Current Campaigns of the RRVGG

      The RRVGG does not have any presently active campaigns though there is hope that will change soon. The anticipated host locations are likely to be at one of two residences OR at the Community Center Meeting Room for 4-5 hour game sessions IF enough players joined the group and were willing to pitch in for the rental of that host location.

Past Campaigns

      The RRVGG has had tens if not hundreds of campaigns with some going as far back as 1993 and STILL not reaching the climax. Others were the equivalent of a television miniseries. Still others went on like a very episodic television series. All in all they were good fun whether sitting as a Player or Game Master!

      This was the VERY first campaign run by the new RRVGG in the RIFTS® World. It was a pretty stock mercenary/bounty hunter campaign but it was so different from what players had experienced before, where high technology and science- fiction meets fantasy and magic, that I believe we were all instantly and irrevocably hooked. It first started with a skirmish played out between Kingsdale™ and the Coalition States®, in which Kingsdale™ emerged victorious and the CS State of Missouri wound up with a black eye. Immediately after that mini-campaign After that We adventured, searched out ruins for profitable salvage goods - including some really far fetched finds like a Vietnam War era AC-47 and an authentic Richard Petty stock car but it was all good fun. The biggest thing we did however was to go after the worst scum of North America, from smugglers, to murderers, to profiteers, to rapists. As mercenaries we helped Kingdoms to rise and toppled others. This campaign ran from 1991 to 1993, when it culminated in an anti-CS campaign led by a power known as The Colony, composed of twins with a unique mystical bond and amazing super powers. By that point our game world was kinda goofy in that it contradicted the books in so many places that we decided it was time to move on to a brand new RIFTS® game world. This made "Wanted - Dead or Alive" the first and last campaign of our very first game world.

      This was a supplementary RIFTS® game put together by Jan Knoell to play when Edward A. May was not available. It was an espionage, mercenary and assassin group for hire based out of Kingsdale™. They went on several jobs, assassinated spies, world leaders, and even made an attempt on Joseph Prosek while playing in a Universal Football League. (He survived, but as a partial conversion cyborg!) "One Shot, One Hit, One Kill" ran from 1992 until 1993.

      This was the very first true campaign of the new RIFTS® game world set in the Vampire Kingdoms™ among the ranks of Reid's Rangers™. We had a riot playing in this campaign slaying vampires, liberating towns and eventually even defeating a couple of vampire intelligences. While with Reid's Rangers™ we made trips to the 'Burbs™ of the Coalition City of Chi-Town™ to acquire weapons and even tangled with the Mechanoids® in a side campaign. Reid's Rangers™ ran from 1993 to early 1994 when our characters started to see just how messed up the core Rangers were and eventually struck out on their own. That factor aside this campaign proved the crucible from which the most prolific heroes of our RIFTS® emerged.

      Many of the characters active in the Reid's Rangers™ campaign became dimensional travelers/adventurers during which we adventured, explored, quested for legendary artifacts or weapons, tracked down and captured or ended villainous criminals, tyrants and madmen alike throughout the Megaverse®. We did everything from one player-character adopting an orphan as his own daughter, to building new nations with hope and principles all the way to saving entire worlds. While there was really no central theme to this campaign it was a continuous series of games that interconnected, mingled and compounded upon one another until many of our player characters became known to vast swaths of RIFTS® Earth and even entire worlds in Dimensions far separated from their home. During this campaign the Gathering of Heroes in Africa occurred. A subsequent anti-vampire campaign forced the Vampire Kingdoms™ to regroup and cooperate with one another for survival's sake and in a few cases change their ways to stave off the wrath of these characters."Infinite Realities, One Group of Heroes," was the longest running campaign of the RRVGG continuing from 1994 all the way to 2012 - with the remaining members of this campaign now relegated to NPC status.

      This campaign was a whole new brand of fun in role-playing and putting ones' personal beliefs aside and immersing yourself into the beliefs of those kept in the dark about the truth of the world around them. Back in Black was an entirely Coalition States® military and adventuring campaign. Appointed to Odessa Lone Star, an insignificant border outpost at the south western border of the Coalition States®, rife with corruption and slovenly behavior, our characters spent two years whipping these troops into some of the best in the Coalition States® - eventually becoming the core to what would be the CS Special Forces. (Strangely our story line was nearly perfectly mirrored in the later book RIFTS® Mercenaries under Col. Larsen's background!) Running from 1994-1996 on a near weekly basis and a brief return to it in 1998 (Alternating between this and "Infinite Realities, One Group of Heroes," our characters reached high levels and became fairly high ranking officers in the military, with one achieving the highest rank recommended for a player-character, Colonel. By the end of the campaign our characters also were more worldly in knowledge but realized that it was dangerous to voice any sort of sympathy or reluctance to discriminate against D-Bees™. In fact some of our actions and conversations may well have gotten us charged with Treason but the campaign never turned in that direction as we still followed orders and executed them in a manner that was satisfactory.

      The next in our series of military campaigns was also Orelian Command which was a mercenary campaign based out of Center, on Phase World®. Orelian Command was a strange unit though, composed of alien ships, nobody in Three Galaxies® were familiar with and were primarily manned by Terran crews. As it turned out they were from the nearest neighboring galaxy to the Three Galaxies®! Within that galaxy was the Phase World® version of Earth, the forgotten homeland of the Terrans in the Consortium of Civilized Worlds™ in a futuristic version of the Robotech®/Macross II® saga. They were there trying to build a large mercenary unit on the backs of obsolescent military equipment to forge it into a new branch of power and then to return to their own galaxy with these mercs in tow for an anticipated future show down with the dreaded Marduk®. Our characters were based off of the OCS 17 Stella, a Corvette as described in one of the Macross II® ship books. As part of Squad 17 we were the Special Forces element that did all of the ground operations, did a lot of EVA ops and similar. We fought against the Trans- Galactic Empire™, Smugglers, Vacuum Wasps, Pirates and of course the Marduk®. The pinnacle of our campaign was when we managed to stop a Trans- Galactic Empire™/Marduk® Alliance from being forged which would have spelled the end to not only to Earth but likely to the Consortium of Civilized Worlds™ and the United Worlds of Warlock™! The campaign ran from 1996 to 1998 but ended abruptly before the climax of the campaign where we would travel to their galaxy and play our role in the war against the Marduk® when two of the key players in the campaign Dan J. Beaton and Clinton E. Knoell moved away. The ending was instead narrated to add to player-characters involved in the campaign to move on to other games and to provide to their backstories.

      This was without a doubt the most intense campaign of any of our experiences. The Skies Over Tolkeen™ game was set up after waiting YEARS to see the Siege on Tolkeen™ BOOK as it was originally supposed to be. Finally in 1998, Edward used previously printed materials, including those printed in the Adventure Booklet that came with the RIFTS® Game Shields and created our own Tolkeen™. In retrospect most players were thankful that this was how it was done because it remained more true to the setting by using previously printed materials than the canon Coalition Wars® books penned by Bill Coffin & Kevin Siembieda. The unique twist to the campaign though was that this player-character group were volunteer pilots for the Royal Tolkeenite™ Air Force as part of the 9th Royal Tolkeen™ Air Force Fighter Squadron. While primarily focused on the air war in which We battled the black aircraft of our enemies, defended the cities of this great kingdom with our lives and supported the boots on the ground but we also occasionally were required to engage in battle on the ground as well. In the process we made friends and lost them, as is true in any war, but the NPCs in this campaign somehow seemed more real than those in any other previous campaign. Maybe it was because we knew everything there was to know about them. Maybe we were all actually experiencing shell shock from the vivid setting. All we know is that this was the ONLY campaign in which there were tears around the table at the loss of an NPC in the game. Traumatic as it may have been though I do not think a single one of us would ever give away our experiences in this game. This campaign ran from 1998 to 2004 which made it the single longest running focused objective campaign in RRVGG history. It was rotated around with a couple of other campaigns but the lure of the Tolkeen™ War always drew us back until her final fall. It should be noted that during the penning of the Coalition Wars® books discussions between Bill Coffin and Edward A. May did transpire and information was exchanged between the two in regards to our own campaign which MAY have contributed to some of the material that appeared in the Coalition Wars® Sorcerer's Revenge™ book. It corresponded loosely with a phase of the war that took place in our campaign a few game-months into it which was code named "Sorcerers Fury," after the spell. The canon version lacked considerable substance and detail which utilized the unique climate of Minnesota in that region to create a "Perfect Storm" setting in which nearly any military would be hard pressed to push forward while giving an enemy that could control these and other weather effects an insurmountable advantage. It is the opinion of this Webmaster that the likely reason this was not included was to allow for the bulk of the armies which were nearly annihilated in our campaign to somehow survive undetected in the Minnesotan wilderness for a year without detection.

      This campaign began in the Spring of 2004 and ran until the summer of 2006. It was about a mysterious rune sword that fell into the hands of Alekesis Dromana, a Chiang-Ku™ Hatchling Dragon, literally in Hades. Nothing was known about the blade for many years afterwards, though she carried it and used it frequently, until a freak accident during a guild ritual broke the mystical restraints placed upon this ancient rune weapon. She soon learned that this weapon was forged by the hand of the spirit it held within in an attempt to end an ancient blood feud. The spirit was not content with simply demanding the blood of his arch-nemesis - but instead he wanted to show her why. Though a great many things, including a long drawn out dimension hopping series of adventures, were planned for this campaign it never quite got off-world, having been interrupted by "The Rescue". Though we planned to resume play after The Rescue, several key characters in this campaign were retired at the end of "The Rescue", leaving Dark Heart to have to wait until the next champion can come along and fulfill his destiny.

      This short campaign was run by Anthony V. May during the summer of 2006, in which Nyan's wife was brutally murdered and Nyan's daughter and the pregnant wife and daughter of the longest running player-character in the campaign, Maddigan Morgan, were kidnapped by unknown forces. We were soon led on a wild goose chase via clues left by the abductors that led us to a pocket dimension somehow linked to the RIFTS® World. Afterwards we were dragged through all manner of supernatural horrors, enemy plots, and ultimately led us to our prize. We soon learned through a bizarre set of circumstances that the Coalition States™ and Free Quebec™ had discovered this pocket dimension and chose to use it as an unlikely trapping point to draw us in and acquire of all things - genetic samples! It was an exciting campaign that kept us all guessing, but ultimately ended the long-running high powered game group with the retirement of several key characters to NPC status.

      "Flashpoint" was a short lived Phase World™ RIFTS® mercenary campaign that began with a dispute over a low gravity planet rife with natural resources that had been claimed by an independent species (of our own creation) a century prior and had left a an automated beacon indicating it as claimed territory. This did not coincide with the laws of a warlike species (also of our own creation) that discovered the same planet a few short Terran decades ago, which dictated that a permanent colony or manned space station was necessary to lay claim to any system or planet and thus disputed the claim. Although the case was posed before the affiliates of the warlike race, the Consortium of Civilized Worlds™, they sided with their friendly neighbor's view as opposed to the independent species views. With neither side willing to surrender their rights to the resources of this planetary body a war was brewing. The real trouble was that these two powers posturing for an entanglement were set within the narrow boundary of space between the Trans-Galactic Empire™ & the Consortium of Civilized Worlds™ and a war breaking out at their border could easily draw both intergalactic powers into it! It was a very fun game because both cultures, philosophies, beliefs and technologies had been thoroughly developed which created an amazing dynamic to the story line for how two species coming to blows might be like when they are so very alien to one another on a fundamental basis. Unfortunately this was a poor choice for a campaign with no less than TEN players plus a Game Master when role-play and detailed descriptions of customs, etiquette and completely foreign technology even when compared to the rest of Phase World™ were major factors inter-spaced with combat between two powers that have completely different philosophies of tactics and strategy. Ultimately this campaign was dropped both due to player disinterest (due to long turn waits) and getting all ten players together on a consistent basis.

      Spec Ops Unit: Anti-Terrorism Task Force was a Ninjas & Superspies™ campaign based largely upon the television show called "The Unit." While the scenarios seemed to work out well on TV the first few sessions of this game saw many player characters killed. After the Club was disbanded and the group fractured, gameplay continued at the Halstad (North) location for some time. It is unknown to this Webmaster for how long it ran or if it ever reached any point of conclusion.

      This campaign was spin-off of the RIFTS®: Skies Over Tolkeen™ campaign which had come to its terrible conclusion a few years prior. It was not a pure military campaign in that it not only involved air combat but it involved a squadron of veteran volunteer Tolkeenite™ pilots aboard a light submersible aircraft carrier called the Typhoon (Taifun) in exploring the Pacific, defending the Republic of the Misty Isles against foreign aggressors that would seek to do her harm, battling pirates & land based adventures to meet with foreign emissaries and to get involved in local situations along the Pacific Coast of both North & South America. It ran for several months with a smaller game group than others of its time in the early 2010s. It did not have a true conclusion but led into a new game of adventure and discovery that would have tied the Misty Isles and all its miriad of existing connections with Mutants in Orbit™. This campaign did not yet have a name and sadly it ended after only a half dozen game sessions or so, due to scheduling conflicts, a player that relocated and the deteriorating health of both Tammy & Tony May. It was the last RIFTS® campaign launched by the RRVGG pending the next game.