I watched the BBC series Video Nasty the other day. It's pretty good. The trailers made it look like a period comedy set during the 1980's video nasty scare -- of which I am a bit young to have direct experience, but I remember well its legacy -- and it is sort of that, but let's just say the trailer is a bit misleading.
Anyway.
One early scene takes place in a video shop, one of the hundreds of independent -- and slightly dodgy -- establishments that dotted the nation before the chains took over. This shop had its own branded VHS cases, as you'd recognise if you'd ever been in a video shop from 1990ish onwards. Except that's not how I remember 1980's shops operating.
I remember that you'd browse the shelves in the pokey little room behind the newsagent, pick your film, take it to the counter, and then you'd get your rental VHS in a case that looked like a faux leather book. Like this:
I find this both cute and weird. Not only because people thought the appropriate way to display a VHS was to make it look like a generic leather-bound book, but also because there was apparently some need or desire to display or shelve a film you were only going to have in your house for two or three days. It looks eccentric and odd from 2025. To be fair, it looked eccentric and odd from 1995!
Following on from the role-playing games I have and haven't played, here are the games I've played but would very much like to play again before my body fails and my essence returns to the cosmos.
Or something.
13th Age - Probably my favourite version of "advanced" D&D. I think we still have much to explore with this game, not least a big old dungeon.
Barbarians of Lemuria - I enjoyed the last time I played this, only 13 years ago (!). I liked a few of the system mechanics and I also liked how the game captured the feel of pulp fantasy.
Cold City - Great fun. I would love to play this or its cousin Hot War again.
Dragonlance: The Fifth Age - The system is quite unlike anything else but I've only played it in short bursts; I'd like to give it a try for a longer term campaign to see how it goes.
Feng Shui - I'm not fully on board with the rules of the game, as I think they sort of get in the way of what they are trying to do, but I love the concept and setting, and I'd like to give it another try one day. Maybe with different rules?
Mutant Year Zero - It's a solid ruleset -- a descendant of which we played recently -- and I like the blend of base building and wilderness exploration, and how each feed into the other. I think my mistake when running it was in making things feel aimless and giving the impression that everything was randomly generated; if I ran it again I'd make more effort to highlight interesting locations and even perhaps create actual "missions" to give some added focus.
Pendragon - Just because it's Pendragon, and it's great, although I prefer a sort of loose picaresque wander about Mythic England as opposed to the Allegedly Great Pendragon Campaign, which really doesn't do much for me.
Rogue Trader - The ruleset is not the best but the setting has a great deal of potential; my previous attempt was more focussed on plot and story, and I wonder how a more freeform "space crawl" approach would go down.
Star Wars - The D6 variant. I played a fair bit of this in my teens and it was good fun, even if I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan. The expansion of the franchise in recent years has broadened the type of stories told on screen, and reminds me of the sort of off-piste adventures we had in the setting back in the dim and distant 1990s.
(Please! Where is Call of Cthulhu? Well, it gets played about once a year by my group so I don't feel the need to add it to the list. Just assume that I always want to play Call of Cthulhu Iä, fhtaghn, etc.)
What in fact happened was Stuart ran a Space: 1999 adventure using the Alien system, and it was good fun. I've always enjoyed the late-period Gerry Anderson series -- although I think UFO is better -- so it was fun to play around in that setting, just before the Moonbase Alpha accident that kicks the series off. The Alien ruleset -- derived from one of my favourites, Mutant Year Zero -- is quite good too, and worked well for the relatively low-tech world of 70s UK science fiction TV. It does tend towards horror and stress -- as you'd expect -- so it created a bit of a different tone for Space: 1999, perhaps the sort of thing you'd get if the series had been made in 1985 rather than 1975.
I'm not sure I have any interest in Alien itself as a game setting, but the system seems flexible and applicable for all sorts of things. I wonder how it would handle the Cthulhu Mythos?
Hmm...
Stuart's summary of the first session is here, and the second here.
Here's another untested and probably insanely unbalanced Stargrave scenario.
DANGER ZONE!
Sector Periculosum is a terrible place. Some say it's full of toxins from the Last War. Some say it's been reclaimed by a hostile biosphere. Some even say it's haunted by vengeful ghosts. Almost no one comes back from their alive. But those that do come back, come back rich.
SET-UP
Divide the table into 16 equal parts, making sure that the boundaries between each section are clear to all players. Each section should be numbered, although not necessarily on the table itself; a diagram is fine, as long as all players can see it.
Place terrain and select board edges as normal. There is no central loot token in this scenario, but each player should place three loot tokens, generating the third token's type as normal. You should try to avoid putting loot tokens on section boundaries.
There is no Target Point for this scenario.
SPECIAL RULES
Danger! Each turn after the first, before rolling for initiative, roll 1d20; the number rolled is the table section that will become a Danger Zone at the end of this turn, after the Creature Phase. Rolls of 17-20, or that correspond to a section that is already a Danger Zone, have no effect.
At the end of the current turn, that section becomes inaccessible for the rest of the game and all figures within it are treated as being killed. Loot tokens in that section are destroyed.
If a figure is on the boundary between a Danger Zone and a safe section use common sense; if over half of the model is in a safe area then they are safe. If in any doubt, roll a dice to decide.
Danger Zones ignore terrain; being inside a building is no safer than being in the open!
Figures can be pushed, teleported, or otherwise manipulated into Danger Zones.
Abilities or effects that protect a figure from being killed work against Danger Zones. In these cases, move the figure to the nearest safe edge, rolling for a random edge if there is any doubt.
Danger Zones do not block line of sight and can be travelled through by means of teleportation or similar abilities, but cannot be flown or jumped over (usually; see Option 1, below).
Option 1 - Role-playing? For the sake of simplicity the Danger Zones are just big killer squares of generic sci-fi death, but you may decide that they are flooded with water, in which case they are treated like normal areas of water, after the initial fatal flooding. Or they are filled with thick gas, in which case they cannot be seen through. Or they are clouds of murderous nanotech, blocking line of sight and flight. Whatever you decide, make sure all players agree to any exceptions before you start.
LOOT AND EXPERIENCE
Loot and experience are scored as normal, with the following additions:
+10xp whenever a crew member starts a turn in an imminent Danger Zone and escapes (up to 30xp).
+10xp whenever a crew member extracts a loot token from an imminent Danger Zone (up to 30xp).
+10xp whenever a crew member is killed by a Danger Zone (up to 30xp).
Experience awards stack, for example if a crew member escapes a Danger Zone with a loot token.
