The following material is copyrighted as indicated in the body of text. It has been posted to this web page for archival purposes, and in doing so, no claim of authorship is expressed or implied, nor is a profit being made from the use of the material. Three young men were charged with conspiracy to commit murder late last month after police in Brockville, Ont., twigged to their alleged plan to randomly stalk and stab a police officer at a downtown party. Rifts is one of the most popular role-playing games in Edmonton, according to Darrell Minty, manager of Warp 2's sister store. Rifts is set in a distant future involving dimensional travel and intelligent robots.
Players do battle, with the outcome usually determined by a dice roll.
And hostility to police, said gamer Jay Fowler, is key to the plot. Minty, meanwhile, said he doesn't buy the idea that police could have mistaken a role-playing game for a conspiracy to kill. People who play these games like to stay in a cosy room with a refrigerator nearby and eat cookies. This is the sort of thing the media just loves to jump on. The three Brockville-area accused made a brief court appearance yesterday.