Sunday 10 August 2014

RPG A Day 10: Favourite Tie-In Novel / Game Fiction

#‎RPGaDAY‬

Day 10 Question – Favourite Tie-In Novel / Game Fiction

Five examples - none actually novels. (I really should get around to reading The Subtle Knife.)

The Beast Within for Vampire: The Masquerade was a short story collection rather than a novel, so it was essentially a bunch of liftable characters and adventure hooks. Not all of them worked for me, but enough did that I happily reread it last year when preparing a Requiem game set in the same city.

Do purely in-character artefacts like The Book Of Nod count?

Both examples that are directly useful in-game.

But for fun?

Showing obvious bias, George Alec Effinger writing for Trinity and Warren Ellis and Greg Stolze for Adventure!

Game Fiction for a game I hardly ever play: the Dungeons & Dragons comics by Leverage creator John Rogers.

A novel I considered but disqualified, Drachenfels by Kim Newman as Jack Yeovil, because it charges headlong away from the Warhammer universe with nary a backward glance.

And finally a real oddball choice. GDW’s Challenge magazine had a regular feature, the Traveller News Service, a page or two of news stories in the Traveller universe - adventure hooks, and fallout from published adventures and the Traveller metaplot. As someone not into the game, it still made for interesting reading.

And then in the issue previewing Traveller: The New Era, in which a sentient computer virus destroys intergalactic civilisation and decades pass before recovery begins, this happened.



And the next issue’s TNS page was all like that. Even the page listing in the contents was. And the issue after was a test signal interrupting it, before normal service was restored, decades of game time later to support the New Era setting.

I love that kind of thing, when the story intrudes on the format, like when an episode of a TV show has a modified credits sequence.

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