Playing Role Playing Games (RPGs) was a totally geeky thing to do in the early 80s. Nowadays people play games like this online with virtual simulations and it is seen as pretty normal. In light of the fact that computers at home were in their infancy we used imagination. Our first game of choice was Dungeons and Dragons. This was in the day that only hippies and geeks read the Lord of the Rings – the geeks from my generation have conquered entertainment to such an extent that films series like Twilight and The Hunger Games are not even thought of as geek territory.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are thought of as the same thing by people who are not interested. Fans tend to have preferences, though some like both. It really is a spectrum from the goblin, vampire and magic end through to hard science fiction, where the plot really serves to explain a scientific principle. In the middle you have series like Darkover, where the two genres mix.
Dungeons and Dragons was fantasy. There was a game called Traveller, which was science fiction. It was based in a universe that had elements of the work of Poul Anderson and EC Tubb, amongst others. Graham bought Traveller and one fateful Saturday in 1981 (27th June) after an afternoon playing AD&D he suggested that we try Traveller.
https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Classic_Traveller
We created some characters – it was horrifying – you had to serve military terms to get skills so the characters would be a t least 40 by the time they went into action. At 14 it seemed way too old (I still think the 4 years terms of service should have been reduced to 2 years).
After all going home to eat dinner in the evening we started. Traveller was meant to be a game to use other skills- such as negotiation – rather than the constant fighting that characterised AD&D (Traveller characters died much more easily than experienced AD&D characters – by that stage our characters were killing minor gods). Graham had chosen John Bonney, Paul Ashby and me to try this out as he thought we would be sympatico.
I regret to say that we were not. We played a module that was called The Sable Rose Affair. It started off ok with us trying to negotiate and act as undercover agents. Paul and John got trapped by the bad guys in the building and it was up to me to get them out. In my defence I would say that the game designers would not have given us laser cannons and grenades if we were not meant to use them.
John, Paul and I were, perhaps, not taking things quite as seriously as we should. When I took the grenades to blow up parts of the building we did not allow Graham a chance to study the game guide to see whether we could do that (actually they could only be fired from a launcher attached to a vehicle) – you have to remember Graham had never run a Traveller game before.
Total mayhem ensued as I merrily let off grenades and blew up half the building. Paul’s character was already dead and the bad guys emerged with John’s as a prisoner. I gunned them all down with the laser cannon. Paul, John and I were in fits of laughter. Graham was definitely not.
None of us were totally innocent, but the biggest culprit was me and I knew it at the time. It was almost like when you get drunk and find the wrong things very funny. Anyway, it is 39 years later and I freely acknowledge that I behaved in a shitty way when Graham had spent (what for us all) was a considerable sum of money buying a new game and ruining it.
I’m sorry Graham. At least we tried harder with the Call of the Cthulhu game.
Vangelis’s music always sounded cosmic. He did the theme to Carl Sagan’s stunning early 80s show Cosmos. I prefer this track – slightly. The film it is from is not science fiction, it is about the 1924 Olympics and deserved its Oscar.
Chariots of Fire
Five Miles Out 