Despite the way the last semester had ended and the continued frustrations of Joel's game, there were reasons for hope when I returned to U of I for my next semester. Primarily, those reasons were Luke and Drew. Two of my closer gamer buddies from Loyola had shown up in Champaign. Luke and Drew were inseparable in high school the way that I had once been with Ryan, and they were both pretty decent gamers. Drew, though, tried to do what the rest of us thought was impossible...he tried to be in a frat and be a gamer simultaneously. It was an interesting contradiction, but eventually he slid away from his gamer roots into marriage and career, neither of which need be fatal to being a gamer, but do require you to make extra effort to stay in the game, which he no longer is. Outside of the occasional video game, I doubt Drew's gamed in years.
But that was much later. For now, I had found two new players for the game. And, as it turned out, Paul had found another. Clay was from southern Illinois and a computer guy that Paul had met at a pledge drive for the radio station, if I recall my origin stories correctly. There was some weird coincidence about Clay knowing Luke's sister as well, so he ended up knowing more than one member of the group.
With a new and surprisingly stable crew in place, we resumed our regular Friday night games at W.I.L.L. That was Paul's D&D game, and rather than take control of existing characters the way I had, the guys rolled up their new characters and on we went. There were some good stories from those games, like Clay's character's habit of trying out magic items before we properly identified them, leading him to being victimized by both a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity and a Necklace of Strangulation with a couple of weeks of each other. Or the time that Paul had the main villain show up on the back of a giant red dragon with the intention of torching the town then flying away...except that since Paul also used a particularly vicious critical hit chart from Dragon Magazine, when I scored a critical from our party's magic carpet I managed to chop his wing off and send them both plummeting to their doom in the middle of town. Or...well, you get the idea. Like pretty much every D&D game I'd ever played to that point, there wasn't so much a story to Paul's game as a series of unrelated events. There were fun times, filled with derring-do and laughter, but rarely did they have any greater meaning besides providing us more loot and experience points to spend.
That changed as we started up a game sans Randy. That way, we reasoned, we could play anytime rather than just Friday nights. So Luke started GMing a game of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Werewolf, like Vampire before it, took a classic monster and made it the player character rather than the opposition. What's more, each game in the series tried to address, or at least make you think about, some facet of the human condition. In Vampire, for instance you're faced with the gradual degradation of your soul as you commit crimes to sustain yourself. Mage covers the conflict between the traditional world of magic and legend and the world of science and technology. An so on and so forth. Werewolf casts your moon influenced shapeshifters in the role of eco-terrorists using whatever means you can to protect the last places of pure nature from the ever encroaching reach of civilization.
Well, that was the idea, anyway. In truth, we didn't much care for that concept, and neither did Luke. Instead we became a group of treasure hunters, tasked with hunting down a bunch of sacred artifacts from around the world before a mixed team of wizards, ninjas, vampires, a mad scientist, and evil werewolves got to them. It was very modern day Indiana Jones....with werewolves. And that was great. Our characters were a diverse lot, ranging from my private detective gun wielding werewolf to the more traditional bruiser melee types that Clay and Drew ran, to Paul's spirit caller. What's more, Luke introduced a number of NPCs to the group who each had distinctive personalities and were interesting to interact with, but weren't powerful enough to do more than back us up in fights. That would be a pattern in Luke's games, the large cast but carefully balanced so that the players are the ones who make the decisions and are the decisive participants in combat, barring the occasional non-combat designed player character.
The thing that made the Werewolf game special was that rather than just stopping like most games do, Luke's game ended like a good novel or movie might. We raced around the world collected around half of the artifacts, raced to Shangri-la, and fought an epic battle there against the opposing team with casualties on both sides that ended in a hard fought victory. And then we stopped, and our characters went their separate ways. Oh, we did try and pick the game up a while later, but just like Crusade after Babylon 5, the game petered out. We'd told the story, and that was enough.
Perhaps that's why I look back on that one game as one of the high points of my gaming career. We told a story from beginning, to middle, to end, and told it well. And that's something to be proud of, even if it was only told among ourselves in cramped dorm rooms and student lounges.
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