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1: Who 2:
What 3: Where Links |
In 1987, I was at
Westercon. That year it was being hosted at the Oakland Hyatt Regency.
It was a dread and disturbed weekend. The Hotel itself was relatively new, but the lighting was dark, a mix of reds and oranges, giving the place a rather macabre air. The style was post-modern, but the angles were... well... wrong somehow. And on display were a number of art pieces that disturbed, rather than enhanced the beauty of the place. The Convention was terrible, filled with Machiavellian politics and backstabbing. And these were all people who were (in theory) friends. It was my first real inspiration for what would someday become the Styx Regency. Some time after that some friends and I decided we wanted to play an odd assortment of characters. Picking an assortment of antiheroes from Stormbringer, Hawkmoon and Superworld, we descended on the poor soul who'd "volunteered" to be our gamemaster for the night, and made him come up with something on the spot, and his response was to toss us, willy-nilly, into a "Cthulhu Now" seat-of the pants adventure, inflicting our merry band of cutthroats on a poor, unsuspecting Oakland. And in the morning ('cause we'd played all bloody night), he LEFT us there... This was my second inspiration. By 1988, it finished germinating, and an unsuspecting band of players at Mythcon (hosted that year at UCB's Clark Kerr Campus) found themselves in a most unusual CoC Now game, met the mysterious Devlin Rogue, Manager of the Styx Regency, and that body of work known as the Styx Papers was born. It's been two decades, more or less, and has been enjoyed by many, many players over the years. Though the game may change, the nightmare never seems quite ready to end. The campaign has had a facelift this time around, a little retooling for a new set of rules. A handful of characters from the old chronicles have come to at the tail end of 1986, heads full of memories of what might be. But they're their old selves again (sort of), and not everything seems quite where they remember it... 20/20 hindsight rearends the Butterfly Effect... I wonder what will happen this time? - Ian Grey, 4/30/06 |
