CCC2025.25: Valpuri Savolainen

Game: Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (Palladium Books, 1983)

My Experience: This is another game where my play experience is mostly limited to Little Sister’s games. She put together a campaign in our early college years that fell apart almost as soon as it started because everyone involved was having more fun with her Shadowrun campaign. A few years later, she ran a one-on-one for me. We actually got a fair ways into that one, as she had a nicely detailed setting based on the old Legend of the Red Dragon BBS door game (showing our ages here). My character was painfully unoriginal, a port of my former primary character on a MUD which, itself, was based heavily on Warhammer Fantasy. But we were entertained. I own the 1998 third printing of the Palladium Fantasy rulebook, but it’s a Palladium product, so I suspect very little changed between 1983 and 1998…

Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms

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CCC2025.24: Hackbird

Game: Eclipse Phase (second edition – Catalyst Game Labs, 2009)

My Experience: Little Sister once ran a one-on-one game for me, which lasted about three sessions before our respective schedules both imploded. I keep thinking I want to do something in the setting, but it suffers from the same issue as Blue Planet – it’s so expansive that I struggle nailing down a focused campaign concept. Although I own the 2009 first edition book (and what’s what Little Sister and I used), I used the second edition rules for this writeup. Couple of reasons: I hadn’t built a second edition character yet and I wanted to see what it’s like, and, from appearances, the process takes about a third as long. Seriously, original-flavor Eclipse Phase character creation is about as crunchy as first-edition Shadowrun.

Hackbird (Sequence C15.5359j), Dataspace Predator

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CCC2025.23: Jarlath Shonida

Game: Exalted (first edition – White Wolf, 2001)

My Experience: I’ll admit that despite being in the White Wolf freelancer community while Exalted was in development, I kind of slept on it for a long time. I wasn’t really into fantasy gaming at the time, and the other influences cited for it weren’t particularly ones I’d liked on first exposure, either. I picked up a copy to support the folks I knew who worked on it, and then left it on my shelf for several years. Since then, I’ve run a couple of one-shots, but I still struggle to get my head around it. It is epic and majestic and exceptionally cool, but still not entirely congruent with me as a player or GM.

Jarlath Shonida, He to Whom Borders Are as the Morning Fog

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CCC2025.22: Corey Marsh

Game: Conspiracy X (New Millennium Entertainment, 1996)

My Experience: Conspiracy X was one of the forerunners of what now feels like a late ’90s market saturation of X-Files-inspired TTRPGs. I grabbed it soon after it released, ran a campaign that lasted two to three sessions, and never did anything with it again. I own the later edition that runs on Eden Studios’ Unisystem engine, but, as is generally the case with this challenge, I’m using the original here.

Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset

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CCC2025.21: Ekundayo Temitope

Game: Trinity (White Wolf, 1998)

My Experience: I was an intern at the Wolf while Trinity – then titled Aeon – was in early development. I wasn’t in that compartment, but I knew it was coming, and I was hungry for it. Halloween weekend of ’98, I was in Dayton at a Halloween gathering with some friends I’d made on a chat server. We went out to hit a local game store and I saw the book sitting there. That was pretty much the end of the weekend for me. I feel in love instantly. Almost three decades of gaming later, Trinity remains the setting in which I’d most want to be a PC. My only opportunity to play it was a short-lived play-by-email game in which the developer, Andrew Bates, was also playing incognito. I’ve run it a few times, including one complete playthrough of the original published adventure trilogy. I was lucky enough to provide input on several supplements and freelance (not my best work, sadly) on the Player’s Guide right as the line’s first incarnation was wrapping up. When Onyx Path rebooted the line a few years ago, I scored several chunks of the core book and a couple of supplements (which I think are among my best work).

Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer

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CCC2025.20: Bánoy

Game: Aberrant (White Wolf Publishing, 1999)

My Experience: I was never a huge superhero aficionado, so I kinda slept on writing opportunities for Aberrant (and, if memory serves, I was busy with Vampire work at the time anyway). However, the WWGS freelance community at the time was smaller than it is today and somewhat well-coordinated, so I did get to do some playtest work, and ran a couple of pre-release demo games at the infamous Origins ’99.

Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer

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CCC2025.19: Ainsley McTavish

Game: Adventure! (White Wolf Publishing, 2001)

My Experience: Somewhere out there, there’s an Origins Award for this book with my name on it. Admittedly, my name’s on the thing only because of the way the Origins Award process sorted the author names, but there it is. So at least I got that going for me.

Ainsley McTavish, Heiress of Secrets

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CCC2025.18: Vera Rodriquez

Game: Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. (version 2.01 – R. Talsorian Games, 1993)

My Experience: Not as much as I’d like. I played in a couple of sessions of stuff Tracker7 ran in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I’ve tried once or twice to organize a play-by-post but never put in the sustained effort to get anything off the ground.

Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster

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CCC2025.17: Mercedes Cantrell

Game: Dark Conspiracy (GDW, 1991)

My Experience: Dark Conspiracy shares a game engine with several other GDW products, most notably the second edition of Twilight: 2000. Because of my T2k appreciation, I was primed for anything else in that neighborhood, so when DC released in ’91, I snapped it up pretty much immediately. I then flailed about for something to do with it. I wound up running a couple of unsuccessful sessions of it for my Boy Scout troop/gaming group, then shelved it for thirty-plus years. I’ve never gotten to play it – and, truth be told, I’ve never entirely gotten my head around precisely what sort of adventuring the designers intended PCs to accomplish within it.

Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic

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CCC2025.16: Cutter

Game: Blue Planet (Biohazard Games/Fantasy Flight Games, 2000)

My Experience: I’ve adored Blue Planet since I first picked it up in the early 2000s; I may have mentioned it in that light a while ago. For all my adoration of the setting, I’m ashamed to say I’ve done very little with it. I did get into one convention game at Archon, but I was with a bunch of Zombie Squad dudes who were so hung on logistics that we never got out of the planning phase of the op (and for me, that’s saying something). I’ve run one or two one-shots over the years. My biggest problem with the setting is that it’s so wide open that I don’t want to close off possibilities by nailing down a campaign focus.

Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert

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