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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dias Ex Machina" data-source="post: 4468435" data-attributes="member: 58907">History of a Game.  Part 1:    I wanted to take a moment to talk about the history of Amethyst…in the real world, that is.  Amethyst began in the shower after I had watched the film Dragonslayer.  Yes, that long ago.  Okay, the film was on CBC and it was probably 1994 or ‘95.  I had this strange habit when I was young where I would take ideas I had seen on television that was not science fiction and skew it into science fiction.  I considered a setting where dragons would rise up from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust and humans were forced into walled cities to survive.  Now, this was years before the film Reign of Fire would be released.  There was no real fantasy in the setting save for the dragons.  All the human characters lived in the various walled cities scattered over the planet.  There were no elves, no demons, and no disruption.  These dragons were not just monsters but the classic fantasy iterations with heightened intelligence, shape changing, and basic magical powers.  They could speak and were both benign and wicked.  The story dealt with one bastion, Angel, and its constant attack from a family of evil dragons to the south.  There was an Asian city within Angel where a Chinese dragon was thought to be hiding.  That creature was the one called Amethyst.  I honestly could not tell you why I thought of that name at the time.  Maybe I thought it was just cool.  I wrote a short treatment and had some ideas in mind.  I shelved the idea as I was trying to be a screenwriter (and that worked out AMAZINGLY) and Amethyst was a little much for spec script.      Then Reign of Fire came out and I got annoyed and forgot about Amethyst, I thought permanently.  Now, I had given up role-playing.  I did not have a reliable group anymore and a girlfriend at the time that didn’t approve of it.  The last game I had done was one from the late ‘90s.  It was a science fiction game called Pathfinder (seeeeeee…).  It ran for nearly two years and collapsed before its final plotline could be resolved.  That’s a common point for many RPG campaigns (am I right, DMs of the world?).  Not long after, I was forced out of my gaming group because of internal politics (It’s an old story.  Gamers start dating, wackiness ensues, etc).  I had attempted it again but every time, it never lasted more than a session.  I figured I had outgrown it.  Then 2002 came.  About this time, my friend, Chris Brown, returned from the south, hoping to rehook with old friends and start gaming again.  He really wanted to try the new version of D&D everyone had been playing where he lived.  I was never as much a diehard fan of fantasy like I was for science fiction.  I agreed to do my Alien-FUZION game for him and a few other friends.  It was an enjoyable game that ran for over a year.  By the end of the Campaign’s 2nd season (I had planned for four…yes, that’s how I run my games), Chris convinced me to take a short break and run a D&D game.  He claimed the new 3.0 rules had resurrected the franchise.  In the end, the Alien-FUZION game collapsed (as they always do, right? RIGHT?).  One player lost his backbone and dropped out from spousal pressure.  The others wanted to try something new.  I insisted on bringing in a friend from a previous game, Brian Duffels.  With Glen Waughtel, Chris Brown, and Mike Alborn, we had a group.  I wanted some originality with the setting so I looked over my old story treatments for inspiration…and Amethyst was the only one.  Chris quickly kyboshed the idea of creating science fiction characters because he really wanted to play a mage.  So instead, the setting became Amethyst with the 3.0 D&D setting crammed into it.  I didn’t even change the names.  Monsters were everywhere and bastions had a real hard time surviving.  We introduced Saints as a science fiction villain and gebermach as a demon armor that killed Brian’s character’s family.  Straight forward enough.  Fairly soon, Mike would leave, Glen would leave, replaced soon by Conan Veitch and Rene Landry.  At this point, it was still a traditional techno fantasy, where wizards could wield lasers if they wanted to.  One player did, and I quickly found out how broken the game could get when technology and magic was used side by side.</blockquote>

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