Game Hacking in the Cold War Era

If you read my first post on Geekcentricity, you know the bare bones on how I was first introduced to role-playing games.  That was almost 30 years ago.  I know, I'm ancient.  I'm that old guy saying, "back in my day, we walked ten miles to school in four feet of snow."  But there were some great things, as far as gaming goes, happening then.  The first was, in the days before the internet (yes, Virginia, there really was a time when we didn't have that) - accessibility.

Back in the early 1980's, there were "mom & pop" toy stores around town.  There was even one in the local mall.  That toy store, which was later bought out by a national chain and then closed, was where I bought most of my first Dungeons & Dragons books, dice and miniatures.

There was another large toy store a few miles down the road from the mall that also carried Dungeons & Dragons materials until the whole anti-D&D craze took off in the area.  The one benefit of that is that when they discontinued everything in the gaming section, I was there with my friends to buy it all at greatly reduced prices.  I even found an original printing of Deities & Demigods, with the two extra chapters, that had fallen behind the rack long ago.  They sold it to me for $5.  Most of the adventures were marked down to $2.  We cleared that place out in a hedonistic frenzy of consumerism.

There were even a few dedicated gaming stores around town then.  If it was published, you could go to one of them and purchase it.  Every now and then, my friends and I would find a way to make the nearly two hour pilgrimage to the Green Dragon in Charleston.  I think it's still there, though I haven't been in years.

Now, we have the internet for accessibility.  There are still some exciting things going on in the hobby.  To me, the most exciting is the number of "indie" game publishers quietly turning out excellent products in the shadows of the juggernauts (Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, etc.).  There are dozens of small companies and individuals creating some great games with either fresh ideas or revisitations of classic ideas in new ways.  I've heard many people say that the tabletop rpg hobby is dying, being eaten alive by console gaming and mmorpgs.  Personally, I think there is a renaissance on the horizon.  The electronic publishing formats, coupled with technology like the iPad, have a universe of untapped potential to change the gaming hobby as we know it.

Personally, I just hope to get something out there that somebody wants to play.  I want to write something that I want to play and then make it accessible to others.  I'm not talking about a revolution.  I'm just talking about finding a hole, a niche, and filling it.

Back in the early 1980's, D&D was the only game in town and Ronald Reagan was playing cold war chess with Leonid Brezhnev.  I wanted to play a game that reflected all of the cold war angst that was in the air.  The problem was, it didn't exist.  Sure, there was something close.   A little game called Top Secret.  Which was close, but not quite what I wanted.  To use modern video games as an analogy, Top Secret was Splinter Cell when I wanted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It was also brand new and not very fleshed out.

So I did a little game hacking.  I worked from my beloved Mack Bolan: The Executioner series of books (along with all the other tie-in series') by Don Pendleton (and others).  I borrowed a few things from Top Secret, but mostly just hacked Dungeons & Dragons into a game that I called Terrorist Wars.  It was about as immature an effort as you would expect from a twelve year old kid.  It was about as comprehensive and complete as anything an obsessed twelve year old could create.  I filled a pretty thick loose-leaf notebook (on college-ruled paper - I always use college-ruled paper) full of rules.  I had stats for just about every gun you could think of (I got them from a Mack Bolan weapons locker book I had and created stats for them).  I had character classes from Soldier to Spy to Assassin, complete with character advancement charts and everything else that standard D&D classes had in the Players' Handbook.

The game was actually pretty popular among my friends for a few years and several groups I played with seemed to always want to play Terrorist Wars instead of Dungeons & Dragons.  I was always happy to oblige and constantly revised it.  Somewhere around 1985-1986, the game got put away and never taken out again.  Maybe it was Glasnost.  Or maybe we had finally outgrown the game.  Either way, I look back fondly on my first game hack.

Okay gamers.  Here's my question of the day: Have you ever hacked a role-playing game and made a new game out of the rules?  Tell me about it.  What was it called?  What was it about?  Did you ever play it?  How did it go?