You read the most interesting things in the strangest places . . .

1. I was perusing my email today and I ran across an ad for an update to a classic RPG system from the mid-to-late 80s -- Twilight:2000. The original T:2k was definitely a product of the Cold War. In this case of WW3, there was a slow-motion nuclear exchange, both battlefield and strategic. The game begins with a last-gasp NATO offensive cut off in Central Poland. Petrolium was a distant memory; the vehicles of what was left of NATO and the Warsaw Pact ran on alcohol (cue Leslie Fish tune here . . . ). The heroes were what I call "military sausage" -- survivors and remnants of units long destroyed in an operational sense, tossed together, fighting to stay alive and, hopefully, get home.

The updated edition will be Twilight:2013. What really caught my eye was the following bit of ad copy / color text:

"If a heroine dies in the forest and no one sees her fall, does her sacrifice matter?

Yes. If the world is worth saving. This is what we need."

That phrase brought tears to my eyes.

This put me in mind of another bit of gaming history I ran across a few years later. The same company that originally produced Twilight:2000, GDW, produced Traveller: The New Era (T:NE). Like T:2k, TNE was a post-holocaust RPG. Unlike T:2K, the holocaust was the result of the species of silicon-based lifeform that happened to run all the computers in Known Space mutating into a race of homocial maniacs. The virus (literally a computer virus) spread via radio from ship to ship to ground to ship . . . Gigadeaths galore, interstellar society collapses, the hammer falls, etc. TNE picks up the story 75 years later. One of the alien races in Charted Space recovefred more quickly than the rest and started sending out cautious feelers toward human-occupied space and made contact with a group of generally idealistic societies along the border between the old Empire and Earth-human space (several strains of humans in Traveller...). The renewed contacts sparked a renaissance, a New Dawn . . . then reality set in. There were forces Out There that liked things just the way they were, sans Renaissance -- Virus-infested starships (Darwinian selection, the smartest ones still lived) and dictators who ruled because they had all the available tech (harvesters, fuel, main battle tanks). The scions of the starry-eyed New Dawn gave way to the better-organized but still flawed Reformation Coalition.

I fell in love with the RC background. TNE hit the hobby at a time when the dominant meme in the hobby was "dark." White Wolf's World of Darkness games were just starting to come out, bringing a whole new breed of gamer into the hobby. Gone were the socially challenged science fiction / fantasy /military history geeks who entered the hobby when I did, to be replaced with black-clad lit / drama geeks who didn't know a guisarme from an arquebus, but did know how to tell a story. It was a generational change in gaming, and I was on the elder side of the gap. I knew a testudo from a tercio and the ins and outs of 20th century armored warfare, but I didn't know jack about Shelley, Dead Can Dance or modern gothic culture. The WoD eventually left its mark on me because I figured out how I could see the Light therein (namely, a silver Phoenix . . . VERY long story!). TNE was to me in those dark days a beacon of hope in a RPG-verse filled with despair.

To make a longer story short, most of my original Miresseia group got its start playing in my Traveller: The New Era game. The crew of the RCS Lez Zeppelin and the men. women, Schalli and Hivers of 3rd Squad, Second Platoon, Dagger Company (Meteoric Assault), 2nd Battalion (provisional), 1st Regiment Reformation Coalition Marine Corps, under the command of Wu "Kung Fu" Li, swiped nuclear weapons form madmen, freed captured Coalition personnel, protected the Secretary-General of the Coalition from assassins, blew pirates out of space, boarded and took down Virus-controlled ships and BattleMechs, and blew one incautious self-proclaimed Empress of All Known Space into dust bunnies.

The RC game was a hit at the Comic Grapevine every Sunday.

Now it looks like the new publisher of T:2k13 is going to go in that direction. The dark-theme games aren't anywhere as dominant now as they were in 1994 . . . and there have been two more generational changes (at least . . .) since: CCGs, CMGs and now MMORPGs. As committed as I am to other games at the moment, I'm not likely to run T:2k13.

Still, it's good to see hope return in this way.

2. Ever read something written by someone whose name you've only heard before, and you suddenly realize just how incredible a writer that person is? In perusing the various tributes to Gary Gygax out on the gaming Web today, I ran across the one posted to Ken Hite's LiveJournal. As with my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold's Milesverse a decade ago, it was today with Ken Hite.

From Ken's March 4, 2008 LJ post:

But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."

And it was Gary Gygax' work that first pointed me at the works of Jack Vance, for which, again, no words -- not even Gary's words, redolent with pulpy fronds and antiqued thesaurus-hide -- can properly express my debt.

Gary, like all of us in the creative business, rolled his share of fumbles, but his hits were all natural 20s. Somewhere around Elysium's gaming tables, he and Fletcher Pratt are already arguing about flanking bonuses.

OMFG. On a stick. With habrenaro sauce (reader makes whimpering sounds of delight).

"Antiqued thesarus-hide" -- THAT captured EGG's writing style perfectly.

The last sentence of the first paragraph describes exactly how Miresseia was born.

And anyone who can draw the connection between EGG's work and that of Fletcher Pratt is a dangerous dangerous mind.

I...must...have...MORE!