But first, this picture I randomly ran
across on another blog of some Scythians, among the oldest school
Steppe Warriors out there; so it's a shout out to my old Guildies
from AOL's version of Neverwinter Nights and Yurt dwelling folk
everywhere.
Next, I ran across these pics on
another blog.
Now I am not generally a huge fan of
Sci-Fi cross-overs, but seeing the Cylon on the Enterprise bridge was
pretty cool. The second one just reminded me of how I didn't get my
Gold Cylon when I sent away for it. Which reminded me of how I was
similarly screwed out of this-
What is it with me NOT getting
Battlestar Galactica stuff when I was a kid? Was it Karma because I
was the only kid I knew that got the Colonial Viper for Christmas
that year? Everyone else got stuck with the lame almost viper toys,
or, if they were lucky like two of my friends, got the Cylon Raider.
What were they thinking there? Kids
will love having a ship never seen on the show? A Viper-esque thing
on wheels will be great! Don't toy company execs actually ever have
kids look at their proposed toys? Because the Viper and the Raider
were the only ones they produced that were necessary. A shuttle might
have been nice, or anything in the action figure scale. Action
figures with detail and articulation at least as nice as Kenner's
Star Wars figures would have made it a competitive line too, as it
was I got all of mine as gifts; despite being a HUGE BSG fan (at 9
years old I was apparently their demographic), I knew their action
figures were crap. Oddly enough, I have the Muffitt figure sitting on
my desk- top shelf, center, under the light, on top of my Cesare
Borgia tobacco tin full of old coins, behind a bunch of old school
D&D miniatures, mostly Heritage and Ral Partha, some Grenadier or
others.
Now I guess that it is apropos to this
discussion, in a roundabout way, of BSG that my new copy of Dawn
Patrol came in the mail today. Here are the pictures:
It is pretty nearly complete, I didn't
count the counters, but the rest of the contents are there except for
two maneuver cards used for tailing/being tailed. There are three
complete sets of maneuver cards and one set missing two. My wife Mona
actually volunteered to make some more sets using her skills with art
and graphics programs and I can then print them out onto heavy paper
and she'll cut the new decks out. There was also this odd box of
counters that doesn't actually go to Dawn Patrol. I've been a
Wargamer for three decades and I don't recognize these guys, anyone
know what game they're from?
My wife took this picture with our
digital camera, because I am impaired at photography, so I thank her
for that
Anyway, over the years I have built and
rebuilt BSG RPGs, and never got anyone to play with me, even my
buddies like Lance who LOVES the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica.
How Dawn Patrol fits in to all of this is that in a couple of
incarnations of my BSG RPG, I pretty much used Dawn Patrol as a
chassis for the fighter combat. Obviously, it needs some modification
to make it a space fighter combat game, but, in theory, it works all
right. I say in theory, because I never playtested it against anyone
but myself. I don't exactly know when I started "designing"
games, it seems like I must have been in high school, but that seems
kind of late for a BSG project. Probably earlier, I was always stuck
chasing the Questing Beast that is the perfect RPG as Big Darryl's
Squire, so modifying rules was in my gaming blood from the time I was
in junior high I guess.
I don't know how many iterations my BSG
RPG went through. I do know that every time some hot new game system
came along down the pike I had to see what it had that I could use,
modify or be inspired by. I rewrote the WEG D6 Star Wars game into a
BSG RPG, that was dead simple, all you really have to do is remove
the Jedi and change some terminology. I had an entire GURPS version
once, and I didn't even own any GURPS books at the time. Having
access to your friends and mentors gaming libraries is a good thing.
I am pretty sure I quit trying to put together an original series BSG
RPG sometime in the mid 1990s; I am going to guess that I figured if
it hadn't happened by then, it just wasn't going to happen. I know I
quit before the D20 craze, otherwise I'd probably have driven myself
nuts trying to make it happen again and have everyone in my D&D
group be all lukewarm on the idea.
Those counters are from PanzerBlitz.
ReplyDeleteHere's a picture for reference.
DeleteThat's funny, because I said to my wife when I was looking at them that they were probably from one of the old classic games I never played like PanzerBlitz. It was an educated guess, but still.
DeleteI wish there had been a BSG roleplaying gsme. I mean original BSG, not the newfangled boring one.
ReplyDeleteI wish you'd been around for any incarnation of the one I created. BSG 1978 was so much better than the new show.
Delete