The Babylon Project Was a Dream Given Form…

Babylon 5‘s main series originally aired from 1993 to 1998, which meant that its peak of pop cultural relevance happened to coincide with the boom in tabletop RPGs based on licensed properties which occurred in the 1990s. When properties like Xena, Men In Black, and Tales From the Crypt were getting licenced games based on them, you could bet that a Babylon 5 RPG would have shown up sooner or later. (The major outlier at the time was The X-Files, though canny publishers realised that the paranormal yarns and conspiracy theories underpinning that show didn’t lend themselves to being copyrighted anyway, with Conspiracy X being especially shameless and the original Delta Green being somewhat more artful about riffing on the concept.)

In fact, two publishers have put out Babylon 5 RPGs over the years. In the noughties, Mongoose Publishing had the licence, and starting in 2003 put out a couple of editions of a D20-based game under the OGL before they pivoted to putting out The Universe of Babylon 5 as a new line for Mongoose Traveller beginning in 2008. The D20 version of the line got a fairly healthy supply of supplements for it, but only a trickle came out for the Traveller iteration before Mongoose lost the licence in 2009.

I don’t know whether Mongoose declined to renew the licence or the IP owners decided to pull it; what is apparent is that no new licensee has stepped up to put out a Babylon 5 RPG since. This seems like a shame; Traveller was, perhaps, a more elegant fit for Babylon 5 than the D20 system was; its psionic power system seems to lend itself better to adaptation to depict Babylon 5-style telepaths than D&D 3.X-derived magic systems were, and Traveller is designed from the ground up to support spacefaring adventure, includes starship rules and ship-to-ship combat as well as human-scale activities, and has a character creation system designed to create characters with a professional history ranging from civilian life to multiple branches of the military. It’s an obvious choice; hell, the Venn diagram of Traveller fanbase and the Babylon 5 fanbase probably resembles a smaller circle almost entirely absorbed by a larger circle to begin with. It feels like a third party using Mongoose’s Traveller OGL – or Mongoose themselves – could have made a decent go of it given more of a chance.

Before Mongoose ever got their hands on Babylon 5, a different publisher had a crack at the setting. Chameleon Eclectic was a small publisher punching about their weight at the time. They were part of a clutch of like-minded game publishers based out of Blacksburg, Virginia; Shannon Appelcline in Designers & Dragons notes that this is home to Virginia Tech, so it seems plausible that they may have had connections via the RPG scene on campus. Other publishers from this neck of the woods included BTRC, publishers of CORPS, and Pinnacle Entertainment Group, publishers of Deadlands (the latter of whom were early collaborators with Chameleon Eclectic on projects like the wargame Fields of Honor and the CCG The Last Crusade); it seems plausible that they were all part of the same local roleplaying subculture with compatible tastes and preferences.

Chameleon Eclectic made some small waves when they emerged in the early 1990s with Millennium’s End, a game tailored towards the technothriller subgenre as popularised by the likes of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. The game’s default setting cast the PCs as agents of BlackEagle, a mercenary outfit fighting terrorists, organised crime, and other ne’er-do-wells in the unravelling society of the not-too-distant future, but from what I hear it did a pretty good job of providing a system which could be adapted to a broader range of concepts in the overall genre.

Charles Ryan, the game’s designer and a key player in Chameleon Eclectic, would eventually go on to supervise the D20 Modern like at Wizards and co-designed its rulebook in 2002, and D20 Modern is “fantasy technothrillers”, so a case could be made that Millennium’s End kind of acted as his “audition tape” for that gig. Certainly, it seemed to get people to sit up and take notice; the game came in at #31 in Arcane magazine’s 1996 “best RPG” poll, and for a little game from a first-time publishing house to beat out Werewolf: The Apocalypse at the height of White Wolf’s popularity in such a poll is damn good going.

The second RPG from Chameleon Eclectic was Psychosis, a step into a more arthouse realm of gaming; the Psychosis system used tarot cards for resolution, and rather than being sold as a conventional rulebook and setting, instead it was sold as a series of rules-plus-scenario packs, such as Psychosis: Ship of Fools and Psychosis: Solitary Confinement, the concept being that in each scenario the PCs would begin with amnesia and through the process of play figure out the weird scenario they find themselves in, with each scenario pack offering a distinct campaign running some 6-8 sessions.

Now, note the following:

• Tarot card-based resolution.
• A common rules system shared between different scenario packs.
• Each scenario pack offers a limited-scope, short-term campaign.
• The only thing the scenario packs necessarily have in common, other than the rules system, is that the PCs begin with amnesia.

This is more or less exactly what James Wallis was going for with Alas Vegas and the Fugue system, and in the 1990s Wallis was very much interested in arthouse-style takes on RPGs, with his New Style line of games published via Hogshead providing perhaps an early model for what we’d later think of as “indie RPGs”, even though they weren’t released via an indie route. It feels likely that Wallis would have become at least faintly aware of Psychosis, so there’s a very real chance that Charles Ryan’s little diversion into high-concept games ended up influencing Wallis’s later misguided boondoggle.

And the third distinct line from Chameleon Eclectic was The Babylon Project – the first Babylon 5 RPG…