World-Building via Letter Tiles: Last Example Round (Solo RPG)

This is, mercifully, the last post recording my playtest of using letter-tile prompts.  I carried it through the fourth oracle question in order to show just how malleable the emerging story can be. 

Speaking of emerging story, I’ll forgo the complete recap and attempt a two sentence summary.  “An aged Nazi attempts to arm his warlike Hollow-Earth patrons with a Wonder Weapon from WWII Japan, the weapon itself adapted from Hollow-Earth technology.  Only our heroes can stop him”.

OK, so learning about Roswell-in-the-Pacific from the oracle dice, I now fill my hand back to ten tiles and get on with laying down more words.  Hitting two orange squares gives me two hand refreshes and I complete four words before triggering the next oracle question: IDENTITY, GUSHER, MOTOR, and GUARD.

I'm not sure what to do with IDENTITY and GUARD, but since one is oriented horizontally and the other vertically, I'll say they're a word-pair.  So, the IDENTITY of a GUARD at the fringes of the aforementioned royal wedding might be in question?  Or, even better, perhaps it’s the phrase GUARD IDENTITY, with someone trying to hide their true nature.  I like this a bit better, and since IDENTITY is actually built off the previous word NAZI, I think we know who this refers to.

 

The new word MOTOR plays nicely into threads already forming, especially since it's indicated as Goal-related.

 

The word GUSHER gives me some initial ideas about introducing an NPC from the surface world.  I researched oil and gas exploration in the Indian Ocean and read that Japan was a key player in the late 20th century, in roughly the timeframe of my game.  Synchronicity!  Hmmm, maybe I'll change the narrative from last post that the "moon-rocket" is actually a super-science nuclear powered-borer?  Or possibly that there are two vehicles, somehow related?  I’m leaning toward the first option, but this is about letting the universe push us into unexpected directions, so let's ask the Oracle.

 

4th Question: Did a second vehicle from the surface world recently wreck in the Inner World kingdom?

 

Result: 5 "Yes, and…"

 

I can work with this!  Yes, a second vehicle from the surface world recently wrecked in the kingdom, and it has a close connection to the WWII spacecraft!

    

As the picture shows, I still have 37 tiles remaining in the bag and I could keep going.  In fact, I did continue on to a fifth oracle question, but I think I’ve demonstrated the process.

Does it produce a Hugo-award winning narrative?  No.  Does it produce any narrative at all?  That’s debatable, but since there’s no structure, the answer seems no.  I’d say the letter tile process is an idea generator, and a slow one at that.

Still, I find it a fun mini-game and the tile/dice oracle combination does inject unexpected inspiration.  Personally, I would have never introduced World War II elements into my subterranean fantasy world, but now I have an adventure arc featuring just those things.  I’ve got NPCs, their potential motivations, technology that could offer the PCs a way to escape back to the earth’s surface… lots of angles to explore and interpret after only four questions.

The playtest documented here was essentially adventure creation, like a GM getting ideas to build an entire session or two worth of material for a group of players.  The next time I use this technique, I’ll integrate it real-time with a true solo RPG adventure to see how that works.

Steps for solo RPG integration:

1. Start with generalities defined: the PC(s), setting, premise, etc.
2. Run the board set-up as in the intro post and play the tile process through the first oracle question; the intent is to set the solo RPG opening scene and, in Mythic GME terms, define some open threads.
3. Refresh the tile hand and lay down additional words, continuing until the next oracle question is triggered.
4. Leave that question unanswered and return to the solo RPG proper, using the newly generated words either to interpret an altered/interrupted scene, or as additional threads/NPC details; play the solo RPG scene as normal.
5. Between scenes, use the events of the actual play, amplified by the existing tile words, and answer the still outstanding Oracle question.
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 above.      

I used 76 tiles over five questions during my playtest, so that suggests about 15 tiles per question.  A bag of 100 tiles would therefore yield six, maybe seven questions with the first one occurring prior to play.  The tile-based word prompts therefore only last for the first five or so scenes but honestly, that feels about right.  After five or six scenes, there should be plenty of threads to explore. 

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 3 (Solo RPG)

Last round of the emerging story of the subterranean Inner World suggested two warring factions, including one guided by Nazis!  The tile-formed words also hinted that a royal wedding could end the fighting.  The oracle dice confirmed this, stating that:

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

Seven more tiles drawn to fill the hand back to ten, and then another round of word-building.  If I were playing Scrabble, I could have racked up an impressive score on a longer word.  Generating story connections by hitting the desired colored squares and then triggering an oracle question, have me laying down three short words instead: MOON, ODE, and ACE.     

It's coming together!  This shows how the entire story can morph and how it's OK to jettison big portions of previous ideas.  Look at it as if from a character's limited perspective… maybe the previous brainstorming reflects what appeared to be going on, but then more is revealed.

 

The Japanese vessel that disappeared long ago into the Inner World was not a submarine but a MOON-rocket (more of a spaceplane maybe?).  Originally designed for peaceful purposes (Goal), the rocket's development was hijacked to support the war effort.  The NAZI who advises the primitive kingdom was not a scientist but a test pilot, part of a two-person crew with a Japanese ACE fighter pilot turned test pilot.  Their test flight ended in the Inner World, with the German surviving.  Did the Japanese pilot live?  Unknown, but the cryptic Haiku (ODE) he left holds the interest of more than one character (Connection). 

 

Why have we never heard of Japan's WWII-era moon ambitions before, or since?  I'd say this points to a unique vessel; perhaps the HULL of the rocket utilized one-of-a-kind alloys and/or a special propulsion system…

 

3rd Question: Did Japan receive help from the Inner World to build their World War II rocketship? 

 

Result: 3 "No, but…"   

 

No, Japanese scientists did not receive help from the Inner World to build the rocket, but they did reverse-engineer a wreck of an Inner World craft!

The story’s getting more focused but no less weird.  Stay tuned…

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 2 (Solo RPG)

Continuing the demonstration of my tile-laying method of world building, we ended last post with the following question posed to the oracle, and its answer:

Question: Are elements of the subterranean world's nobility actual German Nazis? Answer: Yes, elements of the Inner World nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge.

Getting to that question exhausts my hand of tiles, but since the last word built over a "?" square, I refresh back to a hand of ten letters (see previous two posts for a rundown of the rules).

The next hand of tiles looks promising, especially the Wild tile.  Although I used the 100 tiles included in a basic Scrabble set for my story-creation system, I replaced the two Blank tiles with two “Wild” tiles, labelled “|+|”.  The player uses Wild tile as either a traditional blank tile, i.e. representing any letter desired, or the player can cash it in for 3d3 additional tiles.  As seen from the picture below, I choose the latter option, the additional letters allowing me to make five words this round: VEX, JAPAN, WEAPON, MARRY, and HULL.

Interesting… so both Axis powers from WWII are somehow involved.  VEX shares a Goal story element with VAULT; someone is frustrated by failure to access a sealed area/container, but their failure is someone else's goal.

 

Since MARRY is a Setting element, the scene is a royal wedding!  The background of The War Inside says the inhabitants of the Inner World are advanced, with technology beyond current understanding (anti-gravity, beam weapons, etc.).  The assumption however is that there are different factions, maybe even nations, with disparate technology levels.  Who could be advised by Nazis?  Certainly not high-tech utopian people but instead a more primitive kingdom.

 

The JAPAN-WEAPON pairing suggests that maybe this has to do with Japan's nuclear weapon program in WWII.  JAPAN is an Obstacle here… perhaps a Japanese submarine was lost in the war while carrying heavy water to/from a collaboration with German scientists?  Of course, the submarine did not sink to the depths but disappeared, sucked into the Inner World.  The Nazi adviser to this kingdom here in the present day (1978) Inner World wants to build an H-bomb and knows the wreckage of the submarine holds the key ingredient.  Is that what's in the VAULT though?  Or is it scientific notes?  Perhaps he's already accessed the heavy water and made a dud?  Or perhaps he hasn’t even found the submarine yet?

 

A narrative is starting to form, but I don't want to box myself in.  I’ll explore one of the other words then…

 

2nd Question: Is the marriage part of a truce between warring factions?

 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…"

 

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

 

How were they not threatened?  Superior technology I assume, but it could be another advantage.  Why give one of your nobles in marriage then?  Who is this new faction and what are its motivations? 

  

Like most solo games, each answer just seems to create more perplexing questions.  The fun lies in interpreting the mess, and we’ll do more of that…. next post.

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 1 (Solo RPG)

Stepping through the fourth, and final playtest of my Letter-Tile-Worldbuilding technique is the easiest way for me to explain the process.

First, before we start pulling tiles out of bags, we need a general overview, a light scaffolding to hold everything together. If this was a video rental store (remember those), or a library, in what section would your story be found? Is it science-fiction or fantasy? Or maybe science-fantasy or horror? Within those choices, is it fantastical, or gritty-realistic? We’ll use the letter tiles to help us fill in details, but we need some context to bound things. 

I suspect, for solo RPGs, this context is easy to describe, since presumably most players would start with a preferred system or setting. 

My current solo RPG project could best be described as science-fiction, specifically in the “hidden lands” sub-genre. The setting imagines spies from both Cold War superpowers stumbling upon a subterranean “Hollow Earth”-type world in 1978. The likely PCs are the spies themselves and other travelers from the surface world wrapped up in the web of espionage. Player Character motivation is chiefly returning to the surface world, while preserving or gaining an advantage for their side in the East vs. West ideological struggle. The Inner World consists of many different lands and peoples, allowing all sorts of bizarre encounters, from dinosaurs to advanced technology beyond comprehension. 

While that helps set the stage, I see I still have a very wide playing field and nearly anything could happen in the opening adventure. We have a blank page before us, so let’s use the letter tiles to fill it up! 

Picking up from the set-up detailed in the last post, the board sports five randomly placed letters and a random chit-draw has determined the functions of the colored squares (picture repeated below for clarity). 

Set-up complete

I draw the first ten letters and begin building off of any of those five initial tiles. The first three words come quickly: REIGN, VAULT, NAZI. I play the tiles in that order making sure I save NAZI for last, as it will be built over a “?” square and trigger an Oracle Question and hand refresh. Building those three words uses all ten of my tiles, so after I answer the question I also get ten new tiles! 

First round complete, including oracle roll

Now the fun part: interpretation. Systems like the Mythic GME and Ars Magica have taught me that interpreting word-pairs can be easier than divining the meaning of a single word. One technique I therefore use here is splitting the new words into two categories based on orientation, vertical and horizontal, to limit the number of possible word-pair combinations. If words actually share a letter tile however, I honor that as a link. 

So, getting back to our words here… well, no need to try to form the best horizontal/vertical pairing, REIGN and NAZI both share a letter, so they are obviously linked. Even more so, the letter shared sits on a blue-colored cell, indicating this link has strong Connection to something in the story (likely a character or characters). The word REIGN features two colored squares, actually, the second being a magenta Setting indicator.  The word VAULT also overlays a colored square, in this case a green one, which indicates a Goal-related story element.

First thoughts: the scene obviously opens in a palace where the nobility have some sort of connection to the German Nazi party! A VAULT of some sort has significance to someone's Goals but I don't need to work that into the question directly. 

First Oracle Question: Are elements of this nobility actual German Nazis?

I use a custom oracle method where I roll 5d6 and rank order the dice by score, using the middle (third rank) die. 1-2 indicates “No, And…”, 3: “No, But…”, 4: “Yes, But…”, and 5-6: “Yes, And…”. The oracle gives a 50/50 chance for “Yes” or “No”, with the “But” modifier favored over the “And” roughly 60/40. 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…" 

Yes, elements of the nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge. 

That’s the example done, to the first question. I’ll carry through these posts all the way to the fourth question, where I stopped, having gained sufficient detail for an opening scene. 

If this example doesn’t make the process clear, hopefully the follow on posts will. A big thing I wanted to show here is how the process is a mini-game in it own right, with word-building not just based on what seems interesting for the story, but also trying to hit those colored squares to get hints how the words play into the story.

The results seem “from the ether” to me, and not forced. I certainly didn’t anticipate Nazis in my subterranean world, but honestly, it fits with the whole Hollow Earth conspiracy silliness. And it gives me some immediate baddies for the PCs to punch. And who better to punch than Nazis?

World-building via Letter Tiles: Intro (Solo RPG)

Uncharacteristically for me, I actually followed through on both the brainstorming ideas I recorded last post.

The map idea evolved into my Town in a Pizza Box technique almost effortlessly, but developing a method of letter tiles for story prompts took a bit more work. I’m pleased to say that after three iterations I closed on the final form, and the fourth playtest produced an unexpected but fun narrative framework, with virtually no further mechanical tweaks required. 

I created a custom, narrative-focused board to use in place of the normal Scrabble board. As the picture below shows, the board eliminates all references to scoring, instead showing a pattern of blank and colored squares. Tiles are placed from a hand of ten tiles, but refilling the hand back to a full complement occurs only when tiles overlay certain squares on the grid. Tile placement on the various colors suggests different clues to the narrative, and can even trigger narrative questions. 

I start by drawing five chits, in a separate (virtual*) bag from the normal bag of Scrabble tiles. Four of the five chits represent story elements: Connections, Goals, Obstacles, and Settings. The fifth chit bears an “R” to signify that one color offers additional Refresh opportunities. The five tiles are drawn from the bag and placed on the color index track to the left of the board. As shown here in the example picture below, for this story the colors represent the following: 

Orange: Refresh 
Yellow: Obstacle
Green: Goal
Blue: Connection
Magenta: Setting 

*NOTE: I use the website Playingcards.io to host my custom board and tiles, all of which were created by me; no copyrighted material used.

Next I draw five starting letter tiles and place them randomly on the board. The board has 225 squares total, with 81 squares split into nine central regions, each designated by dashed borders like a keypad. Rolling a d33 (two different-colored d3s) twice identifies first the region and then the actual square itself to place the tile.

Playtest #4 Set-up; Story Elements defined and five tiles randomly placed

Next, I start the story generation in earnest by drawing a hand of ten letter tiles. Unlike with Scrabble, I’m not trying to earn points, but rather determine significant story aspects. A number of constraints therefore drive tile placement.

A word formed with tiles overlying colored squares gains hints on how to interpret the word within the story context.

Placing a tile on the specific color marked Refresh allows an immediate refill of the hand back to 10 tiles. Since there are a finite number of these spaces, it pays to empty one’s hand by forming other words, while still being prepared to build a word on Refresh color.

Placing a tile on a “?” square triggers an oracle question, pausing the tile-laying (after the full word is laid down). The player reviews the words placed so far and any associated story elements indicated by colored squares, and asks a question to be answered by the game mechanism of their choice. As shown here, I use a 5d6 dice oracle; it’s a custom method that generates four possible answers: “Yes/No” each with a “But” or “And” modifier.

Triggering an oracle question also refills the player’s hand back to 10 tiles. Building over the “?” squares is therefore a key focus, but best done only after enough words have been formed to both guide the questioning and empty the hand of tiles. I find I get about three to four new words between each question.

The best way to explain further would probably be to just step through the rest of my fourth playtest as an example.  I'll do that, but in the next post... this one has gone on long enough!

Letter Tile Prompts (Solo RPGs)

Originally posted by me over on RPGG

If this seems eerily familiar to my one or two non-bot readers out there, I actually wrote this up before the Town in a Pizza Box setting-builder post; this was the primordial ooze from which that idea sprang.  The text below only slightly cleans up my brainstorming notes, which started around the concept of Scrabble-like letter tiles and quickly progressed to examining the modification of the underlying game-board to better interact with the tiles, from a solo RPG perspective.

We all have our ways of getting adventure (or dare I say it... story) prompts: from random tables, picture cubes, to grabbing a passage from the nearest book. Personally, I always used the dictionary, rolling a random page, then random column on that page, then scanning down and finding an interesting word (or three and letting one last random roll decide).

Starting Abandoned Solo RPG Campaign #1023 last summer, I decided to try prompts from Scrabble-like letter tiles and it worked pretty well. I grouped the letters into two piles and played against myself, alternating between the two piles with high score as the only goal to help me choose between which tiles to lay down.

Making sense of the resulting mess of unrelated words, framed by some very broad assumptions about the background, led me to an unexpected but surprisingly meaty adventure hook. The first of the following two pics shows my tiles and board.

I used my tablet to host the virtual game pieces, and then took a screen-grab to take notes on. The white erased regions aren't hiding anything naughty, I just wanted whitespace to write on. The second pic zooms in on the notes I took in one of those whitespaces. For context the setting is the far future Pax Galactica framework described in the (highly recommended) Fate Space Toolkit.

The Universe gave me this to work with???

A glimpse inside a weird mind...

(The 🥩 of the post) Tile-based word association is useful for prompts, but I keep having this nagging feeling that the Scrabble board itself could be pulling its weight more. Perhaps it could be replaced with something specifically designed for solo RPGs?

My first idea was to replace the colored markings on a traditional Scrabble board with RPG specific markings. Instead of “Triple Word Score” or “Double Letter Score”, certain squares on the grid would state things like “PC-NPC Connection”, or “PC backstory”, or “Important Place”. Perhaps the colored blocks could be left blank (but still different colored), the words filled in with tiles, and then each color defined randomly with a chit-draw. Finally, for this variant, I’m thinking that a number of tiles could be placed randomly, at the start, to help prevent lock-up in the middle.

My second idea was, how about just replacing the board with a gridded map? It could be a literal map for an RPG set in a rural town or on a space station or similarly “local” campaign. A more wide-ranging setting could instead employ a concept map, that shows perhaps major players and ideas with proximity implying strength of association. Regardless of the map type, a handful of letter tiles could be dropped from height, leaving those that land upright (i.e. readable) on the map to indicate not only the initial germ of a word, but exactly what in the setting (by map position) it relates to. Perhaps instead of dropping tiles, the solo player drops a six-sided letter die, one for each PC and maybe a few for significant NPCs. Each die would have a discrete color to identify to whom it belongs, and words would then be built off these with normal tiles. And if words from two different characters cross… perfect, that implies interaction.

I imagine this only as world-building or adventure design prompts, as it would be too time consuming for use as an oracle. I like the second idea more but the first idea would take far less production effort and I could be testing it today.

Anybody who has read this far… have you ever done something similar? How did it work for you? Thanks for reading!

Town in a Pizza Box (Solo RPG Prompt)

Or: An inspiration tool for lonely fun.

I love “quantum game prep” techniques, where players or GMs can flesh out an RPG (or wargame) setting on the fly. The brilliant RPG Weird Heroes of Public Access uses this technique, charging the players with imagining localities in the fictional town of Fairhaven. I played (unfortunately only) two wonderful sessions of Brindlewood Bay a few years back and the GM employed a similar technique, having us answer leading questions to fill in the details of our PCs’ little burg.

How then can a solo RPG enthusiast, or maybe a GM looking for inspiration during prep, replicate the unpredictable responses of a group of diverse gamers? As always, the dice have the answer.

I made up a quick way of generating a map of small rural town, with the dice indicating not only the spatial positions of the landmarks, but the relationships between them. I generated the landmark category table by referencing the Yellow Pages for my own hometown. Modifying the die roll table could conceivably generate a different setting: a space station, a neighborhood in a metropolis, or a fantasy settlement for instance.

I playtested the idea just this morning and I’m happy to say it works well, at least with my overactive imagination. Only three rounds of rolling (and only the d8, d10, and d20) yielded a couple of juicy relationships that could spawn adventures and NPCs, including a direct relationship between the police station and a financial business over by the local dam.

A quick roll on my homebrew oracle answered “Yes, And…” to the question “is the relationship shady?”; in fact, not only is the relationship shady but it is also a well-kept secret. The nearby presence of the (randomly rolled) dam immediately spawned thoughts of flooded lands drowned by a controversial reservoir project. Illegal seizure of private land? A convenient way to hide the bodies? An inconvenient discovery of a sacred archaeological site? Who knows why the land was flooded and why the police helped hide that reason… it’s a meaty adventure hook that I can leave vague enough to branch off in a number of red herrings.

I haven’t posted this to my downloads page because I plan to expand the tool, adding at least another page to provide examples of each landmark category and include some additional rolls I use to further define certain features (like quantifying elevation changes).

Set the Controls for the Back Wall of Waldenbooks (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

 Alternate Title: The TSR Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog: A Gaming Rosetta Stone

As related last post, even as a primary schooler I rarely was without a book in my hand. Despite the plethora of free books available from the school and public libraries, Waldenbooks was my favorite mall store.

Similar to their feelings regarding the local public library, my parents must've considered Waldenbooks a fairly safe space, because I recall browsing alone while my dad looked for the latest Louis L'Amour novel in another part of the store.  While dad perused the cheesy Westerns, eight- to ten-year-old me navigated to the back wall of Waldenbooks.  I'm not sure if the upper management standardized the layout of all their stores, but the back wall, the back right specifically, of our particular Waldenbooks held all the RPGs.

Wait a second?!  RPGs?  The timeline of my last post saw me as a middle-schooler, still reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Endless Quest books and yet to fully grasp roleplaying or wargames.  True, but all those comic book ads I mentioned inserted, if subconsciously, the images of boxed games into my awareness.  I knew if I saw a box, wrapped in plastic and illustrated with lovely, glossy paintings, then I beheld one of the "real" games the big-kids played.  One seminal moment crystallized this association, so I'll detour from the mall back to the school playground briefly.

Sometime during fourth or fifth grade, a classmate who recognized my nerdiness offered me the Summer/Fall 1986 version of TSR's The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog, handed down to him from an older sibling.  I'm not sure exactly when TSR released this, but I assume it was actually in late spring, and I was still in fourth grade.  Funny how I've forgotten entire semesters of college classes, yet I can remember exactly where (but not when) I was, just outside the art building at recess, when this catalog entered my grasp.

Regardless of the vagaries of memory, this catalog showed me that the mythical "D&D" that we'd heard about in hushed tones (the Satanic Panic was in full swing), and that my first grade friend had futilely tried to show us years before, was far more than Endless Quest books.  Pictures filled the TSR catalog, showing the "real deal" Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets, and introducing me to the slew of competitor publishers.  I saw familiar, and by that time already beloved, properties such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as well as unpronounceable strangeness like the baffling but awesome looking "Call of Cthulhu".  The miniatures at the back of the catalog, especially those weird Grenadier sculpts for CoC, captured my imagination over everything else.  That however, is a tale for another day.

I poured over that catalog, dreaming about buying (or asking for Christmas) nearly everything in there.  Most of the games and accessories were unfamiliar, but a few I recognized not only from the aforementioned comic book ads but from the mall bookstore. 

The Rosetta Stone that was The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog transformed my Waldenbooks visits.  Previously, I had traveled to the right-side back wall of my local to search for Endless Quest and similar game books, as well as genre-specific guidebooks, such as Rovin's The Encyclopedia of Super-Villains.  The boxed sets in shrink-wrap and orange-spined AD&D manuals now became my focus, finally recognized for what they were.

The sensationalized accounts of D&D leading young kids astray influenced my parents, and although we were not a particularly religious household, I could always sense their apprehension when they came to gather me from the Waldenbooks back wall.      

Luckily, I set my heart not on the red-boxed D&D Basic Set, but the purple-pink box next to it that said "Star Frontiers Knight Hawks" on the side.  Although I recognized the Star Frontiers logo from my comics, it was the front cover illustration of battling spaceships that sucked me in.  My beloved Terran Trade Authority books disappeared from the local library a few years prior; now, here in Waldenbooks was something that not only featured TTA-adjacent art on the cover, but offered repeated fun beyond reading in the form of a game.  I had to have it. 

Initially, my folks thought otherwise.  "Too expensive" they said.  I had a plan however (and this is how I can isolate this purchase to the Summer of '86).  Our annual family summer vacation was approaching, and I knew that mom and dad's spending became a little more liberal on holiday.  Somehow (maybe I suggested it?) during our roadtrip through California we ended up at a mall and lucky for me that mall had a Waldenbooks. Even luckier, that Waldenbooks had a copy of Star Frontiers Knight Hawks and with a little strategically placed pressure (whining), I convinced my folks to buy it. 

I had no idea that Knight Hawks was actually an expansion to the original Star Frontiers boxed set; I didn't even understand the concept of RPGs, let alone that they could be expanded.  The multi-hour drive back to our home state gave me ample time to digest the box contents.  I puzzled over the "Campaign Book Expansion Rules", lacking the frame of reference from the base RPG.  The box back indicated that the smaller, gray-colored manual contained rules for a game that could "be played as a beginning or advanced game when played separately", and that's what I wanted to do.

It took little to convince my middle-school best friend, a fellow nerd who shared my love of comic books and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, to try Knight Hawks.  Our young age meant we probably got a lot of the rules wrong, and I remember the cardboard tokens fought a losing battle against the Atari 2600.

We enjoyed Knight Hawks though, which I can definitively say was my first "proper" non-gamebook game, and first wargame.  All thanks to Waldenbooks.        

Last two pics courtesy of RPGGeek.

Scholastic Book Clubs and Terran Trade Authorities (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

Preschool exposure to Star Wars and comic books started me on the path to nerdom.  Public school, particularly the school library, showed me I didn't walk this path alone.

Yes, nearly every little boy in the USA of 1982-83 had a few Kenner Star Wars figures in the toy box, but it was easy to spot those of us who were a lot more "into" the fantastical.  My best school chum Zack later became my favorite GM, and now is a published author of multiple horror novels.  Although we met at the bus stop on the first day of Kindergarten, I first marked him as a kindred geek spirit when he grabbed the Tusken Raider jigsaw puzzle during 1st Grade arts and crafts time.

A brilliant young boy named Colin shared Mrs. P.'s 1st Grade class with us, and he stood out for more than just his nerd interests.  Colin could already read.  Time may distort my memories, but I recall that while the rest of us struggled with our basic vocabulary, Colin got to sit quietly reading alone.  Not only that, he could bring and read the material of his choosing; that meant comic books!

Of course I was drawn to Colin's comics like a moth to flame, and he graciously shared his mags.  Colin inspired my lifelong preference for Iron Man (before he was cool!) over all other superheroes, except maybe ROM; the armored Avenger was Colin's favorite and hence the books he most frequently brought.

It was Colin who first pointed out the ad for Star Frontiers in one of these comics, and he who explained "it's a game."  I was blown away: a game you say?  He pointed out the blurb "from the makers of Dungeons and Dragons" gracing the same ad, offering "yeah, a game like D&D."  Later he brought in an example of this mysterious "D&D", probably a module, but only this wunderkind could understand this slim volume packed with text and esoteric diagrams.  Or maybe I misremember, and he only described it.  Regardless, it was beyond the comprehension of anyone but Colin.  We were only 1st Graders after all.        

Sadly I lost touch with Colin over the years but he taught me that far more worlds than just George Lucas' approved licenses exist, and that while glossy images drew us in, the written word held the key to accessing these worlds.

The school library quickly became a favorite place, where I discovered my first (quasi-) games in the Choose Your Own Adventure books and inspiration in the folklore and paranormal books that seemed to saturate school libraries in the early 80s.  Remember the Scholastic Book Club, and the order forms you could take home to show your folks?  My parents frequently denied me toys "you have too many already", but rarely said no to Book Order requests.  It didn't matter that I always picked the bullshit books about UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Ghosts, or even some CYOA nonsense.  Reading was educational!

Soon I discovered the public library in my rural hometown held an even wider array of CYOA books in the juvenile section, including the imitators like Which-Way and even better the TSR  Endless Quest books which claimed some sort of direct connection to those unfathomable games Colin tried to show us.

My parents reasoned no place in town was safer than the public library, so I found myself there many days after school, lost among the books.  The "grown up" library had many of the same colorfully illustrated books on weird subjects, and others in even larger format.  It was here I discovered probably the most influential works on my hobby aesthetic: Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority books.

I checked out the TTA books repeatedly, marveling at the illustrations through 1st and 2nd grade,   later absorbing the narrative of the Proxima Wars and other Great Space Battles as my reading skills increased.  The books (just the first two in Cowley's series) disappeared, obviously stolen, sometime in my early elementary school days.  Searching through the stacks, hoping the TTA handbooks had simply been misplaced, I discovered many new fantastic books, such as the Target Doctor Who novelizations, and the Usborne World Of... series.

A sympathetic librarian aided my mission to find the TTA books, teaching me to use the microfiche records of neighboring libraries' collections (pre-internet kids!).  Inter-library loan requests reunited me with the first two TTA books, and finally allowed me to read SpaceWreck (I would not see Starliners until buying it in college).

The TTA handbooks shaped my ideas of spaceflight more than any other influence, and were doubtless among the most important books of my childhood, an importance felt even in their absence.  The disappearance of the TTA handbooks left me yearning for spaceship imagery, a yearning that had me recall those ads from Colin's comic books… but that’s the next chapter in my self-indulgent story.     

  

Laser Swords and Spider Women (Hobby Origins, the Beginning...)

Not the name of a new tabletop game but rather my earliest recollections of the fantastical.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in fantasy and sci-fi subjects.  The original Star Wars film debuted while I was still in diapers, with cheap imitations saturating the media landscape while I took my first steps.  Kenner Star Wars toys and their knock-offs were ubiquitous and my toddler eyes no doubt saw them in the bedrooms of older cousins.

My first concrete memory of anything fantastical is watching The Empire Strikes Back upon its theater release in 1980.  I clearly remember the Imperial Walker battle scene and the lightsaber duel but little else, and I think I slept through most of that first showing.  

Star Wars toys featured prominently at that 1980 Christmas, and I was hooked.  My rural hometown routinely brought back popular movies (maybe this was normal back then?) and either the following summer in '81, or a year later in '82 I saw ESB in the theater again, this time soaking it all in.  Knowing the general thrust of the story (ice planet fight, swamp planet stuff, cloud planet stuff) but then being amazed at the Vader-as-Luke's-Father revelation (SPOILER ALERT!) stands as a very clear memory.  

The few readers of this blog know that comic books are my one true love.  Despite stupidly selling my collection decades ago, my earliest comics survived the purge due to their extremely poor and therefore unmarketable conditions.  Armed with these actual copies and the unparalleled Mike's Amazing World of Comics database (R.I.P. Mike), I reordered my jumbled memories.

My first comic?  Spider-Woman #34.  Curious choice for a young boy but then I remember economics and not my preferences played the primary role in my earliest, preschool, comic book acquisitions.  The spinner rack resided at the liquor store* and perhaps in early 1981 I spied a Star Wars comic, or maybe recognized Spider-Man from the old '60s cartoon that was in syndication.  The memory is fuzzy but I remember being told "no", only to have the gruff salesman intervene and offer my dad a discounted comic to placate me.  This happened a number of times, with the shop owner selling my folks comics that either were damaged or poor sellers about to be discarded to make room for the next month's editions.  I believe Spider-Woman #34 fell into the latter category.  None of that mattered to me... the bright colors, slam-bang action, and over-the-top characters were more than my pre-kindergarten brain could ask for.  Remember Hammer and Anvil, two escaped convicts connected at the wrists by an alien super-chain?  As I type this, my nearly 50 year-old brain realizes what a wonderfully wacky supervillain concept this was; there was no chance a child could understand.  But I was enthralled.  I think that my inability to comprehend the comic's plot (I couldn't read yet), coupled with the intense visual imagery (violence, Kirby-crackle, Spider-Woman's curves, etc.) suggested to me that comics were for "big-kids".  I felt like I was being let into a secret world.  And I was hooked for life.

*Note: this is not as seedy as it sounds.  Where I'm from in the western USA, "liquor store" was (in the 80s at least) a term for a general convenience store.  Dad was typically stopping in there to just grab the paper, a half-gallon of milk, maybe some chewing tobacco, or get some fishing tackle.  And yes, some beer.  As evidenced by the spinner rack right at the front door though, it was a kid-friendly place and the foundation of my comic book collection.      

(Pictures copyright original owners, used without permission but at resolutions intended for educational purposes only.  Buy Marvel Comics).