Shortly after I dropped out of Asbury College, I moved in with my extremely anxious, perpetually worried Granny Mabel. She tended to dote on me and bail me out of any bad situation I got into, which contributed to my laziness and lack of responsibility in later years. In any case, it was a depressing time, with me fearing that I would never accomplish anything with my life. (I was not yet convinced; that came later.) I stayed at my Grandmother’s from 1996 to 1998.
The highlight of those years was 1997. I was playing pen-and-paper RPGs all the time with Bill and Ned. The first system we tried was MechWarrior, and we never actually got Bill’s character into a ‘Mech. He was stranded on the mercenary planet Outreach and turned down his first contract offer since he found it disadvantageous. The plot kinda derailed after that since I was counting on him joining the small mercenary band and had prepared pages and pages of material for his BattleMech combats. I remember I created a girlfriend NPC for him, and he became quite attached to her. Draconis Combine assassins killed her and after that he always hated the “Kuritans.”
By far the system we played most was Call of Cthulhu. Due to my lack of creativity I primarily ran published scenarios. I would elaborate extensively on the situations and NPCs, however, so a session written to take a night or two ended up taking days or even weeks to play through. I remember one of the first scenarios I ran was called “Love’s Lonely Children” and it was the first one in the book The Stars Are Right! It featured Y’golonac as the antagonist and a lot of slimy pornographers, hookers, drug addicts and underground punk musicians in a seedy urban environment. It concluded with the protagonist (Bill’s Investigator) going insane from witnessing Y’golonac smashing cars in the middle of traffic.
Another notable adventure was about an Industrial Rock musician named Brian Lochnar. He was setting up obelisks in order to summon the abominable Hastur, He Who Is Not To Be Named. At first, the Investigators (Bill and Ned) tried to travel the country to destroy the obelisks, but Lochnar’s lackeys kept rebuilding them. (There were many encounters with byakhee, some of which ended badly.) Eventually I guided them to a confrontation at one of Lochnar’s concerts where the investigator was to ring something called the Chime of Tzechapl to destroy Lochnar’s physical form. The Investigator chosen for this was Ned, who was on the receiving end of a counterspell which melted his face. Lochnar was destroyed, but ever after Ned’s character would have insane episodes where he would chant over his chime incomprehensibly.
Another role-playing system we played at that time was GURPS. Our most memorable sessions involved each player creating a 100-point combat character and having it out in a giant melee. One of the most effective characters was Bill’s martial artist — we used the Martial Arts Handbook and it was quite broken. He developed a character who had a jump kick that did 3D6 damage — as much as a .357 Magnum. He could basically shatter a limb 100% of the time with his first attack, and his opponent never had a chance after that. Darron, who sometimes played with us, was very competitive and became quite frustrated at that. I remember one time he got so angry that he hit me in the face. Plus, when Big D played any sort of RPG with us, he tended not to take it seriously and disrupt the sessions, taking wild crazy actions that endangered the whole group.
Later I moved from Cthulhu to D&D 3rd Edition, explaining that for investigative games like Cthulhu the ending seemed predetermined, with me guiding the investigators toward a fated conclusion, no matter the steps taken to get there. I felt that D&D was a more open-ended game for the Game Master, since a lot of it focused on combat and in those scenarios the outcome was variable, and since I could play as the enemies it was more of a game to me instead of a railroading dialogue.
The RPG sessions were very memorable and we played them for hours for days on end, but 1997 was also a great year for videogames. Fallout and Final Fantasy VII came out that year, as did Diablo. Bill shared my extreme interest in the first two games, and we actually played a Completionist game of FFVII together (collect all Ultimate Weapons, Materia, and Limit Breaks, level to 99 and max stats; we used Kao Megura’s thorough GameFAQ to find everything). It took many hours and I think I even acted out the lines of dialogue to the best of my ability. Sephiroth was particularly fun to read. Fallout and Diablo really couldn’t be shared because they were on PC, but me and Bill talked about the former a lot and compared characters. I remember my favorite gun was a .223 pistol modeled after Decker’s gun in Blade Runner. Someone online speculated that Diablo “was all about the acoustic guitar” and I kinda
think that’s correct… the music was the best feature.
Bill has frequently said that 1997 was one of the best times of his life. Kind of sad I guess. It was tied with his involvement with his first girlfriend though, 1999 or thereabouts. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite time of life since I first began to experience depression and defeatism, but it’s certainly up there.