I’ve been a long time fan of the West End Games d6 system, starting with “Ghostbusters“, the very first system they created, where there was a wild ghost die to add some weird and wild results to the game, which was mostly in favor of the ghosts, not the PCs. It was a blast. They added a little more love to the system and we got what is probably THEE best Star Wars game ever made, d6 “Star Wars“.
The company over the years, created a bunch of other games over the years, some hits, some misses. They did at one point (around 1996) create a generic book with no setting, just a bunch of rules for folks that like to make their custom worlds. There was originally one book, called the “D6 System“, and it was a cool concept, and I liked the idea they were trying to go with when making this book, but it was a bit confusing for a GM because there was no real examples and everything was jammed into one book. Sure I made it work after reading it and then made my own space games, or western like games with this book, but I felt there could be more.
In 2003, they decided to split the books up, giving us “D6 Fantasy“, “D6 Space” and “D6 Adventure” in an effort to attract more people, help give examples, bank off the success of Wizards D20 Modern? I am not sure, but it was a change. Each book was a self contained set of rules to help guide a GM to create that type of world with loads of examples. While these books did help, the rules of the d6 system at this point were so crunchy, and a lot of the rules they had in place for say fantasy, just didn’t work correctly, such as the magic system. I did enjoy d6 Adventure quite a bit as it was basically WEG’s version of say D20 Modern at the time and a modern game is easy to run, its mostly whatever you make of it, and often it was just investigation with guns. I did have fun making my own personal Supernatural (based off the TV show) demon/vampire hunting game. Always a blast!
WEG had some interesting licensed properties over the years, like “Tank Girl”, “Tales from the Crypt”, “Men in Black”, “DC Universe” and “Xena & Hercules” to name a few that I see on my shelf as I am writing this.
While West End Games is dead, there is still a thriving community using the Opend6 license to create material to this day, and they inspire me to create my own things here and there. Today I am looking over the d6 books and trying to decide what I want to create, even if its not for a game to play, creating things is a fun project. Let’s see where it goes!
On a final note: I know Gallant Knight Games was licensed the d6 system to make “D6 2.0”, but I am not interested in that or anything GKG really makes, no offense to those folks who enjoy their products, I just don’t myself for personal reasons.