Part I of this list can be found here.
Star Trek is my original fandom. I started watching the Original Series in reruns on a local TV channel growing up and instantly fell in love with it. As a kid, I read everything about or related to the show that I could and one of my proudest possessions was a gold Starfleet uniform shirt that I probably wore far too often. Consequently, the appearance of FASA's 1982 was a major event for me. I bought a copy as soon as I could and immediately started refereeing a long-running campaign with my friends. In most respects, FASA's rules were nothing special – a fairly basic percentile-driven system – but they included two things that set them apart in my opinion. The first was the lifepath character generation system, which helped players get a handle on who their characters were before the campaign began. The second was a character-based starship combat system that nicely evoked the feel of ship-to-ship combat from the TV series. These, combined with the obvious love the game showed toward its source material, makes Star Trek the Role Playing Game one of my favorite RPGs even today.
I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings, so it was natural that Gamma World would appeal to me. Nowadays, it's pretty common among gamers to make fun of GW and its rather, shall we say, idiosyncratic take on the End Times. On the one hand, I can understand that. From the vantage point of the present, Gamma World, with its mutant chicken-men and rabbits that can turn metal to rubber with a touch, certainly might appear silly. On the other hand, I think what's often misunderstood about the game is that it actually owes a lot more to the "dying earth" fantasy sub-genre than straight science fictional speculation. Gamma World postulates that the End Times come several hundred years hence, when all sorts of technological marvels exist and have made Earth quite unlike our own age. After the Fall, Earth becomes genuinely weird, thanks to artificial intelligences, mutagenic substances, and reality warping weapons. That's precisely why I continue to love it and why I hope to have the chance to referee another campaign of it one day.
Like Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu is another "perfect" game in the way that it marries its game mechanics and its source material. Of course, despite its original subtitle – "Fantasy Role-Playing in the Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft" – Call of Cthulhu's source material is much broader than simply the works of HPL. As I have argued before, CoC owes a great deal to Lovecraft's admirer, August Derleth, whose literary vision is far less bleak than that of his hero. An RPG based solely on Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmicism would certainly be horrific, but would it be fun to play? I personally don't think so, which is why Sandy Petersen was wise to have leavened the existential gloom of Lovecraft with healthy doses of Derlethian optimism. In any event, I've played a lot of Call of Cthulhu over the years and hope to do so again in the future. It is, hands down, my favorite horror roleplaying game and yet another reminder that Chaosium is one of the great publishers of our hobby
2. Empire of the Petal Throne
Solid, though as you say not very surprising, choices for numbers 1-5. They do spark a couple of thoughts, though. First, I hadn't realized that you only started playing EPT with the House of Worms campaign. Since your interest in Tekumel seems to predate that campaign, I am wondering how you got involved with Tekumel and what (if any) RPG provoked your interest. Second, I very much appreciate what you say about Gamma World belonging to the "dying earth" tradition. I don't think GW's essential weirdness gets enough appreciation, not least because its modules tend toward more standard post-apocalyptic situations, with locations that are identifiable as 20th-century cities and so forth. The best evocation of Gamma World for me is Dean R. Koontz's 1975 novel Nightmare Journey, which presents an America totally transformed from the present day. It has many quintessential features of Gamma World: one of the main characters is a mutated bear, and there's an organization that is basically the Knights of Genetic Purity. In fact, it reads more like Gamma World than the novels that Ward specifically mentions as influences on the game.
ReplyDeleteI first got involved with Tékumel in the early '90s through the then-current RPG, Gardásiyal. I bought a copy of EPT a few years later, but I never had the chance to make use of it in play until I began the House of Worms campaign.
DeleteI always think of the two Hiero novels when fishing for literary examples of what Gamma World feels like, with Philip Jose Farmer's Dark Is the Sun a very close second - and that one is also more clearly a "Dying Earth" setting, where Lanier's world is just a bit battered..
Delete"Hiero's Journey" and "Star Man's Son" are the two books that specifically inspired me to get Gamma World. They are on the on the opposite end of the post-apocalyptic spectrum of weirdness though.
DeleteAgreed that Dark Is The Sun is very Gamma World, and the Hiero books feel closer to the game than Star Man's Son or The Long Afternoon Of Earth do. Nightmare Journey, though, reads almost like what you'd get if someone had read the game rules and written a novel inspired by them.
DeleteOf the games listed in these two posts, the one that holds the most intrigue for me is Gangbusters, and that's largely because I've never played it, but find the setting and genre appealing as all get-out. Plus, I was a huge fan of the TV series, The Untouchables with Robert Stack as Eliot Ness. There must be lots of good adventure ideas in that old show for GB.
ReplyDeleteGreat games all of these.
ReplyDeleteOne thing surprised me: that Gamma World ranks so high, even higher than the fantastic Star Trek by FASA.
I've played all ten of your picks, but my own list would be quite different.
ReplyDeleteMuch as I love original Star Trek and happy as I was with FASA-Trek when it came out, the honeymoon with that game is long since over and I find the game mechanics to be a terrible fit for the IP. Thankfully many of the adventures are quite good and readily adapted to other rules, and they're unusual in having that "old school Trek" feel that you simply don't have with more recent games based on the IP. Even when Modiphius tries to emulate TOS-era stuff they wind up feeling "tainted" by the later series. Last Unicorn might actually have been best at getting the different eras to feel right IMO.
EPT, well, we're coming up on the one year anniversary of Barker getting outed for what he was, and I have walked away from Tekumel in general and EPT in particular. Never again. It would once have made my top five (and maybe top three) but those days are past.
Pretty sure I'd replace those two with some version of Runequest and one of the many superhero genre games I've played - most likely the Sentinel Comics RPG, but V&V and Champions are contenders as well with M&M still in the running as a bit of a dark horse.
Played Gamma World 1st ed. as a teenager. I think you're right: a lot of people have focused on the "silly" aspects of the game, but it was very much inspired by post-apocalyptic fiction of the late 70's, including Planet of the Apes, Kamandi, Thundarr, etc, all of which had "silly" elements but played them straight. The sample setting/adventure in 1e was definitely not a laugh-fest.
ReplyDeleteGamma World also had an advantage of being mostly cross-compatible with D&D/AD&D, allowing for more gameplay options. I was very surprised at the time that TSR didn't do this more often with their other RPGs. (EPT and MA are the only ones I know of that used a D&D "engine" such as it was.)
Small correction - Thundarr originally aired in 1980 and 1981, not the 70s. It was certainly influenced by Kamandi, which was itself influenced by the even earlier 1968 Planet of the Apes film and its sequels.
DeleteThundarr not getting more seasons or at least a modern re-make remains baffling to me. Imagine Genndy Tartakovsky doing Thundarr in 2023...
True. Another possible influence for GW is John Christopher's "Sword of the Spirits" trilogy, which featured "pure" humans lording over the dwarf and mutant classes. But 1970s post-apocalypse scifi was very widespread. It'd be interesting to see a Gamma World "Appendix N"
DeleteA Gamma World "Appendix N" would be fascinating and something I would want to read through.
DeleteAnd Thundarr not getting more seasons was a tragedy. It also inspired my Gamma World games.