Strangely enough, given my previous post, it’d be a Fighting Fantasy book. I strongly remember it being Ian Livingstone, but not what book it was.

Going back to the idea of proper RPGs, it’s a little trickier. I’m not sure which I bought first – Orpheus or Witchcraft.

I suspect it was Orpheus, as Witchcraft was out of print, and I had to order it from America. Admittedly, that may still mean I bought Witchcraft first, but Orpheus was almost certainly in my hands first.

I now own all of Orpheus, including the short stories book. It’s one of the only games I own in its entirety – may in fact be the only game. I’ve only skimmed some of the later books in the vain hope that someday I might get to play in a proper campaign and knowing all the metaplot would spoil things a bit.

The first game I properly ran was a Witchcraft game. It didn’t go so well, didn’t even really go anywhere. I think we managed a couple of sessions at best before it fell apart – something that seems a common trait in my games when I’m feeling down.

The next game was a Vampire: the Requiem game as I recall – that actually went on for a while. The bit that stands out there was the ghouled cat called Twinky who ended up being better than most of the characters in a fight – when she could be bothered to take part. Rule 1 of ghouling – never let them know they can do it without you. Okay, so I was bending the rules with letting a cat do it independently, but it amused the players no end.

Then there was the old World of Darkness game that was actually a feint into a new World of Darkness game – the Apocalypse was changed by a cabal of mages who cast a ritual to remake the world in their image – setting themselves up as the Exarchs and removing everyone else’s memories. For some reason, the players could recall who they’d been, but had lost their abilities; they were just mortals stuck in an insane asylum. In the Old World, they’d been vampires and werewolves, and now they were just human. One of them found Malkovian in the asylum basement and got themselves ghouled – nowhere near as powerful as the vampire they’d once been, but still useful. With that, they managed to break out of the asylum and escape into the real world. Things didn’t go too far after that, but I thought the concept worked rather well.

I figured I’d join in on the #rpgaday theme for the month. The first topic is the first RPG you played.

That I can remember? One of Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy books. I don’t remember which one, but I’ve probably still got it somewhere…

Of course, if you’re meaning a true RPG, it was a modified version of the West End Games Star Wars system as part of the Imperial Order (a Star Wars gaming fan-club that had a roleplaying wing at the time – Warbird Wing for life).

The first RPG I actually played around a tabletop was Witchcraft. I joined a game in first year, and that was an interesting game. The first of two PCs named Pyro (after the MegaTokyo character, but with actual fire abilities like the Marvel one). The second Pyro was in the Orpheus game I also played in first year. They died within a week of each other as I recall. My notes on what they could do were quite extensive – I’d handwritten out all of the relevant rules text into notebooks with coloured tabs to keep it all organised; I never do that any more.

So that’s a brief look into where my roleplaying habit started.