Dark Conspiracy Roundtable

The dark minions may have tried to sabotage our first episode, but we're back with a deep dive into the fascinating world of Dark Conspiracy, GDW's dystopian monster-hunting RPG from 1991.

Dark Conspiracy occupies a unique place in roleplaying history – a game that bridges old-school wargaming crunch with forward-thinking character development systems. We explore how this game, with its eerily prescient setting of corporate overreach and societal collapse, created some of the most detailed and mismatched parties in gaming. Where else could you play a heavily-armed scooby gang featuring a Navy SEAL, a paramedic, and a homeless guy with sunglasses?

The game's mechanical complexity is both its blessing and curse. We marvel at the obsessive detail – magazine tracking sheets for individual bullets, eight pages of space travel rules in a monster-hunting game, and vehicle stats for everything from military hardware to Winnebagos. Yet beneath this crunch lies innovative systems for character development, NPC generation, and adventure design that were ahead of their time.

We also connect Dark Conspiracy to GDW's broader legacy, from Traveller to Twilight 2000, examining how these games influenced an entire generation of players. Our discussion ranges from character optimization (cyborg escapees with strength 18, anyone?) to the evolution of game design, from pure simulation to narrative focus.

Whether you're a longtime fan of GDW games or simply curious about this fascinating chapter in RPG history, join us for this exploration of a game that tried to have rules for everything – including how many tons of cargo your spacecraft could deliver to the moon.

What was your experience with Dark Conspiracy or other GDW games? Did you track every bullet, or handwave the crunch in favor of the story? Let us know at roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com or find us on Instagram!

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Chapters

• 0:10 Introduction to Dark Conspiracy
• 4:20 The Unexpected Crunch of GDW Games
• 14:54 Character Creation and Career Paths
• 28:20 Equipment, Combat, and Excessive Detail
• 41:10 Traveller and GDW's Game Design Heritage
• 54:30 Running and Playing Dark Conspiracy
• 1:07:46 NPCs, Contacts, and Adventure Design
• 1:26:36 GDW's Legacy in Gaming History
• 1:37:45 Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

Transcript

Iain: 0:10

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast, dark Conspiracy. So hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save. Today is our roundtable, following our Dark Conspiracy History episode and for eagle-eared listeners, if that's a phrase, I have redone the Dark Conspiracy History episode Because in the initial one it appeared that the Dark Minions didn't want their secrets spilled. So they did something to the sound and made the music drown out my dulcet scotch tones. So it's been corrected and it now can actually be listened to the really fun thing. By the way, I'm joined here with Jason. Steve is not with us. He's sadly unwell, poor Steve, so thoughts and prayers to Steve, obviously.

Jason: 1:07

Yeah, hope you get better soon, buddy.

Iain: 1:09

But yeah, Jason, one of the things that amused me was I actually had a whole bunch of listeners message me, mail me about the sound quality. I'm like, oh, people still listen to this, even after months of absence.

Jason: 1:28

So that was quite refreshing to know that people still listen to our nonsense people do. Because I got I got a random whatsapp from uh, rob bell. Um, so shout out to rob where you put a new podcast out. I was like, have we? Obviously that was the darkest bruising history episode. So he was like is this one all the end? I'm like, yes, this one's all the end, but we are recording one, he's not listening to it.

Iain: 1:50

Probably then he's like yeah, it's just him. Rob, incidentally, said to me that he's become aware of how much I slow my voice down over in the US, and he says he has to listen to it at 1.25 speed for me to sound at my normal speed.

Jason: 2:05

I would say 1.5 easily.

Iain: 2:09

Anyway, how are you, Jason? It's been a while.

Jason: 2:12

I'm very good. I'm very good, looking forward to a few bits and pieces coming out. I was noticing on the web there's a lot of chatter about the new Vampire, the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 coming out I was a huge, huge fan of the original back in 2004. Um, I've heard mixed reviews, some of them good, some have been bad. Um, I'm still going to play it, so I'm quite excited looking forward to that.

Iain: 2:39

Uh, other than that, just the usual, you know, watching society collapse at a slow rate across the world which is actually really fitting given that we were going to talk about dark conspiracy today, because it's the thing that I pointed out in the history podcast. Having reread that, it is a strangely prescient game because all of the stuff that seemed very jolly, science fiction and dystopian back in 1991, I'm like that's most of what's happened nowadays the, the societal inequality and collapse, the corporate overreach it feels very um prescient for today's society yeah, it absolutely does.

Jason: 3:18

And I mean all these dystopian future games that we're sort of seeing and have played and loved and all this kind of stuff. And you look at it now and you're like did these guys know what's coming? It's like the simpsons.

Iain: 3:27

They've predicted pretty much everything that's happening so we're probably gonna end up talking about gdw as a whole, because we were talking pre-recording and the fact is we've actually played a ton of gdw's games and the thing that I find fascinating about them is that gdw was obviously originally a war games company and it really shines through in their games, like when I reviewed dark conspiracy again to write the history podcast, like the combat section in that game. My my god, it was like a tactical skirmish war game rather than a fast flowing RPG. Let's kill the monsters and move on. There is a lot of war game heritage bundled up in these systems.

Jason: 4:21

I think it's called Crunch these days.

Iain: 4:23

It is definitely it's crunchy, as a gravel pit filled with frosties, for example. It's ridiculous. The thing I loved about dark conspiracy is the authors have clearly said we need every possible rule for every possible circumstance that we can possibly come up in our game world. So in a game that is primarily about being a very heavily armed scooby gang in the ruins of dystopia america, they're like we need space travel rules because they might go into space at some point and there's a whole suite of rules like that. When I look into them them I'm like I've never used these rules when I've run the game ever.

Jason: 5:07

It could have just been a source book. Do you know what I mean?

Iain: 5:09

It could have been an add-on, Right exactly.

Jason: 5:11

Do you need that right now?

Iain: 5:13

Yeah, this game's got extraterrestrials, so yeah, we could do a space source book. But it's almost like that joke about Fast and the Furious franchise. In the furious franchise are like, yeah, they finally go into space, that's what dark conspiracy is. Like they finally you know, your players finally get to go into space and guess what? You've got rules for combat and microgravity. Fantastic, off you go, but it just feels like ridiculously complete. For the sake of it I said.

Jason: 5:38

It is like I remember, I think, going back to my character in Dark Conspiracy. I had a character in Dark Conspiracy. I had a cyborg escapee, yes, okay, and you roll each period of time I think it was Every four years A bit of Traveller. Yeah, traveller every four years. Of course it's Traveller. And I think every time I rolled I was getting like plus two strength Plus two strength Plus two strength. This guy, I time I rolled I was getting like plus two strength plus two strength plus two strength. This guy, I think, was the stats one to ten or two to twelve, like Traveller.

Jason: 6:08

I think it was one to ten, I think yeah, I think I ended up with a strength of eighteen by the end of it, which basically meant this guy could hip fire a .5 cal HMG without taking off the top of a tank. Of course, he would then turn on you in a heartbeat when the bad guys turned up that was my favourite part of the Cyborg Escapee career.

Iain: 6:28

I had a player who was my assistant on doing that and they had the final confrontation with the extraterrestrial big bad. And he's all getting ready to fly at this thing and have all these combat reactions and everything else. And the ET pulls out a little remote control and presses a button on it and he's like right, go and attack your friends yeah I can see the rest. I'm like, oh yeah, we're really great grateful he's got all this ablative armor and 18 strength and yeah, hit firing 0.5 cal, yeah, and it does say in the description that if you pick this career, your gm is going to dick you over at some point.

Iain: 7:08

It never stopped people. They'd be like it's such an easy, easy way to get plus two strength and dermal body armour.

Jason: 7:12

I picked it for that reason. You know there are reasons to pick it. I mean, I'd say it got silly because I was hoping to roll something else.

Iain: 7:21

Let's talk about character creation in Dark Conspiracy for a second, because on the yeah, on the surface of it, it looks really good. It's like the standard gdw life paths system. You know, you start off as a I think an 18 year old uh, and you can roll or you can do points allocation on your stats, and I always found that points allocation was great for people who had a particular idea of what career they wanted to go into, because all the careers had various requirements. So you would build your character to be that the entry requirement for whatever career you wanted. You just wouldn't be like a amazing version of that person, whereas if you rolled your stats it was complete chaos but you could end up with the most busted character ever. You know, I think I used the example on the, the podcast you give someone with like the physical build of a linebacker but also this genius level iq that you happen to have, but you're really not very charismatic in the slightest. The idea was you. You built this character in four years progression and you ended up having a very detailed overview of really your character's background. What did you do? In four years progression and you ended up having a very detailed overview of really your character's background. What did you do every four years? Who did you meet?

Iain: 8:29

Because dark conspiracy makes great use of contacts. It's one of the parts of the system I really like that. Every four year period you made contacts and you built up this web of people that you knew and you also got a bunch of skills and, you know, cash that you'd then use to buy rifles later on presumably, but it made, in my experience anyway, the most mismatched parties that you've ever seen, because, especially, people all went random because you'd end up with this navy seal and a paramedic and a homeless guy. It was just an odd mix. I used to just hand-wave away the whole rationale. How do you guys know? You know each other because you're the heroes right. Go. But what was your experience of it?

Jason: 9:19

So the thing is that was exactly what I was used to from GDW, right? So I'd played quite a lot of gdw stuff beforehand, mainly traveler, lots and lots and lots of traveler, and you can see exactly where their life path system came from.

Iain: 9:31

It's exactly the same at least you can't die in this one they.

Jason: 9:36

Yeah, you didn't die in the later versions of traveler, you just got wounded and mustered out with a purple heart, which is really interesting because that only made sense if you're American, because everybody else has a purple heart. So, but you know, you learn these things. So, yeah, I mean it fitted it and I wasn't used to systems where you spent points. At that time everything was wrong. D&d was wrong, travel was wrong.

Jason: 10:01

You know RuneQuest was wrong. That was. You know. There's all these games. It was all just roll the dice and you ended up with random stuff. You did. You ended up with mad parties, and the only thing that linked them all was they all bought their sunglasses from the same vendor.

Iain: 10:17

Everybody had to have a pair of Serengeti sunglasses.

Jason: 10:20

That was the other one, a pair of Serengeti sunglasses. Off you go looking that up as well.

Iain: 10:27

It was a pair of Serengeti sunglasses, so off you go looking that up as well. So it was a voyage of discovery. It was and it's. It was interesting because you had all these different careers there's like 50 plus different careers you can choose from in Dark Conspiracy. That will allow you to make various different types of characters. But when you actually really go into the system, it really seems to be suggesting that and the best way to hunt these monsters is with heavy firepower. Therefore you need to, you know, get tooled up and and go for it at the end of it. So you're almost like well, why wouldn't I make a military character?

Iain: 11:04

rather, than you know this hard-bitten private eye who's got a you know a snub rose revolver in his pocket yeah, it was.

Jason: 11:12

It was very much less kind of call of cthulhu, investigation or you know that kind of stuff and very much more kind of twilight 2000, but with aliens it's kind of another gdw game. Well done, I brought that one in, yeah. But it's actually something, that GDW game.

Iain: 11:25

Well done, I brought that one in, yeah but it's actually something that I found some of my players really liked. Was that the fact it wasn't Call of Cthulhu? I ran Call of.

Iain: 11:33

Cthulhu about the same time and some people loved Call of Cthulhu. I had certain players who hated it because they couldn't go toe to toe with the monsters, and they were the ones who were like, I don't really want to play Call of Cthulhu, can we not play something else? And Dark Conspiracy almost hit that sweet spot between people who wanted to be Mulder out of the X-Files and other people who wanted to be Mulder's friend, john Rambo, who turned up hip-firing his squad support weapon and yelling at the. There's curiously, there's no sanity mechanic.

Iain: 12:07

It's like you see these things it's like cool, let's roll for initiative, let's go, and it's it's very much. You're going to be the guy on the cover with the trench coat and the big rifle who's confronting those creatures, but in a way that's fine, because if you go into the game knowing that's what you're playing, you just embrace it. It's what. You go into the game knowing that's what you're playing, you just embrace it. It's what I said in the history podcast, that you look at everything the game's got chucked into it, like all the creatures which vary from these like lovecraftian evil things to the campy 1950s space aliens, and thematically they're all over the place, but you take the ones you want for your game and you ignore the other ones. Like you cannot conceivably use all of these creatures in your, in your world, so I bet people tried.

Iain: 12:52

I bet people have tried. Same people try to do crossovers for vampire, the masquerade and werewolf. There was one creature I really liked. It was called the pale. That was like a vampire but it fed on body heat and that's a really sinister concept. And meanwhile there's some other creatures that are basically a guy who's had a wolf's head stitched on his body and he eats people. Okay, fair enough, and it's obviously designed for those monster of the week type campaigns, whereas there's other stuff that's very conspiracy based. You know the creatures that look like us and hide amongst us. You can make a really good kind of thriller out of that. But if you want to go toe to toe with like a weird tiger, there's rules for that as well yeah, it did seem a lot more ammo tracking than library use.

Jason: 13:37

Well it's funny.

Iain: 13:39

you should say that one of the things they had for the character sheets on page 327 it's it's got 25. It's a sheet for you to photocopy and give to your players. Kids ask your parents what a photocopier is. But it's a magazine record form. It's got 25 little drawings of magazines with bullets and you write down what calibre each magazine is and you check off the bullets one by one, because this isn't one of these lovely systems that abstracts resource management. You are tracking every shot you fire, every hit your armour's taken and, in this case, obsessive detail you need to know exactly how many seconds you've gotten around so you know how many more bullets you can put in that clip and slam it back into your storm rifle before you start blazing away at the bad guys again. It kind of gloriously celebrates what it is.

Iain: 14:34

oh, there's also belt ammo record forms as well I completely forgot nine yards right yeah, the really interesting thing about the equipment is there's like 70 plus pages of gear you can buy, but they actually have charts at the end over three pages that just sum up the stats of the weapons. Like so why do we need 70 plus illustrated pages of? I know why? Because it's a gun porn game and people want to look at what variant of the m16 rifle family they happen to be firing before they buy it. But you know, it sums up all the stats over three pages. But we also have 70 pages of of gear you can buy.

Iain: 15:20

There's a whole swathe of weapons and some weapons vehicles that your players will never own, but they give you stats for it. Um, and some of the stuff. You look at it and you think there could be some real interesting scenarios like do I give my players a winnebago just to see what they do with it? Because, guess what, give my players a winnebago just to see what they do with it? Because guess what? The stats for a winnebago in this alongside a scooter and a horse. You know it's. It's that level of obsessive equipment detail that that this book celebrates and loves didn't it have like a stylistic kind of 1950s kind of slightly fallout?

Jason: 16:07

look on things like the vehicles it did so.

Iain: 16:10

Part of the background is because of the greater depression that the dark minions engineered on humanity's economies. They've kind of regressed in terms of technology because they're producing things as like easily as possible. So a lot of stuff that's manufactured is manufactured in old-fashioned ways and therefore it has this more retro aesthetic, whereas the corporate bigwigs you know driving around in ferraris and have sleek cell phones and everything else like that. Your average Joe Schmo has got a TV that your granny would have in a big wooden type cabinet and they only have a house phone and they might have some clunky looking old vehicle that they've managed to get started again. And yeah, they sort of meld that together to suggest that your average person living in the Metroplex and dark conspiracy land has got this technology that is way older than what they have. I think it was a nice way of the authors getting around that thing of we don't know what technology is going to be like in 30 years time. So we're going to say they go backwards and then just give everybody else sci-fi stuff.

Jason: 17:22

But I guess I mean, if you were a conspiratorial, mega, dark, minion, alien thing and you want to take over the world, having your enemy, having all access to nice, shiny new technology, that's a bad idea, right?

Iain: 17:35

well, exactly, yeah, and it does make sense yeah, has that in the equipment chapter as well. It hints at some of the good guys have got extraterrestrials who aren't corrupted working with them to produce technology that will help mankind and it's an excuse to put in those devices. Is it science or is it magic? And that's quite a good touch, because it shows that the Dark Minions have got people to fall back onto older tech, while at the same time there is this tacit acknowledgement that you are in the future and there are super sci-fi gadgets to be had if you want. But the most common gadget Large guns. The guns haven't regressed, the guns are very much up to date and you can buy an anti-building rifle at your local gun store because why not? Obviously the arms industry is still booming.

Jason: 18:28

Capitalism at its best there we go but it's a deliberate attempt. I mean, as you say, to cover up what technology will be in the future, but also to kind of widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. That's a bit of a bit of a theme.

Iain: 18:42

It's a massive theme in the setting and it's I say that's why I think it's kind of prophetic. It's like this whole gap between the mega rich and the normal people and even between, like, the middle classes and the working classes. It's huge and dark conspiracy, even more so than our real world, but we're gradually going that way ourselves. So it's a well done humanity. One of the things it includes at the back of the book is a character creation worksheet where you it walks you through making a character, which back in 1991 I think, was unheard of. It was like you were expected that you read the book and you swat up or you do what your gm tells you and you make your character and I thought, oh, that would be cool. And then I started looking at it and I'm like this is a lot of work for making a throwaway character for a podcast. There is, it goes over two pages for one thing where's your commitment?

Iain: 19:37

this is our first episode in like over a year, so I think your answer is there, but it's. You know there's a lot to it, it's. It's a great idea having this, this worksheet, but I was like, no, I can't be bothered making it, but that that was the sort of thing that dark conspiracy included little touches like that, that, while I had this incredibly crunchy system that came out of like its 1970s wargaming heritage, it also things like that of here's an aid to make things easier for players, you know, and although I was joking about it, the ammo tracking sheets. That's actually quite a nice little touch. It gives the players an easy way to manage a resource that is otherwise, you know, confined to you writing down your character sheets, scoring out continually how many bullets you're using to solve the problems the gm's giving you. So it had a few little innovative design leaps that other games weren't doing at the time solve the problems put in front of you with high velocity lead.

Jason: 20:37

Yeah, exactly, um, no, but you'd be right. I think it's weird because it kind of straddles that point where beforehand it was. You know, there was one way of doing gaming and it was as you say you bone up on, you read up the whole book, and then you, you have to figure it out for yourself, and then you go on to this board advanced and more developed.

Jason: 20:55

Advanced may not be the right word more developed kind of more role-play, friendly, kind of aspect and you know I you can see that I think a lot in some of the sort of early 90s games not just dark conspiracy I mean, um, a lot of them were transitioning from the, the crunchy method, to the, to the fluffy method method, and these guys kind of in the halfway house I think, yeah, it's almost that halfway house between something like early dnd, which is you roll up your stats, you pick your class, uh, you tooled up and you go and kill a whole.

Iain: 21:20

It's almost that halfway house between something like early D&D, which is you roll up your stats, you pick your class, you get tooled up and you go and kill a whole bunch of monsters and Vampire, where it's like who are you as a person?

Iain: 21:31

Yeah exactly, and Dark Conspiracy tries to do that, in that your stats are hugely important because you're going to be fighting a lot of the time. Your solution to the monsters is you find them and you gank them and you move on to the next monster, but at the same time, there's this detailed life path system that basically does answer that question of who is this person? What have they been doing?

Jason: 21:51

And where did you come from?

Iain: 21:53

Yeah, where did you come from, and you know you can make some really fun characters with it. There are some some careers. I remember my teenage self looking at it like who would want to pay a corporate welfare recipient. I'm like that should be a really cool character to make nowadays. You know, you've got you've got this whole backstory of why you've sold your vote to the government or sold your vote to the corporation so they can vote on your behalf and get themselves more power. But it really does stride.

Iain: 22:20

I think the early 90s as a whole actually that was where gaming was going through this, almost like metamorphosis. I remember a whole bunch of games that came out then that were blurring that line between early go, find things, kill them, rpgs and some of the high falutin stuff we got later on, which is no. I want to hear about your inner trauma. I'm not interested in what your strength stat is. I remember things like Cult and Nephilim and all those games. They all acted in a very similar way to this in terms of they focused more towards the character than the stats, and Dark Conspiracy was a halfway house between the pair of those.

Jason: 23:00

I think similar time frame. You're looking at something like first edition Cyberpunkpunk, maybe cyberpunk 2020, I guess, because I had a detailed life path where you could, you know you chose a background. But I remember thinking when I was playing these games, you know, number one was have a concept right, and that was that was it was new at one point having a concept with character you wanted to play um and a lot of it, as I said, was just let's roll six sets of 3D6.

Jason: 23:25

Oh look, I've got a good intelligence, I'll be the wizard. You know that kind of thing. So, whereas these days there's much more focus on thinking ahead, what do you want to play? I mean, when we got to things like Vampire, people were talking about. Talk to your storyteller about what kind of uh stories you would enjoy playing and exploring with this character and things like that.

Jason: 23:45

And you know, the old 12 year old me is sitting there going. You just kick the door in and kill the monster inside and take its stuff right. Um, you know what do I have? To contribute to the gm to help them make a story. Obviously now I am a different person and I still want to kick the door in, kill the guys and steal their stuff, but at least I'll do it as part of an overarching narrative and I'll probably, you know, whinge about it. And oh, woe is me. I had to kill all these people.

Iain: 24:16

Yeah, but as a 12-year-old, bloodthirsty you it's like, oh, it's another five orcs, whereas a 12-year-old will bloodthirst you it's like, oh, it's another five orcs.

Jason: 24:24

I don't care about your families. What do you mean? Level five I can cast a fireball Strength 18? I can hit fire a .5 cal machine gun.

Iain: 24:33

Come on, I was in a D&D campaign recently. It was a couple of years ago actually. I say recently. That's what happens when you get old folks and it was a lot of fun. But the GM was very, very trusting in terms of like, whenever people are doing XP spend in my game, I like to know what they spend XP on for the reasons you've mentioned, like how does this affect the story going forward? He was like cool, just buy what you want.

Iain: 24:58

So my warlock got I think it was level five, and I was like, oh, cool, that's a spell I want to take. So I take a specific spell. And then the next week we come across this big bad guy who starts monologuing and then he's like you know, you will never see me again, haha. And he goes to cast some spell. I'm like I cast counterspell. He's like what? I'm like I bought it last week like go get him fighter, and that kind of derailed things a little bit from from where they where they should be going. But it's something I found recently. So I've started rerunning warhammer fantasy roleplay fourth edition and one of the things fourth edition does is it has that modern sensibility of you can do point spying your character and you can choose your career and choose your race and all this stuff and really build the character you want. Or you can embrace the old way of doing it which first edition had, which is you roll for everything and if you roll for everything it gives you extra xp. Now it's kind of fair. It says you can roll for stuff if you don't like it, you can choose your thing and but you don't get any extra xp. All my players gleefully went for the random chance and these are all people who are used to playing things like vampire and you know story based games. They all gleefully went for the. I'm'm going to roll for it and we end up with this bizarre, dark, conspiracy-esque, mismatched party. There's like a cavalryman and an agitator and a grave robber and a beggar and a docker. Now figure out a reason why these guys are together. And they did and it was great and it works perfectly.

Iain: 26:41

The one character who feels the most fantasy based is somebody who's a priestess, but it has been warhammer. She's not actually very good at doing any priestly things and the light of the backfire on her face, but at the same time it felt like that old way of playing it, like I remember running warhammer fantasy role play back in the 80s. Well, that's what everyone did and you talked about it in our very first podcast that you never got to be a wizard in warhammer because you never managed to roll that elusive like whatever. It was 91 to 100 and you never got to be a wizard. These players one of them wanted to be a wizard but he was like no, I'm gonna roll randomly and see if I can become a wizard throughout the course of the game. That's my character's driving ambition. I'm like that's cool, I like that. But that's what these older games were like. It was like you have this randomness and you have to kind of embrace it.

Jason: 27:31

Yeah, I mean I'm sticking with the GDW theme, actually going to pull us back to Traveller. Well done. I remember when I first moved down to Milton Keynes and I was at this school and I joined their role playing society and the only game anybody had any experience of was D&D. And then there was this guy who was in sixth form at the time, or approaching sixth form, so he's significantly older than the rest of us volunteers to run Traveller. Now I'd played Tra play traveler back up north before I'd come down back in the 17th century or whatever I think it was, and um it's called traveler by coach

Jason: 28:11

yeah, well, yeah, yeah, traveler, it was all horse and cart. There was no jump capable. So, uh, and he was and I was like got these guys? I was like, look guys, this is a brilliant game, you need to play this, you need to play this anyway. So I got a bunch of people and we played it. We played it for a good well over a year. We had a lot of fun in it.

Jason: 28:30

Um, I have different opinions of traveler now and I'm sure we'll go into that in a bit, but it was great. You know we were. But the one thing is that I wanted very much like I wanted a wizard in one of the fantasy role play is I wanted a character with psionics. Now, if you've not played traveler psionics people with psionics are bad. Okay, they will hunt you down, they are considered a threat, yada, yada, yada. So it's all underground this thing. So every time this character would go to a new planet, first thing I'd do is say the ref right, I want to go and look for a science institute. And he made a big deal out of the fact that this character was like convinced that I had something. You know, you can feel something.

Iain: 29:08

You know you can yeah feel the force?

Jason: 29:10

and then and then eventually I find this, this science institute, and he says, okay, now you need to roll your size score and all this kind of stuff. This is after a year of, like you know me trying to do this. I got there and my size score was less than zero and the guy was like, yep, you just wanted it so much. He basically turned it around, said the guy wanted it so much he believed he was right. Right, and I'm like that was my first experience of a ref basically pretty much shafting my character, just you know, for a gig. But it you know. But it's like you said about this guy what I want to be a wizard, I want to do the random stuff and then see if I can get to make that character wizard during during its lifespan. If he does, if he does, I will hunt him down because I never managed to and I'll be so jealous.

Iain: 30:06

In fairness, it's Warhammer, so he'll get hunted down anyway by the church for being different. Because that's the lovely atmosphere of Warhammer. I did actually write them several pages on why it's really bad to be a wizard in Warhammer and he's like oh, this sounds awesome, let's do it. So we will see where that goes.

Jason: 30:23

I'm playing a game of Dark Heresy at the moment and I've taken a Psyker in that, and that's equally as fraught.

Iain: 30:31

It's funny you mention Psyonix, because one of the things that Dark Conspiracy had was empaths. That were people who used empathy to do things and, unlike like most games that you play that have some sort of humans as a psychic race. Dark air is a great example. You know you are actually evil and people are going to track you down and kill you for it. You've got warhammer you're a wizard. In there, magic is evil if you're not basically the state's property and you will be hunted down. You've got Call of Cthulhu, where magic is a necessary tool to fight against the evil of the mythos, but it will ultimately corrupt you and turn you into a bad guy. Traveller. Psyonix, they're going to be hunted down because it's you know people are bad. Dark Conspiracy cool.

Iain: 31:26

It's another set of skills you get for zapping the bad guys with brain bolts, and it's not so much that in the original, but there was a Psyonix sourcebook that came out and it was just like how can we make these characters more busty?

Iain: 31:40

And I remember there was one career class you could take that was basically rogue extraterrestrial. You were an ET who was on the run from its brethren because you hadn't been corrupted by the dark and you had a brain that was basically a howitzer and it gives you all this stuff about how terrible it is to be one of these things and you read the stats. You're like I'm going to be this guy because I don stuff about how terrible it is to be one of these things. That you read the stats you're like I'm gonna be this guy because I don't care how terrible, I'm gonna melt anything that comes toward me with my mind and there'll be nothing you can do and there's no downside to. It's not like warhammer, where you botch your role and, like demons, tear open a reality and drag you in and do unmentionables to you for eternity. It's just another skill in dark conspiracy for for monster busting do you get an ammo chart for it?

Jason: 32:26

it must be an ammo chart. Psychic blasts or something. Yeah, brain howitzer.

Iain: 32:31

I've five rounds in my brain, howitzer you get a slight headache and a bit roll for the blast radius. Yeah, there was actually something in the fact.

Jason: 32:38

Let me I've actually got the. I've got the pdf here. Let me see if I can find this there actually something in the fact.

Iain: 32:41

Let me I've actually got the PDF here let me see if I can find this. There was something in the the wonderful space travel chapter chapter. They've got a whole chapter on space travel. That's how ridiculous it is. There's a chart for launch characteristics and you can calculate how many tons of deliver and you can calculate how many tonnes of deliverable you can have when taking cargo to the moon. There's a re-entry table. There's an in-space transfer table. There's a difficulty of intercept diagram. It's got a nice little picture of a space shuttle and you roll a I think a d8 or something to determine whatever. There's a maneuvering tables and then there's like three pages of spacecraft that you're never going to use in your game and it's just absolutely obsessive in its. It's in its determination to make this simulation of a world that the ref must have a rule for everything, rather than just saying, hey, if we end up in space, just busk it, make up whatever you want you didn't busk it in the 90s that wasn't the way it was done.

Jason: 33:52

my friend, that was not the way it was done. I'm just wondering how much of that was kind of because the games that came before Dark Conspiracy from. Gdw were predominantly sci-fi games, right, so you? I mean there are a couple of exceptions, but you know you're looking at travel, one of the biggest games ever made really and that's theirs and they, you know, they went there's mega traveler, traveler 2300, all that kind of stuff.

Jason: 34:16

So they were big into spaceships for them to confine themselves to a single world. I mean they successfully did it with Twilight 2000. I don't remember any spaceship rules in. Twilight 2000,.

Iain: 34:28

thankfully, there was lots and lots of guns, tons of guns, in Twilight 2000.

Jason: 34:31

Lots and lots of guns and ways to make your vehicle run on methanol or ethanol Still production. How many litres of alcohol could you produce based on how many tons of grain or vegetation you could put in your still? Um, I, yeah, I could probably still work out how many liters of ethanol I need to get an m1 abrahams to travel 50 kilometers, you know, closer to krakow, basically, yeah that that that is a really good point.

Iain: 35:02

I think a lot of this has probably come from that heritage, like the combat rules have absolutely come from that heritage.

Iain: 35:10

There's there's tables for boat damage, aviation damage, turreted vehicle damage, standard vehicle damage, vehicle damage, which i'm'm guessing is for non-turreted non-standard vehicle yeah, there's hit locations for everything and I mean I've always found in all games I run I very rarely apart from maybe, I think, twilight 2000 back in the day.

Iain: 35:40

I very rarely have ever used vehicular combat rules because most of the time something like Dark Conspiracy. Most of my players were on foot poking around the Scooby-Doo ghost house looking for dark minions, or in the middle of a city chasing down corporate evil. I very rarely went because they had that whole outlaw setting. That was like the mad max type setting between cities and they made a great part of saying nobody really goes there. So like, okay, fine, I'm gonna keep my players in the city, then I'll miss out means me as a ref, I don't have to read my 50 pages of vehicular combat rules. But but again it just seems that they're like yeah, we need this. Someone might decide to go out into the wilderness. So we need vehicular combat rules because we might get a hold of a turreted vehicle and we need to know where it's hit when someone inevitably hits it with an RPG.

Jason: 36:37

Yeah, but you also need to know what happens to the bad guy when a 105mm armour piercing round from a M1 smacks him in the face right, and I guarantee the rule is in there somewhere. You know, this is the kind of rifts discussion with damage and mega damage.

Iain: 36:53

Oh, right, yeah.

Jason: 36:53

As soon as you get vehicle combat. I can't remember there was people in Traveller talking about you know what, if you use a ship laser, a pulse laser or a beam laser on some poor unfortunate in the starport or whatever, and it's like you just you don't get a rule for it, they die. Yeah, it's not hard, it is rocket science, but it's not.

Iain: 37:17

There was a game recently it might have been Mothership. They more or less had that exact wording of you know, if you use something that's meant for demolishing buildings or starships or vehicles on a human, they die. It doesn't matter how tough they are or how much armour they're wearing, they're vaporised. It's like you know, you fire an RPG at a person, they're going to die if it hits them because it's it's designed for taking out things considerably bigger and tougher than than human beings. But yeah, I think in the, in the 70 plus pages of weapons and other goodies in dark conspiracy, you're going to find rules.

Iain: 37:59

Um, for that. I'm just actually looking at it here. You know there's two pages of of ammunition and caliber. If you need to know exactly how many rounds of 0.475 wildly magnum rounds you can buy, there's rules for that here. Most games you play nowadays it comes to explosives. For example, there's a whole thing that basically it'll say something like for however many you know kilograms of explosive you have, it does 1d10 damage. This has got two pages of different types of plastic explosive that you can buy, listing what, who the manufacturer is, what sort of caps they've got, what tools you need for them, what, how you build a, you know a detonator it would probably be banned these days.

Iain: 38:53

Right, it's just be like you're gonna have to have some very uncomfortable conversations with with somebody when you uh got these books I did a tiktok recently of that of um, him being hauled into hr by somebody who was like okay, did you just google how much does a child skeleton weigh? It was like, well, it's for dnd, it's for research it's for research.

Jason: 39:20

I remember we're joking when we used to play vampire, the eternal struggle card game yeah, I remember talking to dan on msn messenger that shows you how long ago it was. Yeah, on msn messenger. And when we started playing it was called jihad. Right and you start. And so we were even joking that we were probably being monitored by the nsa or something because we keep referring to jihad purely because it's a vampire card game, not for any other reason.

Iain: 39:46

Right, exactly.

Jason: 39:47

You know. So yeah, but this yeah same thing. I think it had overpressure rules and things for the explosions and stuff.

Iain: 39:54

It doubtlessly did. I never actually used them. My players never actually used explosives, I never got to use them.

Jason: 40:01

No, no explosives. I never actually used them. My players never actually used explosives. Surprisingly, no explosives. I guess we probably would have tried if we could have. And the vehicles? As you said, vehicles were used to get from point A to point B, not to get involved in combat. It was motorbikes and cars just to get around, rather than humvees with the obligatory .5 cal on the top.

Iain: 40:22

You know so far. I remember the combat system. It was like incredibly convoluted but like again with most things in dark conspiracy, you kind of cut out the bits you don't need, like you know I'm not going to be using explosives or whatever you know, hand wave that away. But one thing I liked was it was one of those ones that used a very kind of fixed damage for weapons. That it wasn't like a lot of Palladium stuff where you know you roll 1d6 for damage. I'm like I'm shooting the guy with a gun that's got it's not going to do one hit point of damage, it's going to hurt, right, yeah, it's going to hurt. And this had a fixed number. It's like this hits you and it does X. I kind of like that because it's you know you're consistently hurting someone with a gun. Yeah, you can roll for randomness to hit, but if you get hit in the head with a round from a gun it should hurt and you should probably die. And Dark Conspiracy kind of, unless you're a cyborg escapee who's got like.

Jason: 41:18

Oh, he just bounces off. He just headbutt the grenade back. Yeah, exactly A bit of armour scape. He was good like oh, he just bounces off.

Iain: 41:21

He just hit the grenade back. Yeah, exactly a bit of armor plating on his skull.

Jason: 41:24

But he was. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think I, when I had a habit of drawing characters and I think when I drew him, I at one point I did draw him like arnold schwarzenegger out of terminator with a half skip missing and a red eye, just because it just felt that way to me, which was great. Um, but yeah, I mean, I mean, there's always been this thing about rolling damage and rolling hit points and rolling things like that, and the one thing I've always said is, if you're rolling hit points and you're rolling damage, that's an awful lot of variables, right, it's almost like just roll one and don't roll the other.

Jason: 41:55

That would make more sense to me. So if you're rolling damage, then make sure everybody's got. If you're rolling damage, they make sure everybody's got roughly the same out of hit points and things like that, because you can't get flesh wounds and things like that right. I remember getting really silly in twilight 2000 when it was like it wasn't even a single round you fired, it was a burst, it was always I think an m1911 was like it had.

Jason: 42:15

They said it had like three rounds. It hasn't got three rounds, it's got three attacks worth of ammunition. You know that kind of thing. So that made it even more abstract.

Iain: 42:25

It's something that Alien does quite nicely, that it abstracts ammunition and basically says that if you're in calm circumstances and firing individual shots and you're not stressed, you're going to manage your ammunition, and it doesn't really track things like how many bullets have you left in your gun.

Iain: 42:46

however, if you're stressed and you roll a little facehugger dice, it means you've run out of ammo, and if you fire, a bust too easily yeah, and if you fire a bust, you automatically get a stress dice, so there's a chance of you running out of of ammo, and it abstracts that quite nicely in a game. That's not really about standing up and fighting the monster. It's about finding a different, you know different solution. So, oh shit, my gun's empty, throw it down and run, whereas that conspiracy you're pretty much. No, I'm gonna go toe-to-toe with this thing and win. Therefore, I want to track every single bullet that I'm firing out of this, rather than like your example of you know, you have an abstract three for the gun, but it's like you fire three, three busts. I like what you say, though, about the confining this to like a single roll.

Iain: 43:37

One thing I noticed with the new version of warhammer which I like, is once you get past a lot of the crunch, it actually makes combat a single roll to hit and damage. When you do your two-hit roll, if you hit your opponent successfully, you generate a number of success levels and they're added to the damage and that's how much damage you do, and there's no need to roll again to find out which various polyhedral dice you're going to roll for damage. It's all done in one roll and that's. That's quite nice and quite an elegant way to do it, because that takes into account things like the narrow glancing blow as opposed to the. You know you, you skewer him in the throat and he and he dies, and while keeping the damage that weapons do consistent, like you know. You know you hit someone with this Vihander, it's going to do more damage than stabbing them with a butter knife.

Jason: 44:26

But it also means the more skillful the opponent, the more damage they're going to do with even a small weapon. Right exactly. You know, the Grey Mouser with his, you know, with his two daggers, and stuff will pretty much, you know, death of a thousand cuts you, you know, whereas, as pretty, much you know, death of a thousand cuts you, you know, whereas, as you said, zweihander over the head.

Jason: 44:44

You don't need to be that skillful, it says the man who's never handled a Zweihander. I just assume you don't have to be that skillful. It's big heavy, he just lumps it up.

Iain: 44:53

You hit someone with it and it's a bit like if you ever go to any British museum and they have displays of like medieval or renaissance weaponry, especially renaissance stuff. You got all this stuff from like spain and italy and it's all very ornate and jeweled and it's designed for you to wear at court and pose and show how much wealth you've got. The stuff from england and scotland is just like these now very dull lumps of metal that half of the time we're used to just bludgeon your opponent to death rather than do anything fancy with any deft or finesse. It's like no, I'm going to get him in the ground and keep beating him with a steel rod until he dies yeah, but okay, so I'm going to bring that one right back to GDW as well.

Jason: 45:37

Go on, and another game you've not mentioned which is on guard god tells all about on guard it was the first rpg, wasn't it? It was. I believe it was their first one.

Jason: 45:48

It was in the 70s, I mean it was before I started gaming, which is a long time ago, um, and I came across it when I after I moved south, so I was uh mid 80s, I guess we're talking here when I came about it and it was about for a while and the interesting thing to me was so it was based in um, basically it's like a french court was. What it was basically was about basically about your character and how you develop your uh personal kind of wealth story or influence at court. So I think I rolled up this character and I was pretty unlucky on the character generation roles. It wasn't particularly uh important family um. But then I got lucky and I got uh managed to land a uh commission in the cavalry and things like that.

Jason: 46:34

Now, all of a sudden, commissioning the cavalry oh hello, you've got some standing now. So there's all this thing and you build up the standing of the character and then it's all about going and wooing and romancing and and eligible ladies in court and then obviously you will come up against somebody who is also trying to romance the woman that you're trying to romance, in which case it's dueling time so, um, and the, and the weird thing, the difference that was to me was it was and it even mentions on the wiki, by the way, so I'm not and it was exactly how we played.

Jason: 47:08

It was like a play by mail. It wasn't played by mail, we met every week, but what we did was we'd fill in our orders, send them to the ref and then he'd tell us the next week what had happened.

Jason: 47:17

So it was kind of play by giving a piece of paper over yeah, like diplomacy yeah, like diplomacy, you plan, your, I'm going to attend this court, I'm going to try and woo this lady, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, etc. Etc. And the only problem was I basically got pretty much mortally wounded in the first uh duel that I did uh and spent the next few months recovering because, you know, in renaissance france there isn't a huge amount of magical healing available. Um, so when you do get hit and punctured by somebody's rapier repeatedly, you're on your back for a little while. So, um, but it was. But, but it was. It was weird to me because it's g. I didn't even remember it was gdw till we said we were going to look into recording this podcast.

Jason: 48:02

Um, and it was only when I was looking. I was like I played that. I didn't even remember it was GDW until we said we were going to look into recording this podcast and it was only when I was looking.

Jason: 48:12

I was like I played that I didn't realise it was GDW and it's so like not there. Yeah, it's not a Wogging right. Well, yeah, I mean the dueling rules were. The dueling rules were quite interesting because basically, you would decide whether you were attacking and which location you were trying to attack and the guy would choose to parry and would tell you which part, which part of his body he was trying to parry.

Jason: 48:31

We're talking that level of player control. Um, so that was quite weird and quite insane at the time. So you know, I was used to rolling 2d6 for traveler or d20 for my, for dnd. So to this I was like I shall wield my rapier and try and you know, hit him on the, on the cheek, you know, give him a little rakish scar or something. Meanwhile he's stabbing me repeatedly in the kidneys. You know, it's like that's not.

Iain: 48:59

I say that's dashed unsporting, yeah did you ever play a game called castle falconstein?

Jason: 49:05

no, so I know of it.

Iain: 49:07

Yeah, it's a sort of victoriana, vaguely steampunky fantasy setting and it had special dueling rules because, like, the villains of the piece were like the prussians, uh, who are very into dueling and it was a kind of card. It was used playing cards actually as a system and you drew them similar to that like where would you be going, or dictated if you were parrying or if you were thrusting or whatever it was. But they had a rule that if both players drew a certain type of card, like, your blades would clash in the middle and you'd face each other snarling and as a player you had to come up with a witty riposte before you'd both part. It was a really nice kind of capture of that Errol Flynn style dueling that you're swinging from the chandelier and all that nonsense.

Jason: 49:57

And I can't believe. You used Castle of Falkenstein, which was Talsorian games, and you didn't useenstein, which was Talsorian Talsorian games, and you didn't use Space 1889, which was GDW. You had one job, ian.

Iain: 50:07

Because I've never looked at Space 1889. I remember seeing it when it came out and the whole British Empire in space thing didn't really do it for me yeah.

Jason: 50:17

I think I've grown to like sort of the steampunk stuff a lot more now than I did then. I looked at it a bit like Falkenstein. It was like, nah, it's not for me. But back then you know I was liking Traveller and I've grown out of that.

Iain: 50:33

Well, speaking of Traveller, that's an interesting one to talk about because I remember as a kid and thinking Tra in travel was super cool, mainly because I was a massive fan of the game Elite and I'm like, oh wow, this is like Elite, the role playing game where I get my ship, do all this training and I can upgrade my ship and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Iain: 50:54

And I don't ever remember playing it for a massively extended period of time, need period of time. It was like one of the one of the guys that it wasn't me that ran, it was another guy who ran it and he was a bit on and off because they all just wanted to leave warhammer fantasy roleplay and which is fine because I loved running that. But we play travel now and again and I remember us having more fun with character creation, I think, than actually the game itself. Because once you get into the game, looking back at it as an adult, I don't think it's as much fun as Teenage Me imagined it was going to be. It's basically like I've got a mortgage on a spaceship and I have to work to pay off the space mortgage, like I don't want to do that it's a bit too close to home.

Jason: 51:44

right work to pay off the space mortgage, Like I don't want to do that it's a bit too close to home, right, it's a bit too close to reality. Let's do the corporate grind. I've had this chat with a mate of mine, jason Shrimpton, about he's massive, he loves his sci-fi games, he really does. I've massively kind of turned away from sci-fi games For better or worse.

Jason: 52:03

to me, there's always a button you end up pressing that solves the problem right now whether that, but whether that button is the jump button or whether that button is the laser cannon button it's usually teleport as well yeah, uh, and it's.

Jason: 52:13

I just, you know, to me I don't know, the problem with twice with these kind of games is and you know there's people who will be listening to this and will have a go at me, but in general you're always human, right, that's not too much of a problem, I'm okay with that. But there's no metaphysical part to it, it's just you had a career, you've got some skills, you're a good pilot or you're good, you know, and 90% of the Traveller characters are ex-military. They're all ex-navy, ex-marines. You know, not many people were ex-army, because when it's a space faring nation, you all tend to be marines or navy and things like that. And it just you know, there was no, there's no, I don't know grandiosity to it, there's no like fantasy to it that enables me to be better than your average player. And yeah, a lot of the time to me became mortgage the accounting yeah yeah, and if I didn't pay up, they took my ship away, um.

Jason: 53:07

But but to say that back in the late 80s uh, the mid to late 80s I played it almost non-stop and we had a great time.

Iain: 53:16

So you've raised an interesting point, though, about the appeal, because just thinking about it there, there are certain sci-fi games I like, but the ones that I like are all generally based on a franchise. So I like Alien. Aliens are a brilliant sci-fi RPG. The system's great. I really like the books. They're kind of beautiful to look at and we played it quite a bit a couple of years ago and everyone seemed to have a really good time. They were like wow, it's like being in aliens and it captures that spirit. The west end game, star wars rpg I used to love that. I ran a lot of that university. I played a lot of it and it was fast, it was snappy, people got it and people enjoyed it. I've even played the recent star trek game and it's really good. It's very well put together. Mechanically. It uses that 2d20 system, I think.

Iain: 54:13

It's modiphius, I think yeah, and the components are all gorgeous, but it's also it's in the Star Trek universe and I think the reason I like these is all the world building has been done for you. Like when you're running a Star Wars game, you do not have to explain the background to anyone. There's no one going to come and go. So who's Darth Vader? Everyone knows Where's Tad Wayne?

Iain: 54:34

Yeah, you give people templates of characters that are all stereotypes from Star Wars. You might be a smuggler who owns a ship, who owes a crime, lord money, or you're the wookiee co-pilot of the ship, or you know it's. You're just like cool, I'll be Han Solo. Likewise with star trek, you're the crew of a ship, boldly going where no one has gone before. And, yeah, we all know what to do with that alien. You're going to get eaten and have a good time being eaten in the process. But all the world building's done with you as traveler was. It had a backstory and a background, but it was very open and I remember there was like some supplements where it was almost like here's an for you, go and make up the rest yourself. You know those little black books you could buy.

Jason: 55:24

Yeah, little A5 black books.

Iain: 55:25

Yeah, and there's a lot of that in it that you had to come up with it. So your refs basically are like okay, you're in your ship, you go to Planet X to trade Y and something happens on the way. And that was like 99% of what we did when we played Traveller. It was like, how's our car going to be hijacked this week? Oh, look, it's those guys. And I know they released some supplements later on for some of the alien races.

Iain: 55:49

But the assumption was you're playing a human guy who, as you say, is ex-military in some description and it doesn't have that for at least with Dark Conspiracy. To bring it full circle, you were playing a human, but with all those different careers available. You had that specialization, although I brought this up in the main podcast and I'd be interested in your experience with the system. It was that sort of twilight 2000-esque system of you rolled against your skill and you had a number and you either, like you, doubled or quadrupled or halved your target number based on how difficult things were, and if you didn't have a skill, you rolled against your stat. But it was manifestly more difficult to do that. So just having one point of a skill made you much more likely to to succeed. And therefore your characters, who weren't really specialized in anything, they jumped around from career to career to get as many one points as possible in different skills, so that they were kind of equipped for any eventuality. Did you see that when you played these games?

Jason: 56:57

yeah, massively that's exactly what happened?

Jason: 56:59

um so, but I mean I remember back playing traveler and if I mean, you know, we were young so I got probably got it wrong, but there was no, there wasn't a rule for making a role when you didn't have a skill right and it was, it was like if you didn't have it, you didn't make the role. Um and god forbid, it was a vac suit or a pilot. So the other thing that Traveller lacked massively to me was any form of player development, character development. It came in a lot later and then there were rules for it. But then, if you think about it, when you only gain character skills in character generation every four years, why would you gain after? Oh, I've done one mission.

Jason: 57:47

Yeah, a fortnight of you know.

Iain: 57:49

Treating.

Jason: 57:50

Yeah, exactly. But the thing to me about the world building and travel at least the other thing I guess I don't like about sci-fi games if you go and play D&D in general, you pick up a place to base the game, whether it's Faerun or Eberron or whatever it happens to be, and that's quite well developed. You can get a lot of information. You have different countries, different languages, different races, different places. You can go. All works out for you In Traveller generally. The first book you end up getting was the Spinward Marches.

Jason: 58:20

Spinward Marches, marches, yeah sector in space right which is uh 16 subsectors, I think each subsector had, you know, you had a dedicated two pages but the math that was all based on hexes, with no third dimension and no movement.

Jason: 58:36

Yeah, never mind, astrophysicists be astrophysics, be damned. Um, but all the planets were were upps, universal planetary profiles, and it'll be their starport, their size, and it was all just numbers or letters, because it was hex. It was hexadecimal, wasn't it? So it went up to f, which was the, the best, uh, or the biggest, um. So you know, you get a starport. Is an a rated starport? Actually, that was the best one.

Jason: 58:59

F was no starport at all, um, you know, and you could tell you what fuel you could get, and then how big the planet was. I mean, how many times did somebody ever take into account gravity and travel?

Iain: 59:09

never, no, it's all earth, it's earth it's all, it's all.

Iain: 59:13

Standard one g yeah, absolutely um, it's actually something that came up in, you know, when we talked about palladium and we all had a jolly good laugh at Palladium's insanity and it's just like a mess. But one thing we did have is in Heroes, unlimited, if you generated an alien character and you generated what type of world you came from and you could have high gravity, low gravity worlds. And it then said and here's the effects of you being on earth based on where you come from which I was like, yeah, travel never does anything like that.

Iain: 59:49

It's like you get there and it's just the same as earth.

Jason: 59:52

The sky's a different color they did change it in traveler 2300. So, traveler 2300, you I don't think you picked like a graph, you picked a body type, so I think you could be, uh, endomorph, mesomorph, something else, ohmorph, uh, and like, the mesomorph was the strong, came from a high gravity planet, so they'd be strong, and the I think it was the endomorph would be the low gravity planets and they'd be, you know, willowy and frail but dexterous, that kind of stuff. So they had a nod to it in the subsequent and it changed its name, wasn't it? Because it was Traveller 2300 and then became just 2300.

Jason: 1:00:32

AD, I think it was because they actually had nothing to do with each other.

Iain: 1:00:36

Yeah, it was a weird follow-on from Twilight 2000, wasn't it?

Jason: 1:00:39

Yeah, absolutely the French were the winners or something, the french were the winner, the french and the chinese were the winners, and everybody else was like lagging behind because we we'd actually got into a proper scrap and, yeah, destroyed everything, so good job france I mean it was, yeah, well done france, yeah, uh, but that was.

Jason: 1:00:58

That was kind of. I never got to play much of that. I got to make a few characters, a bit like again and I agree with you, by the way, on, uh, traveler spent. I made so many characters in traveler. The other thing I love to do was I used to love um book five, which was high guard and that was all the navy source books and it meant you could build spaceships. I built spaceships like you would not believe, right, I had spaceships ranging from tiny little scout aircraft to massive, great big battle cruisers and things like that.

Iain: 1:01:27

And you never played in any of them.

Jason: 1:01:29

I never played in any. Well, no, I didn't really. I think there's one game I ran with a guy called Jez this is again late 80s, early 90s and he played a game I think it's his official source book called Trillion Credit Squadron right but but for some reason he let us run off with the Trillion Credit Squadron.

Jason: 1:01:49

So, um, we sold a lot of it and basically had almost a trillion credits in the bank, and I remember going places buying you know textiles, and the guy'd be like, ah yes, that's 8 000 credits a ton. Whatever it was it was actually and I was like have you got change of a mega credit?

Iain: 1:02:06

I'll have a trillion tons please I would literally go.

Jason: 1:02:09

I mean, if that had happened, I'd literally be going planet to planet breaking economies, right, because it's like, just walk into town and go, I'll have a beer, please, yes, here's one credit, here's a million credits here comes the SS inflation, ready to rule another planetary economy, wheelbarrows of credits down to the nearest.

Iain: 1:02:31

I also find with Traveller, though similar to a lot of sci-fi games. It's kind of almost the assumption of, like there's one settlement on a planet yeah there was never any concept of it being like earth, where there's multiple nations, hundreds of nations on a planet, and they all have different cultures. It's like there's a bunch of humans living here and the culture's never changed no there's a couple in spinwood marches.

Jason: 1:02:57

I can think of like two areas where the culture has changed. One was a planet called Darien. Darien, you know, I said it was a hexadecimal. Everything was zero to F, f being 15. Darien was the only planet in the Spinwood Marches that had a tech level of G. Right, that's impossible. Yeah, that's not. So it was. And they lived in like bioengineered fancy spirals, cities and all this kind of stuff. Basically, they were space elves, don't say it, but that's what they were. So they had a little bit about Darian and Darian culture, and the only other bit was over the other side, where you had the Zidani.

Jason: 1:03:36

Oh yes, and the Zidani loved Psyonix and therefore they were bad. Zidane loved Sionics and therefore they were bad, and there was a bit of a Cold War relationship between the Empire and the Imperial side and the Zidane side, the Zidane consulate, I believe. But there was a little bit of culture reference there. Obviously, you mentioned the aliens as well, so you had Varg Aslan.

Iain: 1:04:02

Yeah, aslan, with the lion guys basically big cats, big dogs.

Jason: 1:04:05

That was basically the they were the kilrathi from wing commander yeah, basically, yeah, um, but they were, you know, I don't know, they didn't get played a lot, I must admit, but so if steve is here he would react to this, because I know he.

Iain: 1:04:20

I mean I talked to this before. There was a game that came out for the 16 bit computers. It was Mega Traveller, the Zundani Conspiracy, which was. It was done in the style of Ultima, you know, the Ultima series of games, except it was Mega Traveller, and I think I spent that game most of the time making characters, because you make a party of four characters and you'd save them on a floppy disk so you could use them like again and again. The idea was you could use them between. They were going to make a whole series of these games.

Iain: 1:04:49

I don't think they ever did, but the actual game itself was kind of garbage. I don't ever remember doing much other than going on, I think, the initial planet and then getting ambushed and having my guys that I spent hours making die horribly. I never figured out what the Zandani conspiracy was. I might have to download it for an emulator and play it again and see if there's actually any depth to it. But again, my fondest memories were just making characters for it, just spending hours making these military guys and then sometimes watching them die during character creation.

Jason: 1:05:24

This is where we miss you, Steve. This is the bit that you could give us a hand here.

Iain: 1:05:28

Yeah, thanks, steve. It's true that you see, like bring this full circle back to Dark Conspiracy you keep coming back.

Iain: 1:05:37

All those things in Traveller manifest themselves in Dark Conspiracy. Like Traveller, the gear in Traveller was hugely important, like your ship, your equipment, even the stuff you're trading, all fundamental to the game. Dark Conspiracy is the same. It's like your gear is probably more important than your character. What you buy to hunt these dark minions is important, and it's it's not like call of cthulhu, where you know you have a flashlight and and some hope and you go off into to look in the darkness and see what they're. Dark conspiracy makes out that no, you have to. You have to choose a good gear, load out before you go on this investigation, because your investigation is going to end in a massive gun battle at the end, no doubt. And so it has that. It has the career paths that Traveller has. It's not quite as random. There is somewhat more control in Dark Conspiracy in that you can choose what careers you want to go into and there's nice little mechanical touches Like if you're a criminal, you potentially make a lot of of money, but you can also end up in prison and spend, like you know, some careers, some of your career terms, in prison, which is quite a nice touch. But all the rules for everything else all have their roots in those earlier games. Like it's almost page for page the same as twilight I actually looked at. I've got a PDF of the original Twilight 2000. It's really really similar in terms of I think the combat rules are a straight port, with it's pictures of people fighting Soviets. It's people fighting like Cobra people or whatever the bad guys are. That's a genuine dark race in Dark Conspiracy. The Cobra people never used them, but apparently the Cobra people never used them. But apparently the Cobra people are a big deal in Dark Conspiracy world. But yeah, it's just they've changed the artwork. It's people fighting beasties rather than fighting Spetsnaz. So it's its roots are definitely there.

Iain: 1:07:37

To see the thing that I did find, though, my players love Dark Conspiracy. They had such good fun with it and I actually enjoyed running it and I look at them, probably with my sort of slightly snobbish I play games for the story mindset, but it was actually a ton of fun. I don't think I ever had any official scenario books, I just wrote it all whole. I think I ripped off so much of the X-Files when I wrote this. It was like the X-Files book, bleaker, but I had huge fun putting these things together, arranging these kind of climatic battles where people would, you know, duke it out with the dark minions and the players all had a great time with it. There was never any. Oh yeah, this is all just a great time with it. There was never any. Oh yeah, this is all just fighting. It was like, cool, there's fighting, let's you know, let's go fight the cobra people. Did you like when you played it?

Jason: 1:08:28

did you enjoy it or yeah, absolutely it was a great game, absolutely great game, and it was. It was you've alluded to it before. It was like monster of the week, right, yeah, so you do a bit of investigation, but that investigation generally leads you to somewhere where you can have a little fight and then you pick up a clue that led you to another location where you'd have a bigger fight and eventually you end up at the big bad guys place. I mean, I didn't play a huge amount. I played much more traveler and even much more twilight 2000. I played dark conspiracy, but the the, the amount of it I played I I did have a lot of fun and it was a. Maybe it was just because it was a simpler time. Yeah, whether I'd enjoy it as much these days, I don't know, probably would enjoy a little well, I said I enjoyed putting it together.

Iain: 1:09:10

There was something the dark conspiracy had in the gm's chapter that I remember thinking this is you know, that's a really good way to make scenarios and even nowadays it's like it's kind of revolutionary and it's like when you make your npcs you can like write your npc and say this npc is doing this thing. Or you can draw two cards from a deck of cards and a number represents the the first card, the number represents the degree of that person's motivation and the suit of the second one represents what their motivation is. So if you wanted ideas for making a game, you just drew these cards and they came out and I thought that's actually a really nice touch. If you draw, the hearts are sociable, the diamonds are greedy clubs, they're violent and it's a really great way to give you, give you give yourself some inspiration. They also had a breakdown of, like, different types of npcs. You'd have major npcs and you'd have what essentially were lagoon npcs and, yeah, exactly, and it was like this is the.

Iain: 1:10:22

Here's how you start out a major npc. You know you need to know everything they can do. And, by the way, if you want a thug, here's a stock profile for somebody who breaks heads, or for a cop or for a government agent or whatever type of npc you're using, and I like that. You got a lot of that in early 90s, late 80s type RPGs. You'd have a lot of human type people, detailed, as well as just monsters, whereas a lot of games nowadays you don't get that you know you'll get. Here's what monsters can do, but you don't get. Well, what if it's not a monstrous opponent? What if it's a human opponent? But they have a different career. How do you, how do you make them? So? That was always a a nice touch they made making games or making scenarios simple and easy to to put together. And again, it's advice that I think a lot of modern games don't have. They've lots of stuff about. Here's how you make a story and but what have you stuck for ideas? Drawing cards is a brilliant way to to get that.

Jason: 1:11:23

I might steal that for the next time I write anything, because actually that could be just a random NPC. You know, you walk into the tavern and there's this really mysterious guy with his hood up, and all they want to do is talk to the goblin in the corner or whatever, and you're like ah, for God's sake.

Iain: 1:11:40

I had that in my Vampire the Masquerade campaign. There was a character I introduced as a contact, yeah, who became a major npc because people, oh, we love him, we want more of him, what really just?

Jason: 1:11:51

yeah, it happens all the time. I think it's. There was some meme I saw the other day about you know how do I make this npc really memorable? And the answer is don't. The players will pick the one they like and just attach the story to that one you know illusion of choice is just as good as actual.

Iain: 1:12:06

I ran a game of D&D for my kids during Covid and my son loves making friends with NPCs and there was a band of goblins and I had, like the last two survivors, like surrender, like please don't kill us.

Iain: 1:12:22

I think and my son was like yes, you know, these are my friends. And my daughter, who's cut from sterner cloth, was like we should just kill him. And he's like no, no, no, these are my friends. And he was like so happy he had these goblins. And they come to a bit in the dungeon where, like, the floor falls out beneath them and they'll try and decide how to get across. And and they come to a bit in the dungeon where the floor falls out beneath them and they'll try and decide how to get across. And Andrew's like oh, I wonder how deep that pit is. And Kirsten goes I've got an idea. She just boots one of the goblins down the pit and the game kind of went off the rails. At that point he's like you killed my goblin friend. She's like I don't like your goblin friends.

Iain: 1:13:02

So that was that he had two right well, yeah, the other, yeah, the other one actually proved to be beneficial in the final battle. Poor old gobby. The goblin went down very quickly, um, in the face of the evil wizards, minions and andrew got enraged and um went in there swinging his sword trying to avenge Gobby for who didn't actually do much other than die horribly. But you know, there was a proper no moment.

Jason: 1:13:31

That's a goblin's lot in D&D right.

Iain: 1:13:33

Exactly In various inventive ways.

Jason: 1:13:35

Yeah, just die horribly.

Iain: 1:13:38

I've kind of got that with my current Warhammer campaign that there's certain like key NPCs I'm putting in there and I'm like they're not going to talk to them. I'm going to invent some random fat bargemaster at the Riverside Tavern and that's going to be their best friend, because they're like, oh he looks jolly, let's go and talk to him.

Jason: 1:13:58

The DM has described him to us. He must be important. Yeah, he's, yeah, the DM has said has described him to us, he must be important. Yeah, it's like. No, it's colour.

Iain: 1:14:05

Yeah, I just said he was a bit fat you know, going back to that, that character motivation generation works well. It's what I liked about the contact system in Dark Conspiracy. You know you get contacts of certain kinds every four years in your career and as a GM that was kind of your blessing because they used the contacts as there was a mechanical aspect to it, that you had general contacts and major contacts and general contacts are, you know, you know people in the media or in law enforcement or whatever, and major contacts were, you know, a named individual and the way I used to always play it was everything was general until, like, I pulled one out the hat and I was like, hey, jason, you know, mark, your journalist friend comes to you. You remember Mark, from eight years ago when you were working the graveyard shift as a cop and he would come to you and that was brilliant as a ref for being able to say and here's your adventure, hook, mark, your trusted friend comes to you and says, can you go and investigate the thing? And you're like it's coming from Mark, it must be good, let's go, whereas just having you whole cloth, having to invent that.

Iain: 1:15:14

Well, you're all sitting around watching the tv and there's a thing that suggests people have been disappearing and you all decide to go and investigate it. That's not as compelling as a person is asking you to do it. You have a link to them and it's in your backstory and that's what one way the life path stuff worked really well. You had this network of of contacts and they did it with the generic contacts as well, as if you wanted to find out a piece of information relating to these large areas. You pulled the number of contacts people had and effectively used it as a skill and you rolled it and if you got, you know less than the number, yeah, you find that information. But then I think I think then again, working from memory, I think the rule was the gm then took one point of your collective skill and made that a major contact. You know this person comes to you and says here's the thing, and that was.

Jason: 1:16:03

That was a very nice way of working it it's interesting because, again going back to the fact, this was an early 90s kind of transformative, so, um, that whole context idea was a relative new thing around that time, so again cyberpunk did it. Shadow run did it? You know they had. You know the whole idea of having a network. And one of the things again I guess I didn't like about traveler is and you never had any of that and even if you did, it takes a week to get from one planet right.

Jason: 1:16:30

You've got to go via 10 different planets to get there. You're not getting to talk to those contacts.

Iain: 1:16:35

Yeah, you're not on the radio talking to them because sublight signals.

Jason: 1:16:40

Exactly. Yeah, so you know, the fastest way to get an interplanetary message was to send it as a letter in a jump ship. Yeah, so you know, you get scout ships that just carry the mail, which is, you know, it's very kind of like old wild west frontier that you'd have the mailman riding from village to village to kind of do it, but, um, so I think it lost a lot of that. I think in sci-fi and cyberpunk games there were, there was a lot of focus on who you knew as well as what you knew. Um, and, as you say, great boon for dm for a horror game.

Iain: 1:17:11

It works really well because if you think of a lot of horror films or literature, that's how a lot of the investigation starts. A contact comes to someone and says, hey, this thing looks suspicious, somebody should have a look at it.

Jason: 1:17:26

Main characters and or your or your better, your friend in the in journalism hasn't come back from that scoop.

Iain: 1:17:32

He was invested yeah, exactly, you know, and suddenly you're motivated to do it. It's not just, oh, I guess we're doing it because we're the main characters. It's. We're doing it because there's either, you know, we're emotionally invested, or it's a friend in need, or or something it's a bit, a bit better than walking into the local tavern and saying I'll have a packet christian and four rumors.

Iain: 1:17:51

Please bark, yeah you know rolling this table yeah, it's something that I see with a lot of, even with modern games, especially investigative games. So there's a really good system called gumshoe, and have you ever, have you ever seen the gumshoe? I've heard of it, yeah it works on the premise that if you're doing a mystery players, the main characters should never fail to get the main clues. So, like you go to the crime scene, you will find the next clue. That takes you to the next thing.

Jason: 1:18:25

Otherwise you run out of game.

Iain: 1:18:27

Yeah, when you make a perception roll you're not trying to find the main clue. The GM will give that to you. It may take longer or shorter depending on you know how you make the role, but the success you get on the perception roll is the additional stuff you get. So you know. To use a horror game example, you know you might find out that. You know this person was killed but there's a clue leading to building x. What you might find if you be most successful is oh, maybe he was killed by a vampire. So you get tooled up and prepared for fighting a vampire.

Iain: 1:18:55

And there's a lot of modern games like some of the Call of Cthulhu adventures. It's like go to this location and if you make a spot hidden role, you find blah, blah, blah. Well, what if they don't? How are you going to continue your game if they don't find that?

Iain: 1:19:10

And Dark Conspir conspiracy kind of has a nod to that in the gm section of you know you want to keep the story going, so don't hide the main clues.

Iain: 1:19:19

You know, make them go through a bit of effort to find them, but give them the clue eventually so that they then go to the next location or go to the next person or find the next monster or you know whatever it is they have to do, but your job as a GM is to make sure that they're moving in the right direction. And yes, they can go off in tangents, because players do, and that's part of the fun of RPGs is that phrase of what do you do next? You can do literally anything, but you need to make sure that you are aware enough of the plot that you can not railroad them, but you get them to where they need to go to, and I think a lot of games miss out on that. They rely too much on the mechanical aspect and for a game as mechanical as dark conspiracy, it's nice that they had that nod of yeah, you need to keep the keep the people going yeah, absolutely, I've got a big b in my bonnet about if you hide something important behind a dice roll.

Jason: 1:20:14

Yeah, um, you know, it's cat. It guarantee you know, I guarantee you, at some point everybody will fail. Yeah, you know. And then what do you do? You need a plan b, and what I see an awful lot of refs do is just giving you the information anyway. Well, I'm just going to give the information anyway. Why are you making anybody roll? I like the idea very much, like the idea that make the roll. You're going to get the information but, as you said, like with the vampire example, you get a little bit extra, something that gives you a little bit of a hint, gives you a bit more detail, and if or maybe the opposite you fail, what? Why? I wanted the threshold? So I'll give you something misleading. Yeah, you know, you do roll rubbish, but actually you know I'm going to give you something misleading. And then you can.

Iain: 1:20:53

You can deal with the consequences well, I got my warhammer game the other night. They're investigating this scene and there's a thing I want them to find and this one character is like, right, I'm going to go and root around and do, xyz, I want to make a perception check to see what I get. And she makes it and she fails it and there's a bunch of things you can find. There's one thing is the thing that I want them to find. She finds the thing. The other things doesn't get them because they're tangential, they're nice little bonuses, but you don't get them because you didn't. You didn't find them.

Iain: 1:21:23

But you do find the main thing and usually at that point people are so focused on oh, we found something, that they forget to even like get someone else to then go and make a roll again. Like cool, we find a clue what we're going to do next. And yeah, you're absolutely right, hiding stuff behind the dice roll is just bad games design. Because what are you going to? Are you going to progress your story? If your story is, imagine, like you know, hercule poirot turns up at the mansion and doesn't find the letter saying oh, by the way, it was the butler that did it and he's just got a body and he has no forensics, because it's the 1800s or early 1900s or whenever, and so he's just like well, I guess I can't find it Sorry.

Jason: 1:22:04

Was it you? Was it you, was it you? The only thing I would say is there's an opposite kind of argument as well. So the similar thing to me is when you make all the players in a D&D party roll stealth, right, I guarantee one of them will fail, guarantee it.

Iain: 1:22:20

Usually it's the rogue and the paladin that roll a natural 20 and ghost the way through the bloody thing.

Jason: 1:22:27

But you know, sometimes it's, you know, I know, I understand making a roll. There's this theory, I guess, that making a role builds tension, and it does, but should never be tension to the detriment of what you're trying to achieve in the game. So I would say, here you go. Psa public service announcement to you. Gms out there, don't just make them role stealth because you can. Um, you know, sometimes let them get a bit further.

Iain: 1:22:52

I worked on the principle that you make a roll when the consequences matter. Yeah, so you're under stress. Yeah, exactly, you're under stress. You've been chased, you're, you're up against time, something like you know you're picking the lock. The rogue would normally be able to pick the lock. However, the city guard, they're coming around the corner. Okay, you've got three turns to do this go, and that adds tension. People like oh my god, the clock's ticking, we need to get this done whereas you know you're in the dead of night, there's no one else around. You know that the clues on the other side. Yeah, let the rogue do his thing. Pick the log.

Iain: 1:23:26

You know, some people like making rolls, but I think you make the role when it matters. I played in a D&D game once. When what's that skill in D&D? They've got it in 5th edition. It's almost like the lie detector skill, insight, insight oh god, the amount of times people are like. I want to make an insight check.

Jason: 1:23:43

You're getting into another bugbear of mine now.

Iain: 1:23:45

Go on.

Jason: 1:23:46

Players shouldn't tell you when they're making roles, but the players shouldn't tell you when they're making rolls.

Iain: 1:23:50

You should ask the player to make a roll. Me and one of my friends have a joke about one of the people we used to play with. We'd message each other during the game, going five bucks. Says he sees insight check. Because you're like insight check, insight check. Like you don't have psychic powers, you can't read her aura and find out what she's thinking. You know the ref will tell you when you make it. It's similar like warhammer has an intuition check.

Iain: 1:24:13

I will tell players when to make that, usually if you've got the talent sixth sense. So like, yeah, your spidey sense is tingling, something's not right here. Don't tell them what for, because if they go, I'm making an intuition check on that guy and I go, yeah, something's not wrong, he's a villain, let's, you know, deal with him. But yeah, I think you're right. The ref should be the one who says here's where you make a skill check. I mean, I don't mind when players do something like say there's a chasm, and someone like could I use acrobatics to get across there? Sure, cool, go for it. But I'll be the one who says you know when you roll the dice to make that thing happen. But yeah, dice rolls should only happen really when something's on. It's a bit like you know. I think it was the D&D 4th edition had Taking 20.

Jason: 1:25:00

Yeah, Take 10, Take 20.

Iain: 1:25:02

Yeah, where you've got all the time in the world. Yeah, you pass. You know great, you know you're not going to fail your climbing. Check, if you're climbing a cliff and there's conditions are perfect, you've got all the gear. Yeah, you're going to get to the top, it's just going to take some time, whereas we've been chased by orcs and there's a gale blowing and you've got no ropes and you're trying to scale a cliff. Cool, let's make a roll and, by the way, it's difficult yeah, it's, it's, I don't know.

Jason: 1:25:27

I mean it sounds a bit harsh. Part of the fun is rolling dice. It is.

Iain: 1:25:33

I just see it so often it's like, oh, perception, check why I don't know, about you, but I don't walk into a room and go perception check see, that's why you're going to be the victim of ambush one of these days.

Iain: 1:25:49

Jack will leap off his cattery take your face off take my jugular to bring that back to gdw and dark conspiracy, though you mentioned before with traveler and the lack of character progression, that one of the reasons players like making skill checks is they like to see their characters get better. They like to be better at skill checks, and Dark Conspiracy did allow that you could get experience and improve your character and be better at hip-firing your .50 cal building shredder rifle, but that's why people like seeing that. It's a bit like in video games. People like to see their characters do more spectacular things than they did previously, and that's, I think, why character sheets exist. Is you want to have that thing of? My character is good at this, your character is good at that, and we're going to rapidly get better at doing it as we go along, unless you're playing Traveller.

Jason: 1:26:51

Unless you're playing Traveller. We've got that. And the other thing as well is I mean, I don't know, there's a core set of skills. It's one of the reasons that I love it we could have a whole discourse on this at some point where I like games that have classes and I'm not a big fan of games that don't have classes. So, for example, let's take vampire. We're both intimately familiar with vampire, the masquerade, right.

Jason: 1:27:13

You go to any game tabletop or larp and I guarantee you most of the people in the room will have the same spread of skills. All right, they'll have. They'll have a combat skill. It could be melee, it could be rage, but they will have one. They will have a speaky skill, so they'll have that one as well. They'll have stealth and they'll have perception right, I guarantee they will all have it right. Whereas in a class-based skill, the rogue does stealth, right, the paladin does not. You know it's not up for debate, those things don't tend to. And yeah, I know you can build a paladin that could do stealth, but in, yeah, there are ways. And you know, if you've got druid, pass without trace, fantastic, saw it, but you know it's. I, like everybody in the pie or everybody around your table should have a moment in the sun. Yeah, one of the things I feel about non-class based games, which includes traveler, because it didn't have for classes and careers to start.

Jason: 1:28:10

Conspiracy didn't have for classes and careers includes dark conspiracy didn't have classes, it had careers. You generally end up with a similar level of skill going around. You might if you're lucky you might get one that's different. So you will have as you said, like a paramedic might have medicine, yeah, first aid or whatever they called it in the game.

Iain: 1:28:26

So yeah, yeah, but when I ran vampire recently, I the rule because there used to be this sort of very loosey-goosey stuff around like the core disciplines, that, and for those of you unfamiliar with Vampire, that's the Vampire powers and like anyone could buy them.

Iain: 1:28:41

And I was like no, unless you have something as a clan discipline, unless you're drinking the blood of somebody who has that, you can't learn the other powers. You have to be. You know, if you don't know how to use dominate, you can't use it. You have to be instructed in its use by someone else. And one of the reasons is it gives everyone their moment in the sun. You want to do something. You know you want to cover up this masquerade beach. Go and let the Ventrue shine. He's going to go and wipe people's minds and charm them into believing that there was nothing to see here. There's a big sabbat threat coming. Let the brugia or the gangrel have their day by flying in there with a celerity and their potence and their wolf claws. You know, shredding, shredding people up. If there's some mystical stuff that happens, go on. The tremere can go and do their thing, but it lets. It has that differentiation that you get to your example, like with with D&D, and it's why with Dark Conspiracy I kind of preferred getting people like the group together to make characters and say, okay, let's make characters together and have an idea of almost like the party concept, so that you don't do that thing of jotting around every single different career so you can all get a firearm skill and a melee skill and a healing skill and a charming skill and a stealth skill and a perception based skill.

Iain: 1:30:01

Have someone be the journalist who's good at snooping stuff out. Have someone be the doctor who can heal people. Have someone be the mercenary who is really good with weapons. Have someone be the pilot who can, like, fly the plane to get you there. But don't all take every single skill at one so that you can and also have these very unlikely career journeys of. Well, I, you know, started off at law school but then I became a truck driver and then I was a paramedic and then I happened to fly a cargo jet and, oh god really I'll take whatever I need to get the skills I want.

Jason: 1:30:30

Thank you very much.

Iain: 1:30:31

Yeah, yeah, it was a bit like the old, like first edition warhammer fantasy role play and I think we talked about this in our very first podcast. But you had career entrances and exits, yeah, and most people would go in this mad dash to go through this like very quick hop through different careers to try and get to assassin that had like the most skills and the most advances in the game. Didn't matter, yeah, what you wanted to be assassin was the most useful if you were an adventurer, because it had all the advances that you you wanted to get to be a good character, whereas the new one I kind of like and it encourages you to stay in your existing career and go through the different levels of it, because all the careers had advantages, whereas the old ones, some of them, were just terrible. Like you know, you're a labourer. You get one skill and maybe some other ones If you're lucky.

Jason: 1:31:26

Stable hand yeah exactly.

Iain: 1:31:29

It's like what are you? I'm a mercenary, I can fight with all these different weapons. Oh great, I'm a shepherd, I can play the pan pipes. Good on you the thing.

Jason: 1:31:37

The thing is, I'm sure there's a netflix special out there about a shepherd who kills like numerous nazis in world war ii it's probably an anime yeah, yeah, probably, probably.

Iain: 1:31:46

Or it'll be fin Finnish, it'll probably be Finnish Anyway we have talked for about an hour and a half about the wonderful world of GDW. To close out, what are your in Jason's, final analysis of GDW, because sadly they are now defunct? What would you say is their biggest contribution to gaming, because they've been around really since the beginning. What would you say is their contribution that has left a either a blot or a shining beacon on the gaming landscape. In fact, let's do two, let's do a blot and a shining beacon. What's their biggest blot in the gaming landscape and the biggest shining beacon of hope?

Jason: 1:32:27

oh, my god. Uh, I wish you'd given me some prep time on this. Would have been nice for a heads up for that thing. Okay, so what do I?

Iain: 1:32:34

don't break the illusion for our listeners that this isn't a finely crafted, well-researched, not just shooting from the hip podcast so I mean, I think, I think they were a product of their time.

Jason: 1:32:44

So I think the the thing that that I like is, you know, they developed some quite solid concepts and moved stuff in forward, okay, so, yeah, you're right, they started with traveler and I can bitch about it, all I like and there was no character development, yada, yada, yada but they learned from it and they got better at it. Uh, and therefore, you know that, as you said, even things that I didn't know, like this card system for pulling uh, npc, um, motivations and things, I think that's brilliant. Why is that not more of a thing for more, more games, so that that sounds fantastic. So, um, plot, I don't think they left a plot. I mean, you know that they were, in my mind, a generally good, good kind of contributor to the role-playing space. They were big, heavily focused on crunch right, he said that himself. So that's their wargaming background, I guess. Um, I don't know. I like them.

Iain: 1:33:40

I wish they were still about yeah, I mean I enjoyed them too. I think I would agree with you that they came up with some innovations, like basically saying you don't need class I know you like classes, but they're saying there's a different way you can play. You can play and dark conspiracy is a brilliant example of let's make a detailed background for your character, so you're not just playing this wizard who springs out. In a way, you're playing a guy who was 18 years old and went to university and learned to be a lawyer but then decided his real passion was in driving trucks up and down the country and he met a whole load of interesting people and learned about the dark conspiracy that way. That's a really modern way of thinking about games and characters. That wasn't necessarily around at the time or wasn't necessarily common at the time.

Iain: 1:34:34

The only blot I'd say is it's not again a blot as such, but the excessive crunch that I get. Some people like detailed gaming systems that let you simulate skirmishes, but Dark Conspiracy is, and GDW as a whole is obsessive in the level of crunch. I keep coming back to the space travel rules. You do not need space travel rules in dark conspiracy. There is zero need for them, but they're like they might do it. Therefore, we need rules for it. You know, dark conspiracy that that's gdw's philosophy. If there's a chance, the players do it. We need to have a perfect way to simulate this in our world. So let's write eight pages on space, space travel, in a book about investigating scooby-doo mysteries so your blot is the fact they give you too many rules yes, I like games to be fast moving and I don't want 25 magazine slots to keep track of on my character sheet.

Iain: 1:35:37

I'm fine with abstracting that sort of stuff and being like Star Wars and saying they don't run out of ammunition. Have you ever seen them run out of ammo in Star Wars? No, you're good, let them run out of ammunition when it's dramatically appropriate. But you know Dark Conspiracy, you need to keep track of individual bullets fired or individual rounds fired out of your belt ammunition. So yeah, that's my take Again. I think GDW were fun. I did have fun with their games. Dark Conspiracy I have very, very fond memories of and yeah, looking back at it now, I've got my hoity toity 30 years later. Hat on going. Wow, this is very much early 90s games design, but in the early 90s I loved it.

Jason: 1:36:17

So there, was that as well, and so yeah, or late 80s for Traveller or actually early 80s for Traveller very early 80s for Traveller.

Iain: 1:36:27

Yes, so tip of the hat to GDW, and it's a shame that they're not still in fact. It would be interesting to see what they were like if they were still around, if they changed anything or if they were just like nope, we're still going to have rules for space travel and tracking individual bullet usage in our detailed combat simulation.

Jason: 1:36:47

You have to move with the times right.

Iain: 1:36:50

Well, thank you for that, jason Pleasure, as always. I'm sure we'll find another exciting subject of another roundtable about soon, and maybe Steve won't slack off this time with illness and we can talk to him.

Jason: 1:37:03

Maybe more than one episode a year, right.

Iain: 1:37:06

Yeah, well, we've already had this. It'll be our third episode this year, so that's well done probably actually more than the entire 2024 output. So well done. Alright, mate, I will speak to you again soon cheers bye, bye, and that was our Dark Conspiracy Roundtable.

Iain: 1:37:45

We hope you enjoyed it. We are a semi-regular or frequently irregular podcast on the history of RPGs. We have a back catalogue now of 60 plus episodes, including interviews, roundtables, history episodes, product reviews and actual plays. So if you enjoyed this episode and you're a new listener, please feel free to delve into all of that. If you want to get in touch with us, you can do so via email on rolltosavepod at gmailcom, or you can find us on instagram and leave us a comment there. We'd be really interested to know if you've played dark conspiracy or any other gdw games and what your experience of those were. Did you enjoy them? Did you find them too crunchy? Were they a product of the time or are they something that you fondly go back to nowadays? We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please leave us five stars on our review site. It really helps with visibility and serves as that little dopamine hit to encourage us to do more episodes. Anyway, thank you for listening and tune in again soon.