A thread about telling people if you are a gamer led to a sub-discussion about people playing D&D in the 80s. The power of association caused me to start reminiscing about the pen and paper RPGs I have played over the course of my life. I do not really expect anyone to read through this whole long ramble. It is late and I am tired but I can't sleep and the aforementioned thread made me all nostalgic.
Until just several years ago when work and life issues prevented myself and my friends from being able to regularly meet or have time to prepare for pen and paper RPG sessions, I was still playing pen and paper and live action rpgs on a regular basis (now we mostly play board and card games when we get together instead of having one night for rpg and other nights for board and card games). One of my regular rpg friends is still involved in a Traveller campaign with some other blokes, and some still do live action stuff with a group called NERO, but otherwise we get our fix from computer rpgs where we can play as we are available and no one has to spend hours prepping to run the session for the next meeting.
Soooooo. A list of things.
Yeah. I played D&D and later AD&D. I have the starter box for D&D that we used as grade school kids (it was my dad's and he thought it was cool cuz he is a sci fi/fantasy novel nut, but he never bothered to play with us, he had bought it and some Avalon Hill wargames around when I was born [1978] for himself and I think his friends were not into the idea, so when I was in grade school and was reading The Hobbit and the Heinlein and Asimov young adult novels and and C. S. Lewis novels and the Tripod novels [it is hard to remember which ones I read in grade school, but I do know for certain I read those, because I chose to do book reports on some of them] and a host of other stuff he gave the box set to me). Buuuuut, back to the point. I barely played A/D&D as a kid. Once I had earned a small amount of money to buy and had friends who had other source books for other games, I realized the wealth of non-Tolkeinian worlds of games out there and pretty much never looked back. The majority of my AD&D play was in college in the late 90s - just recently when I met more people who preferred AD&D. One of the primary reasons for this is that I usually wound up being the game master, so we played a game I was willing to run.
I ran a LOT of Call of Cthulhu in my lifetime, although not until high school when I discovered Lovecraft. I had been vaguely aware of this horror game based on this guy's work that I had never read, but once I read him and became obssessed, well, there was no turning back. Guild Wars 2 is an exception, but I have felt inundated with Tolkeinian fantasy for most of my life and while I love Tolkein's works, I am very tired of work derivative of his world. C. S. Lewis once threw a friendly fit at Tolkein about how he was sick of all of the talk about elves. I feel the same way. When I read fantasy I tend to read pre-Tolkeinien fantasy or modern authors that are not derivative of Tolkein. One of my favorite authors is Lord Dunsany, and the Ouroboros novels of E. R. Eddison are fabulous. Otherwise, I have increasingly tended towards modern settings over the years because it feels refreshing.
The Whispering Vault. This is my favorite. It is a horror rpg with a significant focus on role playing and interesting descriptions. If you are familiar with Hellraiser, imagine playing a game where you get to play as a Hellraiser, but be the good guy. It had very limited success, but you can still buy pdf copies of it online.
HOL: Human Occupied Landfill. This is the most absurd, raunchy, rpg you have ever seen. It is a sci-fi game that reminds me a lot of Harry Harrison's universe as imagined by a deranged 12 year old's sense of humor. Even if you never play it, the source book is one of the most entertaining reads you will ever have in a gaming book. This game is NOT for the easily offended or faint of heart. However, what it is for is for organizing your screw around time with your friends into an art form. I actually managed to run multiple successful campaigns of this game over the decades and it is the exception for us not playing any rpgs recently, because every now and then we are in a very silly mood and pull it out and quickly roll up some ridiculous characters and romp around for an evening in this crazy world where anything goes.
Lost Souls. Another little known rpg that I was very fond of. Very good organized game where you get to play as ghosts. While it does not have to be, it is more lighthearted and less angsty than similar themed games like Chill or Wraith. One of the things I liked about this game is that it is heavy on puzzle solving. You can only interact with the world in very limited ways and the party has to really work together to accomplish even the most basic tasks in quite inventive ways.
Lone Wolf RPG. Remember those single player rpgs from the 80s? The choose your own adventures where you got to pick skills and roll a die/use the random number table in the back and stuff? Joe Dever wrote the best selling Lone Wolf series of gamebooks (which are still very much alive and well). I was obssessed (and still am) with these as a kid. When AD&D D20 came out in the early 2000s Mongoose Publishing made a Lone Wolf D20 campaign, and naturally I HAD to get it and I HAD to run a campaign. We spent about a year having a lot of fun with this one. Speaking of post-non-Tolkeinian derivative fantasy settings, the World of Magnamund is my favorite.
Something I used to do is combine settings and game systems. For example, I ran Whispering Vault campaigns in The World of Magnamund, which involved an enormous amount of effort on my part. I have reams of notebooks filled with exactly how this high fantasy world would be converted philosophically and mechanically over into the unique setting of The Whispering Vault. There were other similar things I did, like combine Whispering Vault with Call of Cthulhu, take Chill campaign books and convert them into Call of Cthulhu campaign books (you may be noticing variations on a theme here), I used to create and sell locally fabulously complex AD&D modules which had influences from everything I had been exposed to, etc.
Other than helping run a Vampire: The Masquarade LARP and helping to run a NERO chapter for years, that is the list of games that I personally ran on a regular basis. Other games that I played regularly as an actual party member with friends or in gaming clubs now follows.
GURPS. This was a neat thing that I got to do every now and then. I was acquainted with people who were really into GURPs and ocassionally got to join in on whatever setting they were running.
White Wolf games, mostly Vampire. I was never really into these, but it is what many of my friends were into, so I played it with them - a lot. We did pen and paper and LARP.
Star Wars. The old Star Wars rpg was so good.
Paranoia. This is a wonderfully absurd game. Basically everyone lives in a 1984 type society of the future and you can effectively never die because you have infinite clones of yourself who will suddenly come and take your place minus the last 15ish or so minutes of memory when you die (which you do frequently).
Champions and Heroes Unlimited. These were fun. We had fun. I tend to get mixed up which was which, but I think there was a lot more Heroes Unlimited than Champions. Probably my best time in a campaign was making a cyborg where I rolled max dollars for equipment I could buy and came up with the most ridiculous things to have instead of making a standard cyborg. Things like replacing my voicebox with a machine that would let me replicate any voice in the world (and I kept a little hard drive in there filled with famous people and world leaders to draw from, plus some extra scratch space for temporary sampling and replication); replacing my left thigh a cavity containing a flame thrower and fuel cells. Replacing an arm with a cyborg forearm that really did not do anything like be super strong or things like that, instead each finger had a cap on the end and I could shoot a different acid or gas from each fingertip. The arm insides were really just there as a repository for the gas mixing and storage facility; the other hand had fingers that could extend any kind of tool Inspector Gadget like (swiss army fingers) plus had a Wolverine style extending climbing claw that I imagined would do more damage in combat than it actually did and was ineffectual for climbing because I only had the one claw; both of my eyes were replaced with eyes that did a variety of things; the non-flamethrower leg had a hollow opening for a variety of weapons and ammo storage; my feet did something I cannot remember; I still had lots of money left over to buy parts but the GM freaked out and told me there was no space left for my brain and I had to stop. Oh, and I played a hippy cyborg who mostly quoted Cheech and Chong movies and stand up routines, which is actually why the GM was very annoyed with me. He kept trying to kill my character and I kept finding unique ways to use my ineffectual but extensive enhancements to survive. I had a great time, the GM had a terrible time, and the rest of the party mostly howled with laughter as session after session went by and I continued to be the MVP of the team despite having no legitimate reason for being capable of handling anything at all. This is the only case I have ever seen in an rpg where being slightly good at everything worked out instead of just resulted in failing roll after roll after roll.
I was never into it, but we played some Palladium games (Rifts) from time to time.
We had good times with Car Wars.
What was the name of that James Bond styled rpg? Superspies and Supervillains or something like that? That was a lot of fun, too, although we never properly had a campaign, just a bunch of one off sessions with the intent to continue. The guy who owned the source books was never good at following through.
There are a bunch of others that we tried out or played once in a blue moon. Tunnels and Trolls
Bunnies and Burrows (Watership Down anyone?)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I know we played a few sessions in junior high, but we had no idea what we were doing and it never worked out)
Ghostbusters (that was fun but sadly short lived)
a lot of Robotech/MechWarrior on and off over the years
Traveller (no one else seemed to like it but me)
Star Trek (we never did more than make characters)
Killer (ok, that is really live action, but we had so much fun once a year with this)
James Bond 007
Ars Magica (you need a GM who is really good at this particular style of game for it to be fun)
Shadowrun (never was really into the cyberpunk thing)
Kult (this one never really took off despite having promise - this was a very well made game but there were better games and only so many hours in the day)
Amber Diceless rpg
Over The Edge and Conspiracy X (we made characters a few times and never played the games)
Nephilim (this game is unique and really really neat, but requires enormous effort to run and I just never did it, it is very complex, we tried to make characters but the other players just did not want to make the commitment, I wound up integrated a lot of the concepts from the game into my Whispering Vault campaigns)
Feng Shui (we never played enough of this, this game is so silly and fun, it is a crazy over the top kung fu/action tropes game where it is easier to dive off of a building, do a triple twirl around a horizontal flagpole, bounce off of an awning, do a bunch of fancy flips in the air, and dive through an open window into your seat than just walk to the corner, get on the bus, walk to your seat and sit in it - with that in mind, imagine how much fun the rest of the game is)
Big Eyes, Small Mouth - anime tropes rpg, the GM was very silly and we had fun
A lot of different AD&D settings - I particularly enjoyed Spelljammer; we had a great Skills and Powers campaign where I used a kit to make a shaman, we had a fun Birthright campaign, and of course lots of other settings we played in or used sourcebooks for - there are too many to list, those three were just particularly memorable campaigns
Kobolds Ate My Baby! - this game is silly. You play a kobold and you are going into the world in search of babies to bring back to the kobold king lest he eat you instead. We played a lot of it, but not enough. Many people would argue this is not an rpg. I argue it depends on how you play it.
I know there are others, but I think I have rambled enough for now.
