My first
time gaming was also my first time GMing, by the simple expedient that I was
the one who owned the rulebook. My first RPG was RIFTs, purchased ahead of the bigger name Dungeons and Dragons because of the awesome ads Palladium used to
run in Marvel Comics, the ones that (very briefly) described the game with an
accompanying illustration of either a pack of Dog Boys led by a Coalition
Psi-Stalker or one robot crushing another robot’s skull. Yeah. I had no idea
what Line Walkers, Juicers, Crazies or Dog Boys were, but they sounded a fuck
of a lot more exciting than fighter, mage, thief.
This was
sixth or seventh grade, and for my first session, it was just myself and a
single player, my oldest friend, Erik. The next year we’d find some other folks
to join the game, but we played one on one for a while. Looking over the rule
book, we both decided that for our first time out of the box, we wouldn’t try
playing in Rifts Earth, just because that was a whole lot of cultural and world
information to keep straight, all the while learning the basic mechanics of the
game, and the whole concept of role-playing games in general. So I cobbled
together a homebrew world, which was in many ways a precursor to Otherverse America.
At this
point, neither Erik nor myself had read any William Gibson and didn’t know the
word cyberpunk, but we’d both seen plenty of James Bond movies, Robocop and
very recently, a bootleg VHS tape of Bubblegum Crisis, and that was what I was
going for. So first game session, and I’m homebrewing a campaign world. I
decide it’s the 2020s, and Erik’s character (a high tech private detective
type) would be infiltrating a mega-corp. His character by the way was another
homebrew, if a fairly minor one- a City Rat’s skillset and outlook, equipped
with a set of SAMAS powered armor, because we both really wanted to try out all
the cool equipment.
I’d just finished reading Michael
Crighton’s Rising Sun, and I stole
the novel’s Nakamoto
Tower setting and related
mega-corp as the villains. The basic premise: Nakamoto was on the verge of a
technological break through, and a rival mega-corp wanted the tech, and wanted
Nakamoto’s own research sabotaged. In other words, the prototypical cyberpunk
plot, but it worked.
Anyway, I learned my first lesson
of GMing that day, that the players never do what you expect them to do. Once
Erik’s City Rat was assigned the mission, I expected he’d either barge in guns
blazing or else stealth his way in. Instead, he did something fucking absolutely
brilliant. Using a false identity and some of the advance he got for the job,
he simply rented some office space in the Nakamoto Tower!
Now, while he was still several floors away from Nakamoto’s secured research
facility, he had a legitimate reason to be in the building. He made up a dummy
corporation on the spot, even hired a cute secretary to keep up appearances
(and yes, later in the session he had a chance to bang her. In my defense I can
only saw we were both 12, and hey, I previously mentioned James Bond movies as
an inspiration for the mission, right?).
Over the next few days, he was able
to gather tons of intel on the Nakamoto corporation, and even ship his SAMAS
into the building, piece by piece, in boxes of office equipment and crates of
furniture. When it came time for violence, instead of having to fight his way
into the secured skyscraper, he already had his powered armor ready to go,
right inside the opposition’s security cordon.
The
violence also taught me my second lesson of GMing- sometimes you don’t need to
roll for every attack or skill check, and sometimes you have to houserule
something that’s missing. A powered armor dog fight over the streets of future Los Angeles, between
Erik’s SAMAS and a pair of Nakamoto Flying Titans ended with one of the Titans
scragged outright and the other ejecting from his blasted armor at the last
possible second and trying to escape on foot. (My first houserule: that rather
than dying when his Flying Titan got down to zero MDC,
the pilot could eject, mainly so Erik’s City Rat would have a chance to
interrogate him).
Erik took
the opportunity to question him. Oh yeah, did he ever. Ejecting from his SAMAS
either out of some misguided sense of fair play, or because SAMAS versus
unarmored human is too easy a fight to satisfy, Erik’s character tackled the
fleeing pilot on a rooftop. He ended up sitting on the pilot’s chest, a Wilk’s
laser pistol pressed to the pilot’s head. The interrogation that followed was
VERY successful, and after it was all over, Erik decided to blast the guy.
Because it was my first game, and I didn’t know any better, I had Erik roll to
hit.
The guy
dodges.
Erik shoots
again.
The pilot
(who has a 6 ft dude squatting on his chest and a laser blaster more powerful
than a tank gun pressed to his temple, mind you) dodges again. The fuck? We
both have this look on our face, like we can’t believe this is happening. I
realize that given the power of the laser weapon, the rooftop beneath this
guy’s head is cratered, but he’s managing to squirm out of the way of every
blast.
We both
start flipping through the rule book. Aren’t there any rules for point blank
shots? Can’t I just kill this guy? We spend like 10 or 20 minutes looking for
some kind of common sense rule about instant kills and point blank shooting.
Finally I make an executive decision that yeah, Erik can just blast the pilot
in that situation. He puts the pilot out of all our miseries, and I think at
that point, even the pilot was relieved.
After
holing up somewhere to fix his damaged SAMAS, Erik’s character began the
climactic assault on Nakamoto. (Fixing the armor was another thing I had to
houserule. I just said that after a few hours of hard work, his SAMAS was back
to like ¾ its maximum MDC.)
The next
few battles were a lot less memorable than the execution of that poor pilot,
but were fairly satisfying to a pair of blood thirsty young gamers. The
climactic twist, which I’m still fairly proud of, was the tech the Nakamoto
mega-corp was working on was afterlife research. Basically, they’d created an
enormous artificial rift to what they were hoping was heaven and were sending
in robot probes to map it. The way I ended up describing the portal- a big
metal ring with glowy tech bits- was pretty similar to the stargates from the
eponymous movie and TV series (though that was a few years off at the time).
Anyway, Erik’s assault destabilized the portal, and some kind of demon stepped
through- I got some good use of the random demon table at the back of the Rifts
corebook building that thing.
By the time
that first 4-5 hour session wrapped up, the Nakamoto Tower
was in flames, Erik had a CD full of stolen data to give his employers, his
SAMAS was scragged beyond repair, and his City Rat walked, scraped and cut, into
the LA sunset with his arm around his secretary.
After that,
we started a fairly long running series of Rifts campaigns that ended spanning
most of our high school and our college years. It wasn’t quite a contiguous
campaign, as I’ve always focused on shorter, single story arcs. We’d play out
one storyline for a couple of months and than wrap it up, beginning the next
with (usually) different characters on a different part of Rifts Earth. The
world was big enough we could shift focus whenever one of us bought a new
sourcebook and given the way Rifts characters worked, leveling up wasn’t really
a major consideration.
The “series of mini-series”
approach worked well, and defines my style of GMing to this day. I’ve never
actually had one of those epic 15 year D&D games a lot of gamers talk
about, and I’m somewhat in awe of gamers who do.
During that time, we fell into a
pretty regular Saturday night game, fueled by McDonalds dollar menu burgers.
Our group included everything from mega-damage fairies to borgs, Sunaj
Assassins, and Glitterboys to dragons to three flavors of Juicers to a hapless
Conjuror (from Federation of Magic) whose powers were so completely and
hilariously useless in a MDC
environment that we nicknamed him the “Aquaman” of the group. The groups Dragon
was being played by this rather portly powergamer (of course), but he was
responsible for the most memorable line I’ve ever heard uttered in all my years
of gaming.
The group had been chasing one
particular Juicer through the West
Virginia wilderness for a couple of sessions.
Sometimes the Juicer had the advantage and singlehandedly kicked the group’s
ass, sometimes he had to run like fuck. But he’d managed to really get on the
group’s nerves, and had blown up their transport a couple of sessions prior.
Eventually, the group (which didn’t include any Wilderness Scouts or woods
savvy characters, if I recall right) gets hopelessly lost in the woods and
eventually stumbles across the Juicer’s lair, at something like 6:30 AM. They find the Juicer’s ATV
parked outside this old, pre-Rifts bunker he was squatting in.
The Dragon,
he tells everybody else to wait in the tree line and he strides up to the ATV
in human form. Everybody knows something is going to go down, but dude’s a
Dragon- whatever he starts, he’s going to be more than capable of handling. We
don’t know how right that assumption is. So the dragon unscrews the ATV’s gas
cap, and still in human form, spits fire right into the gas tank.
KA-BOOM! Parts of that ATV reach low Earth orbit!
And the
Dragon’s just standing there, naked now, because all his human clothes burned
away, but the fuck does he care- he’s a Dragon. The Juicer comes roaring out of
his hidey hole, dressed only in his drug harness and his undies, twin laser pistols
in his hands. And I see the Dragon player’s eyes light up.
“You mean
his head’s exposed?”
Just pure
glee in this fat man’s voice. Like a kid at Christmas, and I acknowledge that
yeah, this guy is pretty much naked. And on Rifts Earth that’s a very bad
thing.
“Throwing
stones.”
Okay. For
those of you not familiar with the game, throwing stones is probably the
weakest of the new combat spells introduced in the (fuckin’ awesome) Federation
of Magic book; it’s like a MDC
version of magic missile from
D&D; does piddling damage, but pretty much always hits. The Dragon didn’t
want to show off, he later explained, with that same grin. So one casting, one
tossed magic pebble, and you had a Juicer missing his head and most of his
shoulders. Bye-bye, recurring NPC.
They all come up to explore the
bunker. Inside there’s a bed, the Juicer’s armor on the floor beside it, a
television playing cartoons and a bowl of cereal still cold on the table. The
group did give me points for verisimilitude.
Anyway, one final Rifts anecdote. A
couple of weekends ago, I ventured into the civilized lands of San Antonio for a weekend with my old
friends. Among other things, I hit up a lot of Half Price Bookstores while I
was there. I lost most of my Rifts books over the years- my time in the Navy
cost me a lot of my collection, as did a few moves and some drama between my
brother and his ex-girlfriend- drama which ended with the ex making off with
six boxes of RPG books and graphic novels I had entrusted my brother with. So I’ve
been trying to recollect what I’ve lost, and one of the books I scored this
trip was Rifts: Lone Star.
My friend Erik and his girlfriend
(who is curious about RPGs and might try one the next time I’m in town) were
with me. I was flipping through the book when I came across the Wayne Breaux
illustration of the infant Dog Boys playing with the female. I smile- I’d
forgotten about that one.
“Hey, look,” I say, holding the
book open to the page, “canine kindergarten.”
The look of horror on their face was
hilarious. Both Erik and his girlfriend got this look of visceral disgust. His
reaction was priceless, because he’d killed quite a few Dog Boy soldiers in his
years gaming with me.
“Ugg…. I knew they had Dog Boys,
but….”
“Yeah, man, that’s how they train
‘em. Kinda cute at that age, aren’t they?”
And Erik’s looking at me like he’s
not sure whether to feel guilty about blasting Dog Boys by the dozens back in
the day, or wishing he’d blasted more of them.
His girl
friend, meanwhile, is just baffled. Why are there dog people in this book? I
explain that this one country in the game makes dog-men to be super soldiers,
that they’re kind of like bipedal drug dogs. She agrees that sorta makes sense
but that canine kindergarten picture is creepy as hell- it’s right in both
their uncanny valleys.
I fucking
love Rifts.
CHRIS
2 comments:
I love Rifts as well, a whole Megaverse of what ifs to enjoy.
I picked up Fuck the Command, now one of my new adversaries is the Pundit Clone. I thought the Nemesis's breath weapon was hazardous, but that skreed is just vile.
Hope Endara sees daylight some day, and good luck with that Psi-Watch update.
Thank's man- I had a ton of fun coming up with the Pundit Clone's powers. Hopefully she killed off a couple of PCs before your group took her down.
CHRIS
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