In Praise of Run out the Guns!

In 1998, Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) published a boxed set called Run out the Guns! RotG! It was a condensed version of the current edition of Rolemaster (3rd edition I believe), set in a historical milieu of the Golden Age of Piracy.

As today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, it felt apropos to post this.

In regards to RotG!, I've longed for a copy of my own since I managed to play it at an all-night RPG event (sometime in 2008/2009 when I lived in Utah), and I had an absolute blast with it. Something about it clicked for me, and I was thrilled to find a good-condition copy today that I managed to snag for well less than the going market rate.

Anyone who knows or follows my work knows I love "straight" historical gaming with no frills. I don't need magic to have a good time, just give me some real-world historical drama to hang a hook on, and let's go. I particularly enjoy Age of Sail-style roleplaying games. Master and Commander, piracy, the classic Errol Flynn.

Run out the Guns! was my first real "straight historical" roleplaying game (everything previously was D&D, World of Darkness, et al.) and I bit into it hard. The character creation was punchy (at least as I remember it), and the rules/historical facts were detailed enough to sink your teeth into without weighing you down too far.

Getting your leg blown off? No magic healing! Get a peg leg and learn to live with it. Combat was lethal, punchy, and to the point, and you often didn't want to engage in it!

I remember my character well, a French ship's carpenter who (due to the seduction rules working of stamina) got himself into quite a bit of trouble in port, and often found himself working frantically to repair damage to the ship. It was shocking to me how engaging a non-combat activity during combat was, and to this day, I can't forget how much I was influenced by it.

Sadly, Run out the Guns! is no longer in print, and it isn't' available in PDF anywhere I can find. Hopefully one day it is!

A lot of this is filtered nearly 15 years later, and as such, I am left mainly with the feelings the session inspired, rather than concrete memories and details to rely on. But I suppose for a lot of us gamers who started young, those feelings and memories are what we are chasing a lot of the time.

I'm looking forward to my copy arriving and myself being able to review it and see if my memories hold up.

Today's Recommendation

While Run out the Guns! is no longer available, other games that scratch a similar itch are!

This one is my personal favorite. Tom Mecerdy's Shot & Splinter is a fantastic naval hexcrawl built on a razor-edge OSR chassis (its inspiration in Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast is likewise fantastic). I think they're well worth your time (and I intend to start a campaign of them soon enough).