Friday, August 24, 2018

#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 24: Which RPG do you think deserves more recognition?


Day twenty-four of #RPGaDAY2018 is another remixed question kindly provided by M L Straus, who hosts the Youtube channel OG GM's Adventures. There's a link there that'll take you to his answers to the interview questions I asked those who supplied prompts for this year's #RPGaDAY. Be sure to head over and subscribe.

Taking the original question "Favourite Game System" from way back on the 18th August 2014, the question has been remixed to become "Which RPG do you think deserves more recognition?"

This can be interpreted a few ways - is it a specific game that you love but you don't think gets much attention, or possibly a system that really ticks all your boxes that you want to shout about? Or an old game that should be recognised for changing how gaming works?

So many ways to answer!

Maybe I'll do all three?

Specific game that I love that gets overlooked - that's easy. I love Tales from the Loop, and it's getting a lot of attention at the moment with Twitch streams, and the upcoming Amazon series. But it's easy to forget another great RPG of kids investigating the weird that came out many moons ago - Little Fears, by Jason L Blair.

Little Fears 1st Edition 
It's a really cool and simple system, using D6s like Tales from the Loop, where the players are all children battling the weird. Unlike Tales from the Loop, Little Fears isn't about technology or robots, it's about real supernatural horror. Nasty horrors from Closetland. The kids fight back through friendship, and belief in themselves and more.

Little Fears - Nightmare Edition
The game got a complete revamp in 2009 with the Nightmare Edition, changing some of the background of the threats and giving it a new system, but at its heart is the same great game with brilliantly executed character creation, real tension, and a brilliant and improved feel that makes it almost like playing a game of Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Great stuff.


A particular system that I want to shout about? While I haven't played it, I did pick up Psychosis: Ship of Fools, simply because it uses a deck of Tarot cards as the main game system. It's an interesting premise, and I think one that heavily influenced Alas Vegas, where the characters all wake unaware of who they are, and in weird, seemingly unconnected locations.

You split the tarot deck into minor and major arcana, with the minor arcana being used for task resolution (each suit represents a sort of ability or type of action) while the major arcana are used for cool effects.

Nice!

And that leads nicely on to the old game that I don't think gets enough recognition, as it's by the same publisher - Chameleon Eclectic. That would be The Babylon Project. While the game wasn't as huge as it could have been for an RPG based on the cool TV series Babylon 5, it did have a particularly great character creation system that has been a great influence on me. Rather than the roll or pick some values, and add skills and stuff, the Babylon Project was all about creating a background for the character first.

You create each stage of the character's life, and as you go you pull out elements of their background that would be used to inspire which skills and abilities the character needs scores in.

Great to see character creation done that way around - something I'm hoping to do with WILD, especially as the character's background is going to be vital in that game.

There we go. That's the end of "Which week"... until tomorrow, stay multi-classy!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

BRPG obv.! The Bastardised Role Playing Game was the best game in the world never to be published! Closely followed by Odyssey. And those are unbiased opinions completely objective and unaffected by the fact I wrote one of them.
Milo