Darrell's weblog

I admit it, when I was younger, I played a lot of role-playing games. Of course there was the omnipresent Dungeons and Dragons, which I played quite extensively, but there were also numerous other, less well-known, RPGs that I enjoyed.

On the humorous side, there’s Paranoia, “the role-playing game of a darkly humorous future.” My friends and I played this game a lot whenever we grew tired of the seriousness (yes, we were serious about role-playing) of other games. Not only did this game not take the future too seriously, it didn’t take itself too seriously. The rulebooks contain many references to throwing out the rules and doing whatever you want, as long as you have a good time. Which we did.

Since all of my high-school friends were also “military geeks” (nearly all of us went on to military service after school), we also played a lot of Twilight: 2000. In this game, the players are the last remnants of a shattered military unit left stranded after World War III in Europe goes nuclear. In the 1980’s, when we played this game, this was a very real threat, so it had a hint of realism to it. Also, it worked out that you could play military style characters with military equipment, but (conveniently) without the military structure. Besides filling my head with enormous amounts of military trivia that would make my future friends laugh at me, this game also resulted in my becoming very familiar with maps of Poland.

Of course, my friends and I weren’t just interested in the military. Several of us were also HUGE Middle-earth geeks. Just in case you live under a rock and only recently gained access to the Internet (and therefore this blog), Middle-earth is a fictional fantasy world created by J.R.R. Tolkien and is the setting for much of his literary work, most notably The Lord of the Rings. So it was no surprise that we also enjoyed playing Middle-earth Role Playing, mor commonly referred to as “M.E.R.P.” The rules were a simplified version of the complex Rolemaster game. The game is set more than 1000 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, and generally resulted in groups of players fighting against the forces of a resurgent Sauron all over Middle-earth. Great fun.

As honorable mentions, here are a few of the other role-playuing games that I played off and on, but not necessarily for any significant amount of time: Gamma World, Champions, Robotech, James Bond 007, and probably a few more that my subconscious refuses to let me remember.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed my little trip down memory lane. So now I’ve either piqued your interest in role-playing games of yore that you may have enjoyed, or you are now convinced that I am much more of a geek than you ever imagined.