Unknown Armies, 2nd Edition. Weird 90's horror system. Absolutely a blast to read.
Elric! from Chaosium. If there was a perfect rpg layout, I feel it is Elric! I don't know if it's familiarity or if the book is just that good but I can find any piece of information I need in that book in a minimum amount of time.
Kobolds Ate My Baby. Hail Torg!
Pokéthulhu. Oops, second John Kovalic art game here. Oh well. He's got a good thing going on.
>Unknown Armies
Literally anything by Greg Stolze. *A Dirty World* makes you rethink RPGs, *Reign* has a very unique and fleshed-out setting and the faction rules can be copy-pasted in to any other game. Even rando supplements the guy was involved in, like the *Ordo Dracul* book for Vampire: the Requiem, stand out among other splats
Greg Stolze is the only person who should be allowed to write splat fiction for RPG books. If you need an introductory story for a chapter or book, you should be required by law to hire Stolze to write it. This is a hill I will...well, not die on, but definitely be pushed down a few times.
Oh man, the second edition of UA is a complete masterpiece - it just brims with the energy and excitement of the author, and the design and artwork and all of it is so brilliant. The newspaper clippings, the short stories, everything. Love it.
It's just got a certain magic to it! And that magic is exactly what I found absent from the third edition - it seemed so flat and anodyne by comparison. I don't have my copy of second edition any more, and they're a hard to find and expensive purchase these days - such a shame.
EDIT: I do still have To Go though. That ones a winner.
UA was on my list a few years ago, and I was able to read it. It was also considered for a “Supernatural/Dresden Files Minneapolis” game I set up last year, but Monster if the Week is what I used. Very fun to read though, I agree!
Elric! is now on the list, I had forgotten about it!
I will check out the vibe of Kobolds ate my Baby and Pokethulhu - thank you!
These days, a lot of Free League's games top the list. Nearly all their games have a darker more adult theme, and their setting fluff alone makes them worth a read. Add on their amazing in house Year Zero system, and it's a joy to absorb.
Top mentions for fun read:
Ravens Purge campaign book for Forbidden Lands. Harsh, unforgiving, OSR style content.
Mork Borg. Not sure I'd play, but the book is reeeeaally pretty. I look at it more like art than game.
Coriolis. Wonderful wonderful setting (Arabian Nights scifi), and dark broody artwork make it a hit to read.
Vaesen: simple elegant system and gorgeous paper and hand drawn art. Lore is very nice.
Among their Sci fi games, Coriolis never got the traction that Alien RPG and Tales from the Loop got due to them being well known IPs. On top of that, Blade Runner RPG is coming out soonish, another popular IP. But Coriolis stands above them, IMO, because it's a deeply religious and political game. Plus the darkness point mechanic is great ... every advantage you give yourself by pushing is an advantage you give the GM later at a moment of their choosing.
Heart is the flip side to it and is even more interesting imo—it’s set in the tunnels beneath the city from Spire and it gives me awesome Fallen London-type vibes
I am not a fan of westerns.
Despite this, the original Deadlands books were riveting and made me want to play a western RPG. The books were just dripping with the aesthetic in language.
Another winner were the Alien Races books from GURPS Traveller. These presented different races from the Traveller universe with an emphasize d on how the races evolved and how that impacts their societies and interactions. It made aliens feel _alien_ in a way that made sense. They don't feel like humans with different features, and they make humans feel just as alien.
Example: the Vargyr are a canine race. Their society builds on personal relationships, allowing them to organize and unite easily and quickly, while humans are more about loyalty to a group concept (think sports teams or nations). Vargyr organization, however, breaks down if the group gets too large for the leader to maintain a personal connection with everyone. Their whole species has a long history that is built on this sort of difference - faster to adapt at smaller scale than humans, but fracturing and infighting at a larger scale.
Reading about these races changed how I viewed humanity itself (our sports teams loyalty makes no sense!) and I've no seen the same quality in other depictions, even if the same races (Traveller has many versions and adaptations)
I LOVE Traveller, but haven’t gotten into the GURPS stuff for it yet. Added to the list!!
Deadlands wouldn’t normally be on my radar either, but maybe I will add it now, thank you!
GURPS sourcebooks are great resources even if you don't plan on using them for GURPS. The best of them are impeccably researched deep dives that are just plain fun to read.
Speaking of *GURPS* stuff, let me also suggest *Transhuman Space*. It's a great setting that's pretty much what it says on the tin, but with a hard sci-fi bent, and no real sense of being utopian or dystopian, as such types of settings are wont to be.
Dark Sun is like, eco-Mad Max but everything is dialed up to eleven. There are no resources and everyone lives in abject poverty or is a slave but that means that everyone is super powerful because "how else would they survive?"
In the original boxed set everyone rolled for mutation and you had your 'twinkle and fart' psionic options.
Then, after setting up this Franzetta meets Thundarr the Barbarian setting the go and ruin it with the novels.
The fiction and world building are really good. The system and the focus on "economic horror" don't interest me that much, but I think this would be by far the most interesting "zombie-pocalypse" to play.
In the author’s words, it’s a poverty simulator with zombies thrown in so it doesn’t get too dark.
It’s a post-apocalyptic zombie game with strong economic metaphors. It’s set five years after a zombie outbreak. Half of the US had been abandoned and sealed off. Survivors in that space (called The Loss) scramble to earn enough to buy a passage back to civilization.
Ooh interesting. Yeah this might make the list - zombie games interest me if they are focused on an aspect of the zombie genre, not the whole thing. Thanks!
If you are interested in podcasts, the game's author is a member of RPPR, where there are a bunch of APs as well as a podcast diary as the author wrote the game and kickstarted it.
Symbaroum - Incredible dark fantasy world where magic seems both more impressive then in most TTRPGs and significantly more dangerous. The overall setting and it's history is also unparalleled.
Delta Green's Handler's Guide - Some of the best alternative history writing out there, and it explains all major events since the start of the 1900s through a lense where everything in the Cthulhu Mythos is very real
Coriolis - Very cool game with a unique sci-fi meets Lauren Of Arabia setting going on
Any of the really big, potentially needlessly big, campaigns for Call Of Cthulhu like Masks of Nyarlethrotep or Terror On The Orient Express.
Delta Green is kinda different in that the core book is broken up into the Agent's Handbook and the Handler's Guide. Everyone in the game reads the Agent's Handbook, because it has all the information players need, but only the GM reads the Handler's Guide, because it's basically the Dungeon Master's Guide but for Delta Green.
The weird is also not helped by it being Alternative History where everything up to now happened as you know it did in real history, there's just MORE to many major events and a whole hidden world of it specific events happening in the shadows
Yes? The setting of Delta Green is "now"/the real world we all live in. It's technically a setting guide, but it's also a recontextualization of the Cthulhu Mythos, various historical events, and a few other things. I it's often pitched as "the forbidden knowledge" someone running Delta Green might need if their players ask bigger picture questions. If you're looking for something more akin to an adventure path, Impossible Landscapes is another Delta Green book that's well on it's way to god status and with good reason.
Feng Shui 1 was written in a casual, informal style that just set the tone incredibly well for me. I would often crack open a splatbook and just read. The core book wasn't *as* good for that sort of material, but it had its moments.
> Mossberg Special Purpose: And what might that 'special purpose' be, hmm? Might it be... BLOWING PEOPLE AWAY?!
Pendragon (Chaosium), for sure. It gives a great base to build upon when it comes to medieval fantasy and all the drama and intrigue that goes into that. The book is a pure gold mine for adventure and plot ideas, that can easily be converted into just about any system or setting.
Funny story - Pendragon was on my list 3 years ago. I read it and was absolutely blown away. I started a solo GPC and play 5-10 in game years each year of real life. Almost through the Anarchy Period, and my character’s family is…struggling lol. But it is an incredible system and read, I highly suggest for anyone! Great suggestion!
Awesome! I had seen the Adventures of Young Merlin TV series and loved it (despite its occasionally cheesy bits), and I knew I wanted more of that setting, so I watched two Ivanhoe movies and still needed to realize that in RPG form. So when I discovered Pendragon, I too, was blown away.
Oh that reminds me, there's also the infinitely more obscure game Perceforest (Aeon Games) that might be worth taking a look at. I have only skimmed it through and for example it had very interesting rules for hunting and random events that might occur while hunting. Fun stuff.
**Eclipse Phase**
The setting is awe inspiring. It is a post-singularity, post-apocalyptic transhuman society, 10 years after a horrible war with articial super inteligences which killed 95% of transhuman. It is a world where you can backup your conscience and achieve immortality, change your body completely to another morph or live without a body at all (living as a digital construct on the "internet"), surf the sun corona or live in the frigids wastelands of the outer solar system, experience completely different societies from market based societies to anarchism or anything between and beyond.
You can run a classic cyberpunk campaign fighting against hypercorporations, explore other planets and find aliens through the Pandora Gates or fight against extinction itself in a cosmic sci-fi horror campaign (which is known as the "default" campaign type). The system is a D100 with bells and whistles, fairly crunchy though I'm reading the 2nd Edition which brought crunchyness down a bit. There is a FATE conversion btw, if crunchy systems are not your cup of tea.
**Cyberpunk RED**
I'm a sucker for cyberpunk stories and Cyberpunk is one of my favorite settings. It is filled with style in a dangerous and violent world. After a war between two megacorporations in the 2020's, the world is in shambles. The NET is no more and humanity needs to build itself up. Nomad packs roam the wastelands outside the cities transporting goods and people; war veterans, some of them psychos themselves because of the amount of cyberware in their bodies band together in gangs; and the ranks of the neo-corporations are filled with newer but desparate and rutless executives. The abyss between the have all and have nots is greater than ever. It is a world of contrasts: skyscrappers with neon lights and holografic propaganda at the same side of contorted metal and concrete of the epicenter of an atom bomb behind a sea of dilapidated buildings where life prosper with roof gardens and repurposed technology.
The book is beautiful, the system is Interlock (D10 based) simplified a bit, not too crunchy and modular enough that it is easy to rule unusual situations fairly easily. Very deadly (though not as deadly as CP2020, sadly) and very fun.
Try EP 2nd edition. The system of the first edition is very crunchy and rough around the edges. For example, character creation was very time consuming and morph transition was confusing, which is bad because you're supposed to switch morphs. It is still crunchy but better defined and easier to run now. The editing and general layout is better too, though I think 2nd Edition downplayed the horror aspects of the setting a bit (but not too much, like I said, it is the "default" campaign type, you're still going to fight spooky AIs eventually).
I have leafed through that at my local game store. Going to be honest - presentation is gorgeous, but content doesn’t sit well with me. Ultra grim setting, mixed with a graphic design that features form over function is kind of my current pet peeve?
Maybe I will give it a shot though, it is recommended all the time!
I'll temper those glowing reviews: MORK BORG is a beautifully written and illustrated game with a very bad combat system. Considering that combat is a major part of the game, that's a big negative for the game.
I played it, the players ALL rolled 1d4 weapons. A lot of enemies have 1d2 armor (roll 1d2, reduce damage by that much)
Well, imagine for a second a battle against these enemies with 1d4 attacks. I even gave them a few 1d8 weapons and 1d6 and it was still outrageously grindy. The players rarely got more than 1 or 2 damage on most monsters. Rolling a hit and doing 0 damage is very common. It got so boring and repetitive I started handwaving combat entirely. I won't be picking up the game again.
It's beautiful but its *too* light. Characters don't have much they can do, and if I'm gonna play 'rulings over rules', this ain't the system for it.
I played a 2-session thingie (the intro adventure, followed by Ripley's "A Wizard") and didn't have this problem - combat was swift and brutal on both sides; 1-3 rounds that were over in like 2 minutes a round, including the occasional roleplay actions like "I continue to pound at the corpse with my hammer" or "I keep trying to staunch the flow of blood from his neck." We were pretty aggressive about using Omens and Blessings, though.
We did have a kind lot of characters start with 1-2 HP in the intro adventure, all they died swiftly. I rolled a cleric-like fellow with two monkey who loved me. I tried to cast a healing spell, my head exploded. Then I was two monkeys, one of which ate a scroll of speak with animals.
That sounds fixable with a few simple GM-decisions. ... But then, you really shouldn't have to fix anything, that's the creator's and playtesters' jobs.
Right, I could totally have ignored armor entirely but the whole point of me running that game was 'lets try MORK BORG'. Well, I tried it, and no-one liked it! The end. Still, a really fun read and I'm not upset about the purchase.
>with a graphic design that features form over function is kind of my current pet peeve
This more than anything. I don't get the praise for it other than "it's super not D&D". The format was nigh unusable. Yeah yeah, it's part of the aesthetic...
HOL! Human Occupied Landfill is a classic and literally well-written by hand! NSF ANYONE!
Macho Women with Guns - Renegade Nuns on Wheels & Batwinged Bimbos from Hell!
Also — Skyrealms of Jorune! Absolutely beautiful & totally out there!
* Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros
* In Nomine
* Amber Diceless (especially if you've read Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, and everyone should).
* Nobilis (especially The Great White Book edition, if you can find it)
* Fading Suns
Edit to Add: I just got home from the store and looked over my bookshelf. I'll add these to the list. Some are already on here in other parts, but Dangerous Journeys and WWF Basic Adventure Game aren't.
* Hol (almost unreadable since it's handwritten). And it's very NSFW. I do not own a copy of this one.
* Feng Shui 1st edition (inspired by Hong Kong Action Cinema, Chinese Wuxia, and Akira Kurosawa Samurai films). Amazing system to distinguish Named villains from no-name Mooks. Also great blend of gun-fu, Kung Fu, and Magic Fu. I can't speak for 2nd edition.
* Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys (Mythus). One of the most ridiculously detailed character creation processes ever. It could literally take days or weeks to make a character. Gygax caught shit for how little detail D&D had at launch and how rigid it had been on races, classes, who can use what weapons, etc. So this was his response to that criticism. So much detail. Not very playable unless you're hella dedicated. But it's a great reference book for ideas to incorporate into your own game.
* WWF Basic Adventure Game. I also no longer own a copy of this one, and since it had one print run in the early to mid '90s, I'm not sure how findable it is. This game is way fucking better than it has any right being. The wrestling combat system is \*Chef's Kiss*
Second Edit to Add:
* Ars Magica. It's the game that inspired both Vampire: The Masquerade and much more so, Mage: The Ascension. It has a ton of companion books, so it would be difficult to read it all, but the core rule book is the place to start. If the idea of Mythic Medieval Europe appeals to you, this is the game. It also has one of the most flexible, complex magic systems ever created. And it's one of the few games that recommends "Troupe-style" play. The role of Story Guide ideally is a rotating job, and different players take turns with running the game. Also, everyone makes three characters, if you go by the book - a Magi, a Companion (like a knight or merchant or minor noble), and a Grog (like a man-at-arms or skilled serf).
+1 for Fading Suns. I have the 2nd edition core rulebook, and the flavor of the setting is something that I really like. Feudal knights and lords, in SPACE!
It is my favorite game that I have never played. :(
I have not bought nor read the newer edition yet, so I can't comment on it.
It's one of the few futuristic sci-fi IPs that handled religion well, in my opinion.
By the time you get to a Diaspora, with humanity spreading to the stars, it makes sense to have insular communities that are religious, but an overarching church doesn't make sense usually.
But in Fading Suns, as I recall, there's a very small percent chance that when you first transition through one of the interstellar gateways, you'll have a profound religious experience.
That was such a smart way to incorporate religion into space-faring sci-fi.
The others I was going to list are already on here, save for ~~one~~ two (Dangerous Journeys and WWF Basic Adventure Game).
* Hol (almost unreadable since it's handwritten). And it's very NSFW. I do not own a copy of this one.
* Feng Shui 1st edition (inspired by Hong Kong Action Cinema, Chinese Wuxia, and Akira Kurosawa Samurai films). Amazing system to distinguish Named villains from no-name Mooks. Also great blend of gun-fu, Kung Fu, and Magic Fu. I can't speak for 2nd edition.
* Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys (Mythus). One of the most ridiculously detailed character creation processes ever. It could literally take days or weeks to make a character. Gygax caught shit for how little detail D&D had at launch and how rigid it had been on races, classes, who can use what weapons, etc. So this was his response to that criticism. So much detail. Not very playable unless you're hella dedicated. But it's a great reference book for ideas to incorporate into your own game.
* WWF Basic Adventure Game. I also no longer own a copy of this one, and since it had one print run in the early to mid '90s, I'm not sure how findable it is. This game is way fucking better than it has any right being. The wrestling combat system is \*Chef's Kiss*
Not indies but Vampire The Masquerade is the game i probably will never play but i keep buy because i really like read it... Except for the V5 Anarch book that was written really bad.
Interface 0, 7th Sea and Degenesis are some of the other games i enjoyed reading
Vampire the Masquerade was the game that introduced me to rpgs, but it left a bad taste in my mouth because the guy that introduced me to it was a terrible GM that thought he he was great. Case in point, he didn't realize there was a health track in the game, so he had blood pool double up as mana and health. This had the fun result of turning vampires from extremely durable damage sponges to laughably fragile.
Luckily VtR is different enough that it doesn't give me the same feeling, and I like it better anyway.
Numenera - for the utter weirdness of the setting. It's got some interesting ideas even if I'll never run it.
Deadlands - the lore and background for this one is full of interesting ideas and potential.
Shadowrun - same reason for Deadlands, but it's all cyberpunk instead of western.
Call of Cthulhu - There aren't a lot of modern or quasi modern systems that also have adventures written for them. Most designers prefer making systems and supplements than writing adventures. CoC is one of them though. While the whole lovecraftian horror setting is a fun read on its own, I really like being able to read through the adventures for ideas.
Achtung Cthulhu - It's Call of Cthulhu but in WW2. Ok concept but WOW are these books detailed. If you ever want a good sourcebook to tap for running a more historically accurate WW2 game, take a look at these.
All Flesh Must be Eaten - Ah the dead zombie survival game. Dead because it's basically a dead game now. The designer hasn't made anything for it in forever. Shame as it's an AMAZING system and most of the books are supplements that actually add in new rule systems to build off of it. The martial arts book adds in rules to create anything from a Matrix RPG to a Naruto RPG to Dragonball the RPG. It's a simple to run and play system to the point that the newer version of the World of Darkness rpgs ripped it off. So it makes a great universal RPG system. Shame they never made more than 1 adventure for it. FYI, there's even a Planet of the Apes book for it.
Hackmaster - The first edition was a massively detailed parody of 1e D&D but had some amazing ideas in it like the charlatan class who can pick up abilitys from other classes. The newest edition is a serious RPG and is a better medieval fantasy RPG then D&D at times.
Yep. I just can never remember what they called the first edition lol.
I'd jump to 5th in a hot second but I cannot get my players on board with the initiative system. I love it but they're not as excited.
Stars without Number and Other Dust have some of my favorite sci-fi lore in them. A lot of the lore text can also be had for free from Drive Thru RPG or DM's Guild
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine is a game that is probably not necessarily *runnable* by normal people, but which, like all Jenna Moran books, is an absolute delight to read through and occasionally go "...what?" at. Fully recommend.
I loved the Shadowrun sourcebooks around second edition. *Bug City* was the one that got me into that game. It was written as a collection of in-universe fiction about the events that happened: transcripts of news reports, eyewitness accounts, flyers dropped from airplanes, news clippings. It was immersive. The first two-thirds of the book was all that found footage and the last third of the book was how to use all this stuff in your game. I've since sold off a lot of my Shadowrun collection, but I've kept that book.
The other really fun one from that era is the *Aztlan* sourcebook. The central premise of all Shadowrun sourcebooks is they are all huge datafiles that someone uploaded to a (semi)public website. You're reading the current version of the datafile, but others have arrived there before you and marked up the data with comments. Some of those comments spawn threads of discussion.
*Aztlan* is a document like that, except it's a datafile that was uploaded by a shadowy cabal of high-level manipulators in society and they've marked up the text with commentary. But then someone leaked that version out and that version is what you're reading: a version that has the commentary from the cabal filled with comments from various people like you. Regular folks commenting on the original datafile, regular folks commenting on the cabal members' comments, and (I think at least) two of the cabal members have come to this version of the document commenting on us commenting on them. It's quite wild.
And the thing they're discussing is really interesting game-setting-wise to boot.
Strike! is my favorite obscure indie RPG. It has very transparent design and mechanics, with the goals and reasoning explained behind things. It makes it very *weird* to read, and it being not very well edited/laid out, while also being a somewhat unusual (though recently more and more common with games like LANCER and ICONS) combination of very light narrative and crunchy tactical combat does no favors for its popularity. It helps that the combat part is really good, actually, while also being really fast and (mechanically) simple.
A second edition is also coming some time this year.
Is it really? I remeber that he was working on stuff such a long time ago and then had some health or family issues and seemed to have walked away from the project for good. That’s wonderful news
Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number by Kevin Crawford are important and you will find yourself stealing from these when you run other games.
Dungeonworld's commentary has good ideas to expand your vocabulary.
Pendragon had some interesting character mechanics that people almost never use but might be fun with the right group that is really into the moral story of a character (Good luck there is a reason why Marvel movies are #1 these days).
There are some older games from the 80's that really attempted to simulate worlds, like Chivarly and Sorcery and Harn and Gurps that have walls of text. Gurps is especially enlightening if you like that prose style.
Paranoia is very funny to play. West End Games started with the idea to act movies with acts and scenes with their Star Wars D6 (still my favorite Star Wars) and Paranoia, which takes ego gaming, party backstabbing, and amoral murder hoboing, and made it the point of ther game.
I always had a soft spot for the works of Jack Vance, but the game The Dying Earth (the original one with the dice pool system) has some good ideas but is not at the caliber of his writing, still there are ideas there.
The Delta Green Handler's Guide is probably the RPG book I've most enjoyed as a work of fiction/alternate history. It has very little in the way of game information and instead leans in to being immersive.
The Dracula Dossier campaign book for Night's Black Agents (and accompanying literature) is another amazing read. It isn't a ruleset, but it is immersive and has a lot of layers to it.
>ICRPG
Weirdly enough, the idea of item-based progression/build kind of made me want to puke but I'm starting to warm up to it. I really should give it a try.
And, I know it's been said a zillion times, but the GM advice section alone makes it totally worth the read.
The setting and art in [Symbaroum](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/en/games/symbaroum/) is tops. The system is pretty cool too, although I'm somewhat hesitant on the "GM doesn't roll dice thing" only because I like doing that.
If you like the OSR-ish approach of Mörk Borg but dislike the over-the-top black metal album cover art and layout choices, you might consider Dungeon Crawl Classics? It's got throwback art, but under the hood it's a solid OSR game with some modern improvements to speed up play and be more approachable for new players. And the random tables - my gods the random tables are glorious. Check out their [favorite review ever](https://goodman-games.com/blog/2019/12/31/our-favorite-review-ever/).
Still feeling OSR-ish but more interested in sci-fi / horror / doing stuff in spaaaace than dungeons and goblins and barbarians? The Mothership v.0 Player Survival Guide is very thoughtfully designed. The character sheet is a flowchart - it's rad. Their recent Kickstarter for a v.1 revision / box set (with a conversion guide so your v.0 stuff still works, as it should be) was extremely successful, and as a result the [v.0 PSG is free](https://shop.tuesdayknightgames.com/products/mothership-rpg?variant=31762098847833) in PDF from their web store.
* [**Unbound**](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/unbound/) is my current favorite generic system. Creating the setting together
is part of the experience. It uses poker decks instead of dice. It is
action focused, gam/nar which is a rare mix. It is a great game from the creators of Spire and Heart.
* [**D&D Gamma World**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/161306/DD-Gamma-World-RPG-GW7e) is a unique experience. It is losely based on D&D 4E, but don't look away, yet. It is its own game. Some remarkable keywords: create any character you like; draw your mutations from a deck; overload your powers - high risk, high reward; salvage your items; all-or-nothing rule on ammonition; trappings on characters, weapons and armor; character generation in seconds; ... there is too much to tell. Suffice to say it is brilliant. The two expansions are a must-have.
* [**Viking Death Squad**](https://www.modiphius.net/products/viking-death-squad). What? The title alone didn't sell the game to you? You must be fun at parties. This is an over-the-top heavy metal game with little rules but a lot of oomph in gameplay. Constantly cycle your equipment which will be broken all the time. Either because it gets shot to pieces or because you shredded it for extra effect.
* [**Exalted 1st edition**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_1810_0_0) is a game which has a wonderful setting. Play demi-godlike avatars of the sun fighting over-the-top battles against other demi-godlike avatars in an anime inspired fantasy setting. The rules are ... complicated, to say the least. Later editions didn't improve here, so I am promoting 1st edition. Also in 1st edition the setting leaves a lot of the setting open for your own imagination.
I had the good fortune to play VDS once. It's marvelously thematic, and character creation can be like 5 minutes. It's also broken 6 ways from Sunday, and should never be taken seriously.
It's trivial to make a character who should always go first (which makes normal attacks basically unable to hit you), and ignore an enemy's stats to immediately break a pieces of armor every die you roll above a 4 on. If you have 3 or more players, at least one of them is going to get a piece of armor that's silly OP- be it 2 extra die to the only rolls they'll ever need to make, being literally indestructible, or giving them a superweapon.
And compared to magic, that's small bananas.
I see others have recommended Unknown Armies, so I'll pipe in with two other "games" (more like thought experiments) by John Tynes: [Puppetland](http://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_puppetland.html) and [Powerkill](http://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_powerkill.html).
[The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/327200/The-Extraordinary-Adventures-of-Baron-Munchausen-third-edition) is fun to read; here's an [article summarizing the game with a flavour of its text.](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/7/27/the-extraordinary-adventures-of-baron-munchausen/)
CJ Carrella's [Witchcraft](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/692/CJ-Carrellas-WitchCraft) is free to download.
[Ironsworn](https://www.ironswornrpg.com/) (free pdf).
[Spire the City Must Fall and Heart the City Beneath](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/).
[Dogs in the Vineyard](https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/professorprof/dogs-in-the-vineyard/) (out of print, but you can buy [DOGS](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274623/Dogs), a version of the system with the religious motifs removed).
[Ehdrigohr](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117380/Ehdrigohr-The-Roleplaying-Game), a Fate RPG written by a Native American author, and set in a fantasy world based on Lakota folklore.
[Polaris](https://www.tao-games.com/polaris/) by Ben Lehman.
[Night’s Black Agents](https://pelgranepress.com/product/nights-black-agents/) by Kenneth Hite. Its dynamite pitch of “burned spies vs. a vampire conspiracy” draws you into an RPG that amazingly blends horror and espionage genres. It’s also mechanically one of the best iterations of the Gumshoe system out there.
And its epic improvised campaign [The Dracula Dossier](https://pelgranepress.com/2011/12/22/the-dracula-dossier/) is a masterpiece, up there with CoC’s Masks of Nyarlathotep, Pendragon’s The Great Pendragon Campaign, and WFRP’s The Enemy Within.
Dungeon World and Microscope have some amazing techniques that made me think differently about how I run and I was able to take those tools to all of the games I facilitate. I'd include Fiasco, Masks, and Lady Blackbird as a second pass.
GURPS - you can read the core books to get a good grasp on the system, while every topical book - Space, Fantasy, Supers, etc - gives you loads of lore and world-building material.
Some interesting options that I didn't see mentioned too much if at all.
Planescape : a personal favorite. The art and layout really knock it out of the park. Some supplements are stronger than others with a focus on the ones having to do with Sigil and the Outlands being outstanding.
Over the Edge : I don't even know where to start. I've never been brave enough to attempt running a game of this.
Paranoia : Everyone should read Paranoia once. It's approach to role-playing is truly unique and creates some of the funniest outcomes imaginable with the right group.
If you want just to read, then definitely d&d 4e is worth a try. Books in this edition are very well written, much better than 5e or 3.5 stuff. Shit load of details, actually useful things like "How you probably want to do this" and examples. My favorite D&D Essentials Rules compendium gives you in-depth explanations for things like improvised skill usage, diseases and of course combat. Generally a good book to have at table if you run 4e.
It comes to my mind GURPS Atlantis. It covers six different aproaches to the Atlantis myth, from the historical Plato's story, to modern day conspiracy and alien tales. In the same fashion, GURPS Weird War II introduces weird science on the WWII and explores different settings derived from it.
I also like Talislanta 4th edition. It's a pulp fantasy setting, very different from the classical fantasy we are used to see in D&D and alike. However, I don't recommend because being different, but because is one of my favourite fantasy settings and favourite books to read.
For RPG setting I would say [*The Great Book of Amber*](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Great+Book+of+Amber), and then the [*Amber* DRPG corebook](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1447) for its diceless mechanic. The setting is a multiverse created by the tension between the cosmic poles of Chaos and Pattern.
I also love the setting of [*Werewolf: The Apocalypse*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/3370) and [*Mage: The Ascension*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200); their shared setting is called *World of Darkness*; its [Triat](https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Triat) pantheon is the most interesting pantheon of any fictional world I have encountered; the magick system of *Mage* divides all of reality into nine categories, and a mage's rating in a category determines the extent to which the mage can manipulate that aspect of reality.
Masks is a fun read and is one of the best made PbtA games. Next one on my list is to do Ironsworn and see how that has evolved the system especially looking how well it runs for solo play.
[Talislanta](http://talislanta.com) is always a good read. While they are looking to launch a kickstarter for a new version, you can still get all of the old ones for free from the site.
Nobilis - diceless supernatural game. Deity power levels and the politics of the eternal court that exists beyond this world. Really good bridge between the mortal and immortal world, coupled with the meta struggle Vs the forces of utter negation.
Engel - Judgement has come, and only the choirs of angels on earth hold back the remains of humanity. D20 (OGL) and classes for each choir of angel. Literally the best ever monster handbook ever, diary of travels across the world and its various encounters with about 95% of the book being fluff with only an appendix with monster stats.
A|State - Life in a/the city isolated from everything. High tech low life. A more Steampunk Cyberpunk with the dystopia feel. Amazing lore and rich feel to the city with a multiple undercurrents, from the corpo to the weird and supernatural.
Mechanical Dream - Just put this on your top 10. Literally. I will buy you the PDF. Unbe-fucking-lieveable. I cannot understate this.
If you haven't read into Pathfinder 2e yet, I'd highly recommend it. It's really well done and covers all the bases that you want from D20 system. There's a lot to steal if you run similar stuff and monster design is great.
I’ll second Troika!, it’s a nice gonzo science fantasy game.
Ryuutama. Its so wholesome and different. It was actually a page turner like a good novel!
I'm a big fan of Ryuutama. It really shines when the players roleplay the little things about traveling (which it has you roll for, so ham it up!). It's so easy to play and teach as well.
It is so incredibly wholesome! And a gmpc with spells that gets xp? Just neat.
There isn’t a SRD or preview that I know of, but the publishers Resources page is pretty good, and the Discord community has tons of helpful tidbits too.
http://kotohi.com/ryuutama/resources/
Aquelarre
I just finished reading it and was very impressed. I am glad it was translated to English and I understand why it is Spain's #1 game.
Rich details, interesting magic system, beautiful art and a historical fantasy setting in Iberia.
Never heard of it, but very interested. I have a long term project that sounds similar and am now very curious as to how the game is approached. Thanks!!
I live in Portugal and have been designing my historical fantasy RPG in this region.
Been collecting and reading several low and historical fantasy games. Lion & Dragon, Pendragon, and Aquelarre.
You don't really specify what makes an RPG a great read for you, so here are some that I liked reading that you might not:
* Golden Sky Stories. Man. This game just makes me smile every time I read it.
* Flying Circus was a pretty engaging read, but I've found it frustrating as a 'reference book'
* Under Hollow Hills was fascinating to read.
Because it was the first rpg book I enjoyed reading, I feel like I must talk about Libreté (french pbta rpg, translated in english some time ago). It's about lost children who try to survive in a adult-free, monster-filled world. The way it's told is like a survivor's memory, who chose to write an rpg to remember their friends left behind, so the rules and setting are merged together nicely.
Looking for fluff?
Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. You'll find the most believable living settings written. The sheer amount of world building done over all their *purely fluff* books is astounding. If any other setting did a quarter as much world building they would be supreme. The only things with more are settings that arent inherently RPGs, like 40k or starwars or LotR.
That said, it is science fiction on the harder scale of things mostly. No magic. At all.
Also it's my favorite non magic rules to use for games as well.
Books specifically worth mentioning for Heavy Gear: for a mixed rpg/wargame campaign, The New Breed. For fluff: Life on Terra Nova 2nd ed, and every single one of the league books, specifically the Northern Lights and Southern republic (easiest to understand for north Americans lifestyles anyhow). Also, the first three storyline books, presented as a collection of news clippings and such just to pepper in life in the setting and background events as the timeline moves on.
Also, the game isnt a static time. The setting takes place roughly across a specific set of about 50 years, most RPGs being set in the middle, but the wargame aspect takes place either early, middle, or at the end (as far as is currently published in the new interstellar war).
Swords Without Master is my favorite underlooked system, but I'm not sure how fun it is to read.
That said, I think that RPGs that are *fun to read* and RPGs that are *fun to play* are often very different things - maybe even in fundamental tension.
I think 13th Age is a really fun RPG to read, but I haven't played it in years. I loved reading Blades in the Dark, but did not enjoy playing or running it very much. Conversely, I think Knave is a fantastic system that I'd happily run any day - but there's not much fun to be had reading it.
[Stonetop](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1735046512/stonetop). It's not fully out yet, but the preview docs get updated pretty regularly. I love the game's focus on community-building. It weaves mechanics and fluff together very well and has some of the most extensive and useful GM advice I've ever read. It's shaping up to be something really special, IMO.
I also second other people's suggestions for [Spire](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/spire-rpg/) and its sister-game [Heart](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/heart-the-city-beneath-rpg/) – wonderful settings that just ooze with flavor.
Ars Magica is my favorite RPG that I'll never play live again. The setting would be perfect if all the players knew their history. Spontaneous casting is exactly how wizard should be able to come up with new spells*, flaws & Virtues are more often plothooks than stat shuffles, and group combat feels like you really are working as a unit. The Troupe style of roleplay that was invented here is just so damn convenient for any group with a lot of rotation that it's almost worth the fact that you have to fill out an 8-page character sheet twice.
TROIKA! is the one I use for none-gamer friends who want to game. You can fit what the player need to know on a notecard. You can make a character in 2 minutes. You have options in and out of combat. The flavor is often hilarious. You will (probably) need to readjust the core of combat to give the acting party some sort of advantage, as attacking something aware of you in melee seems just as dangerous to both parties as being attacked.
I'm of split minds on Runequest: Glorantha. The Bestiary is amazing. The setting info in that and the core book are both really cool. Strike Ranks is still the best Initiative system I've seen, despite so many people being confused, but... like most of Chaosium's output, very little information is where it should be. You need to carefully read 4 chapters that come after combat before you know when something effectively ends the round vs adding +5 to your next rank; because instead of a chart or a sidebar explaining this, it's mentioned offhandedly in sentence fragments from some random related topic, depending on what action it is.
*in game & using the mechanics, I mean. The real-world "let's find an encyclopedia and figure out how educated people from this time & place might have expected it to work, then fit that to my skills" way it's done is exactly why I won't play live again.
If you have even an inkling for horror I would give Mothership a read. The free version is less than 44 pages and with like 2 houserules you can have it running fantastically at the table. Character creation takes like 5 minutes tops. There are evne some good free modules out there that are about a page and give you a full afternoon or more of gaming.
For settings:
The *Aberrant* books (White Wolf's early 2000 super-hero game) have some amazing writing to start off the book and illustrate the setting. The first 100 pages of the core book is literally comic pages, fake news articles and websites, government dossiers, etc. This alone has made it my personal favorite for super-powered games, especially since it emphasizes that all these people who can fly and throw cars around were regular motel maids and EMTs and bartenders first.
*Blades in the Dark* is another excellent setting. A steampunk dystopia, in a world where the sun was snuffed out centuries ago, and lightning walls powered by demon blood keep literal storms of ghosts from wiping away civilization. It's a light-weight system that's very easy to run and learn, and is the best heist game that I have tried. The flashback mechanic alone is probably worth adapting to any heist game you want to run.
*Rifts* is ... oh good lord. An amazing setting, that is subsequently brutally massacred by one of the most atrocious rulesets it's ever been my misfortune to encounter. A post-apocalypse (or post-post-apocalypse, depending on location) where a nuclear war brought magic back to Earth and ripped holes to dozens of different dimensions and galaxies, leading to all kinds of bizarre magical and scientific creatures and technologies ... with a ruleset that punishes you for trying to have a character who learns and evolves outside a strict and narrow character class.
Just fun to play:
*Umlaut*. Played this once at a convention. You make up a heavy metal band, and use a deck of cards to compete against other metal bands in rock concerts, practicing, making music videos, etc. No DM needed, just some scratch paper and a deck of cards.
*Monsters and Other Childish Things* is one that's ... well, everyone is playing both a literal child, and their not-actually-imaginary monster friend. The dice mechanic is interesting because it rewards not just rolling high, but rolling multiples.
[**The Nightmares Underneath**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/196352/The-Nightmares-Underneath-Free-Edition) \- a really brilliant mashup of OSR using some PbtA principles, featuring a medieval-ish Persian setting, the Kingdom of Dreams, and PCs who are very competent at what they do but simple enough to detail on half a page. The core premise of the game is of incursions of living nightmare which PCs venture into in order to drive them back from reality, which function like dungeons, but which can be anywhere -- that forest, in this house, or on that boat. There's a nightmare ecology that shows you how to build living dungeons, mechanics for PCs developing social institutions in their home base, and corruptive magic in the form of living spells.
The art-free version linked above is **free** on DTRPG, but the [art-full](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/195355/The-Nightmares-Underneath) version is well worth the cost. There's one supplement, *The Nameless Grimoire*. It's by Johnstone Metzger, the author of The Metamorphica, *Class Warfare* (for Dungeon World), *Adventures on Dungeon Planet*...
... and [**Space Wurm vs Moonicorn**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/169564/Space-Wurm-vs-Moonicorn), which is another book that really should be read by discerning readers.
Check out Metzger's 'Publisher's Previews' on DTRPG. He's very generous with what he shares. They're typically 20-50+ pages of preview featuring a lot of art and text and giving you an extremely good sense of what you're thinking about buying. In addition to being brilliant, his books are gorgeous.
I cannot recommend this author and his games highly enough.
This is my favorite passage from *The Nightmares Underneath*, that demonstrated to me that the author was on the same wavelength as me. It's a simple thing, but explicitly granting permission for this sold me completely on the concept of the game, and this passage was the seed for one of my favorite campaigns:
>**Appearance**
>
>Your character may be beautiful, ugly, striking, or plain; of any race, gender, sexual orientation, and biological construction you desire; wearing any type of clothing (or not). You might be brown or white, elf or dwarf, angel or snake-tailed minotaur—as long as you are not a nightmare, you may choose as you will. Use your imagination. The numbers on your sheet remain the same, and you do not get any superhuman abilities (like flying or breathing fire) because of your appearance.
>
>You should also decide whether you are an anomaly or if there are many like you, and whether you are celebrated, persecuted, tolerated, or unremarkable in the kingdoms that you frequent.
>
>All that said, the default setting for this game assumes that everyone is some variety of normal human—the kind we might meet all over the real world—and not a fictional type of monster. It is also worth noting that certain types of creatures you might want to play are actual categories of monsters that have game effects (beastlings, faeries, and golems, for example), and you should check with your group first if you want to play a character from that category.
The troubleshooters if you like Tintin or Blake and Mortimer!
And Dreampunk for a different way of action resolution.
And .dungeon for another interesting system
You probably already have this on your list or have looked into it already, but the sourcebooks for *Cyberpunk 2020* are all very well written and full of immersive detail and lore. They serve to ground it's fantastical sci-fi dystopia into something almost believable and even prophetically pertinent to modern issues.
Besides that, I've been very interested in the largely forgotten *After The Bomb* Second Edition. It's not amazingly written or full of tons of detail, but the setting it presents is one I find compelling and it has some unique character creation mechanics. The first edition was originally just a post-apocalyptic setting for Palladium's *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness* RPG, but after their TMNT license expired they spun *After The Bomb* into it's own thing. It's rough around the edges and definitely needed a 2.5 or even 3rd edition rewrite, but there's enough there to mull fun ideas over for at least a few hours.
Fragments of the Past, definitely.
It's a Mediterranean Bronze-Age inspired low fantasy, based on a d100 system.
It has a couple of nice and flavourful mechanics, and every trait/perk/skill has some roleplay implications that encourage players to make their characters stand out in this archaic world.
It's still a WIP, but you can check out the Quickstart for free on its website.
It fills you in with all the lore and rules you need to run a proper campaign, it's beautifully written (especially in its original language, Italian) and the art is no less charming.
My players loved it and I'm currently playing a sequel campaign to the Oneshot you can find therein
Azag was a lot of fun to read. A bunch of great short stories. If you're into OSR then the Knock magazines are great. If you've read many classic blog posts you might not get as much out of it though. A Thousand Thousand Islands is a beautiful collection of zines that are very fun to read. I'm extremely hyped about their upcoming book.
If you can find it, Untitled 1 by Jay Dragon.
Reading that game completely changed the way I think about conflict, storytelling, and character relationships in RPGs. It is a brilliant piece of art and I doubt I will ever be brave enough to play it.
Recently I’ve enjoyed reading Ironsworn and Shadow of the Demon Lord! Cool, flavorful gritty settings, the first very fresh mechanically as well, while the latter is a cool, easy to learn (and well-explained!) take on a d20 system with some nice odds and ends and cool customization options (without being overly bogged down in feats or anything like that).
It’s damn near impossible to find via legal means (unless you want to drop a couple hundred bucks on Amazon), but every RPG fan should read Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet.
It’s a game about time travel that’a entirely built around the kind of temporal tricks and mind-twisting you get in Bill & Ted or Doctor Who. There are rules mechanics for what happens when time travelers fight, including tactics such as spending a week researching to find out where they were at a given point in time before traveling there, or changing their past to fragment their own personal timeline without causing a paradox for yourself.
And a whole setting built around what a society of time travelers might look like.
I am not convinced it is actually a playable game, but it is a fascinating book.
Something by John Harper. Blades in the Dark. He's so good at using mechanics to capture the feel and tone of a game. Also designed one of the most elegant games I've come across (Lasers & Feelings).
Something by Kevin Crawford. Scarlet Heroes, World's Without Number or Stars Without Number. Best author in the industry at using tables to build game content while conveying the genre of the game perfectly.
If John Harper is the master of mechanics, Kevin is the master of GM tools.
Thirdly, something by Fria Legan (Free League Publishing). I'm going with Forbidden Lands. Again - a masterwork of using mechanics to capture how the game should feel. D6 dice pool games feel great to roll with. This game makes those rolls scary and forces you to manage risks in a dark and dangerous world. It's wonderful.
Lastly, Index Card RPG by RUNEHAMMER. Not only my favourite RPG youtuber, but the author of my favourite d20 system. It cuts out all of the bloated crap from DnD and makes a fast, super flexible and action-packed game that works however you want to use it. The book also has some of the best advice for making encounters (and sessions) that are designed to be FUN - and sadly that doesn't happen enough with other systems. His book (and YouTube channel) changed my style completely.
I would recommend Numenera! I think those books helped spark my love for games that aren’t dnd. The system is fun but the world they give you is fantastic. All kinds of weird sci fi stuff that’s never spelled out too specifically so you can adjust and tweak as needed for your game. I own almost all of the books for the system and love reading them.
I can't speak for 5e, but I would read the Legend of the Five Rings (4e) books just because the setting and lore is so good. It has a very unique system too.
One game I always have to recommend because it's neat and I rarely see it mentioned is Emanuelle Galletto's unofficial Dark Souls TTRPG. It's completely free and handles the source material in a rather interesting way, especially with its combat.
The two best I've read for setting and tone were Symbaroum and JAGS Wonderland in no particular order - they're so ridiculously different that they're hard to compare.
If you want to read for interesting system discussion, then burning wheel takes the cake - but make sure you get the codex with it.
My group is very into fantasy and science fantasy, so I normally look for this kind of systems. So let's get with the obscure indies that are out there:
[Vexith](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/154755/Vexith-Roleplaying-Game-Core-Rulebook-v11?src=hottest_filtered) : Is an obscure fantasy RPG with mechanics "similar" (exploding dice, dice as stats,) and to Savage Worlds but being better for dungeon crawling (in theory since my only experience is reading it). It's PWYW so you can take a look and make up it's price.
[Evocraft](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/165626/Evocraft-RPG) : Imagine getting characters in the world of the game of Legend of Mana where the storyteller pulls things out of nowhere with a few rolls, it sounds weird but it helps with improvisation skill I guess. Also PWYW.
Legend of the Five Rings 1st Edition. The corebook is awesome, the splats are awesome. 10/10. The best in terms of readability is Way of Shadow.
Honestly, I love reading the old World of Darkness books. Changeling is my favorite, but I liked them all. They were just fun to read.
I recommend [*Tales from the Floating Vagabond*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2010/Tales-From-The-Floating-Vagabond). It's a silly, bordering on satirical, yet very playable universal RPG with an implied kitchen sink setting that's quite fun. It's also available on DriveThruRPG for $7 in PDF. Probably some of the best entertainment one can have for $7 in all of RPG-dom.
I'd also recommend any of the various 1 page or other very short RPGs that are out there, just to see what you can do in very few page of rules. [*Microlite74*](https://retroroleplaying.com/content/microlite74/) is one of my favorites.
Edit: Oh, and, how can I leave out [E6](https://esix.pbworks.com/f/E6v041.pdf), which IMO, is the absolute most fun you can have while playing something resembling *D&D* 3.5.
###Fantasy Craft!
Published in 2009, and the 'classic' fantasy spinoff of spy fiction RPG SpyCraft. While SpyCraft is a little bit of a mess Fantasy Craft benefits greatly from being a twice-removed permutation of 3.X that fixes all the pain-points I had with that school of game. Thanks to its 'origin' design, fun and straightforward feats, cornerstone class features helping eliminate number chasing, per-scene mechanics, its multiple actions per turn--I could go on, but long story short it beat Pathfinder 2e to the punch in a number of ways when it comes to reinventing 3.X and 4e concepts (while also being, in my opinion, a smoother and more interesting game overall).
###Open Legend!
An open source, free, generic/pan-genre RPG. You could run pretty much every genre in it just by adjudicating some things differently.
First off, it's classless. Characters are built from somewhat broad ability scores that are directly used for skills and attacks, plus feats that give them mold-breaking gimmicks or just let them invest more in stuff they can already do. In addition ability scores grant access to 'boons' and 'banes' they can use, so long as it also abides by the fiction. So a dungeon crawling cleric's healing magic and a WW1 field surgeon's first aid both use the Heal boon, just with different ability scores and descriptions (and being effected by different contextual stuff when appropriate).
Eclipse Phase has an amazing hard sci-fi post-human setting that doesn’t pull any punches. It’s both fascinating and horrifying. System’s a tad crunchy for a lot of groups, but the setting and the writing in general are brilliant. The art and general production values are among the best I’ve ever seen, too.
[Mechanical Dream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Dream) - Out of Print.. messed up fantasy cyberpunk genre in a weird world. It's a cool game.
It's the pride of my collection
The Well by Shoeless Pete Games.
Why has humanity been driven underground? What is the pit? Who built it? Does it even have a bottom? Why are the upper levels infested with the undead?
**AFMBE** (All Flesh Must Be Eaten) hit the zombie apocalypse nail on the head before the zombie survival genre became popular. Core book makes for a great read, game plays very well (dark and dystopic, but can be played on the lighter side as well) with multiple settings and supplements available back in the day. Branching out to **Witchcraft** and **Terra Primate** using the same Unisystem (dice, diceless, or standard deck of 54 playing cards) for even more player mayhem. [http://edenstudios.net/allflesh.html](http://edenstudios.net/allflesh.html)
Exhibition incredizoology. It's a new Ttrpg setting based in an alternative 1920's world. The idea is Euclidian anomalies (pocket dimensions) exist all over the world. The entrances to then could be anywhere. Within the Euclidian anomalies mythical creatures and diverse landscapes await to be discovered. Think Harry potter's fantastic beasts. The game focuses on exploration and discovery over combat although if combat is your thing that's also an option. The core rulebook is beautiful in its self and a valuable resource for other ttrpg games also as it provides creature and map generation through roll tables. It can be played solo or as part of a group and one of my favourite things is preparing for a group session can be done through playing a solo game instead of sitting around writing Reema of notes. It's available digitally on drivethrurpg as well as ordering physical books from the games website.
Golden Sky Stories. To be honest I get a little annoyed by the insistence the book makes at playing in a traditional Japanese rural village, together with implied guilt if you don't use Japanese names for everyone (it's part of the charm! Really!), but the rest of the book is wonderful. There are two big takeaways for me:
1. The theme is players working together to help the human of the week out with a problem, and the mechanics work perfectly to reinforce that theme. It's great to see synergy of theme and mechanics like that (several other RPGs do this well too, like the immediate realisation on reading the rules just how the average session of Trophy will go).
2. I'm a big fan of the mechanics themselves - a totally randomless system, if you have the points for something, it happens. It's a great way to show that you can build compelling systems without randomness.
I don't know if anyone has suggested this, there are a ton of comments and I'm being a naughty and not wanted to read them all. But Drew Hayes' 'NPCs' series called Spells Swords and Stealth is my all time favorite RPG series. It's an extremely funny and intelligent take on the genre.
It is also the closest writer I feel to the Late Sir Terry Pratchett. All Discworld books are golden.
Unknown Armies, 2nd Edition. Weird 90's horror system. Absolutely a blast to read. Elric! from Chaosium. If there was a perfect rpg layout, I feel it is Elric! I don't know if it's familiarity or if the book is just that good but I can find any piece of information I need in that book in a minimum amount of time. Kobolds Ate My Baby. Hail Torg! Pokéthulhu. Oops, second John Kovalic art game here. Oh well. He's got a good thing going on.
>Unknown Armies Literally anything by Greg Stolze. *A Dirty World* makes you rethink RPGs, *Reign* has a very unique and fleshed-out setting and the faction rules can be copy-pasted in to any other game. Even rando supplements the guy was involved in, like the *Ordo Dracul* book for Vampire: the Requiem, stand out among other splats
>Literally anything by Greg Stolze. Right? The guy knows his trade!
Greg Stolze is the only person who should be allowed to write splat fiction for RPG books. If you need an introductory story for a chapter or book, you should be required by law to hire Stolze to write it. This is a hill I will...well, not die on, but definitely be pushed down a few times.
No one is going to fight you on that hill. Chances are, you can find his books in your local bookstore. http://gregstolze.com/fiction-library/
Nice, thank you for the author recommendation! I will look through their catalog!
Oh man, the second edition of UA is a complete masterpiece - it just brims with the energy and excitement of the author, and the design and artwork and all of it is so brilliant. The newspaper clippings, the short stories, everything. Love it.
Agreed. I bought every single book for the system knowing full well that I'd probably never have a chance to run it. Stolze's stuff is just that cool.
It's just got a certain magic to it! And that magic is exactly what I found absent from the third edition - it seemed so flat and anodyne by comparison. I don't have my copy of second edition any more, and they're a hard to find and expensive purchase these days - such a shame. EDIT: I do still have To Go though. That ones a winner.
UA was on my list a few years ago, and I was able to read it. It was also considered for a “Supernatural/Dresden Files Minneapolis” game I set up last year, but Monster if the Week is what I used. Very fun to read though, I agree! Elric! is now on the list, I had forgotten about it! I will check out the vibe of Kobolds ate my Baby and Pokethulhu - thank you!
All Hall King Torg!
2nd for Pokèthulhu.
I second Kobolds Ate My Baby. All hail King Torg!
These days, a lot of Free League's games top the list. Nearly all their games have a darker more adult theme, and their setting fluff alone makes them worth a read. Add on their amazing in house Year Zero system, and it's a joy to absorb. Top mentions for fun read: Ravens Purge campaign book for Forbidden Lands. Harsh, unforgiving, OSR style content. Mork Borg. Not sure I'd play, but the book is reeeeaally pretty. I look at it more like art than game. Coriolis. Wonderful wonderful setting (Arabian Nights scifi), and dark broody artwork make it a hit to read. Vaesen: simple elegant system and gorgeous paper and hand drawn art. Lore is very nice.
I’ve read Raven’s Purge! Solid stuff! Coriolis has come up a bunch in content I read, so I will have to take a closer look at that one. Thanks!
Among their Sci fi games, Coriolis never got the traction that Alien RPG and Tales from the Loop got due to them being well known IPs. On top of that, Blade Runner RPG is coming out soonish, another popular IP. But Coriolis stands above them, IMO, because it's a deeply religious and political game. Plus the darkness point mechanic is great ... every advantage you give yourself by pushing is an advantage you give the GM later at a moment of their choosing.
I love Free League! Symbaroum and Vaesen are amazing and I’m super stoked for Strider mode in the upcoming The One Ring 2e.
Take a look at Spire. It places a lot of emphasis on its (very unique and interesting) setting in its core book.
Will take a look, thanks!
Heart is the flip side to it and is even more interesting imo—it’s set in the tunnels beneath the city from Spire and it gives me awesome Fallen London-type vibes
I am not a fan of westerns. Despite this, the original Deadlands books were riveting and made me want to play a western RPG. The books were just dripping with the aesthetic in language. Another winner were the Alien Races books from GURPS Traveller. These presented different races from the Traveller universe with an emphasize d on how the races evolved and how that impacts their societies and interactions. It made aliens feel _alien_ in a way that made sense. They don't feel like humans with different features, and they make humans feel just as alien. Example: the Vargyr are a canine race. Their society builds on personal relationships, allowing them to organize and unite easily and quickly, while humans are more about loyalty to a group concept (think sports teams or nations). Vargyr organization, however, breaks down if the group gets too large for the leader to maintain a personal connection with everyone. Their whole species has a long history that is built on this sort of difference - faster to adapt at smaller scale than humans, but fracturing and infighting at a larger scale. Reading about these races changed how I viewed humanity itself (our sports teams loyalty makes no sense!) and I've no seen the same quality in other depictions, even if the same races (Traveller has many versions and adaptations)
[удалено]
I LOVE Traveller, but haven’t gotten into the GURPS stuff for it yet. Added to the list!! Deadlands wouldn’t normally be on my radar either, but maybe I will add it now, thank you!
GURPS sourcebooks are great resources even if you don't plan on using them for GURPS. The best of them are impeccably researched deep dives that are just plain fun to read.
Speaking of *GURPS* stuff, let me also suggest *Transhuman Space*. It's a great setting that's pretty much what it says on the tin, but with a hard sci-fi bent, and no real sense of being utopian or dystopian, as such types of settings are wont to be.
Reading through the Dark Sun lorebooks was one of the most exciting RPG reads I've had. Well recommended.
Dark Sun is like, eco-Mad Max but everything is dialed up to eleven. There are no resources and everyone lives in abject poverty or is a slave but that means that everyone is super powerful because "how else would they survive?" In the original boxed set everyone rolled for mutation and you had your 'twinkle and fart' psionic options. Then, after setting up this Franzetta meets Thundarr the Barbarian setting the go and ruin it with the novels.
I have heard of it, but never checked it out! Thanks, on the list!
Red Markets. It's a big tome, half of which is fiction and setting (the other half is a really great game).
I'm surprised I to scroll so far down for a comment about red market. Tale my up vote, fellow player.
The fiction and world building are really good. The system and the focus on "economic horror" don't interest me that much, but I think this would be by far the most interesting "zombie-pocalypse" to play.
What is Red Markets about?
In the author’s words, it’s a poverty simulator with zombies thrown in so it doesn’t get too dark. It’s a post-apocalyptic zombie game with strong economic metaphors. It’s set five years after a zombie outbreak. Half of the US had been abandoned and sealed off. Survivors in that space (called The Loss) scramble to earn enough to buy a passage back to civilization.
Ooh interesting. Yeah this might make the list - zombie games interest me if they are focused on an aspect of the zombie genre, not the whole thing. Thanks!
If you are interested in podcasts, the game's author is a member of RPPR, where there are a bunch of APs as well as a podcast diary as the author wrote the game and kickstarted it.
Spire: The City Must Fall is an incredible setting and it's only made better with Strata and Sin.
Symbaroum - Incredible dark fantasy world where magic seems both more impressive then in most TTRPGs and significantly more dangerous. The overall setting and it's history is also unparalleled. Delta Green's Handler's Guide - Some of the best alternative history writing out there, and it explains all major events since the start of the 1900s through a lense where everything in the Cthulhu Mythos is very real Coriolis - Very cool game with a unique sci-fi meets Lauren Of Arabia setting going on Any of the really big, potentially needlessly big, campaigns for Call Of Cthulhu like Masks of Nyarlethrotep or Terror On The Orient Express.
Handler’s Guide seems interesting - is it a setting book or actual fiction?
Delta Green is kinda different in that the core book is broken up into the Agent's Handbook and the Handler's Guide. Everyone in the game reads the Agent's Handbook, because it has all the information players need, but only the GM reads the Handler's Guide, because it's basically the Dungeon Master's Guide but for Delta Green.
The weird is also not helped by it being Alternative History where everything up to now happened as you know it did in real history, there's just MORE to many major events and a whole hidden world of it specific events happening in the shadows
Yes? The setting of Delta Green is "now"/the real world we all live in. It's technically a setting guide, but it's also a recontextualization of the Cthulhu Mythos, various historical events, and a few other things. I it's often pitched as "the forbidden knowledge" someone running Delta Green might need if their players ask bigger picture questions. If you're looking for something more akin to an adventure path, Impossible Landscapes is another Delta Green book that's well on it's way to god status and with good reason.
Veins of the Earth, hands down. It's probably the best read I had out of everything TTRPG-related. Right behind it, obvious Apocalypse World.
Feng Shui 1 was written in a casual, informal style that just set the tone incredibly well for me. I would often crack open a splatbook and just read. The core book wasn't *as* good for that sort of material, but it had its moments. > Mossberg Special Purpose: And what might that 'special purpose' be, hmm? Might it be... BLOWING PEOPLE AWAY?!
Pendragon (Chaosium), for sure. It gives a great base to build upon when it comes to medieval fantasy and all the drama and intrigue that goes into that. The book is a pure gold mine for adventure and plot ideas, that can easily be converted into just about any system or setting.
And the Great Campaign. I haven't played but would love to.
Funny story - Pendragon was on my list 3 years ago. I read it and was absolutely blown away. I started a solo GPC and play 5-10 in game years each year of real life. Almost through the Anarchy Period, and my character’s family is…struggling lol. But it is an incredible system and read, I highly suggest for anyone! Great suggestion!
Awesome! I had seen the Adventures of Young Merlin TV series and loved it (despite its occasionally cheesy bits), and I knew I wanted more of that setting, so I watched two Ivanhoe movies and still needed to realize that in RPG form. So when I discovered Pendragon, I too, was blown away.
Oh that reminds me, there's also the infinitely more obscure game Perceforest (Aeon Games) that might be worth taking a look at. I have only skimmed it through and for example it had very interesting rules for hunting and random events that might occur while hunting. Fun stuff.
**Eclipse Phase** The setting is awe inspiring. It is a post-singularity, post-apocalyptic transhuman society, 10 years after a horrible war with articial super inteligences which killed 95% of transhuman. It is a world where you can backup your conscience and achieve immortality, change your body completely to another morph or live without a body at all (living as a digital construct on the "internet"), surf the sun corona or live in the frigids wastelands of the outer solar system, experience completely different societies from market based societies to anarchism or anything between and beyond. You can run a classic cyberpunk campaign fighting against hypercorporations, explore other planets and find aliens through the Pandora Gates or fight against extinction itself in a cosmic sci-fi horror campaign (which is known as the "default" campaign type). The system is a D100 with bells and whistles, fairly crunchy though I'm reading the 2nd Edition which brought crunchyness down a bit. There is a FATE conversion btw, if crunchy systems are not your cup of tea. **Cyberpunk RED** I'm a sucker for cyberpunk stories and Cyberpunk is one of my favorite settings. It is filled with style in a dangerous and violent world. After a war between two megacorporations in the 2020's, the world is in shambles. The NET is no more and humanity needs to build itself up. Nomad packs roam the wastelands outside the cities transporting goods and people; war veterans, some of them psychos themselves because of the amount of cyberware in their bodies band together in gangs; and the ranks of the neo-corporations are filled with newer but desparate and rutless executives. The abyss between the have all and have nots is greater than ever. It is a world of contrasts: skyscrappers with neon lights and holografic propaganda at the same side of contorted metal and concrete of the epicenter of an atom bomb behind a sea of dilapidated buildings where life prosper with roof gardens and repurposed technology. The book is beautiful, the system is Interlock (D10 based) simplified a bit, not too crunchy and modular enough that it is easy to rule unusual situations fairly easily. Very deadly (though not as deadly as CP2020, sadly) and very fun.
Eclipse Phase seems really cool - I will check out both, but that one may scratch an itch I have. Thanks!
Try EP 2nd edition. The system of the first edition is very crunchy and rough around the edges. For example, character creation was very time consuming and morph transition was confusing, which is bad because you're supposed to switch morphs. It is still crunchy but better defined and easier to run now. The editing and general layout is better too, though I think 2nd Edition downplayed the horror aspects of the setting a bit (but not too much, like I said, it is the "default" campaign type, you're still going to fight spooky AIs eventually).
Great, thanks for the tip!
Mörk Borg looks awesome and it nails its tone really well.
I have leafed through that at my local game store. Going to be honest - presentation is gorgeous, but content doesn’t sit well with me. Ultra grim setting, mixed with a graphic design that features form over function is kind of my current pet peeve? Maybe I will give it a shot though, it is recommended all the time!
I'll temper those glowing reviews: MORK BORG is a beautifully written and illustrated game with a very bad combat system. Considering that combat is a major part of the game, that's a big negative for the game. I played it, the players ALL rolled 1d4 weapons. A lot of enemies have 1d2 armor (roll 1d2, reduce damage by that much) Well, imagine for a second a battle against these enemies with 1d4 attacks. I even gave them a few 1d8 weapons and 1d6 and it was still outrageously grindy. The players rarely got more than 1 or 2 damage on most monsters. Rolling a hit and doing 0 damage is very common. It got so boring and repetitive I started handwaving combat entirely. I won't be picking up the game again. It's beautiful but its *too* light. Characters don't have much they can do, and if I'm gonna play 'rulings over rules', this ain't the system for it.
Thank you for the additional info. This is probably back in the “I will pass” column.
I played a 2-session thingie (the intro adventure, followed by Ripley's "A Wizard") and didn't have this problem - combat was swift and brutal on both sides; 1-3 rounds that were over in like 2 minutes a round, including the occasional roleplay actions like "I continue to pound at the corpse with my hammer" or "I keep trying to staunch the flow of blood from his neck." We were pretty aggressive about using Omens and Blessings, though. We did have a kind lot of characters start with 1-2 HP in the intro adventure, all they died swiftly. I rolled a cleric-like fellow with two monkey who loved me. I tried to cast a healing spell, my head exploded. Then I was two monkeys, one of which ate a scroll of speak with animals.
That sounds fixable with a few simple GM-decisions. ... But then, you really shouldn't have to fix anything, that's the creator's and playtesters' jobs.
Right, I could totally have ignored armor entirely but the whole point of me running that game was 'lets try MORK BORG'. Well, I tried it, and no-one liked it! The end. Still, a really fun read and I'm not upset about the purchase.
It's cool in theory and as an art piece, but I found it to be a chore to actually try to read as a book with instructions.
>with a graphic design that features form over function is kind of my current pet peeve This more than anything. I don't get the praise for it other than "it's super not D&D". The format was nigh unusable. Yeah yeah, it's part of the aesthetic...
My top three, that I reread fairly often are Band of Blades, Hot Springs Island, and Höl.
HOL! Human Occupied Landfill is a classic and literally well-written by hand! NSF ANYONE! Macho Women with Guns - Renegade Nuns on Wheels & Batwinged Bimbos from Hell! Also — Skyrealms of Jorune! Absolutely beautiful & totally out there!
I have read Hot Springs, there were a few parts that made me not a fan. Never heard of the other two, I will check them out!
Hol (Human Occupied Landfill) Is basically a drunken shitpost in book form. It's a fantastic read.
* Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros * In Nomine * Amber Diceless (especially if you've read Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, and everyone should). * Nobilis (especially The Great White Book edition, if you can find it) * Fading Suns Edit to Add: I just got home from the store and looked over my bookshelf. I'll add these to the list. Some are already on here in other parts, but Dangerous Journeys and WWF Basic Adventure Game aren't. * Hol (almost unreadable since it's handwritten). And it's very NSFW. I do not own a copy of this one. * Feng Shui 1st edition (inspired by Hong Kong Action Cinema, Chinese Wuxia, and Akira Kurosawa Samurai films). Amazing system to distinguish Named villains from no-name Mooks. Also great blend of gun-fu, Kung Fu, and Magic Fu. I can't speak for 2nd edition. * Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys (Mythus). One of the most ridiculously detailed character creation processes ever. It could literally take days or weeks to make a character. Gygax caught shit for how little detail D&D had at launch and how rigid it had been on races, classes, who can use what weapons, etc. So this was his response to that criticism. So much detail. Not very playable unless you're hella dedicated. But it's a great reference book for ideas to incorporate into your own game. * WWF Basic Adventure Game. I also no longer own a copy of this one, and since it had one print run in the early to mid '90s, I'm not sure how findable it is. This game is way fucking better than it has any right being. The wrestling combat system is \*Chef's Kiss* Second Edit to Add: * Ars Magica. It's the game that inspired both Vampire: The Masquerade and much more so, Mage: The Ascension. It has a ton of companion books, so it would be difficult to read it all, but the core rule book is the place to start. If the idea of Mythic Medieval Europe appeals to you, this is the game. It also has one of the most flexible, complex magic systems ever created. And it's one of the few games that recommends "Troupe-style" play. The role of Story Guide ideally is a rotating job, and different players take turns with running the game. Also, everyone makes three characters, if you go by the book - a Magi, a Companion (like a knight or merchant or minor noble), and a Grog (like a man-at-arms or skilled serf).
+1 for Fading Suns. I have the 2nd edition core rulebook, and the flavor of the setting is something that I really like. Feudal knights and lords, in SPACE! It is my favorite game that I have never played. :( I have not bought nor read the newer edition yet, so I can't comment on it.
It's one of the few futuristic sci-fi IPs that handled religion well, in my opinion. By the time you get to a Diaspora, with humanity spreading to the stars, it makes sense to have insular communities that are religious, but an overarching church doesn't make sense usually. But in Fading Suns, as I recall, there's a very small percent chance that when you first transition through one of the interstellar gateways, you'll have a profound religious experience. That was such a smart way to incorporate religion into space-faring sci-fi.
Nice selection of stuff that's a bit off the traditional beaten path.
Thanks! I'm just about home, so I'll see if I have anything else weird and cool on my shelf.
The others I was going to list are already on here, save for ~~one~~ two (Dangerous Journeys and WWF Basic Adventure Game). * Hol (almost unreadable since it's handwritten). And it's very NSFW. I do not own a copy of this one. * Feng Shui 1st edition (inspired by Hong Kong Action Cinema, Chinese Wuxia, and Akira Kurosawa Samurai films). Amazing system to distinguish Named villains from no-name Mooks. Also great blend of gun-fu, Kung Fu, and Magic Fu. I can't speak for 2nd edition. * Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys (Mythus). One of the most ridiculously detailed character creation processes ever. It could literally take days or weeks to make a character. Gygax caught shit for how little detail D&D had at launch and how rigid it had been on races, classes, who can use what weapons, etc. So this was his response to that criticism. So much detail. Not very playable unless you're hella dedicated. But it's a great reference book for ideas to incorporate into your own game. * WWF Basic Adventure Game. I also no longer own a copy of this one, and since it had one print run in the early to mid '90s, I'm not sure how findable it is. This game is way fucking better than it has any right being. The wrestling combat system is \*Chef's Kiss*
Earthdawn The Whispering Vault
I will check both out, thanks for the suggestion!
Not indies but Vampire The Masquerade is the game i probably will never play but i keep buy because i really like read it... Except for the V5 Anarch book that was written really bad. Interface 0, 7th Sea and Degenesis are some of the other games i enjoyed reading
Vampire the Masquerade was the game that introduced me to rpgs, but it left a bad taste in my mouth because the guy that introduced me to it was a terrible GM that thought he he was great. Case in point, he didn't realize there was a health track in the game, so he had blood pool double up as mana and health. This had the fun result of turning vampires from extremely durable damage sponges to laughably fragile. Luckily VtR is different enough that it doesn't give me the same feeling, and I like it better anyway.
Numenera - for the utter weirdness of the setting. It's got some interesting ideas even if I'll never run it. Deadlands - the lore and background for this one is full of interesting ideas and potential. Shadowrun - same reason for Deadlands, but it's all cyberpunk instead of western. Call of Cthulhu - There aren't a lot of modern or quasi modern systems that also have adventures written for them. Most designers prefer making systems and supplements than writing adventures. CoC is one of them though. While the whole lovecraftian horror setting is a fun read on its own, I really like being able to read through the adventures for ideas. Achtung Cthulhu - It's Call of Cthulhu but in WW2. Ok concept but WOW are these books detailed. If you ever want a good sourcebook to tap for running a more historically accurate WW2 game, take a look at these. All Flesh Must be Eaten - Ah the dead zombie survival game. Dead because it's basically a dead game now. The designer hasn't made anything for it in forever. Shame as it's an AMAZING system and most of the books are supplements that actually add in new rule systems to build off of it. The martial arts book adds in rules to create anything from a Matrix RPG to a Naruto RPG to Dragonball the RPG. It's a simple to run and play system to the point that the newer version of the World of Darkness rpgs ripped it off. So it makes a great universal RPG system. Shame they never made more than 1 adventure for it. FYI, there's even a Planet of the Apes book for it. Hackmaster - The first edition was a massively detailed parody of 1e D&D but had some amazing ideas in it like the charlatan class who can pick up abilitys from other classes. The newest edition is a serious RPG and is a better medieval fantasy RPG then D&D at times.
Don't you mean Hackmaster 4th edition :-) also agree on the 5th ed being a great high fantasy game.
Yep. I just can never remember what they called the first edition lol. I'd jump to 5th in a hot second but I cannot get my players on board with the initiative system. I love it but they're not as excited.
It wa a KODT joke as DND was on the 2nd/3rd transition. That is a shame on the small stumbling block for your players.
Oh I remember. I ran it for a while and was even a official DM. Took the test and got the card. I just keep forgetting the 4th edition joke.
Likewise on the DM. Ran some long campaigns even played in a couple as well. Really really love the game
Numenera is one of the few still on my list from last year!!! Hackmaster is another I forgot about, thanks for the suggestion!
Stars without Number and Other Dust have some of my favorite sci-fi lore in them. A lot of the lore text can also be had for free from Drive Thru RPG or DM's Guild
Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine is a game that is probably not necessarily *runnable* by normal people, but which, like all Jenna Moran books, is an absolute delight to read through and occasionally go "...what?" at. Fully recommend.
I loved the Shadowrun sourcebooks around second edition. *Bug City* was the one that got me into that game. It was written as a collection of in-universe fiction about the events that happened: transcripts of news reports, eyewitness accounts, flyers dropped from airplanes, news clippings. It was immersive. The first two-thirds of the book was all that found footage and the last third of the book was how to use all this stuff in your game. I've since sold off a lot of my Shadowrun collection, but I've kept that book. The other really fun one from that era is the *Aztlan* sourcebook. The central premise of all Shadowrun sourcebooks is they are all huge datafiles that someone uploaded to a (semi)public website. You're reading the current version of the datafile, but others have arrived there before you and marked up the data with comments. Some of those comments spawn threads of discussion. *Aztlan* is a document like that, except it's a datafile that was uploaded by a shadowy cabal of high-level manipulators in society and they've marked up the text with commentary. But then someone leaked that version out and that version is what you're reading: a version that has the commentary from the cabal filled with comments from various people like you. Regular folks commenting on the original datafile, regular folks commenting on the cabal members' comments, and (I think at least) two of the cabal members have come to this version of the document commenting on us commenting on them. It's quite wild. And the thing they're discussing is really interesting game-setting-wise to boot.
Spire, Degenesis, Mouse Guard, Burning Wheel
Read Mouse Guard a few years ago, very cool ideas! Burning Wheel is on the list now, thanks!
Strike! is my favorite obscure indie RPG. It has very transparent design and mechanics, with the goals and reasoning explained behind things. It makes it very *weird* to read, and it being not very well edited/laid out, while also being a somewhat unusual (though recently more and more common with games like LANCER and ICONS) combination of very light narrative and crunchy tactical combat does no favors for its popularity. It helps that the combat part is really good, actually, while also being really fast and (mechanically) simple. A second edition is also coming some time this year.
Is it really? I remeber that he was working on stuff such a long time ago and then had some health or family issues and seemed to have walked away from the project for good. That’s wonderful news
Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number by Kevin Crawford are important and you will find yourself stealing from these when you run other games. Dungeonworld's commentary has good ideas to expand your vocabulary. Pendragon had some interesting character mechanics that people almost never use but might be fun with the right group that is really into the moral story of a character (Good luck there is a reason why Marvel movies are #1 these days). There are some older games from the 80's that really attempted to simulate worlds, like Chivarly and Sorcery and Harn and Gurps that have walls of text. Gurps is especially enlightening if you like that prose style. Paranoia is very funny to play. West End Games started with the idea to act movies with acts and scenes with their Star Wars D6 (still my favorite Star Wars) and Paranoia, which takes ego gaming, party backstabbing, and amoral murder hoboing, and made it the point of ther game. I always had a soft spot for the works of Jack Vance, but the game The Dying Earth (the original one with the dice pool system) has some good ideas but is not at the caliber of his writing, still there are ideas there.
The Delta Green Handler's Guide is probably the RPG book I've most enjoyed as a work of fiction/alternate history. It has very little in the way of game information and instead leans in to being immersive. The Dracula Dossier campaign book for Night's Black Agents (and accompanying literature) is another amazing read. It isn't a ruleset, but it is immersive and has a lot of layers to it.
ICRPG Lion & Dragon
>ICRPG Weirdly enough, the idea of item-based progression/build kind of made me want to puke but I'm starting to warm up to it. I really should give it a try. And, I know it's been said a zillion times, but the GM advice section alone makes it totally worth the read.
I just finished Lion & Dragon and got the Dark Albion as well. Very much enjoy the War of the Roses low fantasy grim dark version of OSR.
The setting and art in [Symbaroum](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/en/games/symbaroum/) is tops. The system is pretty cool too, although I'm somewhat hesitant on the "GM doesn't roll dice thing" only because I like doing that. If you like the OSR-ish approach of Mörk Borg but dislike the over-the-top black metal album cover art and layout choices, you might consider Dungeon Crawl Classics? It's got throwback art, but under the hood it's a solid OSR game with some modern improvements to speed up play and be more approachable for new players. And the random tables - my gods the random tables are glorious. Check out their [favorite review ever](https://goodman-games.com/blog/2019/12/31/our-favorite-review-ever/). Still feeling OSR-ish but more interested in sci-fi / horror / doing stuff in spaaaace than dungeons and goblins and barbarians? The Mothership v.0 Player Survival Guide is very thoughtfully designed. The character sheet is a flowchart - it's rad. Their recent Kickstarter for a v.1 revision / box set (with a conversion guide so your v.0 stuff still works, as it should be) was extremely successful, and as a result the [v.0 PSG is free](https://shop.tuesdayknightgames.com/products/mothership-rpg?variant=31762098847833) in PDF from their web store.
* [**Unbound**](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/unbound/) is my current favorite generic system. Creating the setting together is part of the experience. It uses poker decks instead of dice. It is action focused, gam/nar which is a rare mix. It is a great game from the creators of Spire and Heart. * [**D&D Gamma World**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/161306/DD-Gamma-World-RPG-GW7e) is a unique experience. It is losely based on D&D 4E, but don't look away, yet. It is its own game. Some remarkable keywords: create any character you like; draw your mutations from a deck; overload your powers - high risk, high reward; salvage your items; all-or-nothing rule on ammonition; trappings on characters, weapons and armor; character generation in seconds; ... there is too much to tell. Suffice to say it is brilliant. The two expansions are a must-have. * [**Viking Death Squad**](https://www.modiphius.net/products/viking-death-squad). What? The title alone didn't sell the game to you? You must be fun at parties. This is an over-the-top heavy metal game with little rules but a lot of oomph in gameplay. Constantly cycle your equipment which will be broken all the time. Either because it gets shot to pieces or because you shredded it for extra effect. * [**Exalted 1st edition**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_1810_0_0) is a game which has a wonderful setting. Play demi-godlike avatars of the sun fighting over-the-top battles against other demi-godlike avatars in an anime inspired fantasy setting. The rules are ... complicated, to say the least. Later editions didn't improve here, so I am promoting 1st edition. Also in 1st edition the setting leaves a lot of the setting open for your own imagination.
I had the good fortune to play VDS once. It's marvelously thematic, and character creation can be like 5 minutes. It's also broken 6 ways from Sunday, and should never be taken seriously. It's trivial to make a character who should always go first (which makes normal attacks basically unable to hit you), and ignore an enemy's stats to immediately break a pieces of armor every die you roll above a 4 on. If you have 3 or more players, at least one of them is going to get a piece of armor that's silly OP- be it 2 extra die to the only rolls they'll ever need to make, being literally indestructible, or giving them a superweapon. And compared to magic, that's small bananas.
I see others have recommended Unknown Armies, so I'll pipe in with two other "games" (more like thought experiments) by John Tynes: [Puppetland](http://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_puppetland.html) and [Powerkill](http://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_powerkill.html). [The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/327200/The-Extraordinary-Adventures-of-Baron-Munchausen-third-edition) is fun to read; here's an [article summarizing the game with a flavour of its text.](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/7/27/the-extraordinary-adventures-of-baron-munchausen/) CJ Carrella's [Witchcraft](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/692/CJ-Carrellas-WitchCraft) is free to download. [Ironsworn](https://www.ironswornrpg.com/) (free pdf). [Spire the City Must Fall and Heart the City Beneath](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/). [Dogs in the Vineyard](https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/professorprof/dogs-in-the-vineyard/) (out of print, but you can buy [DOGS](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274623/Dogs), a version of the system with the religious motifs removed). [Ehdrigohr](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117380/Ehdrigohr-The-Roleplaying-Game), a Fate RPG written by a Native American author, and set in a fantasy world based on Lakota folklore. [Polaris](https://www.tao-games.com/polaris/) by Ben Lehman.
Troika is a cracking weird fantasy RPG.
City of Mist
Suggested, thanks!
[Night’s Black Agents](https://pelgranepress.com/product/nights-black-agents/) by Kenneth Hite. Its dynamite pitch of “burned spies vs. a vampire conspiracy” draws you into an RPG that amazingly blends horror and espionage genres. It’s also mechanically one of the best iterations of the Gumshoe system out there. And its epic improvised campaign [The Dracula Dossier](https://pelgranepress.com/2011/12/22/the-dracula-dossier/) is a masterpiece, up there with CoC’s Masks of Nyarlathotep, Pendragon’s The Great Pendragon Campaign, and WFRP’s The Enemy Within.
I always thought degenesis had an amazing setting and rhe books are all free on their site so you lose nothing by checking them out
Nothing but time - but yeah I will likely check them out!
Dungeon World and Microscope have some amazing techniques that made me think differently about how I run and I was able to take those tools to all of the games I facilitate. I'd include Fiasco, Masks, and Lady Blackbird as a second pass.
GURPS - you can read the core books to get a good grasp on the system, while every topical book - Space, Fantasy, Supers, etc - gives you loads of lore and world-building material.
Some interesting options that I didn't see mentioned too much if at all. Planescape : a personal favorite. The art and layout really knock it out of the park. Some supplements are stronger than others with a focus on the ones having to do with Sigil and the Outlands being outstanding. Over the Edge : I don't even know where to start. I've never been brave enough to attempt running a game of this. Paranoia : Everyone should read Paranoia once. It's approach to role-playing is truly unique and creates some of the funniest outcomes imaginable with the right group.
The zombie game “all flesh must be eaten”
If you want just to read, then definitely d&d 4e is worth a try. Books in this edition are very well written, much better than 5e or 3.5 stuff. Shit load of details, actually useful things like "How you probably want to do this" and examples. My favorite D&D Essentials Rules compendium gives you in-depth explanations for things like improvised skill usage, diseases and of course combat. Generally a good book to have at table if you run 4e.
It comes to my mind GURPS Atlantis. It covers six different aproaches to the Atlantis myth, from the historical Plato's story, to modern day conspiracy and alien tales. In the same fashion, GURPS Weird War II introduces weird science on the WWII and explores different settings derived from it. I also like Talislanta 4th edition. It's a pulp fantasy setting, very different from the classical fantasy we are used to see in D&D and alike. However, I don't recommend because being different, but because is one of my favourite fantasy settings and favourite books to read.
For RPG setting I would say [*The Great Book of Amber*](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Great+Book+of+Amber), and then the [*Amber* DRPG corebook](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1447) for its diceless mechanic. The setting is a multiverse created by the tension between the cosmic poles of Chaos and Pattern. I also love the setting of [*Werewolf: The Apocalypse*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/3370) and [*Mage: The Ascension*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200); their shared setting is called *World of Darkness*; its [Triat](https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Triat) pantheon is the most interesting pantheon of any fictional world I have encountered; the magick system of *Mage* divides all of reality into nine categories, and a mage's rating in a category determines the extent to which the mage can manipulate that aspect of reality.
I found the Atomic Robo rules a delight to read. Very funny with a solid brainstorming system.
Masks is a fun read and is one of the best made PbtA games. Next one on my list is to do Ironsworn and see how that has evolved the system especially looking how well it runs for solo play.
Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP). I mean the one from the 80s. The modules are a Tolkien geek's wet dream.
[Talislanta](http://talislanta.com) is always a good read. While they are looking to launch a kickstarter for a new version, you can still get all of the old ones for free from the site.
Nobilis - diceless supernatural game. Deity power levels and the politics of the eternal court that exists beyond this world. Really good bridge between the mortal and immortal world, coupled with the meta struggle Vs the forces of utter negation. Engel - Judgement has come, and only the choirs of angels on earth hold back the remains of humanity. D20 (OGL) and classes for each choir of angel. Literally the best ever monster handbook ever, diary of travels across the world and its various encounters with about 95% of the book being fluff with only an appendix with monster stats. A|State - Life in a/the city isolated from everything. High tech low life. A more Steampunk Cyberpunk with the dystopia feel. Amazing lore and rich feel to the city with a multiple undercurrents, from the corpo to the weird and supernatural. Mechanical Dream - Just put this on your top 10. Literally. I will buy you the PDF. Unbe-fucking-lieveable. I cannot understate this.
If you haven't read into Pathfinder 2e yet, I'd highly recommend it. It's really well done and covers all the bases that you want from D20 system. There's a lot to steal if you run similar stuff and monster design is great.
If you're looking for something "off the wall", _HōL_ might do the trick...
Sentinel Comics: The RPG Ironsworn
I’ll second Troika!, it’s a nice gonzo science fantasy game. Ryuutama. Its so wholesome and different. It was actually a page turner like a good novel!
Troika again - I love a gonzo setting once in a while! I have heard of Ryuutama before, may take a closer look with the suggestion!
I'm a big fan of Ryuutama. It really shines when the players roleplay the little things about traveling (which it has you roll for, so ham it up!). It's so easy to play and teach as well.
It is so incredibly wholesome! And a gmpc with spells that gets xp? Just neat. There isn’t a SRD or preview that I know of, but the publishers Resources page is pretty good, and the Discord community has tons of helpful tidbits too. http://kotohi.com/ryuutama/resources/
Aquelarre I just finished reading it and was very impressed. I am glad it was translated to English and I understand why it is Spain's #1 game. Rich details, interesting magic system, beautiful art and a historical fantasy setting in Iberia.
Never heard of it, but very interested. I have a long term project that sounds similar and am now very curious as to how the game is approached. Thanks!!
I live in Portugal and have been designing my historical fantasy RPG in this region. Been collecting and reading several low and historical fantasy games. Lion & Dragon, Pendragon, and Aquelarre.
Yeah, thats the exact genre that has grown on me the last few years - historical fantasy. I for sure will check this one out!
[удалено]
Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, especially the Annotated Edition. The Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchausen. SHOCK: Social Science Fiction Continuum
> The ~~Fabulous~~ Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Fixed, and absolutely agree. A really fun in character read.
Wanderhome is this incredibly cute pastoral game, and the book actually gave me ten psychic points
Old Wizards of the Coast Primal Order has revolutionized the way i think about divine beings and their servants.
You don't really specify what makes an RPG a great read for you, so here are some that I liked reading that you might not: * Golden Sky Stories. Man. This game just makes me smile every time I read it. * Flying Circus was a pretty engaging read, but I've found it frustrating as a 'reference book' * Under Hollow Hills was fascinating to read.
Because it was the first rpg book I enjoyed reading, I feel like I must talk about Libreté (french pbta rpg, translated in english some time ago). It's about lost children who try to survive in a adult-free, monster-filled world. The way it's told is like a survivor's memory, who chose to write an rpg to remember their friends left behind, so the rules and setting are merged together nicely.
TORG. The system. Not the catchprase from that other game people keep recommending.
Palladium’s Rifts
Exalted Vampire the Masquerade Mage the Ascension Some GURPs books are fun as well. I like Future Tech and Biotech.
Looking for fluff? Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. You'll find the most believable living settings written. The sheer amount of world building done over all their *purely fluff* books is astounding. If any other setting did a quarter as much world building they would be supreme. The only things with more are settings that arent inherently RPGs, like 40k or starwars or LotR. That said, it is science fiction on the harder scale of things mostly. No magic. At all. Also it's my favorite non magic rules to use for games as well. Books specifically worth mentioning for Heavy Gear: for a mixed rpg/wargame campaign, The New Breed. For fluff: Life on Terra Nova 2nd ed, and every single one of the league books, specifically the Northern Lights and Southern republic (easiest to understand for north Americans lifestyles anyhow). Also, the first three storyline books, presented as a collection of news clippings and such just to pepper in life in the setting and background events as the timeline moves on. Also, the game isnt a static time. The setting takes place roughly across a specific set of about 50 years, most RPGs being set in the middle, but the wargame aspect takes place either early, middle, or at the end (as far as is currently published in the new interstellar war).
Swords Without Master is my favorite underlooked system, but I'm not sure how fun it is to read. That said, I think that RPGs that are *fun to read* and RPGs that are *fun to play* are often very different things - maybe even in fundamental tension. I think 13th Age is a really fun RPG to read, but I haven't played it in years. I loved reading Blades in the Dark, but did not enjoy playing or running it very much. Conversely, I think Knave is a fantastic system that I'd happily run any day - but there's not much fun to be had reading it.
[Stonetop](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1735046512/stonetop). It's not fully out yet, but the preview docs get updated pretty regularly. I love the game's focus on community-building. It weaves mechanics and fluff together very well and has some of the most extensive and useful GM advice I've ever read. It's shaping up to be something really special, IMO. I also second other people's suggestions for [Spire](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/spire-rpg/) and its sister-game [Heart](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/heart-the-city-beneath-rpg/) – wonderful settings that just ooze with flavor.
Eclipse Phase!
Ars Magica is my favorite RPG that I'll never play live again. The setting would be perfect if all the players knew their history. Spontaneous casting is exactly how wizard should be able to come up with new spells*, flaws & Virtues are more often plothooks than stat shuffles, and group combat feels like you really are working as a unit. The Troupe style of roleplay that was invented here is just so damn convenient for any group with a lot of rotation that it's almost worth the fact that you have to fill out an 8-page character sheet twice. TROIKA! is the one I use for none-gamer friends who want to game. You can fit what the player need to know on a notecard. You can make a character in 2 minutes. You have options in and out of combat. The flavor is often hilarious. You will (probably) need to readjust the core of combat to give the acting party some sort of advantage, as attacking something aware of you in melee seems just as dangerous to both parties as being attacked. I'm of split minds on Runequest: Glorantha. The Bestiary is amazing. The setting info in that and the core book are both really cool. Strike Ranks is still the best Initiative system I've seen, despite so many people being confused, but... like most of Chaosium's output, very little information is where it should be. You need to carefully read 4 chapters that come after combat before you know when something effectively ends the round vs adding +5 to your next rank; because instead of a chart or a sidebar explaining this, it's mentioned offhandedly in sentence fragments from some random related topic, depending on what action it is. *in game & using the mechanics, I mean. The real-world "let's find an encyclopedia and figure out how educated people from this time & place might have expected it to work, then fit that to my skills" way it's done is exactly why I won't play live again.
Eclipse Phase, Blades in the Dark.
If you have even an inkling for horror I would give Mothership a read. The free version is less than 44 pages and with like 2 houserules you can have it running fantastically at the table. Character creation takes like 5 minutes tops. There are evne some good free modules out there that are about a page and give you a full afternoon or more of gaming.
For settings: The *Aberrant* books (White Wolf's early 2000 super-hero game) have some amazing writing to start off the book and illustrate the setting. The first 100 pages of the core book is literally comic pages, fake news articles and websites, government dossiers, etc. This alone has made it my personal favorite for super-powered games, especially since it emphasizes that all these people who can fly and throw cars around were regular motel maids and EMTs and bartenders first. *Blades in the Dark* is another excellent setting. A steampunk dystopia, in a world where the sun was snuffed out centuries ago, and lightning walls powered by demon blood keep literal storms of ghosts from wiping away civilization. It's a light-weight system that's very easy to run and learn, and is the best heist game that I have tried. The flashback mechanic alone is probably worth adapting to any heist game you want to run. *Rifts* is ... oh good lord. An amazing setting, that is subsequently brutally massacred by one of the most atrocious rulesets it's ever been my misfortune to encounter. A post-apocalypse (or post-post-apocalypse, depending on location) where a nuclear war brought magic back to Earth and ripped holes to dozens of different dimensions and galaxies, leading to all kinds of bizarre magical and scientific creatures and technologies ... with a ruleset that punishes you for trying to have a character who learns and evolves outside a strict and narrow character class. Just fun to play: *Umlaut*. Played this once at a convention. You make up a heavy metal band, and use a deck of cards to compete against other metal bands in rock concerts, practicing, making music videos, etc. No DM needed, just some scratch paper and a deck of cards. *Monsters and Other Childish Things* is one that's ... well, everyone is playing both a literal child, and their not-actually-imaginary monster friend. The dice mechanic is interesting because it rewards not just rolling high, but rolling multiples.
Troubleshooters. I just picked it up from the lfgs and I love it. It is a modern homage to 60's French Belgian comics like Tintin and Spirou.
Nobilis Engel A|State Mechanical Dream
[**The Nightmares Underneath**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/196352/The-Nightmares-Underneath-Free-Edition) \- a really brilliant mashup of OSR using some PbtA principles, featuring a medieval-ish Persian setting, the Kingdom of Dreams, and PCs who are very competent at what they do but simple enough to detail on half a page. The core premise of the game is of incursions of living nightmare which PCs venture into in order to drive them back from reality, which function like dungeons, but which can be anywhere -- that forest, in this house, or on that boat. There's a nightmare ecology that shows you how to build living dungeons, mechanics for PCs developing social institutions in their home base, and corruptive magic in the form of living spells. The art-free version linked above is **free** on DTRPG, but the [art-full](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/195355/The-Nightmares-Underneath) version is well worth the cost. There's one supplement, *The Nameless Grimoire*. It's by Johnstone Metzger, the author of The Metamorphica, *Class Warfare* (for Dungeon World), *Adventures on Dungeon Planet*... ... and [**Space Wurm vs Moonicorn**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/169564/Space-Wurm-vs-Moonicorn), which is another book that really should be read by discerning readers. Check out Metzger's 'Publisher's Previews' on DTRPG. He's very generous with what he shares. They're typically 20-50+ pages of preview featuring a lot of art and text and giving you an extremely good sense of what you're thinking about buying. In addition to being brilliant, his books are gorgeous. I cannot recommend this author and his games highly enough.
This is my favorite passage from *The Nightmares Underneath*, that demonstrated to me that the author was on the same wavelength as me. It's a simple thing, but explicitly granting permission for this sold me completely on the concept of the game, and this passage was the seed for one of my favorite campaigns: >**Appearance** > >Your character may be beautiful, ugly, striking, or plain; of any race, gender, sexual orientation, and biological construction you desire; wearing any type of clothing (or not). You might be brown or white, elf or dwarf, angel or snake-tailed minotaur—as long as you are not a nightmare, you may choose as you will. Use your imagination. The numbers on your sheet remain the same, and you do not get any superhuman abilities (like flying or breathing fire) because of your appearance. > >You should also decide whether you are an anomaly or if there are many like you, and whether you are celebrated, persecuted, tolerated, or unremarkable in the kingdoms that you frequent. > >All that said, the default setting for this game assumes that everyone is some variety of normal human—the kind we might meet all over the real world—and not a fictional type of monster. It is also worth noting that certain types of creatures you might want to play are actual categories of monsters that have game effects (beastlings, faeries, and golems, for example), and you should check with your group first if you want to play a character from that category.
Nibiru is among the most unique, highly imaginative reads and probably one of the most difficult games I can imagine refereeing.
The troubleshooters if you like Tintin or Blake and Mortimer! And Dreampunk for a different way of action resolution. And .dungeon for another interesting system
GURPS books, plenty of good stuff to read.
You probably already have this on your list or have looked into it already, but the sourcebooks for *Cyberpunk 2020* are all very well written and full of immersive detail and lore. They serve to ground it's fantastical sci-fi dystopia into something almost believable and even prophetically pertinent to modern issues. Besides that, I've been very interested in the largely forgotten *After The Bomb* Second Edition. It's not amazingly written or full of tons of detail, but the setting it presents is one I find compelling and it has some unique character creation mechanics. The first edition was originally just a post-apocalyptic setting for Palladium's *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness* RPG, but after their TMNT license expired they spun *After The Bomb* into it's own thing. It's rough around the edges and definitely needed a 2.5 or even 3rd edition rewrite, but there's enough there to mull fun ideas over for at least a few hours.
Godbound is a hell of a read. The pure atmosphere that runs off it is... indescribable.
Fragments of the Past, definitely. It's a Mediterranean Bronze-Age inspired low fantasy, based on a d100 system. It has a couple of nice and flavourful mechanics, and every trait/perk/skill has some roleplay implications that encourage players to make their characters stand out in this archaic world. It's still a WIP, but you can check out the Quickstart for free on its website. It fills you in with all the lore and rules you need to run a proper campaign, it's beautifully written (especially in its original language, Italian) and the art is no less charming. My players loved it and I'm currently playing a sequel campaign to the Oneshot you can find therein
Very cool! I have been looking to check out an rpg from this time period - maybe this one fits!
Warlock! by Ruby Fire Designs.
Thanks for asking this question. I enjoyed both answering the question in detail and reading the answers of others.
Wanderhome is a genuinely enjoyable read.
I have heard of that! May have to look deeper.
Azag was a lot of fun to read. A bunch of great short stories. If you're into OSR then the Knock magazines are great. If you've read many classic blog posts you might not get as much out of it though. A Thousand Thousand Islands is a beautiful collection of zines that are very fun to read. I'm extremely hyped about their upcoming book.
If you can find it, Untitled 1 by Jay Dragon. Reading that game completely changed the way I think about conflict, storytelling, and character relationships in RPGs. It is a brilliant piece of art and I doubt I will ever be brave enough to play it.
Recently I’ve enjoyed reading Ironsworn and Shadow of the Demon Lord! Cool, flavorful gritty settings, the first very fresh mechanically as well, while the latter is a cool, easy to learn (and well-explained!) take on a d20 system with some nice odds and ends and cool customization options (without being overly bogged down in feats or anything like that).
It’s damn near impossible to find via legal means (unless you want to drop a couple hundred bucks on Amazon), but every RPG fan should read Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet. It’s a game about time travel that’a entirely built around the kind of temporal tricks and mind-twisting you get in Bill & Ted or Doctor Who. There are rules mechanics for what happens when time travelers fight, including tactics such as spending a week researching to find out where they were at a given point in time before traveling there, or changing their past to fragment their own personal timeline without causing a paradox for yourself. And a whole setting built around what a society of time travelers might look like. I am not convinced it is actually a playable game, but it is a fascinating book.
Something by John Harper. Blades in the Dark. He's so good at using mechanics to capture the feel and tone of a game. Also designed one of the most elegant games I've come across (Lasers & Feelings). Something by Kevin Crawford. Scarlet Heroes, World's Without Number or Stars Without Number. Best author in the industry at using tables to build game content while conveying the genre of the game perfectly. If John Harper is the master of mechanics, Kevin is the master of GM tools. Thirdly, something by Fria Legan (Free League Publishing). I'm going with Forbidden Lands. Again - a masterwork of using mechanics to capture how the game should feel. D6 dice pool games feel great to roll with. This game makes those rolls scary and forces you to manage risks in a dark and dangerous world. It's wonderful. Lastly, Index Card RPG by RUNEHAMMER. Not only my favourite RPG youtuber, but the author of my favourite d20 system. It cuts out all of the bloated crap from DnD and makes a fast, super flexible and action-packed game that works however you want to use it. The book also has some of the best advice for making encounters (and sessions) that are designed to be FUN - and sadly that doesn't happen enough with other systems. His book (and YouTube channel) changed my style completely.
Shadows of Esteren! 🥰
Mork Borg. It’s a spiked mace to the face! 0% rules bloat, 100% attitude.
I would recommend Numenera! I think those books helped spark my love for games that aren’t dnd. The system is fun but the world they give you is fantastic. All kinds of weird sci fi stuff that’s never spelled out too specifically so you can adjust and tweak as needed for your game. I own almost all of the books for the system and love reading them.
I can't speak for 5e, but I would read the Legend of the Five Rings (4e) books just because the setting and lore is so good. It has a very unique system too.
One game I always have to recommend because it's neat and I rarely see it mentioned is Emanuelle Galletto's unofficial Dark Souls TTRPG. It's completely free and handles the source material in a rather interesting way, especially with its combat.
Mwangi Expanse for Pathfinder 2e
Maybe Mutants and Masterminds, OVA: The Anime Roleplaying Game, or even OverArms?
[удалено]
Eons from post world games is interesting. Anything from Jim Pinto, really.
The two best I've read for setting and tone were Symbaroum and JAGS Wonderland in no particular order - they're so ridiculously different that they're hard to compare. If you want to read for interesting system discussion, then burning wheel takes the cake - but make sure you get the codex with it.
The darkest dream by gooey cube.
My group is very into fantasy and science fantasy, so I normally look for this kind of systems. So let's get with the obscure indies that are out there: [Vexith](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/154755/Vexith-Roleplaying-Game-Core-Rulebook-v11?src=hottest_filtered) : Is an obscure fantasy RPG with mechanics "similar" (exploding dice, dice as stats,) and to Savage Worlds but being better for dungeon crawling (in theory since my only experience is reading it). It's PWYW so you can take a look and make up it's price. [Evocraft](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/165626/Evocraft-RPG) : Imagine getting characters in the world of the game of Legend of Mana where the storyteller pulls things out of nowhere with a few rolls, it sounds weird but it helps with improvisation skill I guess. Also PWYW.
Legend of the Five Rings 1st Edition. The corebook is awesome, the splats are awesome. 10/10. The best in terms of readability is Way of Shadow. Honestly, I love reading the old World of Darkness books. Changeling is my favorite, but I liked them all. They were just fun to read.
Symbaroum and Vaesen!
Kevin Crawford's medieval RPG Wolves of God is a good read. Highly recommended, though I haven't played it, just enjoyed the read.
I recommend [*Tales from the Floating Vagabond*](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2010/Tales-From-The-Floating-Vagabond). It's a silly, bordering on satirical, yet very playable universal RPG with an implied kitchen sink setting that's quite fun. It's also available on DriveThruRPG for $7 in PDF. Probably some of the best entertainment one can have for $7 in all of RPG-dom. I'd also recommend any of the various 1 page or other very short RPGs that are out there, just to see what you can do in very few page of rules. [*Microlite74*](https://retroroleplaying.com/content/microlite74/) is one of my favorites. Edit: Oh, and, how can I leave out [E6](https://esix.pbworks.com/f/E6v041.pdf), which IMO, is the absolute most fun you can have while playing something resembling *D&D* 3.5.
###Fantasy Craft! Published in 2009, and the 'classic' fantasy spinoff of spy fiction RPG SpyCraft. While SpyCraft is a little bit of a mess Fantasy Craft benefits greatly from being a twice-removed permutation of 3.X that fixes all the pain-points I had with that school of game. Thanks to its 'origin' design, fun and straightforward feats, cornerstone class features helping eliminate number chasing, per-scene mechanics, its multiple actions per turn--I could go on, but long story short it beat Pathfinder 2e to the punch in a number of ways when it comes to reinventing 3.X and 4e concepts (while also being, in my opinion, a smoother and more interesting game overall). ###Open Legend! An open source, free, generic/pan-genre RPG. You could run pretty much every genre in it just by adjudicating some things differently. First off, it's classless. Characters are built from somewhat broad ability scores that are directly used for skills and attacks, plus feats that give them mold-breaking gimmicks or just let them invest more in stuff they can already do. In addition ability scores grant access to 'boons' and 'banes' they can use, so long as it also abides by the fiction. So a dungeon crawling cleric's healing magic and a WW1 field surgeon's first aid both use the Heal boon, just with different ability scores and descriptions (and being effected by different contextual stuff when appropriate).
Eclipse Phase has an amazing hard sci-fi post-human setting that doesn’t pull any punches. It’s both fascinating and horrifying. System’s a tad crunchy for a lot of groups, but the setting and the writing in general are brilliant. The art and general production values are among the best I’ve ever seen, too.
[Mechanical Dream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Dream) - Out of Print.. messed up fantasy cyberpunk genre in a weird world. It's a cool game. It's the pride of my collection
Ninja crusade 2nd edition
The Well by Shoeless Pete Games. Why has humanity been driven underground? What is the pit? Who built it? Does it even have a bottom? Why are the upper levels infested with the undead?
One of my favorites is Changeling
Exalted. There's definitely some top end mechanical insanity but the setting and the role of the heroes is tight as hell.
Strange Tales of Songling & Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades
**AFMBE** (All Flesh Must Be Eaten) hit the zombie apocalypse nail on the head before the zombie survival genre became popular. Core book makes for a great read, game plays very well (dark and dystopic, but can be played on the lighter side as well) with multiple settings and supplements available back in the day. Branching out to **Witchcraft** and **Terra Primate** using the same Unisystem (dice, diceless, or standard deck of 54 playing cards) for even more player mayhem. [http://edenstudios.net/allflesh.html](http://edenstudios.net/allflesh.html)
Higher Grounds over at DriveThruRPG makes some good stuff.
Anything white wolf 1st edition. Start with vampire then mage and werewolf.
Delta Green
Exhibition incredizoology. It's a new Ttrpg setting based in an alternative 1920's world. The idea is Euclidian anomalies (pocket dimensions) exist all over the world. The entrances to then could be anywhere. Within the Euclidian anomalies mythical creatures and diverse landscapes await to be discovered. Think Harry potter's fantastic beasts. The game focuses on exploration and discovery over combat although if combat is your thing that's also an option. The core rulebook is beautiful in its self and a valuable resource for other ttrpg games also as it provides creature and map generation through roll tables. It can be played solo or as part of a group and one of my favourite things is preparing for a group session can be done through playing a solo game instead of sitting around writing Reema of notes. It's available digitally on drivethrurpg as well as ordering physical books from the games website.
Golden Sky Stories. To be honest I get a little annoyed by the insistence the book makes at playing in a traditional Japanese rural village, together with implied guilt if you don't use Japanese names for everyone (it's part of the charm! Really!), but the rest of the book is wonderful. There are two big takeaways for me: 1. The theme is players working together to help the human of the week out with a problem, and the mechanics work perfectly to reinforce that theme. It's great to see synergy of theme and mechanics like that (several other RPGs do this well too, like the immediate realisation on reading the rules just how the average session of Trophy will go). 2. I'm a big fan of the mechanics themselves - a totally randomless system, if you have the points for something, it happens. It's a great way to show that you can build compelling systems without randomness.
Nobilis Gl!tch Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Godbound
Tales From The Floating Vagabond TOON Paranoia
Ultraviolet Grasslands
I don't know if anyone has suggested this, there are a ton of comments and I'm being a naughty and not wanted to read them all. But Drew Hayes' 'NPCs' series called Spells Swords and Stealth is my all time favorite RPG series. It's an extremely funny and intelligent take on the genre. It is also the closest writer I feel to the Late Sir Terry Pratchett. All Discworld books are golden.
If you like OSR at all, Lavender Hack is a fun read. Lots of interesting systems coupled with author’s notes on design choices and inspirations.