Ask the Author: Shannon Appelcline
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Shannon Appelcline
The Platinum Appendix for Designers & Dragons contains a history article on my own roleplaying group, the RuneQuest Mafia. You can also find it on RPGnet in my Advanced Designers & Dragons column.
For the last decade or so, I've mostly been running games. There have been notable campaigns for AD&D 1e, Elric, D&D 3.5e, Mongoose Traveller, and Pathfinder. I most recently ran a short game of Mouse Guard that was warm up for a Burning Wheel game that I'm hoping to debut in the near future. You can find Actual Play (AP) writeups of all of those at RPGnet. I believe the Pathfinder was the longest of those, at 71 sessions over four and a half years.
The longest-running games that I've run in have been Ars Magica and RuneQuest. The Ars Magica games ran as four different campaigns from 1991-1999. The first two were connected and ran somewhere over 100 sessions and led to my writing _The Roman Tribunal_ book for Ars Magica, which was my first RPG supplement. The RuneQuest campaigns were all set in the same world, my friend's Erzo, and also ran as a number of different campaigns: 3 or 4, depending on how you count it. They also ran sporadically, with the earliest beginning in 1989 and the last ending in 2004. I have no idea of the count of those games, but I'm sure they exceeded 100 together as they ran weekly for a couple of years at a time for each campaign.
My longest running character in Ars Magica was probably Rupes, an annoying and manipulative elementalist. (My own web site, erzo.org, has write-ups of many of those Ars Magica games.) My longest running character in RuneQuest was probably Kidzen Teko, an annoying giant rabbit fighter. Generally, my characters are troublemakers. Those guys both fit the giant-lug-who-gets-into-trouble-because-he-doesn't-better archetype, as opposed to the mischevious-troublemaker archetype.
For the last decade or so, I've mostly been running games. There have been notable campaigns for AD&D 1e, Elric, D&D 3.5e, Mongoose Traveller, and Pathfinder. I most recently ran a short game of Mouse Guard that was warm up for a Burning Wheel game that I'm hoping to debut in the near future. You can find Actual Play (AP) writeups of all of those at RPGnet. I believe the Pathfinder was the longest of those, at 71 sessions over four and a half years.
The longest-running games that I've run in have been Ars Magica and RuneQuest. The Ars Magica games ran as four different campaigns from 1991-1999. The first two were connected and ran somewhere over 100 sessions and led to my writing _The Roman Tribunal_ book for Ars Magica, which was my first RPG supplement. The RuneQuest campaigns were all set in the same world, my friend's Erzo, and also ran as a number of different campaigns: 3 or 4, depending on how you count it. They also ran sporadically, with the earliest beginning in 1989 and the last ending in 2004. I have no idea of the count of those games, but I'm sure they exceeded 100 together as they ran weekly for a couple of years at a time for each campaign.
My longest running character in Ars Magica was probably Rupes, an annoying and manipulative elementalist. (My own web site, erzo.org, has write-ups of many of those Ars Magica games.) My longest running character in RuneQuest was probably Kidzen Teko, an annoying giant rabbit fighter. Generally, my characters are troublemakers. Those guys both fit the giant-lug-who-gets-into-trouble-because-he-doesn't-better archetype, as opposed to the mischevious-troublemaker archetype.
Shannon Appelcline
Chaosium's classic RuneQuest. Most people loved RQ2, but my best experiences were with RQ3.
I'm actually a fan of most of the BRP family of games. Most of my roleplaying writing experience before Designers & Dragons was in that category, with publications for Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, Nephilim, and some scattered, small stuff for RuneQuest itself as well as Elric.
I'm actually a fan of most of the BRP family of games. Most of my roleplaying writing experience before Designers & Dragons was in that category, with publications for Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, Nephilim, and some scattered, small stuff for RuneQuest itself as well as Elric.
Shannon Appelcline
You mean the Epic Collections that are theoretically reprinting the entirety of their comics? A big huzzah! There's so much great old stuff in the archives of the comic publishers. It's terrific to have one of the big two taking a really long look at getting *everything* in print.
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