Towards the end of the century, I found the station analysis mailing
list and got reasonably involved in the whole SLA industries thing, eventually
being invited to join a new game that was going to be running in Peterborough. At the time I was a single parent in the
outskirts of London, but these were still the times when I had the spare time
and space in which to organise the things I wanted to do around the things that
I had to do, and so I accepted and we started playing.
First long term campaign that I’d been in as a player, I’d played a
number of things before that had had reasonable sized story arcs, and I’d run
games that lasted years and years myself, but only as the GM, never as the
player.
Nemesis was an Ebon, wielding a customised double ended vibroblade and
with a rank ten DNA tattoo all over him as one of his purchased advantages…
Darth Dodd Anyone?
Never intended as subtle, he came into his own when presented with the
group that became the operative squad known as Storm. There were six of us on that day when we
started, Hybrid, Andi, Patch, Faith, Sanction, and Nemesis, simple mission, go
pick up the newly constructed vevaphon (Faith) and then go deal with some pigs
down in the sewers, what’s the worst that could happen…?
Well, if the truth be known, the worst that could happen (to the GM
anyway) was the team of players that had been assembled that day…
We went to look for hints and leads into what had been going on in the
sewers, as everything was pointing to something a little more involved than
just pigs in sewers. We did a raid on a
gang property, mowed through them like a thresher, and then came to the last
one there, now you can use your imagination as to what had gone before when I
say that my character had one of the gangers arms in his hand and was waving it
in front of the other ganger in the manner of a Jedi hand wave to convince him
to talk, when this failed, we resorted to simpler tactics…
Nemesis: Look, if you won’t tell us, I’m going to have to get creative…
Ganger: I’ll tell you everything, please don’t hurt me…
Nemesis: If you lie to me, I’ll feed you to the Vevaphon…
Faith (Without missing a beat): Please Lie…
So, mangled heaps of gangers later, the fiancée of the GM whose house
we’d invaded called us all through for dinner, up like a shot we were, leaving
the GM sat in the remains of his encounter, with nothing to do but put his head
in his hands and weep quietly…
This was how it went for some time, the problem for that GM was that in
the group that he was working with, there were (and this was the players, not
their characters), one Entrepreneur (Running three businesses at the time), One
Gigolo (more than a few hundred confirmed hits), One Arms Dealer (for our
government, not theirs), One confirmed Genius (Made Baltar look both stupid and sensitive...), One molecular Biologist (Who considered that Ebola could be improved
significantly given a little time and a lot of glass), and One that could only
be considered as almost human.
Between all of us, we could make any game a
good one just by working between ourselves, so while we were on the case, the
opposition would go down, but for the most part, we’d get involved in our own
interactions, and this was what made Nemesis the best character I’ve ever
played, not the character himself or the things he got up to, but the people he
got up to them with.
Over the course of the next several years, we eventually broke the
game, it was only a matter of time, no GM could fairly be expected to keep up
with players like us, but we went all around mort, we went to Orienta, we went
into space, we took every colour on the BPN board, and we nearly killed each
other more than once, we fought, we won, we lost, and through all that time,
the players were a family…
It’s been more than ten years since that game was going, I still stay
in touch with all the players who are still available through non-diplomatic
channels, and while I recognise that if we all got back together now, the game
would not be the same, and so I think back to the times when there were six of
us who defied gods and monsters every time we were together, never turning
back, never giving in, and I smile…
Because those times don’t come often in games, and you should cherish
the times when they do…
