Weirder Tales: A Space Opera

Long ago, when roleplaying games were Sweet Sixteen and I was eighteen going on forty, I had a chance encounter with an enthusiastic game designer named Lee Garvin. Within a year and change, that temporal pebble was an avalanche in my life, as I devoted many keyboard-hours to material for Tales from The Floating Vagabond, Lee's strange little comedy RPG.

Ultimately, my Vagabond time would become obscure; folks who know my work often have no idea I had anything to do with it (maybe to my benefit). But, once upon a time, I was attached to a minor mountain of Vagabond projects, ranging from tie-in comics to GMing advice to magazine adventures to big chunky modules. At one point I was asked by the late Erick Wujcik if he could run one of my Vagabond articles in Amberzine, which makes as much sense as you might suppose.

Almost all of these projects fell to doom, as RPG-things often do. Much of the finished writing ended up repurposed for other games, and, for the record, I did say yes to Erick, then promptly flaked on sending him the article, mostly because it was 1993 at that point, and my time with Vagabond was already coming to an end.

For all of the effort I put into it, just one item made it onto game shop shelves, the 1992 campaign module Weirder Tales: A Space Opera, an acidic Shaggy Dog Joke about Bug-Eyed Monsters, mutations, and novelty telephones. While I'd done a butt-ton of magazine articles by that time, and had already written GURPS Russia (published much later, in '98) this strange little space-adventure became my first book on shelves.

For many years, I had vague intentions to do something with it, to reimagine it for another game, redesign it to my modern standards, things like that. Been busy. Never did any of that, except a flurry of experiments in what Bug-Eyed Stick-Figures might look like.

So, why this, why now? Well, Tales from The Floating Vagabond has been back on the scene. While Lee is no longer with us, his friends have kept the old bar going, with an all-new edition and all-new support material. They also publish PDFs of the 1st Edition stuff ... except for Weirder Tales, since I've been sitting on it, drawing stick-BEMS.

So, let's complete that digital library. Here's the original 1992 module, scanned, spiffed up, augmented, and preserved for the ages. Or at least, whatever portion of the ages might enjoy a Random Mutation Table.

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Special thanks to Robin Jenkins (this module's original editor) and Nick Atlas (original Vagabond editor and contributor) for helping make this PDF better than it could have been without them.