Fantastic Five(ish)

Over at Tower of Zenopus, Blacksteel lists the first five role-playing games they played. I like rpgs. I like lists. Let's have at it!

The first rpg I played was Fighting Fantasy, except I don't always count it because my friend Gareth didn't properly grasp what what we were supposed to do, so we read through it together as a sort of collaborative solo Fighting Fantasy adventure. Still, we made choices and rolled dice and fought battles, and it is an rpg, so I'm counting it. Today, anyway.

Then there was a gap of a few years until around 1994 or 1995 when my friend Tim saw that I was a big Warhammer 40,000 fan and said something along the lines of "If you like orks with guns, then you'll love this" and...

We did love it. We played the heck out of Shadowrun for the next three or four years, until our group broke up as everyone headed off to university or went off to work or went travelling. Tim was a massive Shadowrun fan and had pretty much all of the splatbooks so he ran most of the games but occasionally wanted to play something too, and somehow we met Dave and Dave was a keeper of eldritch lore...

That was me done for. We played the heck out of Call of Cthulhu too and, unlike Shadowrun, that love survived "growing up" and has lasted through the years decades.

After that, it's a bit fuzzy and I'm not certain what my fourth or fifth rpgs were. We were teenagers with a lot of spare time, we were new to the hobby, and we played a ton of games between huge, sprawling Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun campaigns. I know Dave introduced us to Cyberpunk 2020, RuneQuest, and d6 Star Wars, and Tim encouraged me to get and run Traveller: The New Era, and Tim also ran a bizarre sleep-deprived game of Basic Dungeons and Dragons -- the Black Box -- in there too, so those are all likely candidates, but my gut feeling -- based on Star Trek: Voyager being on the telly at Dave's house when we went over to play -- is that RuneQuest was fourth, specifically the Games Workshop third edition:

My friends and I still remember this game as "the Battle of the Left Arm" because for some reason the hit location dice were wonky that day and all of the player-characters had their left arms either injured or severed in a battle with some broo.

Fifth though? No idea. Roll 1d4:

1. Black Box D&D
2. Cyberpunk 2020
3. Star Wars d6
4. Traveller: The New Era

BRUTICUS COMPROMISED

I am 45ish. My ambition*, before I vanish into cosmic dust, is to own a complete Bruticus.

This is Bruticus:

I owned two-fifths of him when I was a child. I had Onslaught, a fantastic toy and the main body, and I had Blast Off, one of the limbs -- usually an arm -- and a neat little space shuttle. Alas, I did not have the rest of the Combaticons. I did have a couple of other combiners -- Blot and Nautilator -- so I could assemble most of a hybrid, mutated Bruticus, missing a limb. Probably an arm.

At least they were all Decepticons, but it was Bruticus Compromised, at best, and it always niggled at me.

Later, in 2001, I was surprised to discover that the toys had been re-released with different colours and under different names, so flush with student loan money -- ha ha -- I bought them all and at last could assemble Bruticus.

Except it wasn't Bruticus. It was Ruination. This shouldn't matter, but it did, and anyway, I have somehow since lost Rollbar/Swindle, so even if it didn't matter I'm back to four-fifths.

I missed out on the various revamps and reimaginings of the toys -- including this beast -- but just a few weeks ago they released a new Vortex toy. Here he is:

(That's his 2001 incarnation there, "Ro-Tor".)

We will be getting his team-mates Blast Off and Brawl -- probably a leg -- and leader Onslaught in 2026. Maybe I will have a complete Bruticus before I'm 50.

*(I do have other ambitions. I'm not a total loser. Of course, those ambitions include such lofty goals as "finish painting my Eldar army" so...)