1. First RPG played this year: grinding old Tunnels & Trolls solos, levelling a new Elf Rogue ("really wow Mark did he also wear black and have long hair? Ever consider playing against type?") for use in other solos, but got off-track. Where's that notebook?
2. First RPG run this year: Basic Fantasy back in February. BFRPG's too Candyland for my hardcore ass, much as I respect their process. PUG player group were also meh discord randos. Help LFG.
Or if 2 is first GM for me, this college nerd David babysat me when I was 8, taught me D&D with Holmes & Monster Manual. He wasn't very good, had the map out in the open, just treated it as a boardgame. 2 of my 4 starting characters (!) died, the other 2 I've played for decades since.
Years later I talked to him again, and he'd FOUND JAYZUS (was he lost?) and renounced D&D and was so worried I was into Satanism, which to be fair I was. Jesus sucks, Satan's RPGs rule.
3. First RPG bought this year: Paid $0.00 for Cairn, and it's barely worth that. It's literally a combat system, spell list, very minimal monster list, no setting, no *game* procedures or loop. Sorry, Yochai, but no. Item tokens may be of some use playing Knave (which has everything).
First RPG paid for: Cyberpunk RED. It's relentlessly mediocre/adequate, like Mike realized what a fuckup Gen, 3.0, etc. were, and just made a CP2020+25 years. Stagnant world & design.
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4. Most RECENT game bought. Depends on what you mean.
Ironsworn: Delve is a supplement. Knave 2E hasn't shipped yet, tho I have the beta PDF. Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised, I guess? Depending on timestamp of kickstarter close vs shopping, RoleMaster Unified Core Law.
Mostly I've been buying modules & weirdo sourcebooks instead of new games, which obviously I don't need.
5. OLDEST game you've played.
Technically it's a tie, Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (ed. Eric J. Holmes) (1977), and Tunnels & Trolls 4th Ed (1977).
Most often I use later editions or remakes of both. Holmes is difficult to use as-is for longer games, you need at least OD&D books or Meepo's Companion to extend it beyond 3rd-Level. T&T 4E is a perfectly serviceable game as-is, I prefer or at least put it on par with later ones.
6. Favourite[sic] game you NEVER get to play.
Well, RoleMaster's the obvious candidate, but every new edition/decade I can usually get a group together a while.
Whispering Vault, even explaining the concept makes most players back away slowly and call police. Played it for a few years in '00s.
Underground is great game/setting, but very hard to convince players that homeless superhero veterans on the streets of shitty "future" (now past) 2021 L.A. is gonna be fun.
7. SMARTEST RPG you've played.
HERO is a min-max math optimization game, on top of Champions being a fairly complex world of many factions rather than just one hero/villain group.
Tri-Tac's games, Fringeworthy has a complex game, vastly more than anything else I've ever played, requires a lot of background knowledge of science & technology, and a really open-ended alternate realities setting. Later easy games like Beach Bunny Bimbos With Blasters are so much better.
8. Favourite[sic] CHARACTER
First and always closest to my heart is Grecal the Grey Wizard. Rolled up in my first D&D session, 15 INT & DEX, average stats otherwise. More of a stab-first, dart-throwing, puzzle-solver, 1/day spell is last resort. Survived the first dungeon with his buddy Starkad Giant-Kin, 2 others died and left in that dark hole. Levelled him for years, switched to Illusionist. Last seen leading a Mages' Guild after a dragon-regicide went bad.
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9. Favourite[sic] DICE
Sides? 6. I love d6-only games (Tunnels & Trolls, Traveller, etc.), I think every other die type is either a mistake (polyhedrals) or an abomination (those 10-sided things). "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Manufacturer: GameScience®! I have many sets including polyhedrals. They're so choice, if you have the means, I highly recommend them.
Attached: 3 images Got my clone Holmes dice set in. Good mix of colors & styles, they roll better than Chessex except the marbled ones are shittier (and off sequence! See that back d8‽) Keeping the bottom 2 of each color in my tray. Alas, no orange, pink, or d20 numbered 0-9 (I don't use 10-sided dice). Brown dice are hilariously ugly, gonna use the POOP DIE for really bad shit, that comes up 1 you fall in the latrine. Brand was "Yellow Mountain Imports", just some drop-ship from China. #rpg #dnd #dice
10 Favourite[sic—I will never get tired of this gag] tie-in FICTION.
Counting down:
4. Knight of the Black Rose.
3. Shadowrun: Into the Shadows. Good anthology of cyberpunk + fantasy. The Street finds its own uses for magic.
2. TORG: Storm Knights trilogy, by Bill Slavicsek. "Never life, never death".
1. Dark Conspiracy: Fiddleback trilogy. Lovecraftian horror from Mike Stackpole; often more pulp HPL homage than you expect.
11. WEIRDEST game you've played.
HMM. Weirdest games are ones I haven't played; we made chars and did a little intro in Mechanical Dream, which is the weirdest game I've ever read. But it was <2 hours total time.
Skyrealms of Journe is weird, but not *that* weird, it's basically Metamorphosis Alpha on a planet.
I played and ran a lot of Kult, which gets very weird, psychosexual, kinky, as well as splatter-horror. 1st Ed only, 2nd is unreadable, 3rd is fucking PBTA.
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12. Old game you STILL play.
I almost exclusively play old games (or clones), they're always better! Tunnels & Trolls (pref 4E, some 5E, Deluxe), OD&D (Holmes or Swords & Wizardry), Call of Cthulhu (can't stand 6E+, got the lovely 2E reprint box), Traveller (played Trav Book until recent switch to Cepheus). I'd play Stormbringer 1E, but OpenQuest 2E or my own post-Mongoose d100 mechanics are fine.
What do I even play from this benighted Millennium?
13. Most memorable character DEMISE.
Some perfect GM kills:
I ran GDQ, in Hall of the Fire Giant King, they'd made it to the bottom floor, the river of lava, nobody had died. An angry Fire Giant on their trail, the [SPOILER MAJOR ENEMY] were ahead, they charge across the bridge, giant comes up behind, hits rear guard hard, yeets him right into the lava. 9 levels gone!
Another dungeon, a chute goes down to darkness. PC jumps in. At the bottom is a cell full of ghouls.
14. Favourite[sic] CONVENTION purchase.
Most of my con game purchases have been meh, ephemeral things. Tunnels & Trolls 7E in a tin! Really awful! Nobody liked it!
But I bought my GameScience® dice from Lou Zocchi every time, and I love those.
15. Favourite[sic] Con MODULE/ONE-SHOT
Way back when I was playtesting/kibitzing for the Weapons of the Gods RPG, I made a trivial
Fight in the Noodle House
test adventure, you meet the bad guy you've been chasing getting soup, fight starts. Just what it sounds like, with a table of random events in the fight, passerby who'd get involved, people throwing crockery & hot noodles at you, falling beams once you cause damage, just a lot of chaos. Every run was different.
16. Game you WISH you owned.
I have most of my ideal games, the good ones still in print, or reprints, others PDF only. If you have Tunnels & Trolls, Holmes, Call of Cthulhu, and some kind of Traveller, what else do you need in life? Some more Fighting Fantasy would be good.
Non-RPG, I'd murder a dude to have an original Dark Tower in working condition. I have Kovalic's Dork Tower, which is like 50% of it but cheesy. I hate the iPhone-app-controlled new one.
17. FUNNIEST game you've played.
Just too obvious: Paranoia, 1st Ed. Taking serious, depressing, dystopian literature and movies, and the Cold War which was very likely to kill us ANY DAY NOW in 1984, and then throwing in disposable clones, a psychotic computer, mutants, secret societies, treachery, military incompetence, and High Programmers treating it as a game, is THE JOKE.
2nd ed's OK but gets goofy, later editions suck algae cakes.
18. Favourite[sic] game SYSTEM.
Game Designer Syndrome means being unsatisfied with anything.
My Six Word RPG! is objectively perfect:
Describe characters. Roll dice. Gamemaster decides.
And yet I write & play new ones all the time.
I like D100 (BRP minus Chaosium) a lot, but I hate 10-sided dice, and most instances are an inelegant mix of all kinds of dice, weird procedures.
Tunnels & Trolls is sweet, saving throws are awesome. Combat's mechanically vague.
🧵
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HERO is the most logically consistent system. But it is tedious to make characters in.
RoleMaster is sweet, but too hard for casual players, and the infinite house/optional rules mess tells us it's not perfect.
I like Eden's Unisystem enormously, but modern combat in it is ridiculous, every power system is a whole new incoherent set of mechanics.
So my own games are a D100 crunchy (but not too heavy) and a 2d6 very rules lite, or my 3d6 super casual game (which Six Word RPG does better).
19. Favourite[sic] PUBLISHED adventure.
GW1 Legion of Gold. The single best hexcrawl with antagonists doing stuff on it, that's ever been written.
City of Terrors. Best T&T solo, Gull is my favorite city.
Isle of the Unknown. Similar thing, hexcrawl with overarching mysteries.
X2 Castle Amber. Fantastic mix of Zelazny, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allan Poe references. Needs some rewriting.
Vog Mur.
Tegel Manor.
A1-4 Scourge of the Slavelords.
Deep Carbon Observatory.
20. Will still play in TWENTY years time…
Well, T&T is going thru dying/rebirth pains as Monsters! Monsters!, but hopefully it'll be another 20-year game?
Probably RoleMaster Unified will be replaced with RM Unrevised in 2030s, RM Unforgiven in 2040s, so I'll get in my once-per-decade campaign of each.
I should be done with my D100 and pulp games by then, so maybe I'll still be playing them! My attention span for my old games tends to be only a decade at most.
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21. Favourite[sic] LICENSED RPG.
Well how licensed? Call of Cthulhu has a license from the legally invalid Arkham House (scumbag Derleth stole posthumous HPL from his actual executor, then shat out elemental magic fairy stories). But it's a license!
GURPS The Prisoner, it's amazing it exists. Somewhat pointless, but I have played a few sessions of it!
The *weirdest* is also GURPS, Casey & Andy, an obscure mediocre webcomic with a time travel & Satan setting.
22. Best SECONDHAND RPG purchase.
Palladium Books' Compendium of Weapons, Armour[sic] & Castles. I had a couple of the proto-versions of this new long ago, but the collected version is fantastic. If you do any kind of fantasy gaming, you want this book.
23. COOLEST looking RPG product/book.
Skyrealms of Jorune. Cool covers & art, great layout in 2E & 3E. 1E is a typewriter-layout Metamorphosis Alpha hack. 4E was a failure. Those Dragon magazine ads in 1984 could not have been better placed to tempt you to buy.
Awesome SF/F setting, system's fine, it's crunchy by modern standards but not for the time. Really interesting duelling combat, Isho (magic/mutations) is a lot more limited.
There's a new archive of the out-of-print books, much better quality than the previous archive:
https://archive.org/details/jorune-collection_20230406
Also "SOJ RPG" with its own little system:
https://archive.org/search?query=soj+rpg
#jorune
24. COMPLEX/SIMPLE RPG you play.
Kinda repeating myself here. RoleMaster for complex.
Tunnels & Trolls, Fighting Fantasy are simple-ish, but: My little one-shots are among the simplest, Portal Bandits maybe the clearest statement of my philosophy (and I've since ditched the d20):
https://mdhughes.tech/rpg/
I've run it several times now, and weird stuff happens. Cairo, in the future! Steal a sarcophagus and take it (minus gold) back to Pharaoh times for another reward!
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25. UNPLAYED RPG you own.
HMN. There's a few I've done very little with, but I try to play or run one-shot, or at least solo make a character & test their sample adventure in almost anything. Almost any game has something to teach you.
Powers & Perils? I got it for the Perilous Lands world map & book, which is nice but the system's impenetrable. Like I read the chargen and just NOPE ZZZ. I think RoleMaster's a fast action game in comparison.
26. Favourite[sic] CHARACTER SHEET
Easily James V. West's. Just *amazing* stuff, fills all the corners with gribbley bits, actually usable with the slots for your specific game, unlike a lot of goofy sheets.
https://www.jvwest.art/home/charsheets
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27. Game you'd like a new EDITION of…
I already mostly play old editions! A lot of things I like have reprints, POD, or retroclones.
So, I can't really think of any.
I would like Tunnels & Trolls, either a new Deluxe 2 lower-powered, or reprints of 4E-5.5E, or the Corgi rules + gamebooks. The new owner claimed a year+ ago they'd have something soon, and no news since.
Ken's got Monsters! Monsters! updates, but it's not exactly the same.
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28. SCARIEST game you've played.
I'm not sure any game has ever scared me. I was a horror reader from my teens, and it's hard to find a GM better than Ligotti, King, Barker, or Lovecraft. You might think Fighting Fantasy would succeed at it eventually, but they went too goofy on their horror gamebooks.
I think I do *OK* at horror, but multiple players have told me they've had nightmares from my adventures, esp the more body horror ones, which is very gratifying.
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29. Most memorable ENCOUNTER.
Player: Witchcraft, my Revenant caught a possessing ghost, which is what killed him the first time, and dragged us both down onto the tracks of a ghost train which ran us over, "killing" us. I revived, it didn't. Poor mortal victim, but eh.
Referee: Spaceship Zero, I set up a very Dr Who like "free the slaves from Frogmen" plot in a rock quarry, they did good strategy & morale building, 10s of slaves died, 100s of Frogmen, heroic speeches.
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30. OBSCURE RPG you've played.
Modern stuff's never obscure, it's all easily searched for. Back in the day, at best indie stuff would be a samizdat zine, or posted to USENET, a mailing list, or some GeoCities page.
But I'll go slightly up from "nobody's heard of this" to "nobody's played this in 25 years": Ysgarth. It's a typical overly crunchy BRP-ish d100 game of the early '80s. At least 6 editions, and a "lite" game Oroborus which is still heavy. It's OK.
Sad ending, Dave Nalle died in 2021 of this fucking plague:
http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/2021-02-21
There was a half-finished "7th edition" ca. 2003:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031222143425/http://www.fontcraft.com/ysgarth/
Then a single blog post for a re-reboot in 2011, never updated again:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200706055410/http://www.fontcraft.com/ysgarth/
@flargh Way back on USENET, Dave was a pretty normal guy, very much a "get the Man's boot off your throat" libertarianism I share.
So I doubt he went full Republican, but he spent some time working on Ted Cruz campaign, so I dunno. A lot can happen in 20 years.
31. FAVOURITE[SIC] RPG of all time.
Much like your first kiss, first lay, those early games cast a big shadow. So Holmes' "Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set", Gamma World 1st Ed, T&T, Fighting Fantasy, Palladium Fantasy, Stormbringer 1E, Call of Cthulhu are all contenders.
And probably what I've had most fun with is Tunnels & Trolls. If I was taking one game with me, it'd likely be T&T (but which ed‽ Maybe just City of Terrors gamebook).
@mdhughes I had no idea that such a thing as GURPS The Prisoner existed.
That is my wife's favorite TV show, so it's off to eBay for me. Thanks for the heads up!
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