Influential: the games that made me

Welcome to Influential, a recurring column where I look at some of the books, comics, games, movies and other media that have influenced aspects of my work.

Sometimes it can be easy to forget how important role playing games were to my foundational days as a writer. While I haven’t been a regularly active gamer in twenty years now, I still will use them now and then as a means to generation interesting and unique characters, or even as resources to develop the feel of a story.

Unlike so many young gamers, I didn’t touch anything Dungeons and Dragons related for nearly a decade. I first discovered gaming in the late 80s while still a kid in a heavily protestant family complete with a father in seminary. My mother didn’t take every element of that decades anti-Satanic push seriously, but one aspect she certainly latched onto was D&D. I distinctly remember a family meeting when my brother and I were told the two things we were absolutely not allowed to watch: The Terminator and the Dungeons and Dragons animated series. That’s how deep the panic about the game went.

It didn’t work. TSR got their hooks into my family anyway.

My childhood was spent with toys and grand adventures. My brother and I built an elaborate universe of heroes with repurposed action figures as the leads. My older sibling first discovered gaming as well, when a friend from one year of camp introduced him to the Marvel Super Heroes role playing game. This was the halcyon days of the FASERIP system created by Jeff Grubb, the center of an expansive line from D&D publishers TSR that lasted a decade. While I found the game fun, my access was always limited to when I could borrow it from my brother. With that in mind, I set out to find my own game to purchase.

It was 1990. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles engulfed the world. I was just a month or two removed from discovering the original Mirage series through the over-sized First Comics releases. It felt like a no brainer to dive into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. Palladium Books built everything around one specific system. Anyone that’s played it knows exactly how old school their system can be, even in comparison to the mid-80s design of Marvel Super Heroes. It didn’t stop me from loving it. I could build dozens of variants of animal-mutant hybrids and teach them several different fighting styles. It cemented my love for mutant animals, but it didn’t quite feed the itch I had of creating the full range of superheroes swelling in my young skull.

I lived in an incredibly small town in Iowa. The next most sensible solution to build a superhero universe might be Heroes Unlimited, Palladium’s supers game. But I wouldn’t even see that game in the wild for years. Instead, I found something a bit more unique.

It was called The Batman Role-Playing Game. Unsurprisingly this weird, comic-sized tome released in 1989, just in time for the film, but it is 100% pure eighties era Batman (though with a few other DC vigilantes like Ragman and The Question thrown in.) Though the cover can best be described as extremely boring, when I found it a couple years after its original release I immediately wanted it. Considering I found it in a Ben Franklin (remember those) and it was discounted to less than five bucks, it proved an easy get.

The Batman RPG can best be described as Basic DC Heroes. It worked as an easy to understand introduction to the system now called MEGS. Built on 9 stats, every action in the game ran off a single action table. Built on an exponential system where each rank of an ability doubles the last, it has became a favorite of math-oriented gamers for decades. But I loved just how well the mechanics worked for building anything from a world-class detective to a man of steel. (I also found bemusement that it was the only licensed game I read for years that outright said someone playing it should be the character it licensed.)

The game also introduced me to the point buy mechanic of character building. My previous game reads all focused on random character generation through tables. Suddenly I felt empowered to generate a hero from the ground up. Though the math was complicated (though nothing compared to some other point-buy games like Champions I would find later) I worked my way through it and started to really build characters by the dozens.

It was with MEGS that I started to build my own super-universe. Initially, it focused upon a plethora of comics I’d read over the years, not just with traditional DC or TMNT characters, but often heroes and villains adapted from Marvel What If stories, one of my earliest regular purchases at Marvel. (I distinctly remember building an entire X-Men corner of the universe straight out of What if Wolverine was Lord of Vampires?) But while comprehensive builds of superhero universes helped me learn the system, I let that slip away into developing my own characters.

I started with Crusader, a name I regularly used when we also turned our toys into superheroes. He remains a character I want to develop into the star of his own series, but back then he was just pretty much a badass knight with a magic sword. It was the 90s after all. That could describe a million characters.

Things really took off as I sought to develop a young hero with powers unlike any major Marvel or DC hero. I went through a dozen Marvel sourcebooks and a half dozen DC ones in search of something a bit off the beaten path. I found gravity control. Though it wasn’t an unheard of power in either universe, no hero possessed it in those halcyon days of the early 90s.

Lightweight was born on a DC Heroes build.

Over twenty years passed before I published the first volume of the Lightweight series. Now, the character is the cornerstone of the MHP Universe. While he’s dramatically different now than his earliest RPG incarnations, so much of his character was developed in those fledgling days of character creation and genuine excitement at building a universe of heroes.

The universe has grown in far different ways as an adult writer than it might have as a young gamer. But I never lost my excitement in building a superhero universe from the ground-up, nor have I lost my love to use RPG game books as resources to this day.

Even the upcoming KITH found me developing character builds in its earliest stages. I might not be a pen and paper gamer anymore, but it still exists in my DNA and probably always will.

Neither TMNT and Other Strangeness nor Batman the RPG remain in print, but they can still be found regularly in used stores. Arguably better resources still exist, but nothing will quite match those old titles and systems in unlocking the pure creative energy of my mind.