I love a good organizational acronym...usually a backronym...in my gaming. From SLOP, to the CROwN, to BADGER, to the Agents of SKA, to...well, probably some others I'm not remembering...there's definitely an argument to be made that I've spent too much time playing with letters in my head for the purposes of organizations that don't actually exist.
In addition, those who have paid close attention to the RPG settings that have interested me over the years (no, I don't expect that to actually apply to anyone) will know that I have had a long-running fascination with applying the portal fantasy trope to my games. The earliest expression of this that I can remember took place at my bachelor party back in 2011 (celebrated at Con Nooga), during which I DM'ed a short adventure built on the premise of an Earth expedition into a dungeon on another world. Because I'm a sucker for a good acronym, I started out with the plan that the adventuring team would represent the United Nations League of Terran Defense...or...♬dunh dunh dunh♬...
UNLTD
By the time I actually ran the adventure, the org had changed into the Unaffiliated League of Terran Defense, or UnLTD. Because that's...more rebellious...? I'm not really sure, and I was never sure how to feel about that lowercase N (especially when I thought about logos), and I always kinda felt like a "League of Terran Defense" sounded more like the human protagonists in a kaiju story than what I was using it for.
Anyway, this idea would ultimately see publication in Fight On! #14 as "Agents of the CROwN," as the fictional team was redirected to the Council for Research on Otherworldly Narratives...also featuring Kelvin's clean and distinctive artwork...
Now, the Stargate reference that Kelvin brought into the mix isn't really something I had thought of, but it made so much sense and would go on to influence my thoughts on portal fantasy gaming quite a bit in the decade-plus since then. I eventually realized that some variation of Stargate + D&D is actually a pretty common idea to pop up in online RPG discussions. (This will come up again, gimme a sec...!)
So then, quite a while (more than 2.5 years) ago, when I was in one of my phases of thinking a lot about gaming with 3.75-inch toy soldiers, I started tagging my posts with "UnLTD." I think I was zeroing in on that as a name for the ruleset, as the whole "League of Terran Defense" idea kind of seemed to work, and the name could imply the unlimited possibilities of gaming with the huge variety of 1:18-ish scaled figures out there. But...somewhere along the way I hit on the name People of Adventure, which could be a tribute to Fisher Price's Adventure People (one of the OG toylines in that scale) and could be abbreviated POA...almost clever as the name of a game with action figures.
Recently, though...I was thinking about some of the figures I need to stat up for the game. These are some that I think my Mom found at Dollar Tree and kindly sent my way...
And I couldn't help but get Stargate vibes from these. And then, at some point, it hit me: The absolute LEGENDS among 3.75-inch action figures (for a lot of us, anyway) are the G.I. Joe and Star Wars lines...and isn't Stargate kind of a wacky combination of those two?
For whatever reason, now that I'm thinking about the figures that way, the name UNLTD seems pretty good again! Why wouldn't the United Nations put together a League of Terran Defense to protect Earth from fantastic invaders (and potential invaders) from other worlds?
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| Yeah, that gun is something else...I'm gonna have to have a post on that, I think... |
I think that UNLTD lives on...!
(As I always write when I don't know how to end things...more to come!)
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