FAR FUTURES

 GAMING A YET UNSEEN FUTURE

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                          Since my early year encounters with Dan Dare and his ilk, I have been a sci fi fan. From Asimov to Zelazny, I must have read just about every novel that has hit the popular pulp.  As a gamer, I suppose it was inevitable that I would one day turn my literary interests into gaming subjects and so it has come to pass. Being lazy I constructed my universe from a hotchpotch of ideas and inspirations. I followed the Ground Zero Games vision for the early year of the galaxy but avoided introducing aliens. Warp drives were introduced and man exploded into the greater galaxy . I liked Games Workshops good/evil gothic empire and their idea of a civilisation collapse., so my galaxy had one too. This also allowed Golgotha to develop in isolation until rediscovered by the empire. Taking the easy route WH40k was available in all it's fluff , so I extracted the bits relative to mankind and planted it in Golgotha.  The scene is set..                           As I developed the ideas for Golgotha I realised that I wanted to explore all the gaming possibilities of a campaign, space battles , planetary assaults and prolonged fighting groundside. I played around with various systems but finally settled on "BFG" for the space combats, "Prefect" a renegade legion spin off for strategic assault on planets and the wonderful "Dirtside II" for the planetary tactical bits. Thus I set to work.

                   The first stumbling block was the mountains of maps and clutters of paper I was acquiring. Now I am a scruffy and badly organised individual homewise but strangely enough when it comes to gaming I hate clutter!!! It was around then that someone introduced me to an incredible piece of FREEBIE software by Dale Larson called cyberboard. I was using it at the time for what its designed i.e. PBEM gaming when it occurred to me it was a great way to store "living" maps and counters and info. to work once more. Golgotha began to live inside my computer.    

                   Also around that time I joined the BFG-list and kicked the hobby around with others of the same interest. It produced a need to every now and again play some live games. Not really possible here in my corner of Spain . BFG players are hard to find.. There was however Cyberboard. I kept returning to the idea but somehow never got started. Finally that gamers urge gripped me and I started work on the BFG PBEM project. Working with ideas supplied by Ned Smotherman, Bob Henderson, Dex Rolfes etc.. I produced a BFG game box that was identical to the table top game. Only a few major rule changes were necessary to make the game practical and I once more found my way back to eyeball to eyeball (virtually of course) war gaming...