Ask Me Anything: Ciriaco

1. Favorite GURPS setting?
2. Usually play or run?
3. What do you miss about MUSHes, and what games were you playing on MUSHes?
4. Did you have Mekton Roadstriker, and can we play?!

What's a book you read ages ago and still think about sometimes (whether that's good or bad)?

1. How would you rank those game phases from best to worst?
2. What was your favorite character?
3. What's your biggest regret in an rpg?

Since you've been in the hobby since 1980, and have been through all the it phases, what are your thoughts on "the future of ttrpg is digital"?

1. This is a tough one. I think GURPS Bio-Tech is underappreciated, and I've always thought it would be cool to play a 'cyberpunk' style of game in a setting focused on the future of genetics and biotechnology. GURPS Swashbucklers is another one I'd love to play, either on the pirate or the musketeer side. I've probably had the most fun with GURPS Autoduel. My high school group had a long-running campaign in which we were part of an organization of vehicle-driving crime fighters based loosely on the old M.A.S.K. cartoon. It was absurd and also a blast.

2. In olden times, it was about an even mixture of the two. I mostly played D&D, both played and GMed GURPS, mostly GMed Cyberpunk, both played and GMed World of Darkness games. I'm a player these days; my attempts at PbP GMing haven't been very successful, but I'd like to give it another try.

3. For me, MUSHing had a unique combination of immediacy and depth that I haven't found elsewhere. I'm a better writer than I am an actor, so I find it easier to describe scenes and get into character when I'm writing. Play-by-post has similar depth for me, but moves slowly and can seem disjointed or disconnected; live play is immediate and moves quickly but lacks depth. Of course, being both deep and immediate meant that MUSHing took a tremendous amount of time. I don't really have the free time for it these days, alas.

I started on PernMUSH, which was systemless, then got involved in a number of World of Darkness MUSHes. (Trivia: I was one of the founders and the original senior wizard on GarouMUSH.) Aether and Aether II (original, high-fantasy-themed games) were probably my favorites.

4. I did have, and still have Roadstriker II! One of my high school friends was going to run a game called 'Glory Road,' in which we would be explorers traveling in our transforming vehicle-mechs on an interdimensional highway from reality to reality. Still sad that it never got off the ground.

The book that stays with me is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's probably the least sentimental book I've ever read, but its bleak and unflinching vision is strangely delightful. I can't think of another book that presents two broadly opposed ways of living and organizing society, and then proceeds to show you in painful detail why both of them are terrible.

Closer to gaming, I still have fond memories of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. They were younger me's Tolkien. Not sure why there was never (to my knowledge) an RPG based on this world of Welsh myth.

1. Tough question! They all had their charms. I will say that during my GURPS / Cyberpunk period, my gaming group had the combination of youthful enthusiasm, free time, and RPG experience that I think of as the 'sweet spot' for the hobby. When we played Dungeons and Dragons, we had no idea what we were doing and our stories were kind of stupid. My World of Darkness period overlapped significantly with MUSHing, so I did less traditional gaming during those years. I think I'm doing some of my best writing these days, in my OSR phase. With age comes experience and all of that. My limiting factors now are time and energy, old man that I am.

2. I don't have a favorite character, as I tend not to have single favorites of anything. Some fond memories: Walter Etheridge and his absurdly fast, indestructible but almost unarmed sports car in GURPS Autoduel (he had a katana because, you know, it was the 80s); Hauptmann Lawrence Ashley of the Lyran Commonwealth, who led a Battlemech company on an incursion into Kurita space at the outset of the Fourth Succession War (Mechwarrior); T'lor, rider of brown Brolth, who became Weyrleader of Ista Weyr and whose dragon was, as far as I know, the only brown ever to win a senior gold flight on PernMUSH (he kind of cheated); Amipal Chandrima and Zeyd, two very different Varati warriors on Aether and Aether II, who were both, I thought, well-written and through whom I met the person who remains my closest friend. I'm also fond of Odur the Coward, a berserker dwarf in a recently wrapped Shadow of the Demon Lord game that Harrigan ran. Odur was by no means a heroic character and he came to a bad end, but I thought his story had a satisfying arc, which is rare for me in play-by-post games.

3. Right now, my biggest regret is that I've never been able to get a PbP game off the ground as a GM. I've tried three times, and all three have fizzled out fairly quickly. I don't know whether those failures were due to bad luck, bad GMing on my part, the special challenges of this medium, or a combination of the three.

If that phrase is meant to indicate things like virtual tabletops, visual elements, digital maps and props and the like, then I would disagree. I think maps and miniatures have always been more about bookkeeping and mood setting; the core of the tabletop RPG experience, even for 'old-school' players, is in the conversation and imaginations of the players. MMOs and computer RPGs are already leveraging technology to provide much richer audiovisual experiences than anything that's been done in the TTRPG space.

If the phrase is meant to indicate tools that facilitate remote tabletop play, like Discord, video chat and play-by-post sites like Gamers Plane, then I would say, 'I hope so!' Due to life circumstances, it's been a long time since I've been part of a local gaming group, and I suspect that a lot of people are in the same boat. This sort of 'digital space' gives me an avenue for RP that I wouldn't otherwise have. Indeed, without it, I would probably have been out of the hobby by now.

Me too! My in person weekly meets more on discord than in person these days, and I feel like nothing is really lost other than the snacks.

Cool, and thanks for answering!

Try again at running a game, Ciriaco! What’s top of mind for you to run?

Edit: is it ROADSTRIKERS?!

It is not Roadstrikers. :)

I'm still looking for a mecha RPG that combines mechanical simplicity with satisfying mecha combat. It's a tall order, I know. The Mecha Hack comes pretty close.

I'd kind of like to run a short dungeon crawl using one of the Swords and Wizardry rulesets. Maybe White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game. It's a little perverse to use a retroclone when there are so many excellent neo-OSR games like Into the Odd and Knave, but the old games still hold a certain charm for me.

We didn't get too terribly far with The Mecha Hack back in the day, but I stand by that one. Great game. The new version of Tiny Mecha & Monsters should be coming any month now, as well. And I know what you mean -- retroclones generally don't do much for me, but Swords & Wizardry, and specifically WBFMAG have a bit of a hold on me still. I run WBFMAG still as a 'home' game, for my son and his girlfriend, and they dig it.

I'll keep my eyes peeled for when you run something.

Brave New World is a great book!

Novels aside, the reference to poetry is a rare one. Have you ever tried incorporating poetry into gaming? Is there anything you've read (poetry) that you recommend to fans of tabletop roleplaying games?

Interesting question! I know of a (very) few RPGs based on poetry. There's Warrior Poet, which involves the composition of haiku, and there are Allison Arth's solo games: Gentleman Bandit, Dark Highway, Moonblind and Gentleman Pirate.

I've never played an RPG that uses poetry as a major element, although all of the above items have been on my wishlist at one time or another. I'm running a one-on-one game of the horror RPG D13 for my close friend, set in late Victorian London, and the current scene takes place at a literary salon. I've written some intentionally bad poetry that one of the NPCs will recite!

As to poetry for fans of tabletop RPGs, you may or may not know that Neil Gaiman has written a few poems. They're in his anthologies of short stories. Also, for weird fiction fans, Clark Ashton Smith was an accomplished poet, and H.P. Lovecraft... wasn't, really, but he wrote quite a few poems. There are anthologies of the poems of both authors in print-- The Last Oblivion for Clark Ashton Smith, and The Ancient Track for Lovecraft.

Have you always lived in Chicago and what's a cool thing about Chicago that most people don't realize?
What kind of car do you drive?
What kind of music do you enjoy?

I've lived all over the place, but I've been back in Chicago since 2008. One interesting fact: almost all of Chcago's streets are laid out running geographically north-south and east-west. During the spring and fall equinoxes, the sun rises and sets directly down the east-west streets. Very pretty when framed by the skyscrapers, a pain when driving. Known as 'Chicagohenge.'

I work downtown, where parking every day would be prohibitively expensive. I have a Prius, but for the most part I ride the commuter train (the El). I'm typing from it right now, in fact.

My music tastes are fickle and eclectic. I've listened to everything from .Mozart to Band-Maid. You could make a fair argument that I have no taste at all!