Because the campaign's the thing

In starting this developers blog on the creation of The Twilight Sector Campaign (Notice how I got that plug in right off the top? yeah…pretty impressive huh?) I’ve found myself getting nostalgic and thinking about the long twisting road that lead me here.  I was thinking about how my interest in games in general and even more exactly how my interest in games that told stories began.  Where did my downfall begin?  I think I can trace it all back to Strat-O-Matic baseball.

In 1970 I was riding in the back of a pickup truck with my friend Danny Mayfield.  Yes it was quite dangerous, no seatbelts or nothing.  The good news is we survived.  But back to my  point.  We were sitting in the back of a pickup truck reading the Sporting News.  We were both huge fans of the newly created Kansas City Royals and in the back of the magizine we found an add for a “realistic baseball simulation game”.  We knew right away we had to have it.  The ad said the players would reflect their real world selves!  You had a chance to change the fate of your team by good management.  So in essence you had a made up world (the baseball season) with you as the manager (hero) affecting the outcome of the story (where your team finished in the standings).  Isn’t that essentially what’s at the heart of roleplaying?

But the journey wasn’t complete yet.  I was still blissfully ignorant of the vast world(s) that would open before me by using those simple principles.  Fortunately for me some guys up north in Minneapolis and Wisconson were thinking outside of the box.  But hold on we’re not there yet.

Next we jump to the spring of 1978.  I was sitting in a lecture hall at Kansas State University listening to a lecture in my favorite class that semester, The History of World War II.  Like many males the history of war fascinated me.  Maybe we’re all born with some kind of war gene.  I didn’t really want to participate in the real thing or even see anyone else have to subject themselves to the horrors of war.  But none the less the history of such things fascinated me.  Then the professor said; “Anybody interested in extra credit can come by Eisenhower Hall (yes the former President’s brother was once President of Kansas State and got a  buidling named after him for his trouble) on Sunday afternoon.  We’ll have a selection of historical simulation games you can play that will teach you some of the intricacies of the war.”  Hey play a game, get extra credit.  Where’s the down side in that, I was there.

Even after getting my precious British soldiers massacured when German paratroopers invaided Crete, I was hooked.  I’d played plenty of games in my life already.  Created my own versions of Monopoly, designed my own baseball simulation, but I’d never seen these types of games before. I asked the professor where one could purchase such exotic things.  He replied, “There’s this shop in Kansas City.”  Hey I lived in Kansas City.  I could stop by there the next time I was home.  Even as a twenty year old I possessed reasoning abilities far beyond the ordinary!  So stop in I did.  Looked the shop over, there was all kinds of stuff in there, including this strange little white box with the title of Dungeons and Dragons.  I was tempted but no, I was here to pick up a wargame and so I left with Tractics II by Avalon Hill.  Took it back to school and my roommate Mike Lovich and I immediately grew to hate each other over the thing.  It’s OK we’d been best friends since somewhere around kindergarten and remain so to this day.  But boy over a game of Tractics we could get pretty intense.
As you probably know Tractics is kind of an intro level board wargame and being the bright young men we were we figured we needed to graduate to the harder stuff.  I guess you could classify Tractics as my entry level drug!  So back to that little shop I went, but in the meantime I’d read this little piece in Time Magazine.  They used to have a section of blurbs, I think they called it People or something like that.  Well I saw a picture of Gary Gygax and his wife laying on a bed.  The blurb went on to describe this strange new game (already 4 years old at the time, but hey it was new to me and the writer) that didn’t really have an ending and had dungeons in it with hundreds of levels…and monsters…and treasure.  Well say no more, I was intrigued.  So back at the little shop I went fully intending to purchase another wargame.  It was then that my extreme willpower and ability to stay on point kicked in and I bought the D&D game.

So was my turn to the dark side complete.  But there would be many tales yet to come before I would be able to create a tome so dark and vile as one titled The Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook.  We’ll talk about a few of those next time!

Mike Cross
June 26th, 2009

terrasolgames.com