Books 31-32

[subplotkudzu]

31) Time Tunnel: A Murray Lienster effort from 1964 and another book from the house clean-out that provided End if Eternity. This was disappointing, and the fact that it didn't drag me in meant it took pretty much all week to get through. However, while the characters were cardboard and the writing was repetitive, some ideas in it are possibly stealable for a game. Plus, I don't think it's a classic that the players might have read, so I expect I can do so with impunity.

32) GURPS Time Travel: You can probably guess why this one came off the shelf. Several of the ideas in this are really good, but even the genius of John M Ford cannot overcome the written stylings of Steve Jackson, which I have previously described as a high school science teacher trying desperately to sound "Hip". If I do run a Time Travel game I suspect I'll be using some fusion of the ideas in this book, some from Contiuum and plot elements from Time Tunnel. Here's a question to the players who might be reading - would you prefer an episodic series similar to the Star Trek game where this month's time crisis/puzzle is wrapped up by the end of each game, or a longer, 6 session multi-layered time puzzle mystery?

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Time Tunnel isn't very good, and is uncharacteristic of Leinster's other books. Murray Leinster (real name William F. Jenkins) wrote other much better SF short stories & novels. He essentially created the "Sideways in Time" genre with a short of that same name. He also wrote the first SF stories about First Contact scenarios ("First Contact", naturally), and even those that hinted at something similar to the Internet ("A Logic Named Joe".)

I've also enjoyed re-reading many of his SF novels, including his Med Ship series of books, The Pirates of Zan, The Wailing Asteroid, etc. Baen Books recently reprinted a number of his story collections and may be a source for some free download edition.

Don't let your impressions about Murray be marred by this book, Bri.

::B::

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

I wonder about the provenance of GURPS TIME TRAVEL's style, esp since it has emerged that JMF's con persona was a hip science teacher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JohnMFord_as_DrMike_ddb176.jpg).

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Alas, it is also the style of nearly every other GURPS book. I first made the realization reading GURPS 4E, for example, but it's much stronger in the books that SJ had a direct hand in.

[thismustbetheplace-rjs.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I would vote for the episodic structure, mainly for practical reasons. When you're playing once a month, and when various Life Events often mean that it takes eight months to get six sessions in, sprawling mystery plots seem an invitation to a lot of blank looks from the players. Of course, I am no good at mysteries under the best of circumstances....

[(Anonymous)]

There's two "styles" of time travel story. One in which the past (or the future) is a "place of adventure" -- you "go there" have adventures and then move on. It plays to the tourism aspect of gaming and can be great fun, but the players and characters do get rather callous sometimes about the extras inhabiting the backlot of history.

The second is to foreground the time travel itself, creating plots which depend on past-future entanglement, paradoxes, etc. The characters and NPCs get much more involved -- but the Gamemaster risks having his skull explode from trying to keep it all straight.

I've run a type 1, but haven't really dared to try type 2.

Cambias

[thismustbetheplace-rjs.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

"It plays to the tourism aspect of gaming and can be great fun, but the players and characters do get rather callous sometimes about the extras inhabiting the backlot of history."

I actually found that to be a significant problem in the far-future Revolution arc we played -- it's the future, none of this might ever happen -> not real.