RoBoTNiK

I'd better skip ahead a bit, brother: yesterday was eaten up by moving stuff, and my desktop gets packed up tomorrow, and everything else gets packed up Thursday, and then we're in limbo for two weeks and I don't know how much I'll be online.



My 2001 entry was going to be about moving to JP, and the night my car was stolen and we were inexplicably traumatized by a little girl jive-dancing on the subway, coming back from a fancy dinner we couldn't afford. By extension, it was going to be about class and race in America and coming to terms with all that. Though I could have also talked about giving up finger-quotes for Lisa, or getting traction on the dissertation, or the time these dudes flew a couple of planes into some buildings. And then 2002 was all about weddings, ours and the seven others we went to that year. But some of you have been waiting patiently for me to get to gaming, and since it's half of what we talk about around here, I've got to cover it. I just don't know how to do it justice.

( Big pile of gaming memories behind the cut. )

Yeah, you probably had to be there. But if you were there, thanks. Because we were there together.

Here's the original pitch for my space pulp Red Madness game, described here.

[Insert Your PCs Name Here] Vs. The Red Madness! will be a tale of thrilling pulp adventure, but set in the Amazing Stories future rather than the Doc Savage past. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow! Ether zeppelins and rocket planes traverse the solar system! Jetpacks and heli-cars whiz around the gleaming cities of tomorrow! Exo-archaeologists race to find the secrets of the Exploded Planet! Bug-eyed monsters plot their conquest of the Earth! Exclamation points are outrageously over-used! Think Indiana Jones in space. Think Gernsback with Nazis. Think Phantom Menace without Jar Jar. Now grab your turbo-pistols, snap on your big bubble space helmet, and rocket to adventure in the Astounding year of 1963!

Huh? This game is set in 1963? Well, yes, the year is 1963, but this is 1963 as imagined in the science fiction of, say, 1936. So even though there are rayguns and bug-eyed monsters, the feel should very much be “classic” pulp. The technology is all weird science World of Tomorrow stuff, but socio-culturally, this world still looks and feels like the 1920s and 1930s. And all the character types that would work for a classic pulp game should translate handily. The dashing young aviatrix becomes a dashing young rocket-plane pilot (a rocketrix?). The two-fisted archaeologist becomes a two-fisted exo-archaeologist. The English lord raised by apes in Africa becomes an English lord raised by blue-skinned savages in the jungles of Venus. The giggling mad scientist becomes—well, she's still a giggling mad scientist, but she has a lot more to giggle about now...

We’ll be using the new Adventure! RPG system for our game. Despite the shift in setting, the rules and the tone and “feel” of the game will be very much the same. I’ll come up with stats for ray-guns and space vehicles, but other than that, I don’t foresee having to change any of the rules.

What follows is a short handout describing the world of tomorrow, what I’m calling the Astounding! Age of Adventure. It describes the recent history of the world we’ll be gaming in and then has a brief discussion of science in the Astounding Age. You don’t need to study it at great length, but if you like this sort of thing (I do, that’s why I wrote it!) it should help you to imagine your character and get into the spirit of the game.