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| West End Games' offices, Honesdale, PA, 1993 |
When I first began working at West End Game as the
Star Wars
Adventure Journal editor in the summer of 1993 I passed the
massive
TORG map every day. It sat in a windowless inner
office in the second-floor offices (with the infamous shoe company
and “management” downstairs). Someone had somehow acquired a
huge, wall-spanning world map (possibly from National Geographic,
it’s so long ago I don’t recall) and pinned on it different
notations to show where each
TORG cosm had invaded, such as
triangles of yarn or construction paper circles. This was
the
map, the place where the game-designers could chart the progress of
storm knights from across the gaming landscape. And it was already
too late.
I never got into TORG, the game in which multiple dimensions or
“cosms” of various genres invaded a near-future earth and the
characters – heroic “storm knights” – had to foil their plans
for world domination. But in its heyday in the early 1990s it tried
charting new territory for roleplaying game campaigns...certainly new
for West End Games. It launched in 1990 after an aggressive and
enticing ad campaign. I remember seeing the color advertisements in
Dragon Magazine, then perhaps still the best “pulse” of
the gaming industry. They warned that a storm was brewing, with dark
clouded, lightning-streaked backgrounds and ominous in-universe
quotes from characters spanning several genres. The “Possibility
Wars” were coming. It was going to be “A New Roleplaying Game
Experience.” And it did pretty well initially. Several novels
developed the setting from a literary perspective. The boxed set came
with a slew of rule- and sourcebooks, three decks worth of cards, and
two speckled 20-sided dice. The game line churned out an impressive
slew of sourcebooks and scenarios, along with an occasional
newsletter. I’d daresay it is one of the more notable creations
from Greg Gorden and Bill Slavicsek.
