Thankyou for reading.
I
originally envisioned "Tales From Space" back when I was in the seventh
grade. (1988) It's (TFS) roots actually lay in a PnP (Pen and Paper)
game called "Dungeons & Dragons", you know, the satan
worshiping game your parents probably grounded you for playing.
(joking, you can thank "Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters" for stupid
people thinking it's satanic) I never actually liked D&D partly
because I was always asked to be the DM (Dungeon Master). When you're a
DM you always know what's going to happen, you know the story, you know
the cool treasure at the the end of the tunnel. There's no surprise, no
mystery, no fun for the DM. So I set about trying to make a game that
was sort of like one of those "choose your own adventure books" where
you read up to a point, then you get to choose "take the left passage=
go to pg13" or "choose the right passage= go to page16" but instead of
everything being written down and linear, dice rolls could be used and
character stats had an effect on what you chose.
It was rough going at first, most of my friends didn't really like my
idea at the time and to be honest I didn't know what I was doing. I sat
and trudged through it though, and the end result was a crappy "Super
Heroes" game that had some good ideas behind it, but the implementation
was horrid. Up to that point, the only games I had played were games
like Monopoly, D&D, and Shadowrun, so I had no basis for
comparison
to even know if I was producing something that was fun or not. I let
some of my friends try it out and the only thing they did like about it
was my character creation process. They liked the realism aspect of it,
where you had to get a job, you had to have an "excuse" for where your
starting money and equipment came from, and you had to have a place to
call home. They liked the fact you could determine your characters
background, and how that could eventually catch up to you in the game,
they also liked the fact if your character liked to carry big guns
around the cops might not like that to much. In effect, they liked the
solid realism of it. The "choose your own adventure with a
dice
roll and character skills" just kind of went over their heads.
They had been so ingrained to the idea of a Dungeon/Game Master
controlling everything that they just couldn't accept any other way. So
that aspect of my game design hit the back burner for a while.
The next incarnation of my game actually went back in time for a short
spell. I remade my game into a D&D clone using my new found
realism
ideology. This time I used examples of real life from back in the "dark
ages" of world history. I implemented real life skills, the ideas of
working conditions, history, and other aspects of that time frame into
the game. The result wasn't successful by any means. My friends liked
aspects of it, but they didn't like the fact that the rich back in that
time were mostly land owners, and in order to progress in my game you
had to spend time doing menial things which were mostly calculated with
die rolls and character skills, and screwing up those die rolls could,
just as in real life back in that time, could cost you everything. My
players wanted to be straight adventurers, focus all their skills on
swinging a sword, not split it up with swinging a sword AND a sickle. I
tried to explain to them that in reality the most famous of heroes in
history were usually better farmers, artists, or philosophers than they
were soldiers. However, they rebutted with "yeah, but this is a game!"
Back to the drawing board. I discovered that despite the fact the game
was a flop, the ideas behind it weren't.
The third incarnation took place during the wild west. Back in
my
High School years the big "in" thing was the "cowboy" look. I never got
into the look, but I liked the idea. The mid 1850s was a good time to
RP (role play) in my honest opinion. I used the same basic rules I used
in the D&D clone, and I threw some "Wild Wild West"
into it.
I used to like the Wild Wild West tv show, so I thought tossing in the
sci-fi aspect was a good idea. My friends liked it to, but they didn't
like the fact that their characters could die, permanently. In response
I added in Indian Shamans that my friends could play and they could
call on the spirits and resurrect dead characters. That, like in so
many other games tended to make players careless and reckless. With
some more rule tweaking, the recklessness started turning to business
savvy. I introduced rules into the game that allowed players to
purchase/start businesses. I went all out on this, I researched what it
cost to build buildings and things back in the 1800s, what it cost to
feed horses, make and buy bullets, ETC. The prices and history in my
game were more accurate than the information in my American History
book in history class. One of my players started a brothel, another
started a stage coach line, and yet another found gold. Problem was,
back in those days a small success could set you for life. The game
quickly became dull because my players had been lucky on their skill
sets, die rolls, and adventuring that their business ventures were
critical successes and they were set for life. What more did they need
to do? The game fell apart quickly after that. I had in effect created
an awesome business sim, but the PnP RPG adventure aspect of it was
kind of lackluster.
The "High Seas
Adventure" was the fourth incarnation and anything but an adventure to
be honest. I thought up this version after flipping through a
D&D
source book for thieves that included a "swashbuckler" class of
character.("Pirates! Gold" on my Genesis had a hand in this as well) My
friends loved the idea, and they loved my character creation process as
this newest version took it to extremes. Not only did you have the
ability to determine the happenings of the immediate future of your
character, I had written up a way to determine up to five generations
of your character's past. All of it had an impact on who you were right
now, and what you were most likely to become.
I had made it so that half of you statistics were determined by a die
roll, the other half were determined by heredity and family history. If
your family had been farmers, you got bonuses to strength and
endurance, if they had been noblemen then charisma got boosted ETC. My
players liked that aspect of the game more than anything. My gaming
test sessions turned out to be nothing more than character creation
parties as my friends would sit for hours rolling dice and making
family histories. At the time I thought it was a little silly, but now
I see what they liked, it gave them a sense of connection to their
characters. They didn't just appear out of thin air like in every other
game, you had roots, a history, family, and some of our later
adventures would focus on protecting that family and past.
Now, if the core game mechanics had been worth a crap, I probably
wouldn't have scrapped this incarnation. My biggest problem was I
couldn't figure out a realistic way to do ship to ship combat. You line
up two frigates about 200 yards away, and open fire with dozens of
cannon, how do you calculate hits, misses, damage, and men loss
realistically, but not so realistic that if you win the fight you're so
crippled that the game might as well be over. Back when piracy on the
high seas was commonplace, ship to ship combat was usually a very
deadly and career ending task. Fact is, most fights were over before
they began because sailors knew, if you fight, you die. I couldn't get
that down in this incarnation, I couldn't get the realism, and fun
factor meshed right. I did manage to get the character generation
aspects of this version right, and this would be implemented into the
next two versions without hesitation.
The fifth incarnation was a modern day alternate reality game. The
history of this "reality" was such that religion never got a
stranglehold on civilization. That meant that the greatest free
thinkers of history could learn, teach, and progress science without
fear of religious persecution like what happened to them in real
history. With religion out of the picture, science progressed to such a
point that the first moon landing was in 1860, and the only major war
in the history of the world took place in 1920, and man was it a
whopper. My friends never really got a chance to play this version,
mostly because by the time this one came about, they were all long gone
to their own lives. My wife and kids however, loved it. Most
of
the people I told about it though, couldn't see past the inherent
anti-religion aspect of the game. In my honest opinion, there's nothing
anti religious about it, it's just stating simple facts that if the
religious powers that be hadn't of persecuted some of the greatest
minds in history, we'd be MUCH more advanced than we are now. Most of
the wars throughout history were fought on the "my god is better than
yours" principle, most of the tyranny had been imposed through
religious doctrine. Take that out of the picture, and the world's
strife was just removed as well.
With
such a small test audience, and in the eyes of the audience I could do
no wrong, this game was a success. I had combined aspects of my
previous games into this one. However, something was missing, it needed
more, there had to be more possibilities in the future of this
alternate reality.
The sixth incarnation used the Humans, and Human history of the fifth
incarnation, but now later on in time, around 2050 or so, and sent them
hurtling into space. Where they came in contact with a coalition of
aliens trying to live peacefully with different ideologies and
philosophies. A grand place for adventure, intrigue, and business
opportunities for the industrious Humans of the backwards planet Earth.
I introduced the "Patrolled Sectors" with dozens of different minor
races, ten more playable races, eleven counting the Humans, new
technology, new character generation possibilities, starship
construction, combat robots introduced in the fifth version, now taken
to a grand scale. Strife from the Human and Terran first contact, are
we cousins, or is it just a gigantically weird coincidence? What are
the mighty Mon'Za up to in their 3 mile long Blackship, or the Cerian
Hierarchy, in their giant battle platforms. What of the mysteries of
the GCN and moon sized super computer built more than a million years
ago?
What I'm
working on now is the final incarnation of a labor of love that I
started in 1988. I went from being "Thunder", shooting lightning bolts
at villains in my Super Hero game, to being "Soron the Solid" in my
D&D clone. I picked up my six shooter as "Billy Soron" in 1855,
who
liked to tell stories of his great grand-pappy "Soron the Cold" who
sailed the High Seas. I then submitted myself for cybernetic
augmentation, got my Combot pilots license and fought in the "Great
War" of 1920 as "Soron ColdHeart", I even got to see "the Rider
at the Gates" in all his glory. I have to be honest though, he looked
like an average guy to me. Later, when most people just knew me as
"ColdHeart", I was the pilot of the first expedition ship
into
the "Patrolled Sectors" where I was abducted by the Mon'Za, chased all
over the freakin' galaxy by the Cerian, shot at by giant cockroaches,
turned inside out by a Terran Ramp, and finally captured and
interrogated for being some sort of genetic aberration by the TCR
(Terran Corporate Republic). All in the first month of coming to the
Patrolled Sectors!
But I digress,,,,,
This is your story, these are your adventures, and when you sit down
with your grandkids and they ask you to tell them a story, you'll have
your
Tales, From Space