatic Flea was born.

But, of course, the big difference between superhero roleplaying games and Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy adventures is that supers games are generally skewed towards keeping the player characters alive, where as dungeon delvers tend to be fragile, little snowflakes when they are just starting out.

There is a long literary tradition of "child adventurers" - in fact many of my favourite books have juvenile or young adult protagonists (e.g. Philip Reeves Mortal Engines saga, The Wizard of Oz and, of course, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland) - but literary tropes don't necessary work as written in a roleplaying format.

I like the idea of "Earth" men and women traveling to an alien world (e.g Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter books), as it means you don't need to explain everything to the players beforehand and they can explore the world as they go along, and I have no qualms about tooling up imaginary child characters with swords and bows, but what are the logistics of such a starting point?

How would I go about generating statistics for the player-characters? Would the players play younger versions of themselves (as per Villains & Vigilantes) or roll new characters? How would players, particularly those who were parents, feel about putting (fictional) young characters in harm's way?

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Before The Tuesday Knights

After my aneurysm and stroke, I was looking for ways to keep myself entertained and so Nick, Pete and I started our Formula Dé League, playing monthly motor races and eating a lot of very hot curry.

As the Tunbridge Wells Formula De League we would race little plastic cars around boards representing a variety of Grand Prix circuits from across the globe.

The game uses the very clever mechanic of having the vehicle's different gears represented by different polyhedral dice. 

A moment of high drama during the Chinese Grand Prix

As with our current gaming we didn't always stick to the monthly schedule that we had drawn up in advance, but we still managed to rack up enough races for a couple of years (2006/2007) to give our league a sense of verisimilitude.

We each controlled a stable of two racers, competing for both individual and team glory.

Pete was Team Clover (Paddy O'Doors & Muhat Mecoate), I was Team Zerro (Damien Dash & Brian 'Whitey' Whitehouse) and Nick was Team Flamer (Antonio Wasp & Nick Nastily). Nick's Nick Nastily retired during the '06 season and was replaced by Jock Saway.

Press coverage of Nastily's retirement

During 2007, Steve joined us as Team Classic Rock for one race.

As well as creating newspaper clippings of key race-related stories, we even held "prize giving" ceremonies at the end of each year in local restaurants, handing out trophies and wooden spoons to the winners and losers.

A third year's racing was scheduled for 2008, but a resurgence of interest in roleplaying games led to the creation of the Tuesday Knights and that overtook our toy car racing exploits.

The TWFDL: Pete, Nick & I

The release of the Hollow Earth Expedition pulp adventure system had reignited Nick's enthusiasm for roleplaying games and he ran a short and sadly unfinished Edwardian campaign for Clare and I.

But it was the publicity around the publication of the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons that got me thinking about starting our own broader gaming group, replacing our board game nights (we also played the collaborative Lord Of The Rings games) with regular roleplaying sessions.

And so was born The Tuesday Knights. In the end we didn't play Fourth Edition, opting for the more old school Castles & Crusades, which was then replaced by Labyrinth Lord, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Regular board game meet-ups resumed in 2023, with the launch of Monopoly Club, where Pete gets to show off his ever-expanding collection of themed Monopoly boards for Clare, Rachel, and I.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: And So It Began (Again)

The first meeting of the Tuesday Knights (our gaming group) took place on August 19, 2008, when I ran the debut session of a new Castles & Crusades campaign for Nick, Pete, and Clare.

This was the first role-playing game I'd actually run for over a decade. I'd bottled out of running games several times since I'd come out of hospital in 2005 and was still very anxious about whether my health (both physically and mentally) would be up to the challenge.

In retrospect, one of the biggest mistakes I made in those early days was getting distracted by the "new shiny", switching systems to Labyrinth Lord and then grinding the game into the ground, so someone else had to run something instead.

If I could travel back to 2008, I'd tell my younger self to have faith and stick with Castles & Crusades. Who knows, if that had been the case, we could still be playing that campaign now? How incredible would that be?

In the 17 years since that fateful day in the dining room of our old house, our pool of potential players has blossomed, while Pete, Clare and I remain the consistent core. We were joined by Kevin, who has become another constant around the table, Steve, Simon, Meredith, Erica, Mark and, most recently, Mark's daughter, Rebecca.

While other demands on their time have seen Nick, Steve, Simon, Meredith, and Erica step away from the group, we still manage to corral a solid four or five people for our monthly sessions.

Despite the collapse of that original campaign, I did manage to run a three year fantasy campaign using Heroes and Other Worlds (a modern reworking of the classic GURPS-adjacent Fantasy Trip system), which ended with the destruction of the world.

Pete ran a number of Top Secret espionage games, Meredith presented us with a wholly homemade World of Warcraft adventure, Simon saw us right up to the gates of Castle Ravenloft in his 5e D&D Curse of Strahd campaign (which went 'online' during the COVID pandemic), Clare's run some memorable indie one-shots, and the other year Mark scared the bejeebers out of us with his self-penned Call of Cthulhu rural horror adventure.

In between these I've tried to run some other games, but they've invariably crashed-and-burned because of my insecurities, self-doubt, and limited attention span.

I'm hoping that, after my two recent debacles (with Shadowdark and Villains & Vigilantes) I've finally learned enough that when I'm next allowed to sit behind the gamesmaster's screen I'll be able to keep the train on the tracks.

However, our most enduring game has been Pete's "weird science" pulp adventure campaign that started as a 1950's "Atomic Horror" campaign using GURPS, then time-slipped to the 1930s for an epic Hollow Earth Expedition run, before, at the end of last year, switching systems again to Outgunned Adventures for more Indiana Jones-style shenanigans.

And through all this, my rock and number one cheerleader has been my wonderful non-geeky wife, Rachel, who may not get the delights of roleplaying games, but understands how important they are to me.

Every month she cooks our group pizza, serves up drinks, and joins in the pre-game banter as we all catch-up on whatever is going on in our lives.

Last year's gaming plans were largely scuppered by my back problems (osteoarthritis), but hopefully that's behind me now (see what I did there?) and 2026 will be a return to regular gaming for the foreseeable future.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Nick's Traveller Campaign

Until the formation of the Tuesday Knights in 2008, our longest running campaign was Nick's Traveller game, which began when we were still in school.

It followed the intergalactic adventures of Jamus Dirkson (a suave, big game hunter, Roger Moore-wannabe and ladies' man, played by Steve), and his stunted, ne'er-do-well comrade, Marcus DeChambre (a psychotic, trigger-happy, bargain basement-Wolverine, mercenary/scout, played by me).

As much as I enjoyed the gun-fu, hack'n'slash of Marcus at the time, in retrospect I realised I role-played the character very poorly and Nick was extremely tolerant of my juvenile violence obsession - no matter how much it must have screwed with his carefully plotted adventures.

Pete made guest appearances every now and again - but always playing different characters as was his M.O. during that period.

This campaign ran for years and years and only came to an end because 'real life' got in the way and meant regular gaming meets were exiled to the waste bin of history.

After Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller was the first game system of any substance that I played regularly, thanks to Nick. I would hazard a guess that, with substantial breaks, this particular campaign ran for about a decade.

As a side-project Nick also invented the Grav-Ball boardgame (kinda American football in zero-G), which in later years of school became a mainstay of the after-school games club, when we created a league. I'm not sure if we ever finished a season of that, though!

Years before Eden Studios suggested framing games of their Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG as a television show, Nick was presenting us with Traveller adventures as on-going seasons of futuristic vid-casts.

Back in 2007, Nick kindly unearthed his log of our various adventures over the years, with annotations where appropriate.

Season 1

• 1. Loggerheads (an old Journal of The Travellers Aid Society adventure)
• 2. Rumpus on Ranther
• 3. Yo-ho-ho (river pirates in Apocalypse Now-style boats)
• 4. Wheel of Fortune (the first appearance of the Corsair Casino, a popular haunt, and Grav-Ball)
• 5. Hot Spot (archaeology in Vargr space...)
• 6. March or Die (... results in 'volunteering' for the Vargr Alien Legion)
• 7. Night-time on the Khanate (... from which I believe you ended up deserting!)

Season 2

• 1. The Mission (captured by Claw, the Ho Chi Minh of Vargrdom)
• 2. The Shooting Party (hob-nobbing with the local nobility)
• 3. We're Leaving on a Jet Plane (making their getaway...)
• 4. The Night After the Morning Before (... back to the casino)
• 5. Age Concern (a spot of big-game hunting)

Season 3

• 1. Unlucky for Some (fighting the Vargr invasion on an iceworld)
• 2. Dirkson's Dogfight Demise
• 3. Royal Dirk (in which Jamus becomes King of Andrex...)
• 4. King Kang: The TV Movie (a diplomatic mission to a mad Vargr ruler, which also involved rescuing the Marquessa, Jamus' recurring romantic partner [although he had to keep dodging the Marquess] from the harem)

The Mini-Series

• 1. Adventures in Baby-Sitting (a luxury liner - Pete was B'zarr, the head of security - escorting the Archduke's young niece and nephew home)
  
• 2. Day of the Knight (a hijack attempt - well, there had to be really)
• 3. Farewell to Arms, Hello New Order (the all-time quote of the game from Marcus de Chambre: 'I grab a beermat and rush into the toilet..' Dirkson is knighted on Deneb, Marcus deChambre gets proper bionic arms, aahhhh!)
• 4. Dirkson's Dirk (into the desert; velociraptors are mentioned)
• 5. Bungle in the Jungle (possibly some big game hunting to finish off?)
  

What I always loved about Traveller - besides the character generation system where you could kill off your creation before he'd even got to adventure - was the simplicity of the whole system, something sadly lacking in many of the modern inspired systems.

You had a handful of skills, rolled 2d6 for task resolution and your physical attributes were also your "hit points"... it really couldn't have been any easier.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: When Jeff Dee Drew The Acrobatic Flea

Dreams do come true.

Over the years many, many amazing artist friends (and DC artist Des Taylor) have kindly turned my signature Villains & Vigilantes character into works of art.

However, I never could have imagined - when I was sketching out the character back in the early '80s for Steve's original campaign - that one day I'd be able to see him drawn by the definitive V&V artist (and the game's co-creator): Jeff Dee.

This came about as one of the rewards for backing the Villains & Vigilantes Third Edition (aka The Mighty Protectors) Kickstarter back in late 2016.

This incredible work of art arrived at my front door in August 2020 and I was as ridiculously pumped then as I still am today by it.

My favourite RPG character... drawn by Jeff Dee... world-renowned Dungeons & Dragons artist from the golden age of TSR modules, comic book artist, and co-creator of the game that Steve, Pete, Nick, and I played endlessly in our youth.

I still can't quite believe it.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Whence Lovecraft?

Mythos Tomes: My earliest forays into the works of HP Lovecraft

I've been reading HP Lovecraft since I was a teenager. I recall writing about him in my English Literature A Level exam, which given I was supposed to be critiquing Dickens' Great Expectations probably explains my poor grade.

My memory of how I actually came upon the works of Lovecraft is rather hazy, but I'm sure I was already aware - and a fan - of his oeuvre before I invested in my first edition box set of Chaosium's seminal Call Of Cthulhu game.

This was published in 1981, with the second edition coming out in 1983, which suggests I picked up the game sometime between those dates.

I suspect my introduction to Lovecraft could well have been TSR's Deities & Demigods (the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons supplement, published in 1980, that - only for its first edition - included the Cthulhu Mythos as well as Michael Moorcock's Elric mythology, as well as various pantheons or gods and heroes from ancient religions around our world).

This almost certainly led me to invest in the paperbacks you see above, several of which are stamped as coming from the P&P Book Exchange in Goods Station Road, Tunbridge Wells (which is where I also came across my first collection of Wolfman/Perez era New Teen Titans comics that got me hooked on the medium and turned me into a 'proper' comic book collector).

Those paperbacks have seen better days. particularly The Haunter In The Dark And Other Tales Of Terror (a 1963 edition from Panther Books, priced at three shillings and six pence!) which is falling apart because it was read so much.

They’ve Always Been Dead: The History Of Elementals

This video [from Strange Brain Parts] does a deep dive into the origin, history and tragic, exploitative decline of The Elementals, created by Bill Willingham and published by Comico from 1984-1997.

The initial volume of The Elementals was a foundational work for Steve and I during our early Villains & Vigilantes superhero games back in the day, because of the Bill Willingham connection to the game.

He wrote - and illustrated - two of the system's first adventure modules: Death Duel With The Destroyers and The Island of Doctor Apocalypse. Several characters from these scenarios would then appear in The Elementals.

It was only later that I discovered that Villains & Vigilantes' co-creator Jack Herman also wrote some issues on The Elementals.

The first edition of V&V came out in 1979, followed by a revised and improved edition in 1982.

Around that time, the game's creators Jack Herman and Jeff Dee were onboard to create a back-up feature for Willingham’s Elementals, when it was coming out from Texas Comics, but the company dissolved and Bill moved Elementals to Comico.

In a 2011 interview with Ain't It Cool News, Jack explains that his feature would have been based on "my first original V&V character, a superhero-versus-supernatural-horror sort of thing".

When Elementals took off at Comico, Bill Willingham started looking around for in-universe support features. Jack submitted a story which was turned into a full-length issue and he began writing for the title regularly.

Again, quoting the 2011 interview, Jack said: "So, here's this guy who is now rightfully recognized as one of the best comics writers in America, and I was writing scripts for him!"

The Elementals Fight Saddam Hussein, Elementals #17, May 1991, script by Jack Herman,
pencils by Mike Leeke, inks by Dan Schaefer, colours by Julia Lacquement, and letters by Pat Williams

PROJECT 60: PIVOT!!!

My parents' copy of A Pictorial History of The Wild West, which I treasure to this day

Honestly, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that in the last few weeks I've dramatically pivoted on my choices for my PROJECT 60 (geeky things I want to have up and running by the time I turn 60 in late 2026).

If you've been paying attention you'll already be aware that my much-talked fantasy heartbreaker/Frankengame is dead and my RPG focus is wholly upon my recently launched Villains & Vigilantes campaign for the Tuesday Knights: Knight City.

While superhero RPGs - primarily V&V - weren't the first I played as a youngling, they were the first where I felt we had the makings of a long-running campaign, thanks to the sterling work of my old chum, Steve (elder brother of fellow Tuesday Knight founding member, Pete).

I've ensured that there are traces of those original games evident in our current setting, Knight City, and some of the rules tweaks I've employed are based upon changes that Steve created four decades ago.

However, it's not just the roleplaying side of PROJECT 60 that has been flipped. While I'm still intrigued by the 16th Century Border Reivers of Scotland and am very happy with the painted figures I have, and large library of reference material, there was always something niggling at the back of my mind.

One of things that had drawn me to gaming the lawless shenanigans of the Border Reivers had been my perception that this was the closest we had gotten to the American Wild West on our island.

But then, if I was so inspired by the Wild West... why wasn't I gaming the Wild West?

One of my techniques for corralling my spiralling thoughts has always been the principle of returning to square one, remembering what first caught my attention.

And this reminded me that, when I was about six or seven, armed with a bag of plastic cowboy and Indian 'army men' figures, and some cool, clip-together Old West buildings and fences, the very first "wargame" I wrote for myself centred on lawless, Frontier gunfighters.

Years before I even heard of roleplaying games, this was a skirmish game where each figure represented a single gunfighter, and they all had access to certain skills, with "tests" being resolved with a combination of normal six-sided dice and "average" dice (my first exposure to 'non-standard' dice... I was hooked from an early age, thanks to the vintage wargames shop on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells). 

My interest in the Old West can be traced to my parents' copy of The Pictorial History of the Wild West, a battered, well-read, hypnotically-illustrated, "true account of the bad men, desperadoes, rustlers and outlaws of the Old West - and the men who fought them to establish law and order."

Young me could frequently be found pawing through this tome, marvelling at the period photographs and losing myself in the stories of Billy The Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday et al. 

Since then, I've always had a penchant for Westerns, and - at the climax of my three-year Scriptwriting for Film and TV course at Bournemouth University - I even wrote a Western film script, inspired by true events, for my final assignment.

During my great roleplaying interregnum - the extensive period of reading, but never playing, RPGs between the end of our old superhero play-by-post game and then the launch of the Tuesday Knights - one of the games that I was really hooked on was Shane Hensley's first stab at Deadlands, the pre-Savage Worlds iteration of his Weird West setting.

I didn't fully grok the overly-complex rules system but I absolutely loved the backstory and the writing of the atmospheric 'fluff' of the setting. 

While, I guess, these might appear quite 'old school' to modern sensibilities, the rules books, supplements and box sets of that original Deadlands remain, in my eyes, some of the greatest RPG material ever produced.

What all this reminiscing has led to - after doing my due diligence and watching a lot of YouTube reviews and 'actual play' videos - is my investment in Great Escape Games' highly lauded Dead Man's Hand Redux.

This is a well-supported game, from a popular company, that most definitely has legs and scratches my itch for a skirmish game even better than the Border Reivers.

Like I said, the Border Reivers project remains ongoing, but it's on the backburner for the moment, while I dig into Dead Man's Hand Redux, turn my hand to painting the plastic buildings (boy, this takes me back to my childhood), and get the miniatures professionally painted.

With the plastic miniatures you get in the starter box, you're able to design your own gang and I already have ideas to base mine on Timmy The Flea and The Hole-In-The-Head gang, if my primitive modelling skills are up the task!