Dark Conspiracy Roundtable

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Iain (00:10):
Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast, dark
Conspiracy.
So hello and welcome to anotherepisode of Roll to Save.

(00:30):
Today is our roundtable,following our Dark Conspiracy
History episode and foreagle-eared listeners, if that's
a phrase, I have redone theDark Conspiracy History episode
Because in the initial one itappeared that the Dark Minions
didn't want their secretsspilled.
So they did something to thesound and made the music drown

(00:52):
out my dulcet scotch tones.
So it's been corrected and itnow can actually be listened to
the really fun thing.
By the way, I'm joined herewith Jason.
Steve is not with us.
He's sadly unwell, poor Steve,so thoughts and prayers to Steve
, obviously.

Jason (01:07):
Yeah, hope you get better soon, buddy.

Iain (01:09):
But yeah, Jason, one of the things that amused me was I
actually had a whole bunch oflisteners message me, mail me
about the sound quality.
I'm like, oh, people stilllisten to this, even after
months of absence.

Jason (01:28):
So that was quite refreshing to know that people
still listen to our nonsensepeople do.
Because I got I got a randomwhatsapp from uh, rob bell.
Um, so shout out to rob whereyou put a new podcast out.
I was like, have we?
Obviously that was the darkestbruising history episode.
So he was like is this one allthe end?
I'm like, yes, this one's allthe end, but we are recording
one, he's not listening to it.

Iain (01:50):
Probably then he's like yeah, it's just him.
Rob, incidentally, said to methat he's become aware of how
much I slow my voice down overin the US, and he says he has to
listen to it at 1.25 speed forme to sound at my normal speed.

Jason (02:05):
I would say 1.5 easily.

Iain (02:09):
Anyway, how are you, Jason ?
It's been a while.

Jason (02:12):
I'm very good.
I'm very good, looking forwardto a few bits and pieces coming
out.
I was noticing on the webthere's a lot of chatter about
the new Vampire, the MasqueradeBloodlines 2 coming out I was a
huge, huge fan of the originalback in 2004.
Um, I've heard mixed reviews,some of them good, some have

(02:34):
been bad.
Um, I'm still going to play it,so I'm quite excited looking
forward to that.

Iain (02:39):
Uh, other than that, just the usual, you know, watching
society collapse at a slow rateacross the world which is
actually really fitting giventhat we were going to talk about
dark conspiracy today, becauseit's the thing that I pointed
out in the history podcast.
Having reread that, it is astrangely prescient game because
all of the stuff that seemedvery jolly, science fiction and

(03:00):
dystopian back in 1991, I'm likethat's most of what's happened
nowadays the, the societalinequality and collapse, the
corporate overreach it feelsvery um prescient for today's
society yeah, it absolutely does.

Jason (03:18):
And I mean all these dystopian future games that
we're sort of seeing and haveplayed and loved and all this
kind of stuff.
And you look at it now andyou're like did these guys know
what's coming?
It's like the simpsons.

Iain (03:27):
They've predicted pretty much everything that's happening
so we're probably gonna end uptalking about gdw as a whole,
because we were talkingpre-recording and the fact is
we've actually played a ton ofgdw's games and the thing that I
find fascinating about them isthat gdw was obviously
originally a war games companyand it really shines through in

(03:52):
their games, like when Ireviewed dark conspiracy again
to write the history podcast,like the combat section in that
game.
My my god, it was like atactical skirmish war game
rather than a fast flowing RPG.
Let's kill the monsters andmove on.

(04:14):
There is a lot of war gameheritage bundled up in these
systems.

Jason (04:21):
I think it's called Crunch these days.

Iain (04:23):
It is definitely it's crunchy, as a gravel pit filled
with frosties, for example.
It's ridiculous.
The thing I loved about darkconspiracy is the authors have
clearly said we need everypossible rule for every possible
circumstance that we canpossibly come up in our game

(04:44):
world.
So in a game that is primarilyabout being a very heavily armed
scooby gang in the ruins ofdystopia america, they're like
we need space travel rulesbecause they might go into space
at some point and there's awhole suite of rules like that.
When I look into them them I'mlike I've never used these rules

(05:05):
when I've run the game ever.

Jason (05:07):
It could have just been a source book.
Do you know what I mean?

Iain (05:09):
It could have been an add-on, Right exactly.

Jason (05:11):
Do you need that right now?

Iain (05:13):
Yeah, this game's got extraterrestrials, so yeah, we
could do a space source book.
But it's almost like that jokeabout Fast and the Furious
franchise.
In the furious franchise arelike, yeah, they finally go into
space, that's what darkconspiracy is.
Like they finally you know,your players finally get to go
into space and guess what?
You've got rules for combat andmicrogravity.
Fantastic, off you go, but itjust feels like ridiculously

(05:36):
complete.
For the sake of it I said.

Jason (05:38):
It is like I remember, I think, going back to my
character in Dark Conspiracy.
I had a character in DarkConspiracy.
I had a cyborg escapee, yes,okay, and you roll each period
of time I think it was Everyfour years A bit of Traveller.
Yeah, traveller every fouryears.
Of course it's Traveller.
And I think every time I rolledI was getting like plus two

(06:01):
strength Plus two strength Plustwo strength.
This guy, I time I rolled I wasgetting like plus two strength
plus two strength plus twostrength.
This guy, I think, was thestats one to ten or two to
twelve, like Traveller.
I think it was one to ten, Ithink yeah, I think I ended up
with a strength of eighteen bythe end of it, which basically
meant this guy could hip fire a.5 cal HMG without taking off
the top of a tank.
Of course, he would then turnon you in a heartbeat when the

(06:23):
bad guys turned up that was myfavourite part of the Cyborg
Escapee career.

Iain (06:28):
I had a player who was my assistant on doing that and they
had the final confrontationwith the extraterrestrial big
bad.
And he's all getting ready tofly at this thing and have all
these combat reactions andeverything else.
And the ET pulls out a littleremote control and presses a
button on it and he's like right, go and attack your friends

(06:48):
yeah I can see the rest.
I'm like, oh yeah, we're reallygreat grateful he's got all
this ablative armor and 18strength and yeah, hit firing
0.5 cal, yeah, and it does sayin the description that if you
pick this career, your gm isgoing to dick you over at some
point.
It never stopped people.

(07:08):
They'd be like it's such aneasy, easy way to get plus two
strength and dermal body armour.

Jason (07:12):
I picked it for that reason.
You know there are reasons topick it.
I mean, I'd say it got sillybecause I was hoping to roll
something else.

Iain (07:21):
Let's talk about character creation in Dark Conspiracy for
a second, because on the yeah,on the surface of it, it looks
really good.
It's like the standard gdw lifepaths system.
You know, you start off as a Ithink an 18 year old uh, and you
can roll or you can do pointsallocation on your stats, and I
always found that pointsallocation was great for people

(07:42):
who had a particular idea ofwhat career they wanted to go
into, because all the careershad various requirements.
So you would build yourcharacter to be that the entry
requirement for whatever careeryou wanted.
You just wouldn't be like aamazing version of that person,
whereas if you rolled your statsit was complete chaos but you
could end up with the mostbusted character ever.

(08:06):
You know, I think I used theexample on the, the podcast you
give someone with like thephysical build of a linebacker
but also this genius level iqthat you happen to have, but
you're really not verycharismatic in the slightest.
The idea was you.
You built this character infour years progression and you
ended up having a very detailedoverview of really your
character's background.
What did you do?
In four years progression andyou ended up having a very
detailed overview of really yourcharacter's background.

(08:27):
What did you do every fouryears?
Who did you meet?
Because dark conspiracy makesgreat use of contacts.
It's one of the parts of thesystem I really like that.
Every four year period you madecontacts and you built up this
web of people that you knew andyou also got a bunch of skills
and, you know, cash that you'dthen use to buy rifles later on
presumably, but it made, in myexperience anyway, the most

(08:53):
mismatched parties that you'veever seen, because, especially,
people all went random becauseyou'd end up with this navy seal
and a paramedic and a homelessguy.
It was just an odd mix.
I used to just hand-wave awaythe whole rationale.
How do you guys know?

(09:13):
You know each other becauseyou're the heroes right.
Go.
But what was your experience ofit?

Jason (09:19):
So the thing is that was exactly what I was used to from
GDW, right?
So I'd played quite a lot ofgdw stuff beforehand, mainly
traveler, lots and lots and lotsof traveler, and you can see
exactly where their life pathsystem came from.

Iain (09:31):
It's exactly the same at least you can't die in this one
they.

Jason (09:36):
Yeah, you didn't die in the later versions of traveler,
you just got wounded andmustered out with a purple heart
, which is really interestingbecause that only made sense if
you're American, becauseeverybody else has a purple
heart.
So, but you know, you learnthese things.
So, yeah, I mean it fitted itand I wasn't used to systems
where you spent points.

(09:57):
At that time everything waswrong.
D&d was wrong, travel was wrong.
You know RuneQuest was wrong.
That was.
You know.
There's all these games.
It was all just roll the diceand you ended up with random
stuff.
You did.
You ended up with mad parties,and the only thing that linked
them all was they all boughttheir sunglasses from the same
vendor.

Iain (10:17):
Everybody had to have a pair of Serengeti sunglasses.

Jason (10:20):
That was the other one, a pair of Serengeti sunglasses.
Off you go looking that up aswell.

Iain (10:27):
It was a pair of Serengeti sunglasses, so off you go
looking that up as well.
So it was a voyage of discovery.
It was and it's.
It was interesting because youhad all these different careers
there's like 50 plus differentcareers you can choose from in
Dark Conspiracy.
That will allow you to makevarious different types of
characters.
But when you actually really gointo the system, it really

(10:50):
seems to be suggesting that andthe best way to hunt these
monsters is with heavy firepower.
Therefore you need to, you know, get tooled up and and go for
it at the end of it.
So you're almost like well, whywouldn't I make a military
character?
rather, than you know thishard-bitten private eye who's
got a you know a snub roserevolver in his pocket yeah, it

(11:12):
was.

Jason (11:12):
It was very much less kind of call of cthulhu,
investigation or you know thatkind of stuff and very much more
kind of twilight 2000, but withaliens it's kind of another gdw
game.
Well done, I brought that onein, yeah.
But it's actually something,that GDW game.

Iain (11:25):
Well done, I brought that one in, yeah but it's actually
something that I found some ofmy players really liked.
Was that the fact it wasn'tCall of Cthulhu?
I ran Call of.
Cthulhu about the same time andsome people loved Call of
Cthulhu.
I had certain players who hatedit because they couldn't go toe
to toe with the monsters, andthey were the ones who were like
, I don't really want to playCall of Cthulhu, can we not play
something else?

(11:45):
And Dark Conspiracy almost hitthat sweet spot between people
who wanted to be Mulder out ofthe X-Files and other people who
wanted to be Mulder's friend,john Rambo, who turned up
hip-firing his squad supportweapon and yelling at the.
There's curiously, there's nosanity mechanic.

(12:07):
It's like you see these thingsit's like cool, let's roll for
initiative, let's go, and it'sit's very much.
You're going to be the guy onthe cover with the trench coat
and the big rifle who'sconfronting those creatures, but
in a way that's fine, becauseif you go into the game knowing
that's what you're playing, youjust embrace it.
It's what.
You go into the game knowingthat's what you're playing, you
just embrace it.
It's what I said in the historypodcast, that you look at

(12:29):
everything the game's gotchucked into it, like all the
creatures which vary from theselike lovecraftian evil things to
the campy 1950s space aliens,and thematically they're all
over the place, but you take theones you want for your game and
you ignore the other ones.
Like you cannot conceivably useall of these creatures in your,

(12:49):
in your world, so I bet peopletried.
I bet people have tried.
Same people try to docrossovers for vampire, the
masquerade and werewolf.
There was one creature I reallyliked.
It was called the pale.
That was like a vampire but itfed on body heat and that's a
really sinister concept.
And meanwhile there's someother creatures that are
basically a guy who's had awolf's head stitched on his body

(13:10):
and he eats people.
Okay, fair enough, and it'sobviously designed for those
monster of the week typecampaigns, whereas there's other
stuff that's very conspiracybased.
You know the creatures thatlook like us and hide amongst us
.
You can make a really good kindof thriller out of that.
But if you want to go toe totoe with like a weird tiger,
there's rules for that as wellyeah, it did seem a lot more

(13:34):
ammo tracking than library use.

Jason (13:37):
Well it's funny.

Iain (13:39):
you should say that one of the things they had for the
character sheets on page 327it's it's got 25.
It's a sheet for you tophotocopy and give to your
players.
Kids ask your parents what aphotocopier is.
But it's a magazine record form.
It's got 25 little drawings ofmagazines with bullets and you

(14:03):
write down what calibre eachmagazine is and you check off
the bullets one by one, becausethis isn't one of these lovely
systems that abstracts resourcemanagement.
You are tracking every shot youfire, every hit your armour's
taken and, in this case,obsessive detail you need to
know exactly how many secondsyou've gotten around so you know

(14:23):
how many more bullets you canput in that clip and slam it
back into your storm riflebefore you start blazing away at
the bad guys again.
It kind of gloriouslycelebrates what it is.
oh, there's also belt ammorecord forms as well I
completely forgot nine yardsright yeah, the really
interesting thing about theequipment is there's like 70

(14:47):
plus pages of gear you can buy,but they actually have charts at
the end over three pages thatjust sum up the stats of the
weapons.
Like so why do we need 70 plusillustrated pages of?
I know why?
Because it's a gun porn gameand people want to look at what

(15:08):
variant of the m16 rifle familythey happen to be firing before
they buy it.
But you know, it sums up allthe stats over three pages.
But we also have 70 pages of ofgear you can buy.
There's a whole swathe ofweapons and some weapons
vehicles that your players willnever own, but they give you

(15:29):
stats for it.
Um, and some of the stuff.
You look at it and you thinkthere could be some real
interesting scenarios like do Igive my players a winnebago just
to see what they do with it?
Because, guess what, give myplayers a winnebago just to see
what they do with it?
Because guess what?
The stats for a winnebago inthis alongside a scooter and a
horse.
You know it's.
It's that level of obsessiveequipment detail that that this

(15:54):
book celebrates and loves didn'tit have like a stylistic kind
of 1950s kind of slightlyfallout?

Jason (16:07):
look on things like the vehicles it did so.

Iain (16:10):
Part of the background is because of the greater
depression that the dark minionsengineered on humanity's
economies.
They've kind of regressed interms of technology because
they're producing things as likeeasily as possible.
So a lot of stuff that'smanufactured is manufactured in

(16:31):
old-fashioned ways and thereforeit has this more retro
aesthetic, whereas the corporatebigwigs you know driving around
in ferraris and have sleek cellphones and everything else like
that.
Your average Joe Schmo has gota TV that your granny would have
in a big wooden type cabinetand they only have a house phone

(16:51):
and they might have some clunkylooking old vehicle that
they've managed to get startedagain.
And yeah, they sort of meldthat together to suggest that
your average person living inthe Metroplex and dark
conspiracy land has got thistechnology that is way older
than what they have.

(17:11):
I think it was a nice way ofthe authors getting around that
thing of we don't know whattechnology is going to be like
in 30 years time.
So we're going to say they gobackwards and then just give
everybody else sci-fi stuff.

Jason (17:22):
But I guess I mean, if you were a conspiratorial, mega,
dark, minion, alien thing andyou want to take over the world,
having your enemy, having allaccess to nice, shiny new
technology, that's a bad idea,right?

Iain (17:35):
well, exactly, yeah, and it does make sense yeah, has
that in the equipment chapter aswell.
It hints at some of the goodguys have got extraterrestrials
who aren't corrupted workingwith them to produce technology
that will help mankind and it'san excuse to put in those
devices.

(17:56):
Is it science or is it magic?
And that's quite a good touch,because it shows that the Dark
Minions have got people to fallback onto older tech, while at
the same time there is thistacit acknowledgement that you
are in the future and there aresuper sci-fi gadgets to be had
if you want.
But the most common gadgetLarge guns.

(18:16):
The guns haven't regressed, theguns are very much up to date
and you can buy an anti-buildingrifle at your local gun store
because why not?
Obviously the arms industry isstill booming.

Jason (18:28):
Capitalism at its best there we go but it's a
deliberate attempt.
I mean, as you say, to cover upwhat technology will be in the
future, but also to kind ofwiden the gap between the haves
and the have-nots.
That's a bit of a bit of atheme.

Iain (18:42):
It's a massive theme in the setting and it's I say
that's why I think it's kind ofprophetic.
It's like this whole gapbetween the mega rich and the
normal people and even between,like, the middle classes and the
working classes.
It's huge and dark conspiracy,even more so than our real world
, but we're gradually going thatway ourselves.
So it's a well done humanity.
One of the things it includesat the back of the book is a

(19:05):
character creation worksheetwhere you it walks you through
making a character, which backin 1991 I think, was unheard of.
It was like you were expectedthat you read the book and you
swat up or you do what your gmtells you and you make your
character and I thought, oh,that would be cool.
And then I started looking atit and I'm like this is a lot of

(19:26):
work for making a throwawaycharacter for a podcast.
There is, it goes over twopages for one thing where's your
commitment?
this is our first episode inlike over a year, so I think
your answer is there, but it's.
You know there's a lot to it,it's.
It's a great idea having this,this worksheet, but I was like,

(19:47):
no, I can't be bothered makingit, but that that was the sort
of thing that dark conspiracyincluded little touches like
that, that, while I had thisincredibly crunchy system that
came out of like its 1970swargaming heritage, it also
things like that of here's anaid to make things easier for
players, you know, and althoughI was joking about it, the ammo

(20:08):
tracking sheets.
That's actually quite a nicelittle touch.
It gives the players an easyway to manage a resource that is
otherwise, you know, confinedto you writing down your
character sheets, scoring outcontinually how many bullets
you're using to solve theproblems the gm's giving you.
So it had a few littleinnovative design leaps that

(20:30):
other games weren't doing at thetime solve the problems put in
front of you with high velocitylead.

Jason (20:37):
Yeah, exactly, um, no, but you'd be right.
I think it's weird because itkind of straddles that point
where beforehand it was.
You know, there was one way ofdoing gaming and it was as you
say you bone up on, you read upthe whole book, and then you,
you have to figure it out foryourself, and then you go on to
this board advanced and moredeveloped.
Advanced may not be the rightword more developed kind of more

(20:58):
role-play, friendly, kind ofaspect and you know I you can
see that I think a lot in someof the sort of early 90s games
not just dark conspiracy I mean,um, a lot of them were
transitioning from the, thecrunchy method, to the, to the
fluffy method method, and theseguys kind of in the halfway
house I think, yeah, it's almostthat halfway house between
something like early dnd, whichis you roll up your stats, you

(21:18):
pick your class, uh, you tooledup and you go and kill a whole.

Iain (21:20):
It's almost that halfway house between something like
early D&D, which is you roll upyour stats, you pick your class,
you get tooled up and you goand kill a whole bunch of
monsters and Vampire, where it'slike who are you as a person?
Yeah exactly, and DarkConspiracy tries to do that, in
that your stats are hugelyimportant because you're going
to be fighting a lot of the time.
Your solution to the monstersis you find them and you gank

(21:43):
them and you move on to the nextmonster, but at the same time,
there's this detailed life pathsystem that basically does
answer that question of who isthis person?
What have they been doing?

Jason (21:51):
And where did you come from?

Iain (21:53):
Yeah, where did you come from, and you know you can make
some really fun characters withit.
There are some some careers.
I remember my teenage selflooking at it like who would
want to pay a corporate welfarerecipient.
I'm like that should be areally cool character to make
nowadays.
You know, you've got you've gotthis whole backstory of why
you've sold your vote to thegovernment or sold your vote to
the corporation so they can voteon your behalf and get

(22:16):
themselves more power.
But it really does stride.
I think the early 90s as a wholeactually that was where gaming
was going through this, almostlike metamorphosis.
I remember a whole bunch ofgames that came out then that
were blurring that line betweenearly go, find things, kill them
, rpgs and some of the highfalutin stuff we got later on,

(22:38):
which is no.
I want to hear about your innertrauma.
I'm not interested in what yourstrength stat is.
I remember things like Cult andNephilim and all those games.
They all acted in a verysimilar way to this in terms of
they focused more towards thecharacter than the stats, and
Dark Conspiracy was a halfwayhouse between the pair of those.

Jason (23:00):
I think similar time frame.
You're looking at somethinglike first edition Cyberpunkpunk
, maybe cyberpunk 2020, I guess,because I had a detailed life
path where you could, you knowyou chose a background.
But I remember thinking when Iwas playing these games, you
know, number one was have aconcept right, and that was that
was it was new at one pointhaving a concept with character
you wanted to play um and a lotof it, as I said, was just let's

(23:23):
roll six sets of 3D6.
Oh look, I've got a goodintelligence, I'll be the wizard
.
You know that kind of thing.
So, whereas these days there'smuch more focus on thinking
ahead, what do you want to play?
I mean, when we got to thingslike Vampire, people were
talking about.
Talk to your storyteller aboutwhat kind of uh stories you

(23:43):
would enjoy playing andexploring with this character
and things like that.
And you know, the old 12 yearold me is sitting there going.
You just kick the door in andkill the monster inside and take
its stuff right.
Um, you know what do I have?
To contribute to the gm to helpthem make a story.
Obviously now I am a differentperson and I still want to kick
the door in, kill the guys andsteal their stuff, but at least

(24:06):
I'll do it as part of anoverarching narrative and I'll
probably, you know, whinge aboutit.
And oh, woe is me.
I had to kill all these people.

Iain (24:16):
Yeah, but as a 12-year-old , bloodthirsty you it's like, oh
, it's another five orcs,whereas a 12-year-old will
bloodthirst you it's like, oh,it's another five orcs.

Jason (24:24):
I don't care about your families.
What do you mean?
Level five I can cast afireball Strength 18?
I can hit fire a .5 cal machinegun.

Iain (24:33):
Come on, I was in a D&D campaign recently.
It was a couple of years agoactually.
I say recently.
That's what happens when youget old folks and it was a lot
of fun.
But the GM was very, verytrusting in terms of like,
whenever people are doing XPspend in my game, I like to know
what they spend XP on for thereasons you've mentioned, like
how does this affect the storygoing forward?

(24:55):
He was like cool, just buy whatyou want.
So my warlock got I think it waslevel five, and I was like, oh,
cool, that's a spell I want totake.
So I take a specific spell.
And then the next week we comeacross this big bad guy who
starts monologuing and then he'slike you know, you will never
see me again, haha.
And he goes to cast some spell.
I'm like I cast counterspell.

(25:17):
He's like what?
I'm like I bought it last weeklike go get him fighter, and
that kind of derailed things alittle bit from from where they
where they should be going.
But it's something I foundrecently.
So I've started rerunningwarhammer fantasy roleplay

(25:37):
fourth edition and one of thethings fourth edition does is it
has that modern sensibility ofyou can do point spying your
character and you can chooseyour career and choose your race
and all this stuff and reallybuild the character you want.
Or you can embrace the old wayof doing it which first edition

(25:57):
had, which is you roll foreverything and if you roll for
everything it gives you extra xp.
Now it's kind of fair.
It says you can roll for stuffif you don't like it, you can
choose your thing and but youdon't get any extra xp.
All my players gleefully wentfor the random chance and these
are all people who are used toplaying things like vampire and
you know story based games.

(26:18):
They all gleefully went for the.
I'm'm going to roll for it andwe end up with this bizarre,
dark, conspiracy-esque,mismatched party.
There's like a cavalryman andan agitator and a grave robber
and a beggar and a docker.
Now figure out a reason whythese guys are together.
And they did and it was greatand it works perfectly.

(26:41):
The one character who feels themost fantasy based is somebody
who's a priestess, but it hasbeen warhammer.
She's not actually very good atdoing any priestly things and
the light of the backfire on herface, but at the same time it
felt like that old way ofplaying it, like I remember
running warhammer fantasy roleplay back in the 80s.
Well, that's what everyone didand you talked about it in our

(27:02):
very first podcast that younever got to be a wizard in
warhammer because you nevermanaged to roll that elusive
like whatever.
It was 91 to 100 and you nevergot to be a wizard.
These players one of themwanted to be a wizard but he was
like no, I'm gonna rollrandomly and see if I can become
a wizard throughout the courseof the game.
That's my character's drivingambition.

(27:23):
I'm like that's cool, I likethat.
But that's what these oldergames were like.
It was like you have thisrandomness and you have to kind
of embrace it.

Jason (27:31):
Yeah, I mean I'm sticking with the GDW theme, actually
going to pull us back toTraveller.
Well done.
I remember when I first moveddown to Milton Keynes and I was
at this school and I joinedtheir role playing society and
the only game anybody had anyexperience of was D&D.
And then there was this guy whowas in sixth form at the time,

(27:54):
or approaching sixth form, sohe's significantly older than
the rest of us volunteers to runTraveller.
Now I'd played Tra playtraveler back up north before
I'd come down back in the 17thcentury or whatever I think it
was, and um it's called travelerby coach
yeah, well, yeah, yeah, traveler, it was all horse and cart.
There was no jump capable.
So, uh, and he was and I waslike got these guys?

(28:20):
I was like, look guys, this isa brilliant game, you need to
play this, you need to play thisanyway.
So I got a bunch of people andwe played it.
We played it for a good wellover a year.
We had a lot of fun in it.
Um, I have different opinions oftraveler now and I'm sure we'll
go into that in a bit, but itwas great.
You know we were.
But the one thing is that Iwanted very much like I wanted a
wizard in one of the fantasyrole play is I wanted a

(28:42):
character with psionics.
Now, if you've not playedtraveler psionics people with
psionics are bad.
Okay, they will hunt you down,they are considered a threat,
yada, yada, yada.
So it's all underground thisthing.
So every time this characterwould go to a new planet, first
thing I'd do is say the refright, I want to go and look for
a science institute.
And he made a big deal out ofthe fact that this character was

(29:04):
like convinced that I hadsomething.
You know, you can feelsomething.

Iain (29:08):
You know you can yeah feel the force?

Jason (29:10):
and then and then eventually I find this, this
science institute, and he says,okay, now you need to roll your
size score and all this kind ofstuff.
This is after a year of, likeyou know me trying to do this.
I got there and my size scorewas less than zero and the guy

(29:30):
was like, yep, you just wantedit so much.
He basically turned it around,said the guy wanted it so much
he believed he was right.
Right, and I'm like that was myfirst experience of a ref
basically pretty much shaftingmy character, just you know, for
a gig.
But it you know.
But it's like you said aboutthis guy what I want to be a
wizard, I want to do the randomstuff and then see if I can get

(29:54):
to make that character wizardduring during its lifespan.
If he does, if he does, I willhunt him down because I never
managed to and I'll be sojealous.

Iain (30:06):
In fairness, it's Warhammer, so he'll get hunted
down anyway by the church forbeing different.
Because that's the lovelyatmosphere of Warhammer.
I did actually write themseveral pages on why it's really
bad to be a wizard in Warhammerand he's like oh, this sounds
awesome, let's do it.
So we will see where that goes.

Jason (30:23):
I'm playing a game of Dark Heresy at the moment and
I've taken a Psyker in that, andthat's equally as fraught.

Iain (30:31):
It's funny you mention Psyonix, because one of the
things that Dark Conspiracy hadwas empaths.
That were people who usedempathy to do things and, unlike
like most games that you playthat have some sort of humans as
a psychic race.
Dark air is a great example.

(30:53):
You know you are actually eviland people are going to track
you down and kill you for it.
You've got warhammer you're awizard.
In there, magic is evil ifyou're not basically the state's
property and you will be hunteddown.
You've got Call of Cthulhu,where magic is a necessary tool
to fight against the evil of themythos, but it will ultimately

(31:16):
corrupt you and turn you into abad guy.
Traveller.
Psyonix, they're going to behunted down because it's you
know people are bad.
Dark Conspiracy cool.
It's another set of skills youget for zapping the bad guys
with brain bolts, and it's notso much that in the original,
but there was a Psyonixsourcebook that came out and it

(31:38):
was just like how can we makethese characters more busty?
And I remember there was onecareer class you could take that
was basically rogueextraterrestrial.
You were an ET who was on therun from its brethren because
you hadn't been corrupted by thedark and you had a brain that
was basically a howitzer and itgives you all this stuff about
how terrible it is to be one ofthese things and you read the

(31:59):
stats.
You're like I'm going to bethis guy because I don stuff
about how terrible it is to beone of these things.
That you read the stats you'relike I'm gonna be this guy
because I don't care howterrible, I'm gonna melt
anything that comes toward mewith my mind and there'll be
nothing you can do and there'sno downside to.
It's not like warhammer, whereyou botch your role and, like
demons, tear open a reality anddrag you in and do
unmentionables to you foreternity.
It's just another skill in darkconspiracy for for monster

(32:23):
busting do you get an ammo chartfor it?

Jason (32:26):
it must be an ammo chart.
Psychic blasts or something.
Yeah, brain howitzer.

Iain (32:31):
I've five rounds in my brain, howitzer you get a slight
headache and a bit roll for theblast radius.
Yeah, there was actuallysomething in the fact.

Jason (32:38):
Let me I've actually got the.
I've got the pdf here.
Let me see if I can find thisthere actually something in the
fact.

Iain (32:41):
Let me I've actually got the PDF here let me see if I can
find this.
There was something in the thewonderful space travel chapter
chapter.
They've got a whole chapter onspace travel.
That's how ridiculous it is.
There's a chart for launchcharacteristics and you can
calculate how many tons ofdeliver and you can calculate

(33:03):
how many tonnes of deliverableyou can have when taking cargo
to the moon.
There's a re-entry table.
There's an in-space transfertable.
There's a difficulty ofintercept diagram.
It's got a nice little pictureof a space shuttle and you roll
a I think a d8 or something todetermine whatever.

(33:25):
There's a maneuvering tablesand then there's like three
pages of spacecraft that you'renever going to use in your game
and it's just absolutelyobsessive in its.
It's in its determination tomake this simulation of a world
that the ref must have a rulefor everything, rather than just
saying, hey, if we end up inspace, just busk it, make up

(33:47):
whatever you want you didn'tbusk it in the 90s that wasn't
the way it was done.

Jason (33:52):
my friend, that was not the way it was done.
I'm just wondering how much ofthat was kind of because the
games that came before DarkConspiracy from.
Gdw were predominantly sci-figames, right, so you?
I mean there are a couple ofexceptions, but you know you're
looking at travel, one of thebiggest games ever made really
and that's theirs and they, youknow, they went there's mega

(34:13):
traveler, traveler 2300, allthat kind of stuff.
So they were big into spaceshipsfor them to confine themselves
to a single world.
I mean they successfully did itwith Twilight 2000.
I don't remember any spaceshiprules in.
Twilight 2000,.

Iain (34:28):
thankfully, there was lots and lots of guns, tons of guns,
in Twilight 2000.

Jason (34:31):
Lots and lots of guns and ways to make your vehicle run
on methanol or ethanol Stillproduction.
How many litres of alcoholcould you produce based on how
many tons of grain or vegetationyou could put in your still?
Um, I, yeah, I could probablystill work out how many liters

(34:52):
of ethanol I need to get an m1abrahams to travel 50 kilometers
, you know, closer to krakow,basically, yeah that that that
is a really good point.

Iain (35:02):
I think a lot of this has probably come from that heritage
, like the combat rules haveabsolutely come from that
heritage.
There's there's tables for boatdamage, aviation damage,
turreted vehicle damage,standard vehicle damage, vehicle
damage, which i'm'm guessing isfor non-turreted non-standard

(35:23):
vehicle yeah, there's hitlocations for everything and I
mean I've always found in allgames I run I very rarely apart
from maybe, I think, twilight2000 back in the day.
I very rarely have ever usedvehicular combat rules because

(35:45):
most of the time something likeDark Conspiracy.
Most of my players were on footpoking around the Scooby-Doo
ghost house looking for darkminions, or in the middle of a
city chasing down corporate evil.
I very rarely went because theyhad that whole outlaw setting.
That was like the mad max typesetting between cities and they

(36:07):
made a great part of sayingnobody really goes there.
So like, okay, fine, I'm gonnakeep my players in the city,
then I'll miss out means me as aref, I don't have to read my 50
pages of vehicular combat rules.
But but again it just seemsthat they're like yeah, we need
this.
Someone might decide to go outinto the wilderness.
So we need vehicular combatrules because we might get a

(36:29):
hold of a turreted vehicle andwe need to know where it's hit
when someone inevitably hits itwith an RPG.

Jason (36:37):
Yeah, but you also need to know what happens to the bad
guy when a 105mm armour piercinground from a M1 smacks him in
the face right, and I guaranteethe rule is in there somewhere.
You know, this is the kind ofrifts discussion with damage and
mega damage.

Iain (36:53):
Oh, right, yeah.

Jason (36:53):
As soon as you get vehicle combat.
I can't remember there waspeople in Traveller talking
about you know what, if you usea ship laser, a pulse laser or a
beam laser on some poorunfortunate in the starport or
whatever, and it's like you justyou don't get a rule for it,
they die.
Yeah, it's not hard, it isrocket science, but it's not.

Iain (37:17):
There was a game recently it might have been Mothership.
They more or less had thatexact wording of you know, if
you use something that's meantfor demolishing buildings or
starships or vehicles on a human, they die.
It doesn't matter how toughthey are or how much armour
they're wearing, they'revaporised.

(37:38):
It's like you know, you fire anRPG at a person, they're going
to die if it hits them becauseit's it's designed for taking
out things considerably biggerand tougher than than human
beings.
But yeah, I think in the, inthe 70 plus pages of weapons and
other goodies in darkconspiracy, you're going to find

(37:58):
rules.
Um, for that.
I'm just actually looking at ithere.
You know there's two pages ofof ammunition and caliber.
If you need to know exactly howmany rounds of 0.475 wildly
magnum rounds you can buy,there's rules for that here.

(38:20):
Most games you play nowadays itcomes to explosives.
For example, there's a wholething that basically it'll say
something like for however manyyou know kilograms of explosive
you have, it does 1d10 damage.
This has got two pages ofdifferent types of plastic
explosive that you can buy,listing what, who the

(38:41):
manufacturer is, what sort ofcaps they've got, what tools you
need for them, what, how youbuild a, you know a detonator it
would probably be banned thesedays.
Right, it's just be like you'regonna have to have some very
uncomfortable conversations withwith somebody when you uh got

(39:02):
these books I did a tiktokrecently of that of um, him
being hauled into hr by somebodywho was like okay, did you just
google how much does a childskeleton weigh?
It was like, well, it's for dnd, it's for research it's for
research.

Jason (39:20):
I remember we're joking when we used to play vampire,
the eternal struggle card gameyeah, I remember talking to dan
on msn messenger that shows youhow long ago it was.
Yeah, on msn messenger.
And when we started playing itwas called jihad.
Right and you start.
And so we were even joking thatwe were probably being
monitored by the nsa orsomething because we keep

(39:41):
referring to jihad purelybecause it's a vampire card game
, not for any other reason.

Iain (39:46):
Right, exactly.

Jason (39:47):
You know.
So yeah, but this yeah samething.
I think it had overpressurerules and things for the
explosions and stuff.

Iain (39:54):
It doubtlessly did.
I never actually used them.
My players never actually usedexplosives, I never got to use
them.

Jason (40:01):
No, no explosives.
I never actually used them.
My players never actually usedexplosives.
Surprisingly, no explosives.
I guess we probably would havetried if we could have.
And the vehicles?
As you said, vehicles were usedto get from point A to point B,
not to get involved in combat.
It was motorbikes and cars justto get around, rather than
humvees with the obligatory .5cal on the top.

Iain (40:22):
You know so far.
I remember the combat system.
It was like incrediblyconvoluted but like again with
most things in dark conspiracy,you kind of cut out the bits you
don't need, like you know I'mnot going to be using explosives
or whatever you know, hand wavethat away.
But one thing I liked was itwas one of those ones that used
a very kind of fixed damage forweapons.
That it wasn't like a lot ofPalladium stuff where you know

(40:44):
you roll 1d6 for damage.
I'm like I'm shooting the guywith a gun that's got it's not
going to do one hit point ofdamage, it's going to hurt,
right, yeah, it's going to hurt.
And this had a fixed number.
It's like this hits you and itdoes X.
I kind of like that becauseit's you know you're
consistently hurting someonewith a gun.
Yeah, you can roll forrandomness to hit, but if you

(41:07):
get hit in the head with a roundfrom a gun it should hurt and
you should probably die.
And Dark Conspiracy kind of,unless you're a cyborg escapee
who's got like.

Jason (41:18):
Oh, he just bounces off.
He just headbutt the grenadeback.
Yeah, exactly A bit of armourscape.
He was good like oh, he justbounces off.

Iain (41:21):
He just hit the grenade back.
Yeah, exactly a bit of armorplating on his skull.

Jason (41:24):
But he was.
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think I,when I had a habit of drawing
characters and I think when Idrew him, I at one point I did
draw him like arnoldschwarzenegger out of terminator
with a half skip missing and ared eye, just because it just
felt that way to me, which wasgreat.
Um, but yeah, I mean, I mean,there's always been this thing
about rolling damage and rollinghit points and rolling things

(41:44):
like that, and the one thingI've always said is, if you're
rolling hit points and you'rerolling damage, that's an awful
lot of variables, right, it'salmost like just roll one and
don't roll the other.
That would make more sense to me.
So if you're rolling damage,then make sure everybody's got.
If you're rolling damage, theymake sure everybody's got
roughly the same out of hitpoints and things like that,

(42:05):
because you can't get fleshwounds and things like that
right.
I remember getting really sillyin twilight 2000 when it was
like it wasn't even a singleround you fired, it was a burst,
it was always I think an m1911was like it had.
They said it had like threerounds.
It hasn't got three rounds,it's got three attacks worth of
ammunition.
You know that kind of thing.
So that made it even moreabstract.

Iain (42:25):
It's something that Alien does quite nicely, that it
abstracts ammunition andbasically says that if you're in
calm circumstances and firingindividual shots and you're not
stressed, you're going to manageyour ammunition, and it doesn't
really track things like howmany bullets have you left in
your gun.

(42:46):
however, if you're stressed andyou roll a little facehugger
dice, it means you've run out ofammo, and if you fire, a bust
too easily yeah, and if you firea bust, you automatically get a
stress dice, so there's achance of you running out of of
ammo, and it abstracts thatquite nicely in a game.
That's not really aboutstanding up and fighting the

(43:06):
monster.
It's about finding a different,you know different solution.
So, oh shit, my gun's empty,throw it down and run, whereas
that conspiracy you're prettymuch.
No, I'm gonna go toe-to-toewith this thing and win.
Therefore, I want to trackevery single bullet that I'm
firing out of this, rather thanlike your example of you know,
you have an abstract three forthe gun, but it's like you fire

(43:30):
three, three busts.
I like what you say, though,about the confining this to like
a single roll.
One thing I noticed with the newversion of warhammer which I
like, is once you get past a lotof the crunch, it actually
makes combat a single roll tohit and damage.
When you do your two-hit roll,if you hit your opponent

(43:53):
successfully, you generate anumber of success levels and
they're added to the damage andthat's how much damage you do,
and there's no need to rollagain to find out which various
polyhedral dice you're going toroll for damage.
It's all done in one roll andthat's.
That's quite nice and quite anelegant way to do it, because
that takes into account thingslike the narrow glancing blow as
opposed to the.
You know you, you skewer him inthe throat and he and he dies,

(44:17):
and while keeping the damagethat weapons do consistent, like
you know.
You know you hit someone withthis Vihander, it's going to do
more damage than stabbing themwith a butter knife.

Jason (44:26):
But it also means the more skillful the opponent, the
more damage they're going to dowith even a small weapon.
Right exactly.
You know, the Grey Mouser withhis, you know, with his two
daggers, and stuff will prettymuch, you know, death of a
thousand cuts you, you know,whereas, as pretty, much you
know, death of a thousand cutsyou, you know, whereas, as you
said, zweihander over the head.
You don't need to be thatskillful, it says the man who's
never handled a Zweihander.

(44:46):
I just assume you don't have tobe that skillful.
It's big heavy, he just lumpsit up.

Iain (44:53):
You hit someone with it and it's a bit like if you ever
go to any British museum andthey have displays of like
medieval or renaissance weaponry, especially renaissance stuff.
You got all this stuff fromlike spain and italy and it's
all very ornate and jeweled andit's designed for you to wear at
court and pose and show howmuch wealth you've got.
The stuff from england andscotland is just like these now

(45:17):
very dull lumps of metal thathalf of the time we're used to
just bludgeon your opponent todeath rather than do anything
fancy with any deft or finesse.
It's like no, I'm going to gethim in the ground and keep
beating him with a steel roduntil he dies yeah, but okay, so
I'm going to bring that oneright back to GDW as well.

Jason (45:37):
Go on, and another game you've not mentioned which is on
guard god tells all about onguard it was the first rpg,
wasn't it?
It was.
I believe it was their firstone.
It was in the 70s, I mean it wasbefore I started gaming, which
is a long time ago, um, and Icame across it when I after I
moved south, so I was uh mid 80s, I guess we're talking here

(45:59):
when I came about it and it wasabout for a while and the
interesting thing to me was soit was based in um, basically
it's like a french court was.
What it was basically was aboutbasically about your character
and how you develop your uhpersonal kind of wealth story or
influence at court.
So I think I rolled up thischaracter and I was pretty

(46:22):
unlucky on the charactergeneration roles.
It wasn't particularly uhimportant family um.
But then I got lucky and I gotuh managed to land a uh
commission in the cavalry andthings like that.
Now, all of a sudden,commissioning the cavalry oh
hello, you've got some standingnow.
So there's all this thing andyou build up the standing of the
character and then it's allabout going and wooing and

(46:44):
romancing and and eligibleladies in court and then
obviously you will come upagainst somebody who is also
trying to romance the woman thatyou're trying to romance, in
which case it's dueling time so,um, and the, and the weird
thing, the difference that wasto me was it was and it even
mentions on the wiki, by the way, so I'm not and it was exactly

(47:07):
how we played.
It was like a play by mail.
It wasn't played by mail, wemet every week, but what we did
was we'd fill in our orders,send them to the ref and then
he'd tell us the next week whathad happened.
So it was kind of play by givinga piece of paper over yeah,
like diplomacy yeah, likediplomacy, you plan, your, I'm
going to attend this court, I'mgoing to try and woo this lady,

(47:27):
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,etc.
Etc.
And the only problem was Ibasically got pretty much
mortally wounded in the first uhduel that I did uh and spent
the next few months recoveringbecause, you know, in
renaissance france there isn't ahuge amount of magical healing
available.
Um, so when you do get hit andpunctured by somebody's rapier

(47:49):
repeatedly, you're on your backfor a little while.
So, um, but it was.
But, but it was.
It was weird to me because it'sg.
I didn't even remember it wasgdw till we said we were going
to look into recording thispodcast.
Um, and it was only when I waslooking.
I was like I played that.
I didn't even remember it wasGDW until we said we were going
to look into recording thispodcast and it was only when I

(48:11):
was looking.
I was like I played that Ididn't realise it was GDW and
it's so like not there.
Yeah, it's not a Wogging right.
Well, yeah, I mean the duelingrules were.
The dueling rules were quiteinteresting because basically,
you would decide whether youwere attacking and which
location you were trying toattack and the guy would choose
to parry and would tell youwhich part, which part of his
body he was trying to parry.
We're talking that level ofplayer control.

(48:34):
Um, so that was quite weird andquite insane at the time.
So you know, I was used torolling 2d6 for traveler or d20
for my, for dnd.
So to this I was like I shallwield my rapier and try and you
know, hit him on the, on thecheek, you know, give him a
little rakish scar or something.
Meanwhile he's stabbing merepeatedly in the kidneys.

(48:57):
You know, it's like that's not.

Iain (48:59):
I say that's dashed unsporting, yeah did you ever
play a game called castlefalconstein?

Jason (49:05):
no, so I know of it.

Iain (49:07):
Yeah, it's a sort of victoriana, vaguely steampunky
fantasy setting and it hadspecial dueling rules because,
like, the villains of the piecewere like the prussians, uh, who
are very into dueling and itwas a kind of card.
It was used playing cardsactually as a system and you
drew them similar to that likewhere would you be going, or

(49:29):
dictated if you were parrying orif you were thrusting or
whatever it was.
But they had a rule that ifboth players drew a certain type
of card, like, your bladeswould clash in the middle and
you'd face each other snarlingand as a player you had to come
up with a witty riposte beforeyou'd both part.
It was a really nice kind ofcapture of that Errol Flynn

(49:50):
style dueling that you'reswinging from the chandelier and
all that nonsense.

Jason (49:57):
And I can't believe.
You used Castle of Falkenstein,which was Talsorian games, and
you didn't useenstein, which wasTalsorian Talsorian games, and
you didn't use Space 1889, whichwas GDW.
You had one job, ian.

Iain (50:07):
Because I've never looked at Space 1889.
I remember seeing it when itcame out and the whole British
Empire in space thing didn'treally do it for me yeah.

Jason (50:17):
I think I've grown to like sort of the steampunk stuff
a lot more now than I did then.
I looked at it a bit likeFalkenstein.
It was like, nah, it's not forme.
But back then you know I wasliking Traveller and I've grown
out of that.

Iain (50:33):
Well, speaking of Traveller, that's an interesting
one to talk about because Iremember as a kid and thinking
Tra in travel was super cool,mainly because I was a massive
fan of the game Elite and I'mlike, oh wow, this is like Elite
, the role playing game where Iget my ship, do all this
training and I can upgrade myship and blah, blah, blah, blah,

(50:53):
blah.
And I don't ever rememberplaying it for a massively
extended period of time, needperiod of time.
It was like one of the one ofthe guys that it wasn't me that
ran, it was another guy who ranit and he was a bit on and off
because they all just wanted toleave warhammer fantasy roleplay
and which is fine because Iloved running that.
But we play travel now andagain and I remember us having

(51:16):
more fun with character creation, I think, than actually the
game itself.
Because once you get into thegame, looking back at it as an
adult, I don't think it's asmuch fun as Teenage Me imagined
it was going to be.
It's basically like I've got amortgage on a spaceship and I

(51:36):
have to work to pay off thespace mortgage, like I don't
want to do that it's a bit tooclose to home.

Jason (51:44):
right work to pay off the space mortgage, Like I don't
want to do that it's a bit tooclose to home, right, it's a bit
too close to reality.
Let's do the corporate grind.
I've had this chat with a mateof mine, jason Shrimpton, about
he's massive, he loves hissci-fi games, he really does.
I've massively kind of turnedaway from sci-fi games For
better or worse.
to me, there's always a buttonyou end up pressing that solves

(52:04):
the problem right now whetherthat, but whether that button is
the jump button or whether thatbutton is the laser cannon
button it's usually teleport aswell yeah, uh, and it's.
I just, you know, to me I don'tknow, the problem with twice
with these kind of games is andyou know there's people who will
be listening to this and willhave a go at me, but in general

(52:24):
you're always human, right,that's not too much of a problem
, I'm okay with that.
But there's no metaphysicalpart to it, it's just you had a
career, you've got some skills,you're a good pilot or you're
good, you know, and 90% of theTraveller characters are
ex-military.
They're all ex-navy, ex-marines.
You know, not many people wereex-army, because when it's a

(52:44):
space faring nation, you alltend to be marines or navy and
things like that.
And it just you know, there wasno, there's no, I don't know
grandiosity to it, there's nolike fantasy to it that enables
me to be better than youraverage player.
And yeah, a lot of the time tome became mortgage the
accounting yeah yeah, and if Ididn't pay up, they took my ship

(53:06):
away, um.
But but to say that back in thelate 80s uh, the mid to late 80s
I played it almost non-stop andwe had a great time.

Iain (53:16):
So you've raised an interesting point, though, about
the appeal, because justthinking about it there, there
are certain sci-fi games I like,but the ones that I like are
all generally based on afranchise.
So I like Alien.
Aliens are a brilliant sci-fiRPG.

(53:37):
The system's great.
I really like the books.
They're kind of beautiful tolook at and we played it quite a
bit a couple of years ago andeveryone seemed to have a really
good time.
They were like wow, it's likebeing in aliens and it captures
that spirit.
The west end game, star warsrpg I used to love that.
I ran a lot of that university.

(53:58):
I played a lot of it and it wasfast, it was snappy, people got
it and people enjoyed it.
I've even played the recentstar trek game and it's really
good.
It's very well put together.
Mechanically.
It uses that 2d20 system, Ithink.
It's modiphius, I think yeah,and the components are all
gorgeous, but it's also it's inthe Star Trek universe and I

(54:21):
think the reason I like these isall the world building has been
done for you.
Like when you're running a StarWars game, you do not have to
explain the background to anyone.
There's no one going to comeand go.
So who's Darth Vader?
Everyone knows Where's TadWayne?
Yeah, you give people templatesof characters that are all
stereotypes from Star Wars.
You might be a smuggler whoowns a ship, who owes a crime,

(54:44):
lord money, or you're thewookiee co-pilot of the ship, or
you know it's.
You're just like cool, I'll beHan Solo.
Likewise with star trek, you'rethe crew of a ship, boldly
going where no one has gonebefore.
And, yeah, we all know what todo with that alien.
You're going to get eaten andhave a good time being eaten in

(55:04):
the process.
But all the world building'sdone with you as traveler was.
It had a backstory and abackground, but it was very open
and I remember there was likesome supplements where it was
almost like here's an for you,go and make up the rest yourself
.
You know those little blackbooks you could buy.

Jason (55:24):
Yeah, little A5 black books.

Iain (55:25):
Yeah, and there's a lot of that in it that you had to come
up with it.
So your refs basically are likeokay, you're in your ship, you
go to Planet X to trade Y andsomething happens on the way.
And that was like 99% of whatwe did when we played Traveller.
It was like, how's our cargoing to be hijacked this week?
Oh, look, it's those guys.
And I know they released somesupplements later on for some of

(55:48):
the alien races.
But the assumption was you'replaying a human guy who, as you
say, is ex-military in somedescription and it doesn't have
that for at least with DarkConspiracy.
To bring it full circle, youwere playing a human, but with
all those different careersavailable.
You had that specialization,although I brought this up in

(56:10):
the main podcast and I'd beinterested in your experience
with the system.
It was that sort of twilight2000-esque system of you rolled
against your skill and you had anumber and you either, like you
, doubled or quadrupled orhalved your target number based
on how difficult things were,and if you didn't have a skill,

(56:31):
you rolled against your stat.
But it was manifestly moredifficult to do that.
So just having one point of askill made you much more likely
to to succeed.
And therefore your characters,who weren't really specialized
in anything, they jumped aroundfrom career to career to get as
many one points as possible indifferent skills, so that they
were kind of equipped for anyeventuality.

(56:54):
Did you see that when youplayed these games?

Jason (56:57):
yeah, massively that's exactly what happened?
um so, but I mean I rememberback playing traveler and if I
mean, you know, we were young soI got probably got it wrong,
but there was no, there wasn't arule for making a role when you
didn't have a skill right andit was, it was like if you
didn't have it, you didn't makethe role.
Um and god forbid, it was a vacsuit or a pilot.

(57:21):
So the other thing thatTraveller lacked massively to me
was any form of playerdevelopment, character
development.
It came in a lot later and thenthere were rules for it.
But then, if you think about it, when you only gain character
skills in character generationevery four years, why would you

(57:43):
gain after?
Oh, I've done one mission.
Yeah, a fortnight of you know.

Iain (57:49):
Treating.

Jason (57:50):
Yeah, exactly.
But the thing to me about theworld building and travel at
least the other thing I guess Idon't like about sci-fi games if
you go and play D&D in general,you pick up a place to base the
game, whether it's Faerun orEberron or whatever it happens
to be, and that's quite welldeveloped.
You can get a lot ofinformation.
You have different countries,different languages, different

(58:12):
races, different places.
You can go.
All works out for you InTraveller generally.
The first book you end upgetting was the Spinward Marches
.
Spinward Marches, marches, yeahsector in space right which is
uh 16 subsectors, I think eachsubsector had, you know, you had
a dedicated two pages but themath that was all based on hexes

(58:33):
, with no third dimension and nomovement.
Yeah, never mind,astrophysicists be astrophysics,
be damned.
Um, but all the planets werewere upps, universal planetary
profiles, and it'll be theirstarport, their size, and it was
all just numbers or letters,because it was hex.
It was hexadecimal, wasn't it?
So it went up to f, which wasthe, the best, uh, or the
biggest, um.

(58:55):
So you know, you get a starport.
Is an a rated starport?
Actually, that was the best one.
F was no starport at all, um,you know, and you could tell you
what fuel you could get, andthen how big the planet was.
I mean, how many times didsomebody ever take into account
gravity and travel?

Iain (59:09):
never, no, it's all earth, it's earth it's all, it's all.
Standard one g yeah, absolutelyum, it's actually something that
came up in, you know, when wetalked about palladium and we
all had a jolly good laugh atPalladium's insanity and it's
just like a mess.
But one thing we did have is inHeroes, unlimited, if you

(59:32):
generated an alien character andyou generated what type of
world you came from and youcould have high gravity, low
gravity worlds.
And it then said and here's theeffects of you being on earth
based on where you come fromwhich I was like, yeah, travel
never does anything like that.
It's like you get there and it'sjust the same as earth.

Jason (59:52):
The sky's a different color they did change it in
traveler 2300.
So, traveler 2300, you I don'tthink you picked like a graph,
you picked a body type, so Ithink you could be, uh,
endomorph, mesomorph, somethingelse, ohmorph, uh, and like, the
mesomorph was the strong, camefrom a high gravity planet, so

(01:00:12):
they'd be strong, and the Ithink it was the endomorph would
be the low gravity planets andthey'd be, you know, willowy and
frail but dexterous, that kindof stuff.
So they had a nod to it in thesubsequent and it changed its
name, wasn't it?
Because it was Traveller 2300and then became just 2300.
AD, I think it was because theyactually had nothing to do with

(01:00:35):
each other.

Iain (01:00:36):
Yeah, it was a weird follow-on from Twilight 2000,
wasn't it?

Jason (01:00:39):
Yeah, absolutely the French were the winners or
something, the french were thewinner, the french and the
chinese were the winners, andeverybody else was like lagging
behind because we we'd actuallygot into a proper scrap and,
yeah, destroyed everything, sogood job france I mean it was,
yeah, well done france, yeah, uh, but that was.
That was kind of.
I never got to play much ofthat.

(01:01:00):
I got to make a few characters,a bit like again and I agree
with you, by the way, on, uh,traveler spent.
I made so many characters intraveler.
The other thing I love to dowas I used to love um book five,
which was high guard and thatwas all the navy source books
and it meant you could buildspaceships.
I built spaceships like youwould not believe, right, I had

(01:01:21):
spaceships ranging from tinylittle scout aircraft to massive
, great big battle cruisers andthings like that.

Iain (01:01:27):
And you never played in any of them.

Jason (01:01:29):
I never played in any.
Well, no, I didn't really.
I think there's one game I ranwith a guy called Jez this is
again late 80s, early 90s and heplayed a game I think it's his
official source book calledTrillion Credit Squadron right
but but for some reason he letus run off with the Trillion
Credit Squadron.
So, um, we sold a lot of it andbasically had almost a trillion

(01:01:53):
credits in the bank, and Iremember going places buying you
know textiles, and the guy'd belike, ah yes, that's 8 000
credits a ton.
Whatever it was it was actuallyand I was like have you got
change of a mega credit?

Iain (01:02:06):
I'll have a trillion tons please I would literally go.

Jason (01:02:09):
I mean, if that had happened, I'd literally be going
planet to planet breakingeconomies, right, because it's
like, just walk into town and go, I'll have a beer, please, yes,
here's one credit, here's amillion credits here comes the
SS inflation, ready to ruleanother planetary economy,
wheelbarrows of credits down tothe nearest.

Iain (01:02:31):
I also find with Traveller , though similar to a lot of
sci-fi games.
It's kind of almost theassumption of, like there's one
settlement on a planet yeahthere was never any concept of
it being like earth, wherethere's multiple nations,
hundreds of nations on a planet,and they all have different
cultures.
It's like there's a bunch ofhumans living here and the

(01:02:53):
culture's never changed nothere's a couple in spinwood
marches.

Jason (01:02:57):
I can think of like two areas where the culture has
changed.
One was a planet called Darien.
Darien, you know, I said it wasa hexadecimal.
Everything was zero to F, fbeing 15.
Darien was the only planet inthe Spinwood Marches that had a
tech level of G.
Right, that's impossible.
Yeah, that's not.
So it was.
And they lived in likebioengineered fancy spirals,

(01:03:21):
cities and all this kind ofstuff.
Basically, they were spaceelves, don't say it, but that's
what they were.
So they had a little bit aboutDarian and Darian culture, and
the only other bit was over theother side, where you had the
Zidani.
Oh yes, and the Zidani lovedPsyonix and therefore they were
bad.
Zidane loved Sionics andtherefore they were bad, and

(01:03:45):
there was a bit of a Cold Warrelationship between the Empire
and the Imperial side and theZidane side, the Zidane
consulate, I believe.
But there was a little bit ofculture reference there.
Obviously, you mentioned thealiens as well, so you had Varg
Aslan.

Iain (01:04:02):
Yeah, aslan, with the lion guys basically big cats, big
dogs.

Jason (01:04:05):
That was basically the they were the kilrathi from wing
commander yeah, basically, yeah, um, but they were, you know, I
don't know, they didn't getplayed a lot, I must admit, but
so if steve is here he wouldreact to this, because I know he
.

Iain (01:04:20):
I mean I talked to this before.
There was a game that came outfor the 16 bit computers.
It was Mega Traveller, theZundani Conspiracy, which was.
It was done in the style ofUltima, you know, the Ultima
series of games, except it wasMega Traveller, and I think I
spent that game most of the timemaking characters, because you

(01:04:41):
make a party of four charactersand you'd save them on a floppy
disk so you could use them likeagain and again.
The idea was you could use thembetween.
They were going to make a wholeseries of these games.
I don't think they ever did, butthe actual game itself was kind
of garbage.
I don't ever remember doingmuch other than going on, I
think, the initial planet andthen getting ambushed and having

(01:05:01):
my guys that I spent hoursmaking die horribly.
I never figured out what theZandani conspiracy was.
I might have to download it foran emulator and play it again
and see if there's actually anydepth to it.
But again, my fondest memorieswere just making characters for
it, just spending hours makingthese military guys and then
sometimes watching them dieduring character creation.

Jason (01:05:24):
This is where we miss you , Steve.
This is the bit that you couldgive us a hand here.

Iain (01:05:28):
Yeah, thanks, steve.
It's true that you see, likebring this full circle back to
Dark Conspiracy you keep comingback.
All those things in Travellermanifest themselves in Dark
Conspiracy.
Like Traveller, the gear inTraveller was hugely important,

(01:05:48):
like your ship, your equipment,even the stuff you're trading,
all fundamental to the game.
Dark Conspiracy is the same.
It's like your gear is probablymore important than your
character.
What you buy to hunt these darkminions is important, and it's
it's not like call of cthulhu,where you know you have a
flashlight and and some hope andyou go off into to look in the

(01:06:10):
darkness and see what they're.
Dark conspiracy makes out thatno, you have to.
You have to choose a good gear,load out before you go on this
investigation, because yourinvestigation is going to end in
a massive gun battle at the end, no doubt.
And so it has that.
It has the career paths thatTraveller has.
It's not quite as random.

(01:06:31):
There is somewhat more controlin Dark Conspiracy in that you
can choose what careers you wantto go into and there's nice
little mechanical touches Likeif you're a criminal, you
potentially make a lot of ofmoney, but you can also end up
in prison and spend, like youknow, some careers, some of your
career terms, in prison, whichis quite a nice touch.
But all the rules foreverything else all have their

(01:06:55):
roots in those earlier games.
Like it's almost page for pagethe same as twilight I actually
looked at.
I've got a PDF of the originalTwilight 2000.
It's really really similar interms of I think the combat
rules are a straight port, withit's pictures of people fighting
Soviets.
It's people fighting like Cobrapeople or whatever the bad guys

(01:07:16):
are.
That's a genuine dark race inDark Conspiracy.
The Cobra people never usedthem, but apparently the Cobra
people never used them.
But apparently the Cobra peopleare a big deal in Dark
Conspiracy world.
But yeah, it's just they'vechanged the artwork.
It's people fighting beastiesrather than fighting Spetsnaz.
So it's its roots aredefinitely there.

(01:07:37):
To see the thing that I did find, though, my players love Dark
Conspiracy.
They had such good fun with itand I actually enjoyed running
it and I look at them, probablywith my sort of slightly
snobbish I play games for thestory mindset, but it was
actually a ton of fun.
I don't think I ever had anyofficial scenario books, I just

(01:07:59):
wrote it all whole.
I think I ripped off so much ofthe X-Files when I wrote this.
It was like the X-Files book,bleaker, but I had huge fun
putting these things together,arranging these kind of climatic
battles where people would, youknow, duke it out with the dark
minions and the players all hada great time with it.

(01:08:19):
There was never any.
Oh yeah, this is all just agreat time with it.
There was never any.
Oh yeah, this is all justfighting.
It was like, cool, there'sfighting, let's you know, let's
go fight the cobra people.
Did you like when you played it?

Jason (01:08:28):
did you enjoy it or yeah, absolutely it was a great game,
absolutely great game, and itwas.
It was you've alluded to itbefore.
It was like monster of the week, right, yeah, so you do a bit
of investigation, but thatinvestigation generally leads
you to somewhere where you canhave a little fight and then you
pick up a clue that led you toanother location where you'd
have a bigger fight andeventually you end up at the big

(01:08:48):
bad guys place.
I mean, I didn't play a hugeamount.
I played much more traveler andeven much more twilight 2000.
I played dark conspiracy, butthe the, the amount of it I
played I I did have a lot of funand it was a.
Maybe it was just because itwas a simpler time.
Yeah, whether I'd enjoy it asmuch these days, I don't know,
probably would enjoy a littlewell, I said I enjoyed putting

(01:09:10):
it together.

Iain (01:09:10):
There was something the dark conspiracy had in the gm's
chapter that I remember thinkingthis is you know, that's a
really good way to makescenarios and even nowadays it's
like it's kind of revolutionaryand it's like when you make
your npcs you can like writeyour npc and say this npc is
doing this thing.
Or you can draw two cards froma deck of cards and a number

(01:09:37):
represents the the first card,the number represents the degree
of that person's motivation andthe suit of the second one
represents what their motivationis.
So if you wanted ideas formaking a game, you just drew
these cards and they came outand I thought that's actually a
really nice touch.
If you draw, the hearts aresociable, the diamonds are

(01:09:57):
greedy clubs, they're violentand it's a really great way to
give you, give you give yourselfsome inspiration.
They also had a breakdown of,like, different types of npcs.
You'd have major npcs and you'dhave what essentially were

(01:10:18):
lagoon npcs and, yeah, exactly,and it was like this is the.
Here's how you start out a majornpc.
You know you need to knoweverything they can do.
And, by the way, if you want athug, here's a stock profile for
somebody who breaks heads, orfor a cop or for a government
agent or whatever type of npcyou're using, and I like that.

(01:10:39):
You got a lot of that in early90s, late 80s type RPGs.
You'd have a lot of human typepeople, detailed, as well as
just monsters, whereas a lot ofgames nowadays you don't get
that you know you'll get.
Here's what monsters can do,but you don't get.
Well, what if it's not amonstrous opponent?
What if it's a human opponent?
But they have a differentcareer.
How do you, how do you makethem?

(01:11:00):
So?
That was always a a nice touchthey made making games or making
scenarios simple and easy to toput together.
And again, it's advice that Ithink a lot of modern games
don't have.
They've lots of stuff about.
Here's how you make a story andbut what have you stuck for
ideas?
Drawing cards is a brilliantway to to get that.

Jason (01:11:23):
I might steal that for the next time I write anything,
because actually that could bejust a random NPC.
You know, you walk into thetavern and there's this really
mysterious guy with his hood up,and all they want to do is talk
to the goblin in the corner orwhatever, and you're like ah,
for God's sake.

Iain (01:11:40):
I had that in my Vampire the Masquerade campaign.
There was a character Iintroduced as a contact, yeah,
who became a major npc becausepeople, oh, we love him, we want
more of him, what really just?

Jason (01:11:51):
yeah, it happens all the time.
I think it's.
There was some meme I saw theother day about you know how do
I make this npc really memorable?
And the answer is don't.
The players will pick the onethey like and just attach the
story to that one you knowillusion of choice is just as
good as actual.

Iain (01:12:06):
I ran a game of D&D for my kids during Covid and my son
loves making friends with NPCsand there was a band of goblins
and I had, like the last twosurvivors, like surrender, like
please don't kill us.
I think and my son was like yes,you know, these are my friends.
And my daughter, who's cut fromsterner cloth, was like we

(01:12:31):
should just kill him.
And he's like no, no, no, theseare my friends.
And he was like so happy he hadthese goblins.
And they come to a bit in thedungeon where, like, the floor
falls out beneath them andthey'll try and decide how to
get across.
And and they come to a bit inthe dungeon where the floor
falls out beneath them andthey'll try and decide how to
get across.
And Andrew's like oh, I wonderhow deep that pit is.
And Kirsten goes I've got anidea.
She just boots one of thegoblins down the pit and the

(01:12:54):
game kind of went off the rails.
At that point he's like youkilled my goblin friend.
She's like I don't like yourgoblin friends.
So that was that he had tworight well, yeah, the other,
yeah, the other one actuallyproved to be beneficial in the
final battle.
Poor old gobby.
The goblin went down veryquickly, um, in the face of the

(01:13:15):
evil wizards, minions and andrewgot enraged and um went in
there swinging his sword tryingto avenge Gobby for who didn't
actually do much other than diehorribly.
But you know, there was aproper no moment.

Jason (01:13:31):
That's a goblin's lot in D&D right.

Iain (01:13:33):
Exactly In various inventive ways.

Jason (01:13:35):
Yeah, just die horribly.

Iain (01:13:38):
I've kind of got that with my current Warhammer campaign
that there's certain like keyNPCs I'm putting in there and
I'm like they're not going totalk to them.
I'm going to invent some randomfat bargemaster at the
Riverside Tavern and that'sgoing to be their best friend,
because they're like, oh helooks jolly, let's go and talk
to him.

Jason (01:13:58):
The DM has described him to us.
He must be important.
Yeah, he's, yeah, the DM hassaid has described him to us, he
must be important.
Yeah, it's like.
No, it's colour.

Iain (01:14:05):
Yeah, I just said he was a bit fat you know, going back to
that, that character motivationgeneration works well.
It's what I liked about thecontact system in Dark
Conspiracy.
You know you get contacts ofcertain kinds every four years
in your career and as a GM thatwas kind of your blessing
because they used the contactsas there was a mechanical aspect

(01:14:25):
to it, that you had generalcontacts and major contacts and
general contacts are, you know,you know people in the media or
in law enforcement or whatever,and major contacts were, you
know, a named individual and theway I used to always play it
was everything was general until, like, I pulled one out the hat
and I was like, hey, jason, youknow, mark, your journalist

(01:14:47):
friend comes to you.
You remember Mark, from eightyears ago when you were working
the graveyard shift as a cop andhe would come to you and that
was brilliant as a ref for beingable to say and here's your
adventure, hook, mark, yourtrusted friend comes to you and
says, can you go and investigatethe thing?
And you're like it's comingfrom Mark, it must be good,

(01:15:07):
let's go, whereas just havingyou whole cloth, having to
invent that.
Well, you're all sitting aroundwatching the tv and there's a
thing that suggests people havebeen disappearing and you all
decide to go and investigate it.
That's not as compelling as aperson is asking you to do it.
You have a link to them andit's in your backstory and
that's what one way the lifepath stuff worked really well.

(01:15:30):
You had this network of ofcontacts and they did it with
the generic contacts as well, asif you wanted to find out a
piece of information relating tothese large areas.
You pulled the number ofcontacts people had and
effectively used it as a skilland you rolled it and if you got
, you know less than the number,yeah, you find that information
.
But then I think I think thenagain, working from memory, I

(01:15:52):
think the rule was the gm thentook one point of your
collective skill and made that amajor contact.
You know this person comes toyou and says here's the thing,
and that was.

Jason (01:16:03):
That was a very nice way of working it it's interesting
because, again going back to thefact, this was an early 90s
kind of transformative, so, um,that whole context idea was a
relative new thing around thattime, so again cyberpunk did it.
Shadow run did it?
You know they had.
You know the whole idea ofhaving a network.
And one of the things again Iguess I didn't like about

(01:16:24):
traveler is and you never hadany of that and even if you did,
it takes a week to get from oneplanet right.
You've got to go via 10different planets to get there.
You're not getting to talk tothose contacts.

Iain (01:16:35):
Yeah, you're not on the radio talking to them because
sublight signals.

Jason (01:16:40):
Exactly.
Yeah, so you know, the fastestway to get an interplanetary
message was to send it as aletter in a jump ship.
Yeah, so you know, you getscout ships that just carry the
mail, which is, you know, it'svery kind of like old wild west
frontier that you'd have themailman riding from village to
village to kind of do it, but,um, so I think it lost a lot of

(01:17:02):
that.
I think in sci-fi and cyberpunkgames there were, there was a
lot of focus on who you knew aswell as what you knew.
Um, and, as you say, great boonfor dm for a horror game.

Iain (01:17:11):
It works really well because if you think of a lot of
horror films or literature,that's how a lot of the
investigation starts.
A contact comes to someone andsays, hey, this thing looks
suspicious, somebody should havea look at it.

Jason (01:17:26):
Main characters and or your or your better, your friend
in the in journalism hasn'tcome back from that scoop.

Iain (01:17:32):
He was invested yeah, exactly, you know, and suddenly
you're motivated to do it.
It's not just, oh, I guesswe're doing it because we're the
main characters.
It's.
We're doing it because there'seither, you know, we're
emotionally invested, or it's afriend in need, or or something
it's a bit, a bit better thanwalking into the local tavern
and saying I'll have a packetchristian and four rumors.
Please bark, yeah you knowrolling this table yeah, it's

(01:17:55):
something that I see with a lotof, even with modern games,
especially investigative games.
So there's a really good systemcalled gumshoe, and have you
ever, have you ever seen thegumshoe?
I've heard of it, yeah it workson the premise that if you're
doing a mystery players, themain characters should never

(01:18:16):
fail to get the main clues.
So, like you go to the crimescene, you will find the next
clue.
That takes you to the nextthing.

Jason (01:18:25):
Otherwise you run out of game.

Iain (01:18:27):
Yeah, when you make a perception roll you're not
trying to find the main clue.
The GM will give that to you.
It may take longer or shorterdepending on you know how you
make the role, but the successyou get on the perception roll
is the additional stuff you get.
So you know.
To use a horror game example,you know you might find out that
.
You know this person was killedbut there's a clue leading to
building x.

(01:18:47):
What you might find if you bemost successful is oh, maybe he
was killed by a vampire.
So you get tooled up andprepared for fighting a vampire.
And there's a lot of moderngames like some of the Call of
Cthulhu adventures.
It's like go to this locationand if you make a spot hidden
role, you find blah, blah, blah.
Well, what if they don't?
How are you going to continueyour game if they don't find

(01:19:09):
that?
And Dark Conspir conspiracy kindof has a nod to that in the gm
section of you know you want tokeep the story going, so don't
hide the main clues.
You know, make them go through abit of effort to find them, but
give them the clue eventuallyso that they then go to the next
location or go to the nextperson or find the next monster
or you know whatever it is theyhave to do, but your job as a GM

(01:19:33):
is to make sure that they'removing in the right direction.
And yes, they can go off intangents, because players do,
and that's part of the fun ofRPGs is that phrase of what do
you do next?
You can do literally anything,but you need to make sure that
you are aware enough of the plotthat you can not railroad them,
but you get them to where theyneed to go to, and I think a lot

(01:19:54):
of games miss out on that.
They rely too much on themechanical aspect and for a game
as mechanical as darkconspiracy, it's nice that they
had that nod of yeah, you needto keep the keep the people
going yeah, absolutely, I've gota big b in my bonnet about if
you hide something importantbehind a dice roll.

Jason (01:20:14):
Yeah, um, you know, it's cat.
It guarantee you know, Iguarantee you, at some point
everybody will fail.
Yeah, you know.
And then what do you do?
You need a plan b, and what Isee an awful lot of refs do is
just giving you the informationanyway.
Well, I'm just going to givethe information anyway.
Why are you making anybody roll?
I like the idea very much, likethe idea that make the roll.
You're going to get theinformation but, as you said,

(01:20:35):
like with the vampire example,you get a little bit extra,
something that gives you alittle bit of a hint, gives you
a bit more detail, and if ormaybe the opposite you fail,
what?
Why?
I wanted the threshold?
So I'll give you somethingmisleading.
Yeah, you know, you do rollrubbish, but actually you know
I'm going to give you somethingmisleading.
And then you can.

Iain (01:20:53):
You can deal with the consequences well, I got my
warhammer game the other night.
They're investigating thisscene and there's a thing I want
them to find and this onecharacter is like, right, I'm
going to go and root around anddo, xyz, I want to make a
perception check to see what Iget.
And she makes it and she failsit and there's a bunch of things
you can find.
There's one thing is the thingthat I want them to find.

(01:21:13):
She finds the thing.
The other things doesn't getthem because they're tangential,
they're nice little bonuses,but you don't get them because
you didn't.
You didn't find them.
But you do find the main thingand usually at that point people
are so focused on oh, we foundsomething, that they forget to
even like get someone else tothen go and make a roll again.
Like cool, we find a clue whatwe're going to do next.

(01:21:34):
And yeah, you're absolutelyright, hiding stuff behind the
dice roll is just bad gamesdesign.
Because what are you going to?
Are you going to progress yourstory?
If your story is, imagine, likeyou know, hercule poirot turns
up at the mansion and doesn'tfind the letter saying oh, by
the way, it was the butler thatdid it and he's just got a body

(01:21:55):
and he has no forensics, becauseit's the 1800s or early 1900s
or whenever, and so he's justlike well, I guess I can't find
it Sorry.

Jason (01:22:04):
Was it you?
Was it you, was it you?
The only thing I would say isthere's an opposite kind of
argument as well.
So the similar thing to me iswhen you make all the players in
a D&D party roll stealth, right, I guarantee one of them will
fail, guarantee it.

Iain (01:22:20):
Usually it's the rogue and the paladin that roll a natural
20 and ghost the way throughthe bloody thing.

Jason (01:22:27):
But you know, sometimes it's, you know, I know, I
understand making a roll.
There's this theory, I guess,that making a role builds
tension, and it does, but shouldnever be tension to the
detriment of what you're tryingto achieve in the game.
So I would say, here you go.
Psa public service announcementto you.
Gms out there, don't just makethem role stealth because you

(01:22:48):
can.
Um, you know, sometimes letthem get a bit further.

Iain (01:22:52):
I worked on the principle that you make a roll when the
consequences matter.
Yeah, so you're under stress.
Yeah, exactly, you're understress.
You've been chased, you're,you're up against time,
something like you know you'repicking the lock.
The rogue would normally beable to pick the lock.
However, the city guard,they're coming around the corner
.
Okay, you've got three turns todo this go, and that adds

(01:23:14):
tension.
People like oh my god, theclock's ticking, we need to get
this done whereas you knowyou're in the dead of night,
there's no one else around.
You know that the clues on theother side.
Yeah, let the rogue do histhing.
Pick the log.
You know, some people likemaking rolls, but I think you
make the role when it matters.
I played in a D&D game once.
When what's that skill in D&D?

(01:23:34):
They've got it in 5th edition.
It's almost like the liedetector skill, insight, insight
oh god, the amount of timespeople are like.
I want to make an insight check.

Jason (01:23:43):
You're getting into another bugbear of mine now.

Iain (01:23:45):
Go on.

Jason (01:23:46):
Players shouldn't tell you when they're making roles,
but the players shouldn't tellyou when they're making rolls.

Iain (01:23:50):
You should ask the player to make a roll.
Me and one of my friends have ajoke about one of the people we
used to play with.
We'd message each other duringthe game, going five bucks.
Says he sees insight check.
Because you're like insightcheck, insight check.
Like you don't have psychicpowers, you can't read her aura
and find out what she's thinking.
You know the ref will tell youwhen you make it.
It's similar like warhammer hasan intuition check.

(01:24:13):
I will tell players when to makethat, usually if you've got the
talent sixth sense.
So like, yeah, your spideysense is tingling, something's
not right here.
Don't tell them what for,because if they go, I'm making
an intuition check on that guyand I go, yeah, something's not
wrong, he's a villain, let's,you know, deal with him.
But yeah, I think you're right.
The ref should be the one whosays here's where you make a

(01:24:35):
skill check.
I mean, I don't mind whenplayers do something like say
there's a chasm, and someonelike could I use acrobatics to
get across there?
Sure, cool, go for it.
But I'll be the one who saysyou know when you roll the dice
to make that thing happen.
But yeah, dice rolls shouldonly happen really when

(01:24:55):
something's on.
It's a bit like you know.
I think it was the D&D 4thedition had Taking 20.

Jason (01:25:00):
Yeah, Take 10, Take 20.

Iain (01:25:02):
Yeah, where you've got all the time in the world.
Yeah, you pass.
You know great, you know you'renot going to fail your climbing
.
Check, if you're climbing acliff and there's conditions are
perfect, you've got all thegear.
Yeah, you're going to get tothe top, it's just going to take
some time, whereas we've beenchased by orcs and there's a
gale blowing and you've got noropes and you're trying to scale

(01:25:22):
a cliff.
Cool, let's make a roll and, bythe way, it's difficult yeah,
it's, it's, I don't know.

Jason (01:25:27):
I mean it sounds a bit harsh.
Part of the fun is rolling dice.
It is.

Iain (01:25:33):
I just see it so often it's like, oh, perception, check
why I don't know, about you,but I don't walk into a room and
go perception check see, that'swhy you're going to be the
victim of ambush one of thesedays.
Jack will leap off his catterytake your face off take my

(01:25:54):
jugular to bring that back togdw and dark conspiracy, though
you mentioned before withtraveler and the lack of
character progression, that oneof the reasons players like
making skill checks is they liketo see their characters get
better.
They like to be better at skillchecks, and Dark Conspiracy did

(01:26:16):
allow that you could getexperience and improve your
character and be better athip-firing your .50 cal building
shredder rifle, but that's whypeople like seeing that.
It's a bit like in video games.
People like to see theircharacters do more spectacular
things than they did previously,and that's, I think, why

(01:26:39):
character sheets exist.
Is you want to have that thingof?
My character is good at this,your character is good at that,
and we're going to rapidly getbetter at doing it as we go
along, unless you're playingTraveller.

Jason (01:26:51):
Unless you're playing Traveller.
We've got that.
And the other thing as well isI mean, I don't know, there's a
core set of skills.
It's one of the reasons that Ilove it we could have a whole
discourse on this at some pointwhere I like games that have
classes and I'm not a big fan ofgames that don't have classes.
So, for example, let's takevampire.
We're both intimately familiarwith vampire, the masquerade,

(01:27:12):
right.
You go to any game tabletop orlarp and I guarantee you most of
the people in the room willhave the same spread of skills.
All right, they'll have.
They'll have a combat skill.
It could be melee, it could berage, but they will have one.
They will have a speaky skill,so they'll have that one as well
.
They'll have stealth andthey'll have perception right, I

(01:27:34):
guarantee they will all have itright.
Whereas in a class-based skill,the rogue does stealth, right,
the paladin does not.
You know it's not up for debate, those things don't tend to.
And yeah, I know you can builda paladin that could do stealth,
but in, yeah, there are ways.
And you know, if you've gotdruid, pass without trace,

(01:27:55):
fantastic, saw it, but you knowit's.
I, like everybody in the pie oreverybody around your table
should have a moment in the sun.
Yeah, one of the things I feelabout non-class based games,
which includes traveler, becauseit didn't have for classes and
careers to start.
Conspiracy didn't have forclasses and careers includes
dark conspiracy didn't haveclasses, it had careers.
You generally end up with asimilar level of skill going

(01:28:18):
around.
You might if you're lucky youmight get one that's different.
So you will have as you said,like a paramedic might have
medicine, yeah, first aid orwhatever they called it in the
game.

Iain (01:28:26):
So yeah, yeah, but when I ran vampire recently, I the rule
because there used to be thissort of very loosey-goosey stuff
around like the coredisciplines, that, and for those
of you unfamiliar with Vampire,that's the Vampire powers and
like anyone could buy them.
And I was like no, unless youhave something as a clan
discipline, unless you'redrinking the blood of somebody

(01:28:48):
who has that, you can't learnthe other powers.
You have to be.
You know, if you don't know howto use dominate, you can't use
it.
You have to be instructed inits use by someone else.
And one of the reasons is itgives everyone their moment in
the sun.
You want to do something.
You know you want to cover upthis masquerade beach.
Go and let the Ventrue shine.
He's going to go and wipepeople's minds and charm them

(01:29:17):
into believing that there wasnothing to see here.
There's a big sabbat threatcoming.
Let the brugia or the gangrelhave their day by flying in
there with a celerity and theirpotence and their wolf claws.
You know, shredding, shreddingpeople up.
If there's some mystical stuffthat happens, go on.
The tremere can go and do theirthing, but it lets.
It has that differentiationthat you get to your example,
like with with D&D, and it's whywith Dark Conspiracy I kind of

(01:29:38):
preferred getting people likethe group together to make
characters and say, okay, let'smake characters together and
have an idea of almost like theparty concept, so that you don't
do that thing of jotting aroundevery single different career
so you can all get a firearmskill and a melee skill and a
healing skill and a charmingskill and a stealth skill and a

(01:29:59):
perception based skill.
Have someone be the journalistwho's good at snooping stuff out
.
Have someone be the doctor whocan heal people.
Have someone be the mercenarywho is really good with weapons.
Have someone be the pilot whocan, like, fly the plane to get
you there.
But don't all take every singleskill at one so that you can
and also have these veryunlikely career journeys of.

(01:30:20):
Well, I, you know, started offat law school but then I became
a truck driver and then I was aparamedic and then I happened to
fly a cargo jet and, oh godreally I'll take whatever I need
to get the skills I want.

Jason (01:30:30):
Thank you very much.

Iain (01:30:31):
Yeah, yeah, it was a bit like the old, like first edition
warhammer fantasy role play andI think we talked about this in
our very first podcast.
But you had career entrancesand exits, yeah, and most people
would go in this mad dash to gothrough this like very quick
hop through different careers totry and get to assassin that

(01:30:52):
had like the most skills and themost advances in the game.
Didn't matter, yeah, what youwanted to be assassin was the
most useful if you were anadventurer, because it had all
the advances that you you wantedto get to be a good character,
whereas the new one I kind oflike and it encourages you to
stay in your existing career andgo through the different levels

(01:31:14):
of it, because all the careershad advantages, whereas the old
ones, some of them, were justterrible.
Like you know, you're alabourer.
You get one skill and maybesome other ones If you're lucky.

Jason (01:31:26):
Stable hand yeah exactly.

Iain (01:31:29):
It's like what are you?
I'm a mercenary, I can fightwith all these different weapons
.
Oh great, I'm a shepherd, I canplay the pan pipes.
Good on you the thing.

Jason (01:31:37):
The thing is, I'm sure there's a netflix special out
there about a shepherd who killslike numerous nazis in world
war ii it's probably an animeyeah, yeah, probably, probably.

Iain (01:31:46):
Or it'll be fin Finnish, it'll probably be Finnish Anyway
we have talked for about anhour and a half about the
wonderful world of GDW.
To close out, what are your inJason's, final analysis of GDW,
because sadly they are nowdefunct?
What would you say is theirbiggest contribution to gaming,

(01:32:08):
because they've been aroundreally since the beginning.
What would you say is theircontribution that has left a
either a blot or a shiningbeacon on the gaming landscape.
In fact, let's do two, let's doa blot and a shining beacon.
What's their biggest blot inthe gaming landscape and the
biggest shining beacon of hope?

Jason (01:32:27):
oh, my god.
Uh, I wish you'd given me someprep time on this.
Would have been nice for aheads up for that thing.
Okay, so what do I?

Iain (01:32:34):
don't break the illusion for our listeners that this
isn't a finely crafted,well-researched, not just
shooting from the hip podcast soI mean, I think, I think they
were a product of their time.

Jason (01:32:44):
So I think the the thing that that I like is, you know,
they developed some quite solidconcepts and moved stuff in
forward, okay, so, yeah, you'reright, they started with
traveler and I can bitch aboutit, all I like and there was no
character development, yada,yada, yada but they learned from
it and they got better at it.
Uh, and therefore, you knowthat, as you said, even things

(01:33:05):
that I didn't know, like thiscard system for pulling uh, npc,
um, motivations and things, Ithink that's brilliant.
Why is that not more of a thingfor more, more games, so that
that sounds fantastic.
So, um, plot, I don't thinkthey left a plot.
I mean, you know that they were, in my mind, a generally good,

(01:33:26):
good kind of contributor to therole-playing space.
They were big, heavily focusedon crunch right, he said that
himself.
So that's their wargamingbackground, I guess.
Um, I don't know.
I like them.

Iain (01:33:40):
I wish they were still about yeah, I mean I enjoyed
them too.
I think I would agree with youthat they came up with some
innovations, like basicallysaying you don't need class I
know you like classes, butthey're saying there's a
different way you can play.
You can play and darkconspiracy is a brilliant
example of let's make a detailedbackground for your character,

(01:34:03):
so you're not just playing thiswizard who springs out.
In a way, you're playing a guywho was 18 years old and went to
university and learned to be alawyer but then decided his real
passion was in driving trucksup and down the country and he
met a whole load of interestingpeople and learned about the
dark conspiracy that way.
That's a really modern way ofthinking about games and

(01:34:28):
characters.
That wasn't necessarily aroundat the time or wasn't
necessarily common at the time.
The only blot I'd say is it'snot again a blot as such, but
the excessive crunch that I get.
Some people like detailedgaming systems that let you
simulate skirmishes, but DarkConspiracy is, and GDW as a

(01:34:51):
whole is obsessive in the levelof crunch.
I keep coming back to the spacetravel rules.
You do not need space travelrules in dark conspiracy.
There is zero need for them,but they're like they might do
it.
Therefore, we need rules for it.
You know, dark conspiracy thatthat's gdw's philosophy.
If there's a chance, theplayers do it.
We need to have a perfect wayto simulate this in our world.

(01:35:14):
So let's write eight pages onspace, space travel, in a book
about investigating scooby-doomysteries so your blot is the
fact they give you too manyrules yes, I like games to be
fast moving and I don't want 25magazine slots to keep track of

(01:35:35):
on my character sheet.
I'm fine with abstracting thatsort of stuff and being like
Star Wars and saying they don'trun out of ammunition.
Have you ever seen them run outof ammo in Star Wars?
No, you're good, let them runout of ammunition when it's
dramatically appropriate.
But you know Dark Conspiracy,you need to keep track of
individual bullets fired orindividual rounds fired out of

(01:35:56):
your belt ammunition.
So yeah, that's my take Again.
I think GDW were fun.
I did have fun with their games.
Dark Conspiracy I have very,very fond memories of and yeah,
looking back at it now, I've gotmy hoity toity 30 years later.
Hat on going.
Wow, this is very much early90s games design, but in the

(01:36:16):
early 90s I loved it.

Jason (01:36:17):
So there, was that as well, and so yeah, or late 80s
for Traveller or actually early80s for Traveller very early 80s
for Traveller.

Iain (01:36:27):
Yes, so tip of the hat to GDW, and it's a shame that
they're not still in fact.
It would be interesting to seewhat they were like if they were
still around, if they changedanything or if they were just
like nope, we're still going tohave rules for space travel and
tracking individual bullet usagein our detailed combat
simulation.

Jason (01:36:47):
You have to move with the times right.

Iain (01:36:50):
Well, thank you for that, jason Pleasure, as always.
I'm sure we'll find anotherexciting subject of another
roundtable about soon, and maybeSteve won't slack off this time
with illness and we can talk tohim.

Jason (01:37:03):
Maybe more than one episode a year, right.

Iain (01:37:06):
Yeah, well, we've already had this.
It'll be our third episode thisyear, so that's well done
probably actually more than theentire 2024 output.
So well done.
Alright, mate, I will speak toyou again soon cheers bye, bye,

(01:37:41):
and that was our Dark ConspiracyRoundtable.
We hope you enjoyed it.
We are a semi-regular orfrequently irregular podcast on
the history of RPGs.
We have a back catalogue now of60 plus episodes, including
interviews, roundtables, historyepisodes, product reviews and

(01:38:04):
actual plays.
So if you enjoyed this episodeand you're a new listener,
please feel free to delve intoall of that.
If you want to get in touchwith us, you can do so via email
on rolltosavepod at gmailcom,or you can find us on instagram
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We'd be really interested toknow if you've played dark

(01:38:26):
conspiracy or any other gdwgames and what your experience
of those were.
Did you enjoy them?
Did you find them too crunchy?
Were they a product of the timeor are they something that you
fondly go back to nowadays?
We hope you enjoyed thisepisode.
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