I’ve been trying to think back over my first games, my first characters and my first sessions as a GM and do you know what? I think I may have mixed up a few of my firsts.

My first gaming session and my first character are well documented thanks to my drug fueled GM and his knack for memorable sessions. Where my memory has started to slip though is in my very first GM’ing session. I could have sworn it was for a Rolemaster game where I threw dragons on an hourly basis at my friends Arch Mage and Warrior Monk. In fact I was so convinced of this until I tried to remember the Spacemaster games I used to run.

One summer when I was about 14 I had picked up a copy of the Spacemaster box set from the Virgin Megastore in Glasgow. It was the first ruleset I actually owned as until then every game we played was owned by either Joe or Chris. There was nothing wrong with this but being 14 it was very much a case of getting half way through a campaign and then falling out with one of my friends who then took their books and went home. My parents were going away for the weekend and taking my brother with them so I had the house to myself on the Saturday and Sunday. I locked myself away for those days in an attempt to learn all the rules so that the following weekend I could run the game. My friends wouldn’t hear of it though as knowing I would have an empty house they all wanted to come over and stay. that wasn’t going to happen though as I was determined to get these rules into my head. I told a white lie in that I was actually going away with my parents in an attempt to stop them coming round. They still did as they knew fine well that by the time I had told them this my parents had already been away for 4 hours.

So anyway I sat in front of the TV with my years supply of Irn Bru and a bag full of snack food and went to it. I’ve no idea what time I was awake until but I remember waking up in a heap on the floor with my face in the middle of the star map that was included in the set. You can still see the drool marks if you hold it up to the light! By about 7pm on the Sunday night I had drawn up a few characters and ran through a couple of combat scenarios so that I knew the differences between Spacemaster and Rolemaster. Whilst not ready to GM I knew the rules.

Over the next few days I came up with very brief scenario to start the game off and decided to wing the rest. My limited experience was already going to mean regular stoppages for checking the rules and mistakes would happen without a doubt. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I managed to limit the players to Frank and Joe. Anymore than that and I would have seriously struggled.

So the Friday night arrived and we were staying over at Frank’s house so we could have a good run at the opening session. Frank had decided he wanted to be a space pirate so had drawn up a mercenary of sorts and Joe was the pilot for the ship. I filled out the group with a couple of NPC’s and surprisingly the game went very well. My only regret about the game was using our original GM’s star chart instead of the one supplied. There is only so many times you can let the players visit the planet populated by Ogryns that manufactures rubber sex toys without wanting to give up.

How did your first GM’ing session go?

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Something I’ve been thinking about recently actually cropped up in a Darths & Droids strip I read recently. Why is it when it comes to roleplays set on outer space 99% of the time the planet will have one environment and probably only one or two exports? Where is the diversity?

Back in the days of my youth our games were very simplistic. If we were not using a pre-existing setting like Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms or Star Trek our locations were always very simple and generic. It was until I hit my late teens that my maps became anything other than a amoeba shaped blob with badly drawn mountains and trees on it. When it came to space settings though it got beyond a joke.

Picture the scene. You’ve spent two months playing in Waterdeep for a solid three nights a week and maybe a day at the weekend. For a nice break you decide to run a Spacemaster campaign for a few weeks. You throw together some characters with the players and pull out your binder of hand drawn and very detailed ships and get them to choose one from the ‘cheap’ bundle. And what planetary system do you let them loose in? The one who’s entire chart can be described as an A4 sheet with 20 circles drawn on it with generic environment and chief export details written beside it.

It was my one bugbear with the Firefly TV series and Star Wars is famous for it but it still drives me nuts. So why do we keep doing it? I can understand that to populate countless worlds in the same detail as you would a normal one world fantasy campaign but something has to give. The one method I’ve came up with that works is to pick two places on a planet and treat it like a city on a fantasy map. Give it enough detail to play it well and use generic work for elsewhere on the planet and over time the players will much prefer the places you’ve worked on. they’ll keep returning to those same places and this allows you to slowly add new areas on planets that attract interest. So your generic sea/space port kicks off thanks to your characters falling foul of the law and having to make a sharp exit from the gaming area you had prepared. Next time they come back to that planet you’ll have had time to expand on the new location and every bit of work you do fills the game world as a whole.

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