In Nomine, The Land of Doom, and the Death of My Role-Playing Career

I've talked about how I'll never play a role-playing game again, and I want to tell the whole story why. First, I was never a big video-game player, although there were a few video games that I played to death because I was interested in them, and wanted to figure them out. Only one of those games was a video-role-playing game. The reason I like playing role-playing games is that it was a kind of social-improvisational theater. You created a character, and you and your fellow players would create a drama together, with the game-master as the head.

What started happening is that no matter how light the topic of our games, or no matter how much fun we were having, you would sit down at the table and begin to enter a land of doom. It was like Pavlov's dogs. No matter how the game went, something was wrong as soon as you sat down at the table. I can't explain why that is, and it has nothing to do with my beliefs about spirits or visions. My group and I were playing professional-level games, and no-one - except you know who - in my group was a psychopath, but something was wrong.

So we start with the two tales that end my role-playing career. First, I was known in my group as a great gamemaster for Call of Cthulhu. One of the friends in my group used to run a fright-night Cthulhu game on Halloween, and those were always good nights. One of the first years, we re-enacted a Dawn of the Dead horror scenario. Lots of zombie splatter, and a good Halloween night. Another year, we did a sort of end-of-the-world scenario.

My character got killed long before the scenario ended, and I was mad, but it made good sense. I had taken a mortal wound from a tasty-weird Lovecraftian monster, the group found a first-aid kit and bandaged me up, but without better medical treatment in a Lovecraftian world, my character would die quickly, and he did. I hadn't lost a character in years, but I sat back, and it was a good remainder of the game - even as an observer.

A Cthulhu game is supposed to run like a murder-mystery, but none of my players were really into that, so I mastered what I generally called, "uber-Cthulhu," which included a lot of combat and so forth. I drew my material from a great many sources, including Lovecraft the H.P. and today I look back and say, "I tried very hard to control my material and not go overboard with the game. It is a horror game, we played maybe 10 scenarios out of the campaign, and it was meant to frighten. Did I or didn't I go beyond the invisible boundary line?"

I still don't know, but my own GM'ing of that game was one of the first obvious signs that I needed to quit role-playing. The next was the real ender and it was In Nomine. I had read some Steve Jackson game-books when I was young, and I knew Steve Jackson was a maniac. I read through the core-book, and it was amazing. The setups for the characters were amazing, it was a streamlined system that needed few charts or extended calculations, there were some ways for characters to use their powers in concert with one another. Amazing material, but I was not sold on playing the game, and I never should have played the game.

One of the last games I ever role-played, if not the last is an interesting story. A guy I knew in High School who I hated and who hated me was friends with a guy in the group. He was not very successful in High School, but he had totally changed and had become a good man. He worked hard, and he was no fool. We had hashed out our differences, and I consider the guy a friend, though it's been years since I've seen him.

He had role-played a handful of times, and no more. He made the easiest character to play in In Nomine, and role-played it perfectly. We laughed our way through the game. It was a fun time - or so it seemed. However, at the end of that game I talked with that man and he was angry that he had been lured into the game, and he said, "never again." I agreed whole-heartedly. It isn't because of my personal religion, but this is the rational truth - there was something wrong with that game.

There are other games I could list - anything that says Palladium books on it would be worth listing. They probably still sell those core-books and it makes me pale to think about it. Go look at the cover for the Rifts corebook or the Nightgaunts corebook. This goes way beyond Lovecraft the H.P. The core-theme for the Rifts games is amazing, but not even me. Not even me.

There are two more stories and then we'll be done for a while. First, I was playing with a different group, and the guy mastering was a really great GM. He asked me about playing the Zelazny diceless-role-playing game. My response was, "Look, I'll play a diceless game if the mechanics work, but I'm not comfortable with Zelazny." I had read some Zelazny as a young man, and the answer to anything Zelazny was, "no way." No thank you.

Here are two final stories, and it makes you wonder. A buddy of mine managed to go to Gen-Con, which is one of the largest role-playing, war-gaming and comic-book conventions held in the country. The same people who made Cthulhu's corebooks had a game out called, "Nephilim." I'm not going to say much, but the game was a bit like In Nomine, as it was both amazing, and "dead wrong."

So my friend steps up to the table to try, "Nephilim," and he pays 30 dollars to get up to the table - somewhere around there. My friend told me that the man GM'ing was a retired professor of English history. The man might have been a swindler, but I think it might have been real. My friend joked in one of his typical ways - that his response to the game after about 5 minutes was, "Uhm... I feel as if I'm actually performing occult rituals, instead of playing a game about the supernatural..." He left the table and ate the thirty dollars after that five minutes.

Last story. There was a FASA game called Shadowrun, which mixed cyber-punk and fantasy elements, and the background of the game was great, but the engine was terrible. The engine was terrible because the core-engine was the Battletech engine, and that engine was no good for a role-playing game. I had mentioned to my friends - who had been Shadowrunning some - that the best Shadowrun module - and the best module ever made for an rpg - in my own opinion - was an old-skool Runner module called, "The Face of the Harlequin."

So I happened by the gaming store a few months later and was grunging through the bargain bin, and there it was - "The Face of the Harlequin," in a grungy but readable copy. The module was so good that I could have used the material in a different game, but I left that thing behind, and it cost a dollar and a half. It was right out of a horror-flick. Don't go into the basement Gwyd! Don't!

So that is the story. The improvisational-theater and the social-storytelling aspects of rpg's are wonderful. However, just sitting here and re-counting these stories I feel as if I am sitting down at the table again and entering a land of doom. I want to stay away from my personal beliefs about a visionary, mythical world in this case and tell you - there was something developing in those games that still scares me and makes the room darker - just to think of it.

We were not a black-dog roleplaying group either. I don't know, but that is how it ended for me. I love constructing worlds and GM'ing, and I even like playing characters in rpg's, but "never, never again." I've built campaign settings that beat anything but the original Gygax Greyhawk setting to bits. I could put some money in my pocket, but, "never, never again."

I've got to call my Dad here in maybe 45 minutes, but I may do another article here to finish off for this part of the day. To finish off - for a lot of intelligent young people, rpg's are a good outlet, but you need to see the signs and quit when it comes. I worry about my old group, because they didn't seem to be matching the number. It is scary, and I can't explain it. We were no black-dog group, I never LARP'ed, and we weren't a kool-aid cult. What exactly was it?