Caution: Post contains high levels of nerdity

Hey again loyal readers. Er...I guess one begins to wonder if there are any such folks, but honestly it doesn't really matter much. This site is more for me than anything else, although I do heartily appreciate the comments by those of you who do stop by from time to time.

Ok so back to my ramblings. If you checked in earlier this week you may have seen my post about the Dark Heresy game we ran last weekend. During the course of this week I've been doing a lot more reading and thinking about role-playing games, genres, available books and all kinds of other related nerd-activities. *gasp* Yes, I used the n-word!

Thinking back on things, I think the first time I actually played an RPG would have been in grade 10 or 11. A friend of mine who had recently moved to town rounded up a few of us to play a game he went to special pains of describing as "not Dungeons and Drgaons". That game turned out to be "Dark Conspiracy". I don't remember much about the game or the play session except the cover of one of the novels he showed us. I do recall that we had a lot of fun and talked about playing again several times without ever actually doing so.

Going back even further this was not my first exposure to an RPG book. I had in fact bought one back in the summer of 1989 title simply "The Batman Roleplaying Game". I remember reading through the book a few times and simply not being able to figure out how this book could be considered a game. In my defence I'll simply say that I was only 11 or 12 years old at the time and the idea of a "game" outside of my Nintendo or something with a board just didn't make sense in my head.

Back in the present day, I realized that I have actually purchased a grand total of five RPG source books: Batman (which I have never played and am not sure of its location), Dark Matter (a book that uses the Alternity rules system), Deadlands Reloaded (it was just too cool looking to pass up on sale), Call of Cthulhu (purchased out of interest in the FFG Living Card Game) and of course, Dark Heresy.

Where am I going with this you ask? Well, after having played our Dark Heresy game to positive response, I think it may be possible to get a somewhat regular campaign of adventures going for that game. This in turn go me looking at the other books I had to see what kind of nifty plot ideas I could borrow or steal, yet ended up pulling me in an entirely different direction when I re-read the Deadlands Reloaded book.

The character creation section of DL:R had a simple paragraph about skills stating something along the lines of, "All standard skills in Savage Worlds are available in Deadlands Reloaded." What the hell is Savage Worlds? I didn't know either, so I did some digging around and happened upon the publisher's website at www.peginc.com. The Savage Worlds system looks like a generic RPG system that is genre-independant, yet versatile and unique all at the same time. The core rulebook only costs like $13! Now granted, I have not used this system, but judging from the Test Drive rules PDF and the one-sheet adventures available on their site it looks simply amazing. While I don't intend to toss aside the system we're using for Dark Heresy, I definitely hope that I can talk some people into trying a game of Deadlands, or another one-off evening of gaming, using the Savage Worlds system.