CoffeeBear.net

Forgotten Games

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

In my gam­ing group¹, we fin­ished up the cur­rent sto­ry­line in a pre­vi­ous ses­sion. This week we were dis­cussing what we might want to do next as our cur­rent GM needs a break. One thing that always comes up dur­ing this sort of dis­cus­sion is a game run back in every­body else’s col­lege days based on GURPS Cas­tle Falken­stein. As usual when this was men­tioned, the GM who ran this (and still a player in our group) begged off as being too busy². How­ever this time the dis­cus­sion refreshed a vague mem­ory of a gam­ing system/supplement that I’d bought once upon a time.

Given that I tend to horde col­lect books, I went search­ing through my gam­ing library try­ing to find that old system/supplement. I had one major prob­lem with my search… I could not recall what the game was called. So I just searched through all the gam­ing mate­ri­als I had (and knew where they were). Unfor­tu­nately, my search was unsuc­cess­ful. Once I gave up the ini­tial search, I decided to go online and see if I could fig­ure out any more infor­ma­tion on it.

Again I ran into dif­fi­culty in search­ing as I only vaguely recalled when I bought it (the 90’s), what it was about (faeries in Eng­land when gaslight was com­mon, say Vic­to­rian Eng­land) and that I was pretty sure it was pub­lished by TSR. I was think­ing the title was some­thing like Faerie by Gaslight (or maybe by Fog­light) but I couldn’t be sure. Lastly, I recalled that it wasn’t a D&D set­ting but based on another sys­tem TSR put out.

After about half an hour of search­ing I uncov­ered the name of that other sys­tem, Amaz­ing Engine. A few sec­onds later and I knew the game set­ting was called For Faerie, Queen and Coun­try. The worst part of revis­it­ing these old mem­o­ries? As soon as I found a pic­ture of the book for the game set­ting I real­ized I’d bought it, read it (cover to cover more than once) and never, ever once played the damn thing. And now I can­not even find my old copy, even though it’s highly likely in the house some­where. *sigh* So faith­ful reader, are there any old RPGs that once cap­tured your imag­i­na­tion but which you never got a chance to play?

¹ Yes, I am geek. If you’re only just now real­iz­ing this; then this is either the first time you’ve read my blog or you’re seri­ously delu­sional.
² This is not a com­plaint. You are too busy.

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