James Nicoll Reviews

Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number six is TSR’s espionage RPG, Top Secret. As I recall, the designers compensated for the potential lethality of their system by giving PCs luck points they could use to deflect potentially fatal wounds, and that their very detailed hand to hand combat system was a bit like a table-based version of Ace of Aces.

Opponents each picked a moved and cross referenced them on a chart to see what happened. It was possible for combatants to knock each other out simultaneously,

I didn’t play it much but I do recall one session vividly. For reasons that escape me, the group decided it would be more convenient if the other side didn’t have a yacht to which they could retreat, so a PC was dispatched to sink the boat. Unfortunately, there were a number of ships anchored near each other, and the PC got confused whether the one he wanted was the Nth from the left or the right. And that’s how a yacht belonging to Beatrix of the Netherlands got blown up and sunk.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number five is SPI's foray into tabletop fantasy roleplaying, DragonQuest. It was a mix of random generation and design, offering players a range of occupations their character might have mastered. Mages got a much wider range of schools of magic than AD&D offered (and with all the free spells they got at character generation, effectively began the game a couple of thousand experience points up on mundanes), with the catch that newbie mage spells often did not work and spell failure could leave the mage a soot stain on the floor.

As one would expect from SPI, the rules had all the poetry of a legal document¹. First edition combat was incredibly glacial, for which I credit my later tolerance of Champions.

1: Although they slipped in the odd joke--one of the inherent abilities all halflings had was being able to dispose of jewelry in volcanoes without suffering social consequences.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number four is the rather obscure Morrow Project, in which the players are tasked with rebuilding civilization after a thermonuclear war and other complications. To this end, the PCs are provided with a stupendous stash of firearms and explosives.

As I recall, the game specified half of the North American cities designated for destruction and left the other half up to the GM. Criteria suggested for doomed communities included ​“once got a speeding ticket there.”

Oddly, despite my fondness for nuclear destruction, this didn’t click for me. All I remember is that my character had pyrokinesis, which was about as useful as a blow torch, if said blow torch had a chance of giving the user a stroke each time it was used.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number three is the game that hooked me on roleplaying games: Traveller, Little Black Book edition. 

This is a skill-based science fiction RPG heavily influenced by the likes of Norton, Tubb, and Piper. Despite some unique features (like a character generation system that often killed characters before play), it was the most popular SF rpg of its era. Having navigated many editions, it is still in print today.

This particular edition had the slight drawback that the cost per page was significantly higher than the cost per page of photocopies. This drove an evolution towards perfect bound and hard cover versions.

It established my preference for skill based systems over class. Oddly, I prefer FRPGs to SFRPGs because the world building short cuts needed to make SFRPGs playable vex me.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number two is, unsurprisingly, 1st Ed AD&D. Not my thing but I did play one session.

(Original David A. Trampier cover, not the Jeff Easley they replaced it with in 1983)

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. You might expect my first to have been the then-ubiquitous AD&D--the Windows 95 of roleplaying!--but it was not. Instead, it was John M. Ford's science fantasy Starquest, an extremely simple, four characteristic, class-based RPG that as far as I know was only ever published once, in the pages of the July 1979 Asimov's. It didn't have a cover as such but it did have a George Barr illustration.

Like most good-hearted people, I preferred well delineated borders between my SF and F. This "role-playing" sounded pretty silly to me. I didn't expect the idea to thrive and I certainly did not foresee spending time on it.

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By popular demand¹, ten WTF were they thinking moments from classic RPGs, which I admit is something of a target-rich environment. I will limit myself to games I've actually seen, which means I get to skip past _that_ one.

The 1977 edition of D&D added an orthagonal good vs evil to the law vs chaos morality axis. While humans got freedom of choice regarding where on either axis characters fell, this was not true of some non-human races, which in turn means there are whole races good people are morally obligated to kill when possible. This is by no means unique to D&D but it gets special credit for being the one to establish it as a trope in table-top roleplaying games.

1: Well, a couple of people, anyway.

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This may be a misnamed series, because in this case the detail I am very sure I know exactly what the company was thinking.

R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk (later Cyberpunk 2020) adapted the cyberpunk genre to gaming (and did it without getting the FBI coming down on them like a ton of technically illiterate bricks). As far as the game itself goes, it’s about what one would expect: lots of focus on the surface details of cyberpunk¹, not much awareness of any depth in the fiction. Ah, well. Nothing stopping players from adding layers to their game.

The reason I single R. Tal out is because their cover art inspired me to think about how I shelved games. A large fraction of my clientele were women and I didn’t want the first thing they saw when they came in to be something like this. 

I’d like to think this was because I was a particularly insightful but really, it only occurred to me after I overheard two customers complaining about the porn comics another store kept near the register to reduce shrinkage. Cue a bit of reshelving, with the R Tal moved to a side room, and companies like White Wolf and Dreampod 9 in the front.

The reason for the soft core porn art seems pretty obvious: the company thought it would help sell their books, which paints an interesting image of their customer base’s demographics. Sure, the art may potentially alienate a fair swath of the people who see it but that’s really only an issue if you thought the people it puts off were going to buy it in the first place.

1: And made up slang, which happens to be one of those details that grate on me.

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May 2020

21 books read. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by a non-binary author (5%), and 9 works by POC (43%)

Year to Date

106 books read. 56.5 by women (53%), 42 by men (40%), 4 by non-binary authors (4%), 3.5 by unknown (3%), 41 works by POC (39%)

Charts below cut

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They’ll call her a bad mother. Cole can live with that. Because when she breaks her son Miles out of the Male Protection Facility — designed to prevent him joining the 99% of men wiped off the face of the Earth — she’s not just taking him back. She’s setting him free. Leaving Miles in America would leave him as a lab experiment; a pawn in the hands of people who now see him as a treasure to be guarded, traded, and used. What kind of mother would stand by and watch her child suffer? But as their journey to freedom takes them across a hostile and changed country, freedom seems ever more impossible. It’s time for Cole to prove just how far she’ll go to protect her son. 

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