Diplomacy. I was much too old and sophisticated for this role-playing stuff, after all. Still, if this was what the local writers were into, I figured I might as well give it a try.
Famous last words, those.
This Albuquerque gaming group included Walter Jon Williams, Victor Milan, John Jos. Miller, his wife Gail Gerstner Miller, and Melinda M. Snodgrass, all of whom would eventually become important contributors to the Wild Cards anthologies. Royce Wideman and Jim Moore were also part of the group, and my own sweet lady Parris joined in with me. At the time we got involved, the gang was mostly playing a Call of Cthulhu campaign run by Walter, and less frequently Vic’s Morrow Project scenario, so those were the first two games I sampled.
They were great fun . . . and nothing like I had imagined role-playing to be. I had fallen in with writers, and these games were stories. Playing Walter’s game was like stepping into the pages of an H. P. Lovecraft story, except that the characters were more fully realized than Lovecraft’s ever were. There was triumph and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, love affairs and betrayals, and every now and again a shoggoth, too. Our weekly sessions were part communal storytelling and part improv theater, part group therapy and part mass psychosis, part adventure and part soap opera. We created some wonderful characters and lived inside them, and many a night never rolled those funny twenty-sided dice at all.
After a few months, I began to make noises about wanting to try to run a game myself. As much fun as the players were having, it seemed to me that the GM was having even more. He was the creator, the conductor leading the orchestra, the team captain, and the opposing team rolled up in one omnipotent package. “God,” the group called our GMs. Who doesn’t want to play god? I finally succumbed to the temptations and designed my own Cthulhu adventure for the gang. Once I had tasted the joys of godhood there was no turning back . . . even though this particular lot of players were so damned sharp that they unraveled the central mystery of my game about sixteen minutes into the action.
That was more or less where things stood when my birthday rolled around, and Vic gave me that fatal copy of Superworld. The gang had tried another superhero game before my time and hadn’t liked it much . . . but this was a new system, and Vic knew that I was a comic book fan from way back. I had cut my teeth on funny books while growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey. Superman and Batman had more to do with me learning to read than Dick and Jane ever did, and the first stories I ever published were amateur superhero “text stories” in the dittoed comic fanzines. Superworld seemed made for me, and me for Superworld.
What happened next was almost scary. I came up with a campaign and my friends came up with characters, and we began to play, and before any of us knew what was happening Superworld had swallowed us all. At first we were playing once a week, alternating Superworld with sessions of Walter’s game or Vic’s. But soon we stopped playing Morrow Project entirely, and then Call of Cthulhu as well. It was all Superworld. We would assemble at suppertime, play until two or sometimes three in the morning, then postmortem the game we had just played for another hour or so. Many a time dawn caught me while I was driving home from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Within half a year we were playing twice a week, with one campaign running in Albuquerque and a second in Santa Fe, and the same players participating in both. Once, at an especially dull SF con, we adjourned to my room and played Superworld all weekend, leaving the game to do our panels and readings and then rushing back.
A number of characters who would later grace the Wild Cards books made their first appearances in those games, albeit in early “rough draft” versions significantly different from their later selves. Melinda’s first character was Topper, but a Topper who had only her costume in common with the bit player who would appear in Ace in the Hole. Walter’s firstborn was Black Shadow, with powers and personality both rather different from his later Wild Cards incarnation. In the game, Shad was the brother of Vic’s character, who