Any of you who played
Jeff Dee & Jack Herman's
Villains & Vigilantes "back in the day" probably have some of the same fond recollections of the game that I do. First, the
FGU ads for V&V in Dragon magazine were all it took for me to say to myself, "I want to own that game." Second, I thought it was pretty decent of FGU to include the
game master's screen in the box (Revised Edition, 1982) rather than try to sucker me out of another 5 or 10 bucks later (even if it was in B&W white on a pretty cheap uncoated card stock.) And third, it included the "Laws of the Land," (section 5.5 A), a pretty standard criminal code that helped a high schooler wrap his head around concepts like "criminally negligent homicide" and the differences between first- and second-degree kidnapping.
So what has me reminiscing about learning criminal codes 5+ years before Law & Order started its 20-year run? I have jury duty today. I don't know what it is about me, but I seem to be a magnet for jury duty. No sooner is my ineligibility period over when my next jury summons arrives in the mail. C'mon, man...
FUNK DAT! Hopefully I won't have to spend too much time in
voir dire, which should leave me free most of the morning to concentrate on additional engines, tables, etc. for my
d30 DM Companion.
Oh, and in the picture above (a scan of one of my old character sheets that's been in my V&V box since 1985/6)... I don't remember if the character's name was supposed to be an intentional pun, or if it was just a typo.
I'm pretty sure that if you tell the court you need work on your D&D campaign, you'll be able to get out of jury duty. :)
ReplyDeleteLoved V&V back in the day...it taught me that $250/week was actually a poverty-level income, no matter how awesome that sounds when you're 11, and as you said, aggravating/mitigating circumstances, felonies vs misdemeanors, and so much more ... in what, 64 pages?
Actually, I was done about 11 a.m., but by then I'd had PLENTY of time to hash through the wandering monsters section of my D30 DM Companion (found a way to reduce 18 pages of tables down to about 8). Moreso, I made a used bookstore (local indie) stop on the way home and paid just under 3 bucks for a nice collectible RPG item that sells for about A THOUSAND BUCKS!!! (Blog post on this to follow tomorrow morning.)
ReplyDeleteOh. And I just checked. My edition of the V&V book is only 48 pages. I love the look of that small typeface (I think it's Univers, which is coincidentally what I'm using for Starmasters.)
ReplyDelete