Session 0.0 – The Plan Aka a long and boring introduction into how we got here.
It all started when my little boy told me at Daycare the teachers use the mission impossible song as their clean up song. He said that if they clean up before the bomb goes off they get to watch it explode. Curious, I asked him if knew what that song was from and being 5 of course he did not. So over the next couple of days we watched select clips from the movies, you know the ones I’m sure. The ropes from the roof, the rock climbing, nothing inappropriate for a 5 year old. And me being a victim of undiagnosed ADHD of course then took this to a whole other level for myself haha.
You see, a long time ago my friends got super into The A Team but me, being an intellectual, well I got a collection of the old 1960s Mission Impossible dvds. I just never got around to watching them. It’s a slowburner of a show most of the time, at least from what I have seen. So I started watching those.
And recently for other reasons my wife and I subscribed to the Dropout app, mostly to watch game changer with dinner. And wouldn’t you know it, Dimension 20 has a game called “never stop blowing up” which I had seen clips of. I binged it and loved it to pieces.
Back when my friends were watching The A Team we had regular saturday roleplay sessions and this one time we played this amazing game called Millennium’s End. The GM at the time put a real life stopwatch on the table for all to see and was like “you have exactly this long to find and disarm the nuke or its bye bye miami!” It was an amazing experience, riveting and thrilling and full of action hero tropes. We really leaned into that experience. Watching “Never Stop Blowing Up” reminded me so much of that game. I got super nostalgic for it. The thing is, I never owned the Millennium’s End book.
But I did own Spycraft. I had bought it as it was required for the Stargate SG1 roleplaying game. (Again, I never got to play that either.) I also have the 1960s era pdf for that.
Simultaneous to all of this I have also been trying to experiment with Solo RPG playing. My regular group has been on and off lately. I have also been in a weird spot, with sick kids, a new job, my wife changing her career, and just generally being exhausted A.F. I haven’t been able to get in some games. So I have been playing around with different solo games and trying to find something that works for me.
I think I kind of have the vibe I’d like to chase, using some tables from Mythic GM emulator and some chatgpt here and there, and just good old fashioned making shit up. Now that I had my facilitation of a game I just needed a system/story to get into.
Originally I was planning on using the new DnD 2024 PHB to make a character and learn the system, but honestly I am kind of burnt out on fantasy stuff. I have been playing World of Warcraft a fair bit recently, and I just finished smashing out my Mystic Times Campaign Setting (a project 22 years in the making). Every time I went to sit down and do anything with that I just lacked the zest of life to continue.
And then my boy told me about their clean up song at daycare.
So my current plan is to dust off my old Spycraft d20 rpg book and do some world building and have a crack at making something of it. To keep me honest, I plan to try and rekindle my website a bit by recording the process on my Ranger’s Blog. I am inspired by my good friend Luke (Van Dorne) who has built up his amazing blog over at Building Paper Mountains. Even though he hasn’t posted there for a while, he definitely has built up quite a collection of resources over the years. I know he also does some solo play stuff so I am hoping to share this with him along the way and he can keep me honest/give me a few pointers.
In the next post I am going to talk about the world building and follow that with character creation, and then after that the following post will be my first action report writeup for it all. See You all then.
Ciao for now!
-Arjade
