10 and 1 Things About Vincent and the Doctor

(Spoilers for episode 10 of Doctor Who Series 5.)Item 1: Fandom seems to be split between finding the most recent episode either poignant or cheesy. I am definitely in the former column. Wow. Certainly one of my favorite episodes of Series 5 and the most immediately affecting. It wasn't so much the invisible monster as metaphor for Van Gogh's depression or bipolarity. That works, but it's really par for the course for "historicals". No, what I was most charmed by is the look of the show - just gorgeous - and the performance by Tony Curran as Van Gogh. Deeply affecting, and the episode earns both the right to its historical inaccuracies and its leap to 2010, pop song and all. Many of those unimpressed by the plot had to admit to getting teary eyed at the end.

Item 2: If I think it's one of the best episode this series, I also happen to think it's the best "Doctor meets an artist" television story of all time. Like The Unquiet Dead, The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp, it plays fast and loose with historical detail, instead allowing the essence of the artist's work to inform the mood and story. In Doctor Who, these artists are not the ones that actually lived historically, but rather the sum of the things we know about them. Ergo, Dickens is embroiled in a ghost story on Christmas Eve. Shakespeare is a great and polysexual genius who defeats three witches with words. Agatha Christie helps solve a mystery that manages references to all her most popular works. Vincent van Gogh isn't as easy to represent because he didn't write stories. So instead, we get a very visual episode that references his great works, and we don't care much if said works were actually painted on the appropriate date or not. And while all four stories have an undue amount of hero worship (Dickens is the Doctor's favorite author, Shakespeare's genius is on par with his, Agatha Christie is still read in the year 5 billion, and Van Gogh is apparently the greatest artist who ever lived), Vincent is presented in a more adult way, less as a caricature, and not flinching from his mental illness or suicide.
Item 3: Is there a more beautiful, lyrical sequence in Doctor Who than the bit where Vincent's point of view reveals an animated version of Starry Night? Wow. The fields of grain are also beautiful, as is the recreation of the café. I bet if I studied his work, I'd find other visual allusions in the show. This is one case where being on location away from Wales has really uplifted the episode.

Item 4: While the guest-star is poignant, there is another thread running through this story that adds to the poignancy, and that's the ghost of Rory. The Doctor is the only person that remembers he ever existed, but Amy has an intuitive sense about it. Vincent, more perceptive than is normal, senses her loss, and she is caught crying for no reason. (She never denies she's suffered a loss, only that she is sad, but she is presumably talking about her parents.) The Doctor is most hard hit though. Not only does he let slip Rory's name at one point, but he seems to be overcompensating with Amy. He's taking her where she wants to go (she's the Van Gogh fan) and if it seems strange that the Doctor would risk the timeline by bringing Vincent to his future, it shouldn't. He's doing it for Amy. (He may additionally sense that it won't change history. Vincent would succumb to his illness, perhaps feel he can't live up to his future reputation or think he imagined it all.)

Item 5: With Rory out of the way, Amy has no reason to hide anything about her relationship with him. When she says she's "not the marrying kind", are we to infer that she WOULDN'T have gone through with her wedding? She would never have said this if Rory had been there, but evidently thought it.
Item 6: Bill Nighy. He's wonderful in this, but where was his credit? I can only assume it was eaten by the Crack.

Item 7: Speaking of cracks and paradoxes... Last week, I talked about the theory that the Doctor and Amy will eventually double back on themselves to (possibly) go out and fix the cracks. I mentioned some of the clues, like a figure running through the house in The Eleventh Hour and the open door in Victory of the Daleks). Is there a place where this "future Doctor" could have gone by? The answer is yes. He visits Vincent in bed, and the artist doesn't want to go out. He's freaking out. The Doctor returns to Amy and then Vincent walks in all refreshed and ready to go. On the surface, this seems to be part and parcel of his bipolar behavior. But could he have been visited and encouraged by the other Doctor?

Item 8: Non-genre writers seem to be doing a lot better than genre writers this series. Richard Curtis is best known for comedy, specifically Blackadder. Moffat himself came out of sitcoms. The episodes I liked the least have been written by Chris Chibnall and Mark Gatiss, both writers who had done Who (and/or the spin-offs) before. Maybe we're moving away from the RTD era in such a way that its writers aren't meshing well with Series 5's mood.

Item 9: "If you have been affected by the issues in this episode..." Must be the first time a Doctor Who episode has had an invitation to "learn more" or "call a helpline" at the end of it. You have permission to call it "a very special Doctor Who". I guess I'll use that number/website if I ever get a bad case of invisible monsters running through the house.
Item 10: Another lovely bit, I thought, were the circus posters that burnt up in the vortex. Great touch (no I don't think they mean anything per se). I guess Jack's invulnerability aura extends to his coat.

Item 11: Here's my own Van Gogh story... I used to work in a museum/art gallery. Strictly contemporary art, you understand, but nevertheless, people would sometimes call and try to have one painting or another appraised (we didn't really do that). Anyway, this lady called from Riverview, New Brunswick, and said she'd found a painting in her attic and wondered if it was worth anything. Well, right away I'm skeptical. They're usually just landscapes done in a Bob Ross style by old ladies. I asked her to describe it and she said it was yellow flowers and that the signature was "van... van Sosh?" You mean "van Gogh"?, I ask. "Yes, that's it." (Never mind the fact that he signs his works "Vincent".) So I told her it was pretty unlikely to be sunflowers by Van Gogh, because they'd be worth millions. I shouldn't have said that, because she became really defensive. She's sitting on a gold mine, after all! Or a poster from WalMart. They often can't tell the difference between a print under glass and an actual painting. She hung up on me. She must be rich by now...

Star Trek 1280: By a Sleep to Say We End

1280. By a Sleep to Say We End

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Perchance to Dream #2, Wildstorm Comics, March 2000

CREATORS: Keith R.A. DeCandido (writer), Peter Pachoumis and Lucian Rizzo (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (follows the last issue)

PLOT: Thanks to Worf's quick action, Starfleet security takes down the sniper aiming at the new Damiano governor. The humiliated moralist faction takes stronger measures by placing a telepathic weapon inside a Vulcan security officer's mind. It is meant to torment key personnel around her with dreams, memories and eventually, hallucinations drawn from the most maddening places in their minds. Worf soon starts to suffer from bad dreams and visions, until one of them knocks him out, leaving the way open for the moralists to shoot the governor at close range...

CONTINUITY: Worf dreams about the boy he killed in a soccer match (Let He Who Is Without Sin...) and hallucinates both Marla Aster (The Bonding) and a canister falling on him (Ethics). Deanna calls herself Worf's Par'machai (All Good Things...).

DIVERGENCES: None.

PANEL OF THE DAY - World's most boring fight
REVIEW: A much better issue - Worf's dreams are more interesting than Data's, though they are strictly drawn from established continuity and not at all surreal - but I think I may have put the finger on what disturbs me about the art. It's the Damiano. It is very hard to follow the political story at times when all the characters look alike. Each is a combination of breasts, beards and different horn configurations, and because a female face may be associated with a male body, we lose one of the frames of reference we're used to. And they all dress pretty much alike. I found it difficult at times to differentiate one from another. The strengths of the mini continue to be in the character moments, though again, a bit too concerned with referring to continuity. The match that's decided by a single throw is a great Worf moment, as is the interrogation scene where he promises political payback from the Klingon homeworld for having been fired upon. He generally comes off quite well in this issue. I do wish we'd see more of the Worf-Troi relationship, especially if Deanna is gonna throw around terms like Par'machai. Here, he barely gets the same pinched shoulder Data did in the previous issue.

Cat of the Geek #65: Cats in Logan's Run

Names: One ordinary name, one fancy name and one name you'll never be able to guess (its true name). Pictured: Thomas
Stomping Grounds: Logan's Run (1976)
Side: Good
Breed: Various
Cat Powers: Surviving through the coming apocalypse. Taking over the U.S. government. Supernatural ability to meow "hello". Quick reflexes.
Skills: Eat 4, Sleep 3, Mischief 5, Wit 3, Avoiding falling stuntmen 7
Cat Weaknesses: People. It's always people.
Stunt work:

Star Trek 1279: To Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles

1279. To Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Perchance to Dream #1, Wildstorm Comics, February 2000

CREATORS: Keith R.A. DeCandido (writer), Peter Pachoumis and Lucian Rizzo (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (between All Good Things... and Generations)

PLOT: While Data has a dream that pushes him to consider installing the emotion chip, the Enterprise-D's crew attends the inauguration of the first Damiano governor to sit on the Federation Council. Worf is assigned to help with security (and soon disarms a bomb) because moral extremists want her dead before she can become governor, on account of her having only one sexual partner rather than two (the Damiano have three genders). With Starfleet security crawling over the entire site, the extremists turn tail and leave it all up to a sniper...

CONTINUITY: Data is using his dreaming software again (Birthright). He dreams of emotions and of the destruction of the Enterprise-D (both foreshadow Generations), and or Barclay in a red uniform. Spot has a fat cameo. Worf mentions a war between the Kressari (The Circle) and the Subytt (mentioned in Homecoming).

DIVERGENCES: Their is a TNG novel with the same title as this mini-series. Kressari is misspelled Kresari.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Deanna practices her Vulcan nerve pinch on Data...
REVIEW: I can say I've liked DeCandido's work on Starfleet Corps of Engineers, but in Perchance to Dream, he's channeling a little too much of Howard Weinstein. Maybe I'm just burned out on "alien factions" stories, especially when they feature people we've never seen before. A real talkie to, but I guess a whole planet has to be set up. The artwork is filled with strong but stiff likenesses, and even the guest-stars seem to be photo referenced. At first glance, a slick product (like all the Wildstorm comics), but lacking a little life. And that's my main complaint with Perchance to Dream #1. Everything seems to be a little off. Pleasant enough, but ooh, it could be better. Attempts at humor are dryer than they need to be. Data's dream doesn't really connect with the plot in any meaningful way, and though it has potential for character development, it doesn't tell us anything we didn't know about the character. It becomes an excuse to name drop all the episodes in which Data's experienced emotions. And the threesome-o-phobia prevalent in the Damiano society doesn't sit well with me, reminding me of The Outcast, which is never a good thing. Star Trek has traditionally been awful at dealing with sexual orientation issues, and the trend continues here.

My RPG DNA, Part IV: The Mini-Series

(Part I, Part II, Part III)
I'd call it the finale, except that I won't stop role-playing any time soon. One side effect of the Rise of Genre and Multi-Genre in my campaigns was to push me more and more into the New School arena. I blame/thank genre emulation for this. As I said in Part II, D&D is in many ways its own genre. Game sessions have little to do with Lord of the Rings' or Stormbringer's narratives. So when one explores different genres, one may have to divest oneself of those D&D genre trappings, many of which are staples of Old School gaming. This is a lesson I learned early when running Supers campaigns. This genre doesn't call for killing and looting, or even accumulating XP. If D&D is its own animal, emulating itself, Supers generally attempt to emulate comic books, where the genre began and is still most represented. Supers have their own tropes that must either be obeyed or twisted (which is its own acknowledgment of genre). Batman must be able to bust out of a block of ice despite his human strength. He must have the perfect gadget for any situation regardless of his equipment list. He must take the time to deal with a romantic subplot in between story beats. He can't buy a super-power no matter how much XP he's racked up. And he can't kill even if he causes damage that would overwhelm the Joker's hit points. So beyond the emulation of Powers, a Supers game trying to emulate "4-color comics" needs to address many issues that are DRIVEN by genre as opposed to realism and math. DC Heroes, for example, dealt with these with Pushing the Limit, Omni-Gadgets, Subplot support and Bashing Combat. These, and other aspects of the system, said one very important thing: Genre matters.

And I'd say that's been my background philosophy since the 90s, but it's taken a more and more central role in the last few years. From Old School roots as grown a decidedly New School tree. When genre matters, certain things get more attention than others. One of these is the game's narrative structure. If Supers come from comics, then you start thinking of role-playing sessions as single issues of a comic. If you're playing a Doctor Who RPG, then you're looking at how episodic television tells stories. I realize that mixes Genre and Medium, but it's how things worked out.

Back to DCH
In the mid-2000s, I was having problems with player availability. Though Dream Park accommodated this well, it also meant I was trapped in one-shot hell. They made me long for campaigns where I could do more long-term planning and truly explore a world. Campaigns had a knack for collapsing when players became unavailable, however, as happened to my GURPS epic, Shiftworld (see Part III for details). Games became either unrewarding or disappointing. I returned to DC Heroes, this time with a different group of players from the Dream Park gang, because it allowed for one-shots within the same world. By taking the JLA's "roll call" concept and sticking to one or two-part adventures, players could show up based on their availability, could miss sessions, etc. It also became possible to have guest characters in (usually actual DCU heroes), or run one-on-one mini-sessions that were all about the subplots.

The players called their team the Crusaders (no relation to the Archie heroes), and for the attendant website at least, I treated the game as a comic book (as if it had spun out of the Legends crossover in the late 80s). When it went one-on-one, that's just an issue focusing on a single team member. Comics do it all the time. It ran 32 "issues", a good run, and ended, wouldn't you know it, in the middle of a longer arc ("Neutron Dance"). Grrr. DC Heroes' usual emulation did its work, of course, but I added more. By setting it in a particular continuity, and numbering the issues as if they were a monthly, I could make the characters go through that continuity's big crossover events. For example, I brought my issues of Millennium, and allowed them to interact with other heroes in the big crowd scenes (usually in place of Infinity Inc. or the Outsiders, cuz really, who cares if they get wiped from continuity). They even changed some outcomes, and lost a hero in Invasion!

I think we ended the campaign mid-stride by consensus. The motivation just wasn't there anymore, especially with a key player or two moving away. I booted up Planescape again with the remaining players, but despite my best efforts, and 'porting over the idea of subplots and a single living location, sword & sorcery remains a tough sell with my current crop of players. Though I wouldn't say this campaign died in the middle of things, there were a lot of things laid into it that never paid off.

There must be a compromise
Back to the drawing board... What made the Crusaders campaign (where player availability was fluid) last so long, but Planescape (where players remained available) not? I decided it wasn't about availability, but rather boredom. It's my own fault. Through the decade, I trained us to like variety. When I became bored with one-shots, I ran in the opposite direction, towards the interminably sustainable campaign. I ran too far. After a number of sessions, players became bored with the lack of setting variety, and disenchanted with whatever they felt was wrong with their initial character concepts or the setting's shortcomings. With one-shots, they could ride it out. In a Supers campaign, it was also pretty easy to run a subplot to change a character's concept because that's part of the genre's tropes (and it happened). Not so easy in AD&D.

The solution was staring me in the face: The mini-series. Those huge open-ended campaigns of my youth could be called novels (if not very good ones), and lately, I'd been doing way too many movies (one-shots), but seeing my Supers role-playing sessions as a comic book installments had trained me to see games as largely episodic. What else is by its very nature episodic? Television. And so I began to exploit that comparison.

I started attracting players to the idea of a single episodic "season" that would last X amount of time (number of sessions = number of episodes). If they loved their characters and the "show", we could return to it at some point and do another season. If they felt the story was over, we wouldn't need to. It even allowed players to sacrifice themselves in the last episode if they felt it was the way to go. The structural conceit also informed mechanics, and I endeavored to pick a game that was very cinematic (which was in tune with the pulpish habits I'd picked up running Dream Park and DCH). That game was GURPS Black Ops, using Warehouse 23 as an HQ (this was about a year before Warehouse 13 came out on tv for real). We used Cinematic Points and other cinematic rules, in keeping with action movie and television tropes we were trying to emulate. I sold it to players as Men in Black meets John Woo meets Torchwood. It sold even before the pilot, and ran for a whole summer. To emulate the genre further, I added a teaser to the front end of each episode in which players could riff high octane without the need to roll dice, catching the end of an untold tale (think Indiana Jones).

Following it up would prove difficult. Everyone in the group was deep into Doctor Who at the time and emulating an actual television show seemed to be the next evolution (and would bring in new interested players from the friend circle). Cubicle 7's new DWAITAS was coming at the perfect time. And then there were delays with the product, compounded by drifting interest in key players (real life was interfering), and it made us skip an entire summer. It's much harder to start something during the university year (as opposed to keeping something going), so it wasn't until March of this year that we finally got to play DWAITAS (and we're 2 episodes away from the season finale, I'm happy to report). The game pushed us even more deeply into New School narrativism with television structure ideas like Previews of the next session, while keeping it very quick and cinematic just as our previous games had been.

The future...
Our Time Lord story should end within two or three sessions, sadly delayed to the beginning of July (real life again), but it's a delay that allows us to prep for the next mini-series. What will it be? I'm looking very closely at Savage Worlds, which has the same pulpy, "story point"-driven style as most of our recent games. Its multiple settings provide hope that we can re-use it for other mini-series, with less chargen fuss than GURPS tends to represent. And its Plot Point campaigns are already working from a mini-series point of view. Just a matter of choosing a first setting and going with it.

The adventure continues... (Part V in 3-5 years, thanks for waiting)

Further reading about this era :
Thoughts about the Doctor Who
Who RPG: Casting the Time Lord
How to tie all those loose ends
New School Lesson: Role-playing between sessions
New School Lesson: Subplots
New School Lesson: The secret function of dice
New School Lesson: Cinematic Points
New School Lesson: Picking up the pace
New School Lesson: Worse things than death
New School Lesson: Diceless moments
New School Lesson: Previews

Star Trek 1278: Enter the Wolves

1278. Enter the Wolves

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: Enter the Wolves, Wildstorm Comics, 2001

CREATORS: A.C. Crispin and Howard Weinstein (writers), Carlos Mota, Keith Aiken, John Nyberg, and Derek Fridolfs (artists)

STARDATE: 14093.4 (just before the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor)

PLOT: After the death of Amanda Grayson, Sarek gets maried to Perrin on the eve of a summit at which he has invited the reclusive Legarans. Another reclusive race has shown up - the Cardassians. Unfortunately, the latter have no intention of joining the Federation. They're their on orders from the Obsidian Order to sabotage talks with their uneasy neighbors, the Legarans. And while Sarek doesn't trust them from the start, Spock has more of an open mind, fueling the split between father and son. Perrin tries to investigate the Cardassians, but is captured by them. A disguised Cardassian openly insults the Legarans by wearing the color orange, while another boards their ship and poisons their tanks. Only McCoy's warning prevents a tragedy when the Legarans try to leave the summit. The Cardassians commit suicide rather than undergo a mindmeld, though Spock does learn he was wrong to trust their intentions.

CONTINUITY: Sarek has invited the Legarans to a Vulcan summit (as part of the preliminaries mentioned in "Sarek"). We see Sarek and Perrin's wedding ("Sarek"). McCoy is present, shorting after having been made Admiral (Encounter at Farpoint). Spock misses it, but attends the summit, coming back from the Klingon homeworld (The Undiscovered Country). A Cardassian disguises himself as an Antedean (Manhunt). We're told Valeris never recovered from Spock's forced mindmeld (The Undiscovered Country).

DIVERGENCES: A coloring mistake puts a number of people dressed in orange at the Legaran talks, shortly before the Cardassian reveals an orange outfit designed to insult them.

PANEL OF THE DAY - So, what do the Legarans look like?
REVIEW: A.C. Crispin's participation kind of makes this a sequel to her Sarek novel, but given what the typical reader might know, it reads more as a prequel to Sarek's TNG appearances. I really like the idea of stories set in-between the Movie era and TNG, especially those that set up the modern era. The Cardassians are just now coming out of their shell, but we're not far from the Bajoran Occupation, and still decades away from a war with the Federation. The Legarans and their strict protocols were discussed in "Sarek", but we never got to see them. Sarek's marriage to Perrin. All of these things will have an impact on TNG and DS9. The characters are well characterized, and the evolution of their relationships paid more than lip service. McCoy correctly foreshadows that Spock and Sarek will likely never speak again. Mota's artwork is really quite good, whether it be his likenesses, new characters or technology. You'd think three inkers would make a mess of things, but they all hold to a coherent style. While it's a strong character piece and full of fun continuity elements, the ending doesn't quite work. McCoy jumps out of nowhere with information, and we don't know where he got it. There's a rush of action, confusing factionalizing among the Cardassians (Weinstein's influence, I bet), and the plot seems to end because we've run out of pages. Too bad.

My RPG DNA, Part III: The Rise of Multi-Genre

(Part I, Part II)
By the end of my university days, I'd amassed an important collection of role-playing games. The question then became: What do I do with it all? Then my current pool of players finally acquiesced to play a little game from R. Talsorian based on Niven & Pournelle's SF novel ABOUT role-playing, Dream Park, and that gave me the answer I was looking for. Dream Park was a fairly simple, I'd go as far as say BROKEN, little game that encouraged you not only to play in all kinds of genres, but to merge them as well. In Dream Park, you play a player who, based on a vague invitation, selects the skills, powers and gear he thinks he'll need for a one-shot scenario put together by a GameMaster (played by the GM) in a sort of holodeck/animatronic/actor-filled environment. The players play for points that will allow them to purchase even more stuff for their next game, but risk losing them if they die, although some can be recouped if they come back as villainous NPCs later in the game. It's a nifty gimmick, and the published scenarios highlighted multi-genre concepts (1001 Nights/Star Wars, Superheroes/WWII, Postapocalypse/Zombies), though there was definitely a pulp feel about all of them.

This allowed me to adapt a lot of the adventure scenarios, setting books and RPG magazines I'd purchased over the last few years (and lead me to buy even more). I didn't stick with that particular group very long, just long enough to gauge what was missing from Dream Park as published. I would dabble with old favorites in the late 90s (DC Heroes, Planescape, Paranoia), but I would eventually return to DP when I recruited a whole new batch of players as we entered the 2000s. By then, I was almost exclusively recruiting improv players into my games. There are some very good reasons for this. 1) I was (and still am) deeply involved in improv/theater games, and most of my friends are improv players. 2) There's a natural relationship between improv and role-playing, though in the latter, you have to stay in character a lot longer. And 3) improv players tend to be naturally quick witted and funny, which makes for an enjoyable laugh-filled role-playing session. I could probably write a paper no one would read about how improv skills and flaws translate to the role-playing environment. In any case, this choice would mold my role-playing activities a heck of a lot. Playing with people who are more used to acting out scenes than the nitty gritty of rules has led me farther and farther into New School territory.

(LARP aside: In the late 90s, I tried my hand at LARPing with the improv gang, organizing two or three events that relied very little or not at all on rules, but were heavy on role-playing. Great fun, and the fewer the rules - in other words, the less fighting there could be - the more fun we had. My thanks to White Wolf magazine's diceless columns for many of the ideas. Some people have been pestering me about doing some more, and I just might. They better get their sowing machines out or it won't be the same.)

Before jumping back into Dream Park, I tried my hand at Last Unicorn's Star Trek TNG game, but it was a less than stellar success. Players shrugged off the show's conceits and played it more (too) realistically. The captain refused to get off the bridge and the department heads sent their underlings into danger. It turned the NPCs into the real heroes, and though the players seemed fine with it, I chose to end the campaign. There were other changes in the air. More people were asking me about playing, and yet were afraid of the committment a campaign represented. Everyone was either in university or working, and schedules were tight. I took ST: TNG's surviving players, grabbed a few new guys and started running Dream Park again.

I crafted a website with all the player options, so that players could pick their skills and gear beforehand. Soon enough, I'd added a lot of missing options, created new Professions, ported skills and a more granular Tech Level over from GURPS, and tons of superpowers from all those Supers games I collected. (The site is still active and people I don't even know have told me they use it.) With Dream Park, my pool of players ballooned to the teens. It was easy to assemble whoever was available for any given one-shot, while players also racked points and felt they were progressing. For my part, I got to use all manner of material from my shelves (or Pyramid Online which was a great source of multi-genre material): Call of Cthulhu (especially the non-Mythos Blood Brothers books), GURPS, In Nomine, 2300 AD, Space 1889, AD&D: The Horde/Spelljammer, Time Master, Torg, Chill, Shadowrun, James Bond 007, Weird War II, DC Heroes, Ghostbusters, and more all provided adventure material for those games. Every game was completely different.

GURPS Heads, GURPS Heads, Suck 'em up, yum!
But I still wasn't using everything I owned. That, along with my desire to run something other than one-shots (as fun as they were), pushed me to come up with a GURPS campaign that could make use of the 100+ sourcebooks I had. That campaign was Shiftworld, in which we changed settings every few sessions, but the characters remained the same, except not. The frontier town sheriff would turn into a motorcycle cop and later into Mars base security chief, for example. However, he would still remember the other timeline when the setting shifted. His memories would also hold the revised timeline. Aside from the heroes (and one recurring villain), no one noticed the "shifts". So while we took advantage of the settings' potential for adventure, there was an overall arc about figuring out this mystery. Old West, Autoduel, Mars, Ice Age, Mecha, Steampunk, Vikings, Time Travel... and then too many of the key players moved away, so the mystery was never resolved. It was probably the single best campaign I ever ran though, and I'd love to get the old guys together again to put a button on it once and for all.

Between that disappointing unfinished business and an overdose of one-shots, something had to give...

In Part IV: The Mini-Series

Further reading about this era :
Remembering a Dream Park scenario
RPG award shows started in this era
Lesson from Dream Park: In Medias Res
Lesson from Dream Park: Multiple GM personalities
Nazis and dinosaurs: Part of EVERY genre
Hosting a one-shot LARP
Culling the massive collection... possible?
Profiles of my players from this era:
-The Obsessive
-The Flusher
-The Noble Hero
-The Hipster Doofus
-The Dud
-The Rest