There is a tendency in life to focus on those things that we almost had, but somehow were just out of our grasp. Perhaps it was the off-color remark that made us miss the chance of a date with someone special or that glare of sun in our eyes that made us miss that perfect gaming winning catch. Whatever it is, we tend to focus a great deal of energy on thinking about what it would have been like had we not missed that moment. What does this have to do with role playing? One word….Underground.

Let me take you back to the mid-90’s, a time when my closet was filled with flannel shirts, and Pearl Jam (shiver) ruled the airwaves. I was in college back then. It was the summer of 1993, and I was staying at school, spending the summer working in a research lab. I had seen ads for a game called Underground in Dragon magazine. The ads were edgy and gritty, and the reviews I read had piqued my interest. All of those adds led me to the local game store and put the rule book in my hands.

I quickly read the rules and was not disappointed. The rule book was full color glossy with artwork that looked like it was straight out of “Aeon Flux.” The layout had hypertext definitions in the margins. It read like some dystopic comic book like Marshal Law. The rule system was a modified version of the old DC Heroes AP system, which I thought was much better than TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes. In short, I had fallen in love with this game.

I read the book twice that summer, but having no one at school to play with, it sat on my desk unplayed. That fall I started to make my own rules for the game, and the next summer I introduced the game to some friends, but ultimately I never ran it. It was 1994, and a little card game called Magic: The Gathering had eaten up my time and most of my money.

A few more years passed, and I had a new gaming group in a new town. I showed the rule book to some friends who became interested in it. At last, its time had come. I re-read the rules for the fourth time. I dug out my old notes, and converted them from AmiPro to Word. I purchased the bulk of the supplements for the game off of eBay. I wrote an initial story arc. My friends and I created characters and started playing. In two sessions the campaign flopped. Why? I don’t know for sure. Bottom line, we wound up shelving the game, and playing something else.

I mourned the failure of that campaign. I was so ready to play this game. I had waited for years before getting this shot, and to fail so quickly was disheartening. I was sure it was not a failure of the game, but rather the running of it. The failure was some breakdown in the social contract or chemistry between myself and the players. The game was good, and I would run it again. I was like Scarlet O’Hara in the middle of “Gone With the Wind.”

“As God is my witness, I will run an Underground game some day.”

Some more years passed, when last summer I was cleaning up my gaming room, and I found my copy of Underground again. It was sitting patiently on my gaming shelf, just waiting. I started to flip through it. It looked just as good as the day I bought it, so I re-read the rules. Then I found out that Mayfair had started to digitize the books into PDFs. Slowly I started buying them up; stockpiling them. I converted my notes this time from Word to Confluence. Then at GenCon this year, I bought one of the last two books I was missing for the game.

There is something about this game that haunts me. Every time I see the rule books on my shelf, I think to myself, “I could run that right now.” All the ideas I have ever had for the game are still trapped in my head until I can put them into the form of a campaign. To make matters worse, I am a much better GM now than I was in the 90’s, and my players have improved just as much, so I know I could give this game a great run… really dig into the subtext of the game, and craft the kind of stories that would make for a great campaign. But I already have a campaign running now, and work and family don’t allow me the time to run multiple campaigns anymore. Faith and patience are my only comfort now. Faith that one day I will sit behind the screen with this game and finally get those stories out of my head, and patience not to tank my current campaign to make Underground happen tomorrow.

For me, until I run Underground, it will always be the one that got away, haunting me by the knowledge that there is a game out there that I could run to greatness, just out of reach.

What was the game that got away from you?