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1. What IS a role-playing game? Anyone who’s ever purchased a role-playing rule book knows that, inevitably, there’s going to be a page or two at the beginning that asks, and attempts to answer, this question. Let me see if I can do it with a little more brevity. You see, back in the age before the console gaming revolution and the advent of those Massively online games, when someone wanted to quench their thirst for a little adventure, and do it with a few like-minded friends, we had to use something that we used to call “imagination”. Note that I say that with attitude as though we had some kind of choice. If you wanted some gaming, a chance to become someone else and go on fantastical adventures and fight for truth and justice, you had two options. You could actually strap on a sword or a gun and go “Mazes and Monsters” nuts like Tom Hanks (if you don’t remember that film, and say so aloud, Tom will send you a thank-you basket of assorted fruits), or you started up a role-playing game. These games took the form of fat rule books that gave you the tools to create imaginary characters and worlds, and to actually “act out” great adventures around the relative safety of someone’s dining room table. There were many kinds. Dungeons & Dragons is the most famous, and would let you enter a world of swords and elves. Gamma World let you step into the radiated, post-apocalyptic future that so many in the Soviet-paranoia 80s predicted. If you wanted to venture out into space and explore strange new worlds, games like Traveler would be your cup of tea. But for those who grew up loving comic books, and the super-heroes that those colorful tales chronicled, the best game to arm yourself with was one called Champions. Though fans of the DC and Marvel role-playing games would argue that point (and some still do today). And so it came to pass, in November of 1987, that a group of five super-hero-liking adventurers—myself, Tim Watts, Jeff Baumgardner, Kaye Dunham and K.C. Ryan—sat down in the dining room of K.C.’s condo in Roseville, California (a suburb of Sacramento) and began a game that would come to be known—named after the hero team that grew from it—as Forte. Now, I’ve gone in the history of how this all came to be in several essays on these Forte sites (see such examples as the Forte 2000 Introduction, the very detailed “The Forte Universe” history on the Forge page, and the “I (Heart) Forte” essay I wrote for an online zine of mine), so I won’t run through all that again (did I just hear a collective sigh of relief?), but in short, K.C., the “gamemaster” (the person who runs the gaming world and creates all the adventures for the “players” to take part in), took the world he’d already started for other games and began a new chapter in it. He started a game set in Seattle, one with three players he’d known and trusted, and with one new friend (Kaye) who’d never tried role-playing before. We began meeting weekly at his place for several hours of fun and excitement (and a lot of horsing around), and soon enough, the “campaign” (the official word used to notate the overall story you’re running) took on a life of its own. And it just kept on going. And going. It soon took on new players (and old ones left), but the story continued to build on all that had happened previously, and it was soon obvious that this campaign was something special. How special? It kept going for almost eight years. And for three-hundred and twenty-eight “issues” (as Champions is meant to simulate a comic book, each weekly run was called an “issue”, representing an issue of a comic). And the only reason it finally stopped was because the gamemaster himself, like others who had started the game with him, ended up having to move out of state. Forte closed up its doors in September of 1995, after years of epic stories, wonderful characters, and memories cherished by all involved. Well…”closed” is a strong word… Those involved in Forte loved it so much that they never really let it go. They had lived these characters for so long that saying good-bye to them was something no one could quite pull off. While there was no regular game going on, there was an annual gathering in San Diego—at the San Diego Comic-Con—that many of the players would attend, and that ended up being a chance to take part in “con games”, or pick-up Forte adventures, where the old characters got dusted off and the players got to bring them to life again, even if only for one night. But those games soon weren’t quite enough, and the stories that cropped up in them not only were a chance to update where the characters were and what they had been doing in their lives post-Forte, but also suggested so many OTHER stories that could be told. This eventually led to a web site called “Forte 2000”, a fiction project that saw the original four Forte players creating new heroes for Seattle, ones to take up the mantle and carry on the Forte name. These stories adhered heavily to established Forte continuity—or what had come before—and this led to further fictional appearances of classic Forte characters. This project led to another web site called “Forte ‘05”, which told stories of classic Forte characters in the year 2005. This led, then, to the Forte Expanded Universe page, which told new Forte tales and collected some of the “con game” adventures in written form. And this all culminated in the ever-growing Forte Universe site, home of these diverse pages, and to new pages like “Forge”, which told the tale of a group of former Forte heroes banding together to form a new spin-off team and step back into “real time”. Two decades after it first began, Forte was suddenly alive and breathing again, and loads of new adventures were now available on the web for others to read and share in. 2. We’re doing this backwards. Though there were many exciting new Forte tales, new Forte characters, and a WHOLE lot more amazing Forte art than we used to get in the old days, these Forte pages all lacked something that newcomers simply had no access to. A history. All these new stories constantly referred to characters and situations that had come before—the original Forte campaign, in other words—but readers had no avenue to this secret history. There was a reason for that. It was too damn much work. As I said, each Forte run back in the day was called an “issue”, and each issue had what we called “game updates”. We’ll go into that more on the Adventures page on this site. But, with the exception of a small handful of records lost to history, all three-hundred plus issues were recorded by K.C. These write-ups summarized what happened in each week’s run, and while initially meant as just a memory-jar when the players showed up the following week and needed a little refresher on where we all left off, they soon became a living history, and in their pages told the whole tale of the Forte saga—from its world-saving exploits to the more personal character moments. We each had copies, Xeroxed by K.C. week after week (now that’s dedication), and the result, by the end, was hundreds and hundreds of pages of Forte history. And within them, the long and complicated backstory for all the latter-days stories now clogging up the web on the post-campaign sites. Hundreds of pages. And most of them done during a time when there was no stable word processing format. The first fifty were actually handwritten by K.C. and just copied off and handed out. After that, he got himself a real computer, on which he could use whatever archaic word-processing software was there (I believe he used GeoWorks) to type them up. Way down the road, near the end, the PC age was really just beginning, and he could create text documents that could be later accessed and reformatted as needed. But there were no web pages to go to to read old Forte updates. There were binders (for some of us. Others just kind of shoved them in a drawer..). Some of the players kept all the issues, some lost some or all of them during the many moves that would come, but the only way to actually go back and relive the magic was to pull out the sheets and read them. The idea has been in place for a long time (by me, mainly) to somehow collect and digitize ALL the original Forte material. That would mean getting all 328 issues into HTML and up on the web. And tracking down all the “character sheets” for all the Forte heroes and getting them into digital format (back then, we had pre-printed blank sheets and pencils to work with, unlike the snazzy Hero Designer software today’s Champions player gets to use). Plus, there was a great deal of early character art that came into being, but that art is scattered around the country, mostly in the hands of the individual players. And there’s so much more. There were early Forte fiction stories written in the midst of the campaign. There was some classic “bluebooking” (handwritten notes passed back and forth at the gaming table for secret or just off-camera character interactions). There were hand-drawn schematics of the Forte base and its vehicles, cranked out by resident designer Jeff. All this material (and more) made up this whole Forte experience. And only by somehow laying hands on it (if you could somehow get it all into one place at the same time) could someone delve into and enjoy it all. I’ve long felt that one of the most successful Champions campaigns ever run (not too pretentious, hmm?) deserved to be shared with the world (or at least the gaming world). And it’s been my dream to get it all up on the web. That does, however, take a LOT of time. More than I generally manage to have, that’s for sure. But a while back I finally started taking some steps in that direction. I typed up the first fifty updates and got them into Word files, doing one a night for a while. When that was done, I finally had all the issues (sans the missing ones…but that’s another story) typed and in one place. Then the much more daunting task stood ahead. Getting all the OTHER ones, now existing only as typed copies (with the exception of some of the later ones that made it into text files), onto a computer. This would require OCR-scanning, and a LOT of it. And if you’ve ever tried it, you know what a hassle it can be. The words don’t always scan right (particularly if, say, a certain gamemaster saved money by going to a cheap copy store back in the day and handed out the occasional too-light or blotchy update copy…but I digress…), and you have to go through and format them heavily to get them looking like they should. But, it still beats retyping everything, that’s for sure. This is the one step that really kept me from getting on such a project, but to my amazement, a certain Aaron Storck (another Forte player and current Forte site writer) decided to surprise me and made a project of scanning. And he scanned ALL of them, and emailed them to me big Word files. The biggest headache was done! Now I was left with a lot of world-jumbled giant files to jump in an reformat, and soon, I hope to get them all reading right and all stuck up on web pages, where the old gang—and hopefully, some new readers—can kick back and enjoy them, from the beginning. This is the goal of Forte Prime, the site that will, eventually, present to you the whole eight years of the original Forte campaign (and for those who’ve read the latter-day online tales, finally the whole picture!). It will take time. Make no mistake. But I’ve always found I’m more motivated if I start with small steps and build on what I’ve done. That ability to look back and see that you’re actually making progress really gets the fires lit to make more progress. So I’ll try. And while this site will, I’m sure, look quite a bit different when it’s all complete (at the moment, it’s still considered a “sneak preview”), I wanted to give myself that motivation (and put that pressure on myself) by at least getting started. And here’s where it begins. Being the longest and toughest (and most important) part, I’ll be working though the updates first. And then, with those done, I’ll be creating the online version of the original “Forte Index”, a tool K.C. created to help with research for himself and players during the game, a listing of each and every character (good, bad and otherwise) that appeared in Forte and listing what issues they popped up in. This time, though, the online aspect will make things a lot easier, allowing a researcher to simply find a character name, click on an issue number that character appeared in, and go right to that particular issue. Yeah, THAT won’t take too long. But hey…if Forte’s taught me anything, it’s to dream big. And hopefully, one day, the dream will be realized, and Forte Prime will be the place where you (yes, you!) can come to to experience the grand tale of a group of amazing Seattle heroes that fought, lived, loved and sometimes died side by side, saving their city, the world, and on more than one occasion, the universe. It’s a story worth sharing. It’s an adventure worth going on. 3. “For a Day or a Lifetime” I remember watching the movie “Stakeout” once, back in the late 80s, a film that took place in Seattle. Which fascinated me as a Forte player, of course, because in my “real life”, I’d never actually BEEN to the city that my alter-ego, Dr. Jackal, spent so much time cruising around in. There was a scene where two characters were driving into the city, and the camera was on the Seattle city limit sign. It said “Welcome to Seattle. For a Day or a Lifetime”. There were a lot of role-playing games available back in those days, as I’ve said. And a lot of campaigns sprung up by the playing of them. Thing was, “campaigns” were rarely worthy of such a name. Groups of friends who would get together to game were, by and large, people who really put the A.D.D. in AD&D. As in, the attention spans of gerbils. People would get together at Steve’s house on a Friday night, and Steve would have this great new idea for a campaign (or Steve might have just bought a new “module”, or pre-made adventure written by the game company for easy running). Everyone would make characters, all filled with excitement and expectation. And Steve would run one game. Maybe two. And then something would happen. Steve would get bored. Steve would have another idea for a campaign. Or Steve would want to change gears and try a whole new game (spies one weekend, wizards the next). This would lead to the campaign that had just been born suddenly ending, and being tossed on the pile of countless thousands of games that had potential, but were abandoned before they ever truly began. And then it was time to make NEW characters. And a new campaign began! And then…well, you can probably see where that’s going. Gaming doesn’t have to be a long-term thing. Sometimes people just want to get together with their buddies, have some fun, roll some dice and kick some demon ass. No commitment, no heavy effort, just some light sword-swinging revelry. For some, that’s enough, and that’s great. Sometimes a campaign only has to last a day to serve its purpose for those taking part in it. But sometimes, and it’s a very rare sometimes, a campaign comes along that just WORKS. It feels right. It comes alive. Everyone involved learns to love it, and it somehow, inexplicably, becomes a part of their lives from that point on. Sound hokey? Or, for that matter, nerdy? Maybe so. But anyone who’s ever picked up a handful of dice and taken a character they’ve created out into the sunlight for the first time walks into that experience with that possibility in the back of their mind. What if this isn’t just a guy on a sheet that smacks bad guys around for a few hours? What if this character made it past this week…and the next week…and continued on in countless adventures, and grew not only in strength and experience but in character and personality? What if that collection of points (rolled up or spent, depending on your game system) became a legend in his world, lived through the greatest battles, developed friends and enemies alike that would return to his game life again and again? What if he lived in that game for so long that he married and had children, and watched his children grow? What if that character was around for so long that he had more depth and story and layers in him than most characters in the popular fiction these games were meant to emulate? And what if he was part of a team that all went through it with him, equally amazing heroes that took the great journey together? For those who’ve gamed and never experienced that level of character and story—by choice or by circumstance—they don’t know what they’re missing. Yes, you can game for a day. Or, if your luck hits just right, and you’re with the right people, maybe, just maybe, that game will be with you for a lifetime. For some of us, that game is called Forte. And we hope you’ll watch this page grow, and take that journey with us again. From the beginning. This page is for K.C. and Tim, for Jeff and Kaye. For Kevin and Randy. For Adam and Jim K. For Andrea and Logan. For Jim M. and Aaron and Ben. The heroes of Forte. And friends for a lifetime. Michael O’Connell |
