This guest post by Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM) addresses a topic I’ve never seen covered anywhere else: what to do when your system of choice is no longer supported by the publisher.
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If you’ve been gaming long enough (about a month, usually) you know what it is like to hear that your favorite system will no longer be published and/or supported. No new supplements, no new expansion sets, and the biggest problem of all being no new published adventures. For all intents and purposes your system is dead to the world.
Yet there are a few cosmic truths that gamers instinctively understand better than most people. Number one is the principle that you can never have enough dice, but right up there is the concept of the undead entity. For us gamers no system ever truly dies. Just look at how many people still play D&D first edition. One of my favorite systems is Top Secret /S.I., which was laid to rest in 1992, and just this October I ran the system for a group of new players. Game systems are like cockroaches — they are hard to kill.
So grab your GM’s shovel and prepare to break the sacred ground that a publisher dared to stack six feet of upon your beloved game system! Here are some tips to help you resurrect that bad boy for as long as you want to play it.
Get a Copy of Everything that was Published for Your Game
The first step is to get a good copy of any works that the publisher did release, if you do not already have them to begin with. Call your local gaming shops, search the Internet for online distributors, and ask your friends if you can have their copies.
Unless you are a collector you should not worry about the condition of the copy as long as it is usable. There is nothing wrong with a tattered reference book with a torn cover if you can still read the pages inside.
Also search for web pages, magazine articles, convention handouts and promotional materials that were written for the system. Don’t discard anything that was published for the system in any form. If you can acquire it through reasonable means then get it.
The reason you want to gather any and all published works for the system is twofold. The first reason is obviously to have the resources that have already been published available for use in your games. The second reason is not so obvious, but it is actually more important — having lots of existing material makes it easier to create new materials with.
Once the publisher is out of the picture you and your fellow fans are on your own to keep the game system alive, so make it a little easier for yourself by gathering all of the existing reference materials that you can.
Find or Start a Fan Site
Chances are you are not the only person who wants to keep the system alive. Luckily the Internet makes it easy for you to reach like-minded people and share materials with them. Contact any webmaster who already has a site devoted to your system and ask them what you can do to help them keep the system going. If there are no webrings of sites for your recently deceased system, then suggest or start one.
My personal observation is that publishers usually discontinue a system for one of two reasons. The first is that the product line wasn’t profitable. The other is that the publisher is going out of business. Neither of these reasons means that the system was not good, but instead the publisher’s business plan just didn’t deliver for that particular product line. As a result many good systems are kept alive purely by the efforts of the fans that use those systems.
Thus a lot of old game systems have lots of fan sites devoted to them. The sooner that you can start and/or join such an organization the more likely you are to reap the benefits of such a group. Remember though that you must be an active member of the community. Supply any and all of your original works (be wary of copyright issues) to the community and you will help to inspire others to do the same.
Run Con Events with the System
Conventions are a great place to run one-shot adventures for any system, including those that are no longer supported. Run your favorite system at a convention and you might be surprised by how many players you will draw to your event. Make sure to playtest your event or use a proven module. The last thing you want to do is have someone leave the convention saying “No wonder that system went under!” and telling others that it is a bad system.
Instead do everything you can to run a good con event. Even a supported system run poorly can be a lousy con event, but your mission is to have a player leave the table wishing that the system was still being published. At the end of the event tell players where they can go to get copies of the system. Have a handout ready with those fan sites listed as mentioned earlier.
Note: And as long as you are at the convention, make sure to check out the vendor booths for more published materials for your system. You never know what gems you might uncover for your deceased system at a convention!
Work On a Conversion System
The worst part of a system being retired by a publisher is the lack of adventure modules and new sourcebooks. Yet with a little effort you can use other systems’ adventures and convert them to your favorite system. Don’t try to be exact in your conversions. Instead just focus on finding adventures for supported and retired systems that are in the same genre of game as your favorite system.
Know what is considered an “average” human being for both game systems. Then figure out what the extremes are for each system in terms of abilities and attributes. For instance, the retired system might consider someone who can lift 500 lbs. to be at the pinnacle of human strength. Yet the system that you are converting from might allow for a person to lift up to 800 lbs.
Do not bother trying to figure out the math on how to convert the two strength stats between systems in such a situation. Just design a really strong NPC for the retired system and adjust the rest of the adventure as needed. Develop this skill and before long you will be able to take adventures from any system and run them with the game of your choice.
Keep Writing
The best thing that you can do is to continue to write new materials for the retired system, and to share those works whenever possible. Write adventures for the system and play them with your group, then revise those adventures and post them to a fan site. Create stats for new types of equipment, some of which might not have existed when the system was first published. New character classes and monsters are also good items to share with your fellow fans.
So it isn’t necessary to say goodbye to your favorite system just because the publisher axed it. You and your fellow system fans can keep it going with a little organization and effort. In the end the number one rule for keeping a system alive is simple — just keep playing it.
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Thanks for the tips, Patrick!
Do you have a favorite RPG that isn’t in print anymore? What do you do to keep the game alive — or do you just work with what you have, and leave it at that?
Fabulous article! Patrick is my kind of fan. When I ran my one 3.0 campaign, I bootstrapped that group to AD&D and Classic Traveller. It wasn’t bait-and-switch, just a sincere offer “Okay, you guys have played that and you now know you can trust me as a GM. Howabout we now try this?”
Well written. I’m too much a system junkie to actually take your advice, but I admire your passion. And, of course, your familiarity with the system leaves you time to write good adventures… and the conversion thing goes both ways.
There are a couple of fun old systems that you just sometimes feel like ressurecting for a nostalgia game.
My friends always rave about playing their old west end star wars games, and hoard the books for one of those just in case nights.
for me, it depends on whether i really liked the system itself, or the setting. if i liked the system, it usually ends up permanently enshrined on my bookshelf. except for living steel, which disappeared somewhere along the line and i still haven’t recovered.
if i liked the setting, i’ll usually just port it to another system. fr’ex, i’m planning on running an iron heroes campaign sometime, set on the world of rhand (the living steel setting) with the genre knob cranked back from scifi to fantasy. sorcerous spectrals have nuked the infrastructure of magic, humanity has been ravaged by ViSR, and all the rest.
For me, my favorite dead game is Underground by Mayfair. I was able to buy most of the books in an ebay auction a few years ago, and got them at a steal of a price.
I have not run the game in years, but it sits on my shelf, just waiting for me to dig into it and run it again.
Another rules system, and game which I loved, was the original Conspiracy X by Eden. I am not a new fan of the 2nd rules, which uses a completely different rules system. The best part of ConX 1.0 was the combat system, especially the unarmed combat system.
I have a just a few books to get in the series, and then I will be up to date.
The sad part is, that neither of these systems has a strong online fan community that I can find. Since I am not currently running either one, I don’t have the resources to starting a fan site…yet.
http://www.canonfire.com
Where old Greyhawk Grognards go when someone starts messing with their Oerth.
My favorite supers game is Villains & Vigilantes (hence my name in these forums) and although you can still buy the PDF I wish someone woudl start producing new materials for it.
Now let’s all have a moment of silence for Drow’s lost copy of Living Steel, shall we? I feel your pain brother!
I’m definitely in “work with a fansite” camp. I’ve done that, and I’ve seen some excellent fan-made modules come up for systems and settings that I very much want to run, but are hard, if not impossible to find in dead-tree print. Occasionally, I can find them in PDF, but not always.
In fact, I’m trying (rather unsuccessfully so far, though not for lack of trying) to write a module that I might eventually post to a fansite.
This keeps me happy, even if I can’t change the way things are and bring them back into print.
My favorite dead system probably has to be Shadowrun. An edition’s in print, and I have it, but in some ways, it’s dead to me. It left me feeling cold once I read it. No real attraction at all outside of the BP system. The magic section felt poor, with few spells; the new ‘cybermagic’ type system felt tacky; even the cybernetics and weapons felt ‘off’. So now, I have to work up conversions, just to backport, and unlike WotC and D&D, I don’t think there will be conversion notes…
I’ve never been concerned when a game publisher shuts down… heck, most of the time my group barely notices!
We don’t rely on supplements on modules to tell stories and play games. All you really need is the core book and a group of people interested in having fun. The fact that “nothing new” is coming out, or even a new edition that replaces the original, doesn’t matter in the slightest.
Nor do the reactions of others in the gamer community, in person or online. Are there no other groups playing this system? Irrelevant. No fan sites, no active discussions? Piffle; unimportant. All that matters is what your group enjoys doing.
I notice a difference in my take on the playability of OOP games based on two factors: 1) if there’s a newer edition, and 2) how much support the game had while it was in print.
A one-book game, for example, doesn’t change much at all when it goes OOP. D&D, however, not only tends to see new editions, but also enjoys lots of support — so when it dries up, you notice it more.
This advice also applies to the CCG world. When my beloved Netrunner, Middle-Earth, Burning Sands and 7th Sea games went out of print, I scoured the online book shops to complete my sets, and then scoured the internet and saved copies of all the best articles against the day when those support sites went down.
This isn’t exactly the point here, but I still play 3rd edition GURPS. I have the GURPS 4 rulebook, but I haven’t even read the whole thing. The thing is, I know GURPS 3. It’s an easily modified game useable in any genre. I’ve got dozens of house rules based on years of play.
I think that Shadowrun went out of print because it wasn’t very good. Much of the material from the non-core books seemed as if it’d never been playtested.
The RPG industry has lots of competition and relatively few customers. The marketplace is flooded with material, much of it garbage. It’s hard for the good stuff to make it.