Pyramid Pick: Down in Flames

Pyramid Pick

Down in Flames

Published by BTRC

Written by Greg Porter

72 pages, $12.00

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do in a roleplaying campaign is to bring things to an end. It's time to move on, start something a fresh -- a new set of characters, or maybe even a whole new game. But to just walk away from the current story doesn't seem right. There's no closure, no denouement.

Well, if that's your problem, look no further. Down in Flames has more closure than a bickering couple in a door factory. You want to end your roleplaying campaign -- really end it -- then this book is for you.

While it is written for Blacksburg Tactical Research Center's own CORPS modern-day/near-future roleplaying game, the author has kept the stats to a minimum (confined mostly to sidebars) and there's plenty of good ol' plain text descriptions that can be easily hijacked into any number of game systems. And while primarily set in the modern day, it wouldn't take too much work to adapt the neat ideas in this book to many other roleplaying genres.

And there are a boatload of really cool ideas, all based on the premise of bringing your roleplaying campaign to an end by ending the world. Nothing instantaneous and unexpected, mind you -- even as you're ending your RPG campaign, you want to have some fun while doing it. So most of the planet's demises come with warning, or are slow in developing, or both.

The first one presented is your basic global warming disaster -- the seas rise, . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.




Article publication date: October 1, 1999


Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.