So, I'm wondering what RPGs that fell across your desk over the past year (they can be older) gave you some sort of inspiration, and why? Doesn't have to be an exhaustive list.

For me:

Unknown Armies: Simple, concise d100 mechanic without feeling too "sterile" or Generic. Interesting setting, but the system, namely the madness mechanic, make it perfect for adoption into a Kult, Hellraiser or other similar game. I've been reading the background, and for the most part it's a 50/50 with me: I love the mysteries, hate the "most folks are obsessive losers" aspect. But I'm running a game right now with my core game group.

FATE, a flavor of Fudge. It's like Fudge and Risus/Over the Edge had a baby. Great implementation of the Fudge rules. While I haven't had time to run or play it yet, it's next on the list.

BESM - I revisited BESM to handle a game set in a Final Fantasy-India style fantasy setting that I ran for a mini-campaign. Lotsa fun, very simple, all the players quickly grasped the rules. There is very little that I don't like about the game. Just don't ask for the stats for any vehicles or any of my NPCs, and we're golden.

I'm trying to think of some of the Indie games I got my fingers into as well. I love the scene framing ideas behind Trollbabe, but I have the feeling that I want to play this more than run it. Also, Dust Devils flipped my lid, and I'm dying to try this one out, but again I might have to wait for a con to get some play on.

While the Daedalus zine doesn't exactly cound as an RPG on it's own, it deserves some props for including a set of both playable games and viable game settings that, agian, blow the mind. I wasn't too impressed with the first one, admittedly, but I read the Winter edition cover to cover.

...and you?

The Good Knights and The Nighttime Animals Save the World, both by Vincent Baker, have given me much food for thought about simplicity of rules. (Basically everything on his site has rattled my brain in one way or another).

The Great Ork Gods playtest version helped me gather my thoughts about the ways in which players control play.

coxcomb wrote: The Good Knights and The Nighttime Animals Save the World, both by Vincent Baker, have given me much food for thought about simplicity of rules.

*bump*

C'Mon, folks! I'm not looking to feed my ego with a high reply count or anything, but I'd really like to hear some others give some Regular/Indie RPG recommendations so that I can fill out my "to read" list this year... :-)

BRING IT ON!

Hm.

This year, eh?

Nobilis is a book full of glory. Granted, it's peanut glory and a lot of people are allergic to it, but it's glory nonetheless.

I just really got into writing Charm material for Exalted, which is charming for its CCG-ness.

I'm intrigued by Burning Wheel.

I like HQ's mechanics well enough to overlook its layout.

The Nighttime Animals Save The World is...well...wow.

I want to read The Valedictorian's Death but fear it will strike too close to home. I'm still too sentimental about my high school days.

HeroQuest - It's got me excited and depressed all at the same time. It's just so good (minus Glorantha, yes I'm one of those), it's really raised the bar as far as how I look at other rpgs and my own designs.

Shadows - Not last year, but what the hell. This game is always an inspiration to me. It speaks volumes about how much can be accomplished with minimal fuss.

Cheapass Games - yes, pretty much the whole product line. I purchased a couple Cheapass Games a few years ago and loved them. I bought about a dozen more at GenCon SoCal. I want to roll around in them naked.

-Chris

Shreyas Sampat wrote: I want to read The Valedictorian's Death but fear it will strike too close to home. I'm still too sentimental about my high school days.

Lesse.

Inspectres. I haven't laughed so hard in a really long time.

I have most of a writeup down for using Unknown Armies to run stuff in the firefly setting. For collated, rules-free background see http://www.fireflywiki.org. (I'm also considering doing something with the setting using Dust Devils, but that's based solely on what I've heard about the game, cuz I haven't gotten my copy yet.)

Trollbabe. My only problem with Trollbabe is that I seem to have trouble getting a full session in -- we keep starting late and getting one turn in for everyone. Annoying.

Heroquest seems like just the thing to turn my d20 group on to -- provided I ever manage to force my way through the obtuse layout.

Sorcerer has rocked my fucking socks off in the last couple months.

Nobilis has been my game of the year, though -- I've been running a a mostly weekly game for a year as of April 14th. 36 sessions or so. Magical.

My Life with Master. I absolutely must find time to run this with my Nobilis group.

Donjon... OctaNe... Adventures of the Good Knights.

It's been a really good year for finding new games for me.

The Last Year...

I have had a hell of a lot of fun with The Riddle of Steel. Like, all the time. For a while, I did nothing else.

Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. briefly reared it's ancient head again and made me very happy.

Nobilis is constantly a source of amusement, although whenever I run it it turns into "James Bond meets Mystery Cultz meets Urusei Yatsura" and I feel that I'm doing it wrong, even though everyone has fun. Last time the players destroyed the entire history of humanity, the entire factions of the Light and the Dark, and their own imperator *by accident*

I have fallen in and out of love with Charnel Gods more times than I can count.

D&D 3E provides it's own fun, to bring that can of worms into a new thread. I would say it turns me on in a major way, but I am always amazed at the number of effective builds, in a Gamist context.

FATE is the most clever thing I've seen this year.

PuppetLand and Munchkins appealed massively in a not sure I'll ever play them kind of way

Arcana Unearthered (Is Monte Cook indie or not?) briefly rekindled my interest in doing some olde-world roleplaying. D&D but not so depressingly vanilla.

(Incidently, does anyone else get irrationally pleased when other people mention their roleplaying game in posts?)

Burning Wheel has made me want to run vanilla fantasy again. I want to use this system for all of my Dwarf, Elf, Orc, Human needs. Best. Elves. Evar.

I've been using TROS a whole lot and I think it is a neat game, crunchier than I ever thought I'd use in a game but a cool game nonetheless.

I'm about to embark on my 2nd Dust Devils one-shot, which should be a hoot and a half.

It has been a rough year, jobless through much of it and so I think that is sadly about it.

My Life with Master and Little Fears.

I have not had the chance to play either yet, but reading the books gives me "that tingle" down my back and I can't wait to try them out.

I'm also very keen on Transhuman Space. Actually, I'm not a GURPS fan at all, and in fact have not read the book(s) for THS yet (they're on the way as we speak) but everything I have read about them makes me very keen.

Brian.

Buffy, which I totally thought I wouldn't like running (and I was only doing as a favour) turned out to have a fantastic, simple combat system, a drama point system we played way freer and looser with than spec, and players who couldn't get enough of it. Season 2, on its way. Would like to try it with Heroquest though.

Universalis, best game purchase I've ever made. Probably because it works on so many levels - gamism of getting your way and figuring out new ways to turn the rules to your advantage, negotiation, the 'Aha' moment of figuring out where the story should go, building a story out of nothing. I'm yet to be totally convinced that it's an example of narrativist game design - but that's probably for another thread.

Cheers,
Steve.

The single most enlightening and engaging roleplay experience I had in the last year was playing Trollbabe. And the experience is consistently reproducable.

The new Heroquest looks great. I haven't played yet though.

Paka wrote: Burning Wheel has made me want to run vanilla fantasy again.

joshua neff wrote:

I'm currently digging Clinton's The Shadow of Yesterday in a big, big way.

The Shadow of Yesterday.

Geez. . . Well, considering I really only discovered the Forge this year. . .

Great Ork Gods, Legends of Alyria, Little Fears, My Life With Master, Puppetland, Sorceror, Universalis, Unsung, Wuthering Heights. Probably a couple others too.

I haven't read all of these, unfortunately, I'll be making a round of purchases this summer! The ones I have read have jogged my brain into a whole different way of thinking.

Riddle of Steel, far and away. Give me the space I want while still giving me the mechanics I need to really rev the tension up.

Talislanta, because more story hooks one could never want!

James

Hmm. Robots & Rapiers, although I haven't strictly played it yet. (But I wants to, my precious, yes.) And I was struck by My Life with Master, which held its own in actual play. Heartwrenching, it was.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

What's Shadows?

For me, hm... I love UA 2nd edition, but I got that over a year ago.

Definitely My Life With Master. I think this was my hands down favorite this year.
Sword and Sorcerer, which turned me on to some great fiction.
Sex and Sorcery.
Oddly, Dark Inheritance. Uses d20, which I don't favor, and has the Too Much Stuff Syndrome. But it had a bunch of cool ideas I can use, and it has a decent explanation of why certain features are there. (Or maybe that came from the guy selling it -- either way, I like getting the explanation.)
I, Mordred -- I did my dissertation on modern Arthuriana, and this was a lot of fun to read.
Deliria, the most gorgeous item in the GenCon Exhibit Hall.
Fates Worse than Death -- still reading this one. Absurd, absurd premises, but tons of cool, cool stealable stuff.
To Go -- damned good supplement for UA, which I want both to run straight and to steal bits of for my current game.
Shadow Knight -- Lots of interesting stuff about the Zelazny characters as if they were being run as PCs, with insights into the decisions the players made. I don't agree with everything, but it makes me think.
2nd edition Tribe 8 Players Handbook, which actually explains the friggin metaplot

Definite turn off -- recent Chaosium CoC products with gratuitous bugs. I'm an arachnaphobe and not fond of other insects. I don't object to bug pictures when it's got something to do with the scenario or setting, but it doesn't. It's especially heinous in the new Kingsport, which isn't supposed to have that kind of atmosphere.

-Lisa

Anything written by Ron Edwards. The man is a genius at setting up "templates" in the guise of RPGs which allow you to graft ideas onto them and use the games as engines of creation. The mark of genius: in no way do they seem (nor are they) the least bit "generic"; these games have certain styles and ideas built into them on a genetic level, which almost subliminally direct and keep the games on track. As far as his efforts to expand what RPGs can do and be in their own right, Ron is the Harlan Ellison of roleplaying. Sorcerer and Trollbabe are the best examples of this. The only other game I've seen come close is Heroquest.

Paul Czege's My Life with Masterand Nicotine Girls display how you can mine gold out of a narrow focus (Minions of a cruel Master, young economically-challenged women trying to pursue their dreams) and create diverse, rich characters and play. What at first seems almost like rules for a boardgame yields surprising diversity. That is Paul's patented brand of genius, although to be fair, Zak Arnston's game Heavy Metal Opera gives Paul a run for the patent.

Legends of Alyria and Talislanta, two wildly different games, show you what fantasy gaming is all about: passion and imagination. These games are so brilliant in their own ways that you'd have to be totally disconnected from them to have a bad game playing them, their brilliance and enthusiasm is that contagious. (And I eagerly await Legends making it to full print status.)

Deliria, by Phil Brucato, is the game he always wanted to make, and it shows. Love of subject, broad in scope, a baroque and colorful sandbox to play in and lose yourself for hours. Yes, the mechanics are a little too loose in some places, but Phil always was one for letting the needs of the Drama supersede structure, and I can't help but forgive him. It's the same feeling that The Last Exodus gave me.

If I make one game as good as any of these, I'll consider myself worthy.

liked:

HeroQuest - everything has already been said about this, can't think of anything to add

Mechanical Dream - Not sure this was last year, but really cool setting and rules which basically work, but aren't anything special.

Wushu - Cool. Silly. Fun. Works for me.

Loved:

Donjon - Again, prolly not last year per-se, but I discovered it recently.

Burning Wheel - As someone else pointed out, this makes me actually want to run a "proper" fantasy game for the first time in 15 years.

MLWM - Haven't really gotten to play this properly, just biding my time until I can get the right group together....

I'll continue the Burning Wheel love fest. It clicked in a big way for me. For evocative fantasy with a lots of focus on exploration of character, this is my system of choice.

Conversely, when I'm in the mood for "little things, hitting each other", I've derived an immense amount of satisfaction from Savage Worlds. Large scale mayhem, with just enough crunch to satisfy.

And Danger Patrol. I long for it to be released on an unsuspecting world. Damn you Harper! Write faster, Monkey Boy!

Foo. I'd like to take credit for the previous post, before Al Qaeda does.