My Life As A Gamer: "Forgotten Ruin" Returns

The gang running the Old School D&D channel on Twitch and YouTube went on hiatus for a while and their streaming schedule got revised. Forgotten Ruin's tabletop RPG tie-in campaign is now streaming live on Wednesday afternoons, so this is the first new episode after the hiatus. Alas, no Nick Cole antics this time around, but he and Frank Mentzer should return some time down the road.

Now imagine if this campaign were wholly compliant with the Standard, because this campaign premise--put, in gaming terms, as the blending of D&D and Twilight 2000 or The Morrow Project--is one that would really come to life if it were done so. Palladium's RIFTS accepts this as viable right out of the gate, and those games can get this weird with ease. It wouldn't be hard to find other proper RPGs to do this with, and you can just role your own if you like (because that's how Palladium came to be).

Skim the campaign's previous sessions, and you'll see that a lot of Standard-compliant elements are present- including drop-in/drop-out play by others that are not regulars.

Yes, something things are missing, or rather are not put on screen or otherwise mentioned such as Patron-level actions and actors, but one could easily see that they can easily be addressed off-screen and only brought up if relevant to what's going on at the (virtual) table then and there. There isn't much in the way of Henchmen, but hirelings--NPCs under their command--are present from time to time as are NPC allies, and as this is the aforementioned blend of sources some shit is made up in terms of rules.

This is, at its heart, a wargame campaign. It's just run by guys that actually got shot at, so it's going to reflect their experience. What we see here is a subset of the overall participants in the campaign pursuing subgoals, and the emergent nature of it all is fantastic to behold.

The books are pretty good reads too.