I Love This Plan! I'm Excited to Be A Part of It!

In 1986, two years after the release of the original Ghostbusters film, a small upstart game company based in New York City called West End Games obtained the rights to publish Ghostbusters, A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game. 

A bit before this game came out I met my good friend of 35+ years now, Joseph Vitaliano Jr., and we played our first session of Ghostbusters.

Confused? I'll let Joe explain...

"Well my first role-playing experience was with you (He means me, Adam). You were my role-playing mentor. I met with you and other friends of yours back at your apartment in Brooklyn. This was while we were in high school. You had put together your own Ghostbusters storyline, using an RPG system of your own creation*. It was there that I first created the character of Dr. Alexander Thorton. In terms of chronology, this was before West End Games came out with their first version of the Ghostbusters RPG.

The Ghostbusters RPG by WEG happens to be the very first role-playing game system I ever bought. How many games of Ghostbusters did I run? That’s hard to say. I must’ve done well over 50 [over two campaigns and a few one-shots]. Some were based on what West End Games gave us through their supplements, others I just made up.

As I have discussed before, I had issues with West End's approach to their adventure design and approach to making it “funny.“ Sometime after running our first Ghostbusters campaign I got a hold of Call of Cthulhu and began running that. Doing so taught me how to run Ghostbusters. In fact, it gave me a basis for analyzing the humor of the original movies. The comedy [of Ghostbusters] comes from the characters themselves, not from the supernatural. Once in a while you have a comical entity like Slimer but the arch-villains are never funny. They mean business. Gozer and Vigo are serious threats. 

Call of Cthulhu became my main RPG [at some point]. I ran and created many adventures for it. I ran some supplements here and there or used them as the basis for my own stories. I want to try to run other genres of games like fantasy, science fiction, or superheroes [or what have you] but I found I really didn’t quite have the knack to do them.

I will say however, that I did have plenty of uses for many RPGs and their given supplements as idea generators for running Cthulhu and Ghostbusters. [Notably] Palladium came out with their own fantasy series, science fiction game, and even Call of Cthulhu-like setting called Beyond the Supernatural."

Before recounting and updating some of our past adventures and opponents, I thought it would benefit everyone to get some insight into Joe's outlook for creating Ghostbusters plots and scenario designs. As I mentioned in my prior post on our Ghostbusters: The Home Office campaign, we rotated GMs but Joseph served as our 'Head Writer' and 'Show Runner'. 

Without his recollections and observations I would be hard pressed to bring you enough material to make this endeavor worth while. 

He's also just the nicest guy. Thanks for helping out with this brother.

Up next...diving into the Ghostbusters RPG Archives!

AD

Barking Alien

*I had no memory of creating my own homebrew Ghostbusters game when Joe mentioned it. I wonder what it was like. Man I wish I'd saved those notes.