My Gaming Memoirs Part 17 - 1999

My gaming was now running at a steady pace. I was primarily running WFRP with Andy, but every now and then we'd all partake in a quick Star Wars game. It wasn't the full group - in fact, it was mainly only Mark and Paul who'd join in - but we had fun. I had no other games running anywhere else and things ticked over quite nicely.

Mark and Louis had pretty much finished their work on the Setnin Sector, Mark doing all the consolidation of material and Louis working on the internet site, and www.lightsabre.co.uk was launched. It doesn't exist anymore, the link here goes to an archived version of it (and you'll see just how fans built websites back then - ah, the wonder of animated gifs!). A more up to date version of it can still be seen at www.legacy.lightsabre.org.uk and you'll see the sheer amount of information that had to be collected, written out and entered. We also wrote a lot of short stories over the years, primarily based on our gaming adventures but many were original. It was also the year that 'Episode I - The Phantom Menace' came out and we had plenty of new material to play with, both on the website and in the RPGs. It was a good year for Star Wars gaming.

I also started work on putting my Spirit game onto a PC and changed the setting. I ditched the underwater setting for a high-concept science fiction setting called The League Of Seven. It was a grand space opera inspired by Dune, Star Wars and Star Trek and I spent a lot of time adapting the system and re-writing it. Which, as it turned out, was a massive mistake because I managed to overcomplicate the game and lose what made it fun in the first place.

My collection, now, was huge. It took an even larger leap in content when I managed to secure the entire collection of Star Wars D6 books from a friend. I now had everything I needed to run a massive, detailed Star Wars campaign with the Revised and Expanded rulebook. My games were about to leap into hyperdyperlightspeed!

As it happened, we ended up sticking with the first edition rules and the mass of books I had acquired sat on the shelves gathering dust as we used the Lightsabre website as source material and a way to introduce new players to the gameworld. I figured out I didn't need that many books as I was perfectly happy with what I already had.

You live and learn, and it was after this that I seriously cut down on the number of books I was purchasing for my hobby.