My Gaming Memoirs Part 11 - 1993

This was a bumper year for me, as far as roleplaying was concerned. I'd moved out of the house that I shared with my friends and into a flat I now shared with my then girlfriend, Anne. The roleplaying group that consisted of PaulG, Rob, Dave et al had drifted away and now I was gaming regularly with Paul and Mark, the guys who had stuck with me through everything, and the primary game, in fact the only game, was Star Wars D6. Oh, great and wonderful Star Wars D6. The Setnin Sector was huge, now, encompassing dozens of worlds and star systems, dozens of NPCs and literally hundreds of locations. Now Andy had joined the group proper, and with Darren and Louis regularly attending it was usually a great turnout for games. Everyone had their chance to shine.

That is... they would have if Andy could have kept quiet for more than five seconds.

Andy was a force to reckoned with in my RPG group. He was constantly thinking, pushing the story and the action forward, taking his time with certain situations when it suited him but if things looked even slightly awkward - BLAM! Out came the repeating blaster and down went the bad guys. He was loud, sometimes brash and he roleplayed his characters to the hilt. It was all everyone else could do to keep up with him. In most cases it may have been a case of him drowning out the other players, but he actually drove the other players to try harder, push faster and generally get involved more so that they weren't sidelined. The games were amazing. I revelled in the way he drove forward and didn't wait to be told what to do or where to go, or ask a thousand and one detailed questions about what he could see, hear and smell. He also loved stories and taking part in an overall plot and that was what I had been trying to do for the previous three or four years. I now understood that it wasn't just up to me as the GM to drive the story and do all the work with plot and character arcs... the players had to do their fair share, too, and buy into the world I had created to want to develop their characters in such a way. It was quite a revelation to me, and I realised that that was what Paul had done years ago with MERP. He'd allowed me to drive the story, which was another reason why I had been so emotionally invested in it.

Of course, characterisation and plot development aside, things kind of got out of hand when Andy decided to booby trap his entire base and left the othe rplayers out to dry so that he could run away with 15 million credits. I say 'he', Andy was playing Luschia Arkensaw, human female mercenary/bounty hunter/pilot/assassin/whatever she was in the mood for that week. The Star Wars games came to a juddering halt.

Other players drifted in and out of the games once I'd managed to get the games back on track (and anyone would even remotely trust Andy to game with him again) but the core players remained. I GM'd (mostly), and there was Paul, Mark, Andy, Darren and Louis. It was a fine group and we got some fine games in. Star Wars D6 in the Setnin Sector would be our go-to campaign for the next two years.

Which meant for the next two years, gaming at the greatest venue we ever gamed at ever would mean lots of secret plots, player-vs-player action and secret machinations. The gaming group was about to get devious.