What I Did on my Holidays

As mentioned, I took a break from the Star Guard to give myself time to get ahead of plotting the Krai war which is supposed to dominate the story for the foreseeable future.

I told the players I needed about a month, and I would fill the month with a different game. I wanted something that wouldn't take much mental effort or preparation time from me, so that I could concentrate on plotting for the Star Guard. So I picked a setting I had already put a lot of thought into: Earth, in the year 2075, the dystopian future of the post-Strikeforce era. I had the setting worked out in reasonable detail, I had the flow of the campaign worked out, and I had picked a rules system to use. Literally, I had been thinking about this since almost the start of the "historical" game sequences, over ten years ago. It should have run itself.

You know there's going to be a "but"...

But this was the rules system I wanted to use:

 

Car Wars, published by Steve Jackson Games in the early 1980s (and still available in an updated edition).

The problem here is that it's not a role-playing game. It's a table-top wargame in which players move armed cars around a map and try to blow each other up. There are very rudimentary "character generation" rules to let you personalise your car's driver, but it's very much an afterthought.

Did I let this obstacle stop me? (Obviously not, or I wouldn't be bothering to write this essay now.)

My theory of RPGs is that the rules are the least important part of them. If you're creating a character, the personality you put into the character is the most important--actually, the only important--thing, and that comes entirely, 100%, from the mind of the player, not from a set of rules.

And I have the best players in the world. I was confident that with a starting point as ridiculous as "you're the driver of a car and your job is to shoot other cars", I would get a set of diverse, interesting, and fully-formed characters. And I did. 

I'll go into that later. First, here's the world of 2075. As with all games, it starts with the background and a reason for the characters to engage with it:

• The world of 2025
• The Winkernickle Foundation
• Swan Technology Strategies
• Rookie Night in Pittsburgh
• Road Quad Cargo Carrier
• Truck Stops