Destructive Tendencies I
Over twenty years ago I met a group of guys in junior high who introduced me to the world of die based role-playing games. Instead of Dungeons & Dragons, though, they played an offshoot of the Palladium RPG involving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Bored out of my mind at school, I joined these guys who would end up being my friends until the end of high school, and, for at least one of them, well afterward. We ended up playing a number of Palladium based games: Robotech, Rifts, Ninjas and Superspies. Eventually, with the Palladium multiverse, they all congealed into one massive game.
My first character was a mutant alligator from the TMNT RPG. Being completely new to the whole concept of die based games I gave him the first name that came to my head: Snapper. He would end up being my most favorite character and the one the rest of the guys would love to hate. We had a lot of good times, me and the guys, and I can still throw out familiar one-liners from back in the day that instantly draw grins and memories, even after two decades.
Like most players we bent the rules (quite often) and used the books more as guidelines than anything else. I got on the good side of the guy who was our normal GM and as a result, Snapper ended up becoming a cybernetic warlord in charge of his own little country. It annoyed the other players to no end as I played him like the diabolically aligned character he was. I once bit off another players hand when he tried to steal my pizza, but since he was an ally I had it replaced with a cybernetic one (lockpicks included, since he was a thief, but not a very good one because I caught him stealing my pizza). To compensate for their disapproval I built my own mini-expansion for the TMNT RPG called "backwoods and beyond". It was actually an offshoot of the "Mutants Down Under" supplement, since my tiny island was located somewhere in that area. Naturally no one really used it except for me, and I would run campaigns on the side for my buddy Draxon and kid that lived next door to him.
After a while I broke the "expansion" away from TMNT and started to make it into my own little mini-rpg. Having one time made the comment about our players "destructive tendencies" during a campaign I went ahead and kept the name. It was still based on a Palladium games system, and was playable, I just made some of my own weapons, armor and monsters. We had some good times with it.
In 1997 I came across one of the greatest video games to have ever been made, Final Fantasy Tactics. Already a huge fan of the FF series (Ill save that for another blog) I thoroughly enjoyed the grid based, job based play. It made sense to me, it was cool to use, you had extra stats for movement and jumping and, wow! It was maybe a few years afterward that I started to convert my game into a similar but custom system.
About ten or so years in I had something substantial. All throughout the end of my high school days and well into my adult life I wrote. Notepads, notebooks, sticky notes - everywhere I went I wrote. On the job, on my lunch breaks, at home. I had spells, runes, monsters, armor, weapons, psychic powers, curses, a storyline, characters. I had a playable game!
Then I lost it all.
Well, I say lost it all but, in reality, I gave it all away. Back in 2011 I was a schmuck, a joke, a loser. I was married with three kids and some rocky relationship issues. In an attempt to alleviate those issue I threw it all away. Well, burned it all away. It would be years before I realized what a stupid mistake I had done, and what an idiot I was at the time. I slowly started to rebuild, but the spark of my imagination had dwindled. I found it hard to think about the basics of the game, about the system as it was and what I wanted it to be. All I had left where the four characters I had built up: Snapper, Sonja and Slash (trust me, that's four even though it looks like three). When I felt like it I would write some notes, but after a couple of years I was ready to call it quits. Still, things drove me on. Final Fantasy 14, with its rich lore made me long to create a world of my own. I would watch YouTube videos on the Avatar universe (the good one with martial arts and Aang, not the blue, creepy, cat-people one) and wish I could create something so deep and awesome, but it was tough. I went from starting the game in my early teens to, now, 40+ years old. It got tougher and tougher, and my writing got further and further apart.
Fast forward another year or so and, as I'm flipping around through the channels on my TV I come across some weird channel called TBD, I think. They show a lot of nerdy internet stuff (why not just watch it on the internet, then?) and, on one particular day they are running a show that is basically a bunch of guys doing D&D or some such game. My mind is blown! I was ridiculed back in the day for this and now its on TV? Come to find out "table top RPGs" are all the rage now. Guys have whole podcasts built around just sitting down and playing.
I am intrigued.
And motivated.
I mean, in the past ten years I have seen the rise of sites like Patreon and Kickstarter. Seen people bring their games, comic books and art to life through crowdfunding, but I dont really need crowdfunding, I just need time and my creativity back.
Over the past year I have been working on and off on recreating the world of Abraxas, the world in which my game takes place. A world under the thumb of an oppressive god, once benevolent, but now corrupted. Along with him a pantheon of gods bickering amongst themselves while their children suffer. Banished from directly interacting with them, they are stricken from the primary plane by the Highgod, leaving their followers in the midst of a war against the very dead themselves.
All seems lost, until an unexpected visitor from another dimension arrives, a giant metal alligator with gleaming army behind him, and the sword of the god of death on his back.
My world is Abraxas, and I will bring it to life if its the last thing I do.