You know, I probably need to pick up the pace here, lest I leave the impression that the only good gaming one gets is in college. So let's see if I can wrap Champaign up.
Once Luke's Werewolf game wrapped up, there were really two major games and a number of minor games that occupied the remainder of my college career. The first major one was a Marvel Superheroes game that Luke started running to replace the Werewolf game. Like the Werewolf game, it had a number of supporting characters for us to interact with. Unlike the Werewolf game, though, this was because Luke had been working on his own superhero universe since grade school.
In Luke's creation, there's a large, multi-national superhero team called the Shock Troops who fill the Avengers/Justice League role as the premiere superheroes on earth. Our characters started off as a local team in Chicago (naturally) and were sort of the New Warriors to the Shock Troops' Avengers. That's where we started, anyway. Over time, we became allies of the Shock Troops, with a couple of characters moving up to the big leagues and joining the Troops themselves. The thing that was neat about the Shock Troops world was that it was so broad, and Luke had been working on it for so long, that it could accommodate all sorts of characters. So besides our original team, we had a team made entirely of demi-humans (animal people), another of college age superheroes just getting started, and even our own super-villain team that engineered a break-out from super-jail.
The stories in the Marvel game were less a single long story like the Werewolf game had been, but rather, much like the comic books upon which they were based, about the characters themselves. So they had their origin issues, their team-ups, the big adventures, and quieter moments. Along the way we saved the world a few times, punched out Hitler, and generally had a good time with it.
That wasn't the only thing we played, though. As I said, there were several smaller games that got some love during this era. For instance, I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 game that had the gang as troubleshooters for mega-corp Biotechnica, right up until there was a hostile takeover which, as one might expect from Cyberpunk, involved a lot of murder and mayhem. I also engaged in an ultimately futile attempt to get an Amber Diceless Roleplaying game going. That one failed because you need everyone to be at least minimally familiar with the background material, and not enough of us had read the books. And since Roger Zelazny's death and the gradual disappearance of his works from bookstore shelves, it may well be that I'll never reach the critical mass to get a real Amber game going, which is kind of sad.
While I was failing to run Amber, we somehow encountered a guy named Mike and his wife, the latter of whom was busy working on her dissertation, leaving the former with time for plenty of gaming. Alas, once she finished up and got her Masters they moved to New York or thereabouts, so I've long since lost touch with him, but even so, Mike joined the group for a couple of years before vanishing into the wilds out East. During that time, he introduced us to some of the more esoteric games, like Ars Magica and Kult. Kult only went a session, as I recall...Clay scared Mike off with his gruesome character background, I suspect...but the Ars Magica game went on for quite awhile, even if it ended with our covenant failing miserably.
But Mike wasn't just a role-player. He was also a wargamer, which was a rare and dying breed even then and is all but extinct nowadays. Mike managed to get a bunch of us to play hexmap and cardboard counter games like Starfire and World in Flames. The latter of which included one of my favorite gaming moments where Clay and I as France and the United Kingdom respectively managed to not only stall the German advance into France, but even managed to get a successful amphibious landing into Hamburg and force an Axis surrender in 1940! That was pretty damn good. granted when we played the re-match we had a stalemate by '42, but what can you do? We still had our shining moment of glory.
And of course, for the last couple of years there was my D&D game. This game provided the foundation for the D&D games I've run ever since, as it was the first time I ever got serious about world building. It started with the Empire of Gallador, and spread out from there. I tried to think of reasons why certain things would be where, and even got Clay to draw me a map to fill in. It worked out pretty well, and when I felt I was ready, I started a campaign there. The gang managed to go from levels 1 to 9 or so, and along the way we got most of a decent story in. It wasn't my best DMing, that was yet to come, but it was still an important step forward in my gaming development.
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