I was never into Role-Playing Games as much as many people. There were a lot of people where the RPG’S they played defined their entire high school life. Me? I had band. But I played occasionally. I’m sure I’ve mentioned here that I started being interested in RPG’s when I saw some older kids playing D&D down the street from me. It fascinated me, and though I didn’t know anything about dwarves, elves or fantasy magic, I admit that it fascinated me from the time I saw them to the time my friend Josh introduced me to Battletech.
Many of you will have heard of Battletech because you watched the cartoon when it was on Saturday Mornings back in the 80’s. Many of you will have heard of Battletech through the Mechwarrior games (1, 2, 3, 4, and the numerous expansion packs and games.) All of these are incarnations of the original FASA Battletech Franchise, but to me, the glorious crowning achievement of all forms of Battletech is still the miniatures game of Battletech, played on a hex grid with PPC’s, Gauss Rifles, and the mad scramble to grab a hold of Clan Equipment. Battletech was arguably not a role playing game, but it really introduced me to the defining element of good RPG’s, and that is dice.
Later, after Josh sold his Battletech stuff to another friend, we played a lot of Battletech. We even learned how to play correctly. The correct method of play was more complex, and a lot more fun than the original, but something tugged at my heart strings. I wanted to know what D&D was all about.
By the time I came to have the opportunity to run my own game, I had gotten involved in church. Sadly, much of the beliefs I held at the time were completely based on extra-biblical sources, and thus they were of dubious veracity. One of those beliefs is the widely-held belief that Dungeons and Dragons was the devil’s tool. So when it came to us playing a fantasy-based RPG, the grandaddy of all RPG’s was off-limits to our ignorant butts. We settled on a book that I happened across called The Darksword Adventures. The game was called Phantasia, and it was poorly written, and poorly executed. But we had a blast. From turning trees into talking male members, to a trigger happy member of our party killing the main Non-Player Character before he could even get 2 words out, we had a lot of fun.
However, the game was clunky, as I said. I wanted something with a little more meat to it, and it was a natural thing that I turned to Middle-Earth Role Playing. The game was based on Rolemaster, which was also a lot of fun. Our group fumbled along and we had a blast. I’ll never forget when Derek tried to read a lvl 10 lightning rune at lvl 1 and blew his face off. The critical hit and fumble tables were brutal. Another of my friends named James B. cut himself in half when he tried to attack someone. It was messy.
From there, we messed with Mechwarrior (the Pen and Paper RPG), more Battletech, a hybrid version of Battletech and Mechwarrior, and finally a hybrid version of Risk and Battletech that we called Maximum Risk. We had a lot of fun. The group waxed and waned, and usually included Derek or I running the games, and James, Buddha, and sometimes Gabe playing. Good times. We even came up with a name for ourselves…Catastrophic Fumble. “Rolling 1’s…with style.”
Then, we stumbled across what I consider to be the defining moment of gamerdom in each of our lives: Hackmaster.
Hackmaster was based on the old 1st and 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules, with new crunchy bits thrown in. It was a parody, sure, but it was old school gaming at its finest. I won’t even mention how much I spent on Hackmaster materials, but it was a lot…even thinking back on it. But we had the most fun with this game than we had with any other system. Our group went through some cataclysmic upheavals, sure. From the splintering of our group after the creation of a party charter, to several of us getting married, to the entrance of MMO’s into our lives to help suck time….a lot happened. But when I think about the good times we had…we had some seriously fun hours playing Hackmaster.
Well, ladies and gentlemen…a drastically reduced Catastrophic Fumble will be starting up a new game here in a month. Mithicoron, who some of you will recognize from commenting on this blog, and Gabe, who others of you will recognize for the same, as well as being the person who’s over at our house almost as much as we are, will be starting up another game of Hackmaster. I started working on Serenity, but I didn’t have the time to create the adventures I needed to. I turned that over to Mithi, and to my knowledge, he’s working on getting a hold of the sole adventure book for Serenity. I wish him well.
I’m going to be running the group through Quest for the Unknown and Little Keep on the Borderlands. I’ve been looking through the books, and there is a lot of review ahead of me, but the nice thing is that I’ve got the adventure books I need to keep us playing for a couple of years.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to post some game stories here, along with accounts from what’s happened. Kim may join in from time to time. James will even start playing with us again when he moves back to California. All I know is that it feels good to be behind the GM Shield again, dice in hand. I hear they’re even working on a new version of Hackmaster. Who knows what the future will bring? Whatever it is, Catastrophic Fumble will meet it, swords held tightly, ready to hack.
