#RPGaDAY2023 Day Eleven: “WEIRDEST game you’ve played”.

We played our weirdest game when we let my wife take the mantle of GM, sometime around the turn of the century. It was a dark modern conspiracy-horror campaign set in Britain, it was run in a highly improvised manner, and it was powered by The Window.

For those not around in the 1990s, The Window was a free to download .PDF which provided a generic system for tabletop roleplay:

The Window is a transparent portal into the imagination, a roleplaying system designed with the simple belief that roleplaying is about story and character and not about dice and dick waving.

The Window 2nd Edition, S. Lininger (1997), page 3

The Window uses descriptive language to define the character (instead of numbers) and dice were assigned to a Competency Ladder, from a D4 as best and a D30 as worst. If you needed to test something, you rolled your trait – low was good, the target was a 6 or less.

Alongside FUDGE, this game was my portal into the realm of gaming with fewer rules and much more focus on the roles we played and the worlds we explored. Deb was particularly drawn to this approach and The Window provided her with a strong basis for play.

And play we did. I think we began the campaign originally powered by Alternity but, as Deb didn’t enjoy learning all those rules, she began the second part of the game using The Window.

Deb took us through many adventures set in the modern world with our ragtag freelance reporting crew investigating the weird stuff. The first awesome thing she did was move our timeline along a year and ask every player to tell her how their character had changed in that time.

I remember androids replacing politicians in London, with killer robots being sent to assassinate we humble investigators in Hyde Park. I recall breaking in to an RAF base (“Conningford”?) and discovering an alien disk-shaped spaceship… just before all Hell broke loose and we had to run for it!

Remember those changes in the “year out” between games? We discovered that Chris’ character had been kidnapped by an unknown agency and been implanted with a bionic eye which recorded everything he saw. Others spent time learning new skills or tracking down rogue elements but Chris’ idea was the coolest.

It was all pretty much improvised. Talking to Deb after the game ended, I discovered that she was largely running the game on a few sketched out notes, inspiration from “Fortean Times“, and listening to the crazy ideas that we’d speculate about in-game. She did that classic GM idea of swapping out her original plan for a better idea anytime she heard one.

While the Third Precept of The Window was, “A good story is the central goal,” it was my impression that we played it with a harder focus on the Second Precept: “It is the actor’s responsibility to play their role realistically.” In other words, we had a strong sense that it was important to be in-character and acting as-character as much as possible.

That campaign was not only the weirdest game I’ve played, moving as it did across the wide field of real-world strange phenomena and conspiracy theory, but it was also one of the most enjoyable. I got to be my character and we got to explore the emerging tale as a group.

I’ll always be grateful to Deb for running that mad old game. The greatest shame was when I discovered that the grand over-arching conspiracy probably didn’t exist – it was all in our heads and she didn’t have much more of a clue that we did. Knowing that broke the illusion.

But, boy, we loved The Window.

Game on!