Dark*Matter has been one of my favorite settings for many years – however, other than a very short one-off game some 15 years ago, I haven’t really gotten a chance to run it. D&D 3.x (and then Pathfinder) took us back into a lot of fantasy gaming. I’ve been itching to get back into running a longer modern or sci-fi game for several months now, and a few of my players were wanting the same.
So a few months ago, I brushed my Dark*Matter stuff off to finally run a game, but only played an aborted hour or so… and realized that while I used to love running the Alternity system, it no longer had the same appeal for me. But it was more than just prolonged disuse leading to unfamiliarity… my GM’ing style (and playing style if I think about it as well) has changed. And so, it was shelved again as another GM took over and has been continuing our Shadowrun campaign. And as much as I like playing – especially in the Shadowrun universe with all the recent excellent Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun video games being released, I still always have the itch to GM on a regular basis.
While mulling what to run, I came across a post at ENWorld saying that a new version of TORG was coming out in 2016. I went down the rabbit hole a bit and came across a Savage World’s version of TORG – which seemed to work very well. I’d played a Deadlands Reloaded campaign with the Savage Worlds rules a few years ago, and had a very good time of it (playing Joshue Rivera, a vacquero who uses his Cow-Chip Dynashot to take on zombie cows!). It was then that several ideas for games I’ve been wanting to run began to coalesce in my head. I had been looking for a system that was flexible as well as quick and easier to run; a system that also had modernish settings, was easy to convert material to, or both would be a plus as the amount of published adventure materials for Dark*Matter was extremely limited. Savage Worlds was it! And so last week , the campaign began in earnest.