I don't know why I haven't posted about my bi-weekly D6 Space game.
It's not like the game's not fun; to the contrary, it's a bucket of fun. In fact, it's the place where I'm putting to use a lot of the stuff I've been talking about here, what with all the transcendant, GM-as-conduit-for-whatever-he-does RPG action that this blog is about.
So let me talk about it.
It's the game I mention on this thread at The RPG Site; it's also the one I talked about doing at my Friendly Local Games Store in this post from 2 Nov. 2006, only using D6 instead of d20. By all accounts it's been successful (i.e. the players are having fun), I've been having a blast with it, and one of the dudes has decided to run a D6 Fantasy game, he likesthe system so well. Aces.
I really am doing very little prep for it, and I really am stealing liberally from other sources. Just last night, I named a star system "Wiedlin" after Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go's; there's an NPC named Nik Kershaw who is the captain of a ship called the Human Racing; The PCs' ship is named "Clear Air Turbulence", after the ship in Iain M. Banks' novel Consider Phlebas (the ship apparently is named after a jazz-fusion album, so it has a larcenous pedigree already); I have a plan to name a ship, somewhere, after a Missing Persons album.
I have turned a pair of hastily-described, inconsequential NPCs into major parts of the narrative, suddenly, and in the middle of play (Mary and Celeste Anglota, sexy twin starship thieves). I have spontaneously described the contents of a star system, thrown game stats together out of thin air, stuck in subtle clues to other adventures based on ideas long since conceived but never used, cribbed names from a list, rolled up NPC personailities on the spot...
...it's amazing how much solid, fun gaming we've done based on almost no preparation at all.
The key: vibe. I have an idea of what kind of game, setting, mood, feel, etc I want. I watch my players interact with it, and in some cases just improvise based on my backlog of influences and concepts.
Apart from having a simple goal for each session, a few notions of obstacles and a notebook in which to write down the crap I come up with...that's it.
That's how I run my game. And I forget to bring the same notebook most of the time.
It's a creative joy. I'm making stuff up, they're making stuff up, we meet in the middle and asses get kicked. Robots, Imperial Space Centurions, neon-lit space stations, a luxury liner defended by a colony of giant bugs and the pheromone that makes them angry, sanitary nanobots used as a weapon...
...my D6 Space game ROCKS.
