There’s a new game in town

My first foray into role playing games (RPGs) wasn’t actually an RPG at all.

Rather, it was a computer based word puzzle, “The Colossal Cave” aka “Adventure.” I stumbled upon this game during a computer job back in the late 1970s. The game was written in Basic and ran on a PDP-11. I spent hours playing this silly little game, where commands were as basic as E (for east), U (for up), and so forth.

I encountered trolls, and a green snake in the “Hall of the Mountain King,” gathered treasures, and became lost in a “maze of twisty little passages all alike.” I learned secret words for teleporting between the cavern (‘plugh’) and the house (‘xyzzy’) at the end of the road, the latter, for stashing accumulated spelunking treasures.

Adventure cemented my love for all things coding.

I eventually encountered the “true” (and grandaddy of all) RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), where I was often ensconsed in weekend-long campaigns with my engineering cohorts.

RPGs, or rather, Tabletop RPGs (TTRPGs), as they are now known, and their offshoots, while largely obscure, have continued to flourish, even as online gaming, where multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and their object oriented kin (MUD, Object Oriented, MOOs) attempted to gain their own footholds.

TTRPGs can be further divided into genres. For example Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Humor, SciFi, and so on.

While hard-core TTRPG gamers never strayed far, many of us set them aside for families and careers, the campaigns of yore lost in the cave of time, only to resurface when a TV show such as “Stranger Things” or a new game in town reminded us of those seemingly simpler times. The latest game attempting to make inroads into the scene is the DeiselPunk game, "Fuel Priest," created by Timeless Caverns (@TimelessCaverns).

Though I am quite familiar with Steampunk and moreso, Cyberpunk, this is admittedly the first time I had heard of Deiselpunk. This genre arguably fills the gap that Steampunk (Victorian SciFi), and its Progenitor, Cyberpunk (Futuristic SciFi), leave. That of 20th Century, more specifically, World War II era, SciFi, with an apocalyptic twist.

This new game, "Fuel Priest," heavily focuses upon aviation, or rather, the tools of aviation… planes! So, if you love TTRPGs, like I do, follow them on Twitter, and head on over to Timeless Caverns KickStarter page to donate to the cause.

Let’s get this show in the air!