#RPGaDay 2018 Day 28: Gaming Excellence That I'm Grateful For....

Down the final stretch, we are in the Week of Sharing for #RPGaDay 2018.

Day 28:  "Share Whose Gaming Excellence That I'm Grateful For"

I have been blessed by some stellar GameMasters and Players over the years that have each gleaned a little wisdom unto me.

So today I'll give thanks to Russ and Todd, The TORG Guys.

When I was in high school, the premier local gaming organization for the Lehigh Valley Gamer's Association (LVGA).  They ran Lehicon, a convention that attracted players from all the surrounding states and beyond.  I attended Lehicon III as a player, IV as a GM, and then *poof* the LVGA vanished.

One of the former members of the LVGA, Mike Griffith then began running a one-day con at an American Legion Hall in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, called Bogglecon.  Bogglecon was a yeoman effort for his minimal staff of volunteers but brought in over 100 gamers (and a few dealers) from eastern PA.

It was there that I met Russ and Todd, The TORG Guys.

For a D&D-centric con in the days of the early Magic: The Gathering boom, the idea of a stand-up easel with a custom movie poster promoting the game was a head turner.  The boombox playing appropriate theme music kept us interested.  The two GM-method made us watch, and (compared to us post-d20) the idea of stand-up paper characters on a professional board was unheard off.

You know what else was unheard of, if not for these two men?  TORG: The Possibility Wars.

TORG was a "cinematic multi-genre role-playing game" where the Earth was overtaken by other-worldly other-dimensional forces that physically altered the landscape.  Most of North America was overrun with lizard men and dinosaurs,  England was a fantasy realm,  Egypt returned to its former glory as the New Nile Empire, with a healthy dose of Pulp, and Japan become an uber-capitalist technocracy with all the tropes of Japanese culture liberally applied and exploited.   Characters from these other "cosms" could travel between them, but could be subject to the rules of each realm.   A tech guy from Nippon might not fair as well with failing equipment in the Living Land of Dinosaurs, while the Dinosaur shamans  might have wildly differing power in the magic-heavy Aysle or wacky Pulp Egypt.

The flexibility of the rules and settings allowed the TORG Guys to run different games at each con, in a different cosm, with their own movie poster, music, and new maps and figures.   Throughout the 90's, the TORG games were the premier jewel of Bogglecon... and a few reborn Lehicons.  Games were sold out at pre-reg, with plenty of people camping out to grab a chair of a no-show.  These weren't games being run, they were EVENTS!

I can't confirm the Chicken or the Egg of this story, but it can be believed that after honing and polishing these games locally, Russ and Todd went on the road.... to GenCon (Milwaukee) and the same throngs of fans for a few years.

Now, a few years later, Russ left co-GMing arrangement, probably for none of my damn business.  Todd continued on, scaling a few things back a bit and returning to a few classics that had been previously run.  But with the end of Bogglecons and the transition to the early Mepacons, Todd and his TORG game were no longer there.

As I was a GM, volunteer, or even a dealer at most of the cons, I didn't get to play in their games, although I did have the pleasure of getting invited to Todd's house with a few friends to play a New Nile Empire-themed game that was a hoot.   But a subdued "home edition" sense of magic from the con games was still there.

I honestly don't know where Russ went off to do.  Todd was a player in our friend Eric's Star Wars d6 campaign eons ago, and now appears to be a big fan of running Unknown Armies  (which an equally excitable fanbase, if not bigger, than the old TORG fans.)

The only picture I can find of Todd (front), circa 2014 from Blasphemous Tomes

While I don't use the pizzazz angle much in my con games (I am running My Little Pony games for easily excitable kids), I'm grateful for witnessing true "professional GMing and presentation," and know what standards to strive for.

Fun extra fact:  These games were my base inspiration for the Masterbook (West End's name for the generic TORG game engine) game I pondered running in my homebrew fantasy setting of Georic.  Cooler heads prevailed and everyone approved of the game we went with (Hackmaster) but going through with the stand-up paper minis (mounted on Games Workshop bases) would have created an interesting dynamic.