Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Day One
So we finally got it going. My players and I finally got back into one of our common passions: Role Playing Games.
Remember when you were a little kid and played cowboys and indians (or cops and robbers to the more urban oriented crowd)? One group of kids would pretend they were the cowboys and the other crowd would pretend they were the indians. They we'd all hop on our imaginary horses, ride off into the imaginary mesa, seek out our opponents and for the cowboys, draw imaginary peacemakers and let fly at the indians while the otherside ran around them whooping their warcries and firing away imaginary arrows at the cowboys. That was noisy, frantic and a truckload of fun.
Well, today, we grew up into adulthood. Much that it is still fun to go running around the park pretending at cowboys and indians we found another way to do this. There are games today that allow you to take the part of a cowboy or an indian and live out your part in a story in the old wild west. Sort of like a more technically oriented version of 'let's pretend...' (which is essentially what cowboys and indians was all about). These games carried the whole thing further and came up with entire worlds (and universes!) wherein you could play 'let's pretend' in. Instead of just cowboys and indians, you could now play the part of a knight, a wizard, a spaceman, a soldier, a vampire, or a superhero. The permutations are now virtually enless and truly, it is only the player's imagination which is the limit.
This is essentially what a Role Playing Game is. There are computer-based RPGs and there are pen and paper and dice versions. My friends and I are more into the second variety.
There's been so much said about RPGs, much of it, bad. I guess there was a time they associated RPGs with devil-woshipping-angst-driven nutcases. So if you are one of the Jack Chick bible humping crowd, feel free to move on... you may not like what's written here (but then again, who knows? keep reading... you might learn something new and change your ways). These days, people appear to be getting more civilized. Nowadays, my RPG playing kindred are not so much looked at as devil worshipping misfits but rather as people of a more, er, cerebral inclination. Anyhow, who knows, maybe in 10 years or so, the public will grow to accept us even more. Either that or pen and paper RPGs will be so obsolete because every tom, dick and his mother will be plugged into a Virtual Reality environment for fun.
After a month long effort of typing, re-typing, and reading old sourcebooks, I finally finished my gamers' notes for Gurps: Fading Suns. So what is this?
First, the Gurps part - this stands for Generic Universal Role Playing Game Sytem. Gurps is a versatile RPG set of rules that allows you to play 'let's pretend' in any time and any place. If you want to know more about Gurps, check out this link: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ This is our system of choice and we're using the rules for our game here.
Secondly, there's the Fading Suns part. Fading Suns is a setting for a science fantasy RPG by Holistic Design Inc. Their link is here: http://www.holistic-design.com/introFS.htm. As you can see from the link, Fading Suns is set in the 50th millenium, humanity lives in a dark age after a powerful, enlightened, technologically oriented civilization has collapsed. Worse, the suns are fading away (if you guessed that this has something to do with the game's title, you guessed right).
The result: Gurps Fading Suns. I got to playing and pretty much buying up most of the Fading Suns game books in the early 2000s and ran a few games using their system. I loved the milleiu. I'm a big fan of Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer and Frank Herbert's Dune. So I could really relate to the setting of Fading Suns which took a lot of elements from these books. The thing is, I was never satisfied with the game system. So I decided to do what I almost always invariably ended up doing in the past: getting a great gaming setting and plunking it down into the Gurps rules.
It took some effort but heck,looks like its working.
Henceforth, this blog is a record of our intrepid party's story in the endtimes of the Fading Suns.
Remember when you were a little kid and played cowboys and indians (or cops and robbers to the more urban oriented crowd)? One group of kids would pretend they were the cowboys and the other crowd would pretend they were the indians. They we'd all hop on our imaginary horses, ride off into the imaginary mesa, seek out our opponents and for the cowboys, draw imaginary peacemakers and let fly at the indians while the otherside ran around them whooping their warcries and firing away imaginary arrows at the cowboys. That was noisy, frantic and a truckload of fun.
Well, today, we grew up into adulthood. Much that it is still fun to go running around the park pretending at cowboys and indians we found another way to do this. There are games today that allow you to take the part of a cowboy or an indian and live out your part in a story in the old wild west. Sort of like a more technically oriented version of 'let's pretend...' (which is essentially what cowboys and indians was all about). These games carried the whole thing further and came up with entire worlds (and universes!) wherein you could play 'let's pretend' in. Instead of just cowboys and indians, you could now play the part of a knight, a wizard, a spaceman, a soldier, a vampire, or a superhero. The permutations are now virtually enless and truly, it is only the player's imagination which is the limit.
This is essentially what a Role Playing Game is. There are computer-based RPGs and there are pen and paper and dice versions. My friends and I are more into the second variety.
There's been so much said about RPGs, much of it, bad. I guess there was a time they associated RPGs with devil-woshipping-angst-driven nutcases. So if you are one of the Jack Chick bible humping crowd, feel free to move on... you may not like what's written here (but then again, who knows? keep reading... you might learn something new and change your ways). These days, people appear to be getting more civilized. Nowadays, my RPG playing kindred are not so much looked at as devil worshipping misfits but rather as people of a more, er, cerebral inclination. Anyhow, who knows, maybe in 10 years or so, the public will grow to accept us even more. Either that or pen and paper RPGs will be so obsolete because every tom, dick and his mother will be plugged into a Virtual Reality environment for fun.
After a month long effort of typing, re-typing, and reading old sourcebooks, I finally finished my gamers' notes for Gurps: Fading Suns. So what is this?
First, the Gurps part - this stands for Generic Universal Role Playing Game Sytem. Gurps is a versatile RPG set of rules that allows you to play 'let's pretend' in any time and any place. If you want to know more about Gurps, check out this link: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ This is our system of choice and we're using the rules for our game here.
Secondly, there's the Fading Suns part. Fading Suns is a setting for a science fantasy RPG by Holistic Design Inc. Their link is here: http://www.holistic-design.com/introFS.htm. As you can see from the link, Fading Suns is set in the 50th millenium, humanity lives in a dark age after a powerful, enlightened, technologically oriented civilization has collapsed. Worse, the suns are fading away (if you guessed that this has something to do with the game's title, you guessed right).
The result: Gurps Fading Suns. I got to playing and pretty much buying up most of the Fading Suns game books in the early 2000s and ran a few games using their system. I loved the milleiu. I'm a big fan of Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer and Frank Herbert's Dune. So I could really relate to the setting of Fading Suns which took a lot of elements from these books. The thing is, I was never satisfied with the game system. So I decided to do what I almost always invariably ended up doing in the past: getting a great gaming setting and plunking it down into the Gurps rules.
It took some effort but heck,looks like its working.
Henceforth, this blog is a record of our intrepid party's story in the endtimes of the Fading Suns.
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I'm new to GURPS, but my cousin and a small group of her friends have been running the same game for 7 years so I'm in good company. I'm also a huge Dune fan, so your 'Fading Suns' sounds fun. How exactly is the 'Dune' essence incorporated into the 'Fading Suns' game? It's funny that you mention the devil-worshipping association to RPG's. I've heard so many of those things and frankly, I haven't been able to find the connection. I have so much fun with our game that it's something I look forward to every Sunday!
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