The year is 1972. Summer break has just begun. Your mom leaves early in the morning and tells you not to get into trouble. As soon as you're sure she's gone, you fill your rucksack with a carton of OJ and a PB&J sandwich, and then you head down to the sandlot to meet up with the other latchkey kids. All of you are at a magic age where you're not too young to make the whole neighbourhood your playground, but not yet too old to fill that space with make-believe.
Well, is it make-believe? Once you're together, each of you takes on a different persona - a brave superhero, a heroic sportsman or a beautiful princess. Together you search for buried treasure, walk down railway lines, battle monsters in the woods and escape from angry adults. Is it a dragon behind the chainlink fence or just a big Dobermann? Is it Nazi gold in the spinster's attic or just cheap forgotten jewelry? Such questions are meaningless; for the line between fantasy and reality has vanished, now that you have entered the world of Baseballs & Basements!
CHARACTER CLASSES
Beastmaster: You are a pretty ordinary kid but you have an imaginary friend who is anything but ordinary & you are inseperable!
Gadget Kid: You can build awesome gadgets and you have a secret treehouse with secret features...
MONSTERS
Anything that's in D&D except reimagined in some way, probably less deadly/scary and more slapstick. Like maybe sahuagin live in the neighbour's swimming pool, goblins in the attic, hell hound in the abandoned house. And generally the way children would imagine them, so no Tolkien stuff, gnomes would be like the Smurfs, elves would be like the Keebler Elves (even though I don't know what those are because I am Australian).
Actually anything that appears on a cereal box is a monster in this game.
Anything from Dust
Cats: They are up to something let me tell you.
Bullies: The lesser sort will just take your lunch money. The older kids may even put you in hospital.
RULES
Well so it's D&D, yeah? (Why would I want to create a new system for anything when D&D is already the best system there is??) But you can't really die. Fuck me that would be depressing. The perma-death equivalent is that you either get grounded (if you're caught by parents) or laid up in hospital (if you're physically injured) or you just lost your nerve (if you got damaged by imaginary monsters? NO. THE MONSTERS ARE NOT IMAGINARY. But maybe if you take fear damage or something.) The point is that you are unable to play for the rest of the summer, and this summer is the whole game. But just as there's Raise Dead there might be ways to bring a PC back.
And levelling up, I'm thinking as you level up you are growing up. When you hit some sort of level cap you must 'retire' by becoming an adult, and it gets all storygamey as you narrate what you grow up to be (i.e. a Gadget Kid might grow up to be a scientist, a Superhero could become a civil rights activist, etc.) But it is bittersweet because you leave all your friends behind. Time is strange; kids come and go from the game, they grow up and move on, but this summer remains. It's the eternal summer, where there's always more dragons to fight.
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
- The guy in Stand By Me
APPENDIX N:
this game which is adorable and sparked this idea in the first place
all the things with pictures above, especially Calvin & Hobbes and Earthbound
(haven't seen this one but what the hell)
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