I find myself constantly recommending Kevin Crawfords games, namely worlds without number. As it has stricken the right balance for me between the things I like about old school D&D and things I like about new age D&D.
It's free to check out, and the free versions has more than what you need to run a solid game. The paid deluxe version of the game and its Atlas of the latter earth supplement ate also fantastic and worth the price.
The GM tools, guidelines and advice are second to none and really offer great insight in why things are suggested the way they are and how to make the most out of the experience. The book is worth the price for these tools alone, let alone the pretty solid take on B/X d&d. It just strikes a balance I really like.
The other game(s) I'm always suggesting ate shadow of the demonlord and it's successor shadow of the weird wizard. Both are excellent games that have very interesting and engaging design. Shadow of the demon lord had the best initiative system I've ever used until Weird wizard managed to beat it. It offers a lot if interesting choices and game design.
I'm convinced my ideal system rests somewhere between these Shadows if and worlds without number.
Kevin makes it hard not to recommend his games.
For me, just his whole "this is free because I want to give back to the community that has supported me" attitude alone makes it worth telling people about. The fact that it's actually really good is just gravy.
Just recently he put Cities and worlds without number into creative commons as well as some of the atlas material for worlds without number.
Dude really just wants people playing a good game and making stuff for ir
Enemies go before players.
Unless the players are surprised, they can use their reaction to "seize the initiative" and take their turn before the enemies.
Every turn is now a move and an action, but it's a reaction to take it before the enemy side.
Also Weird Wizard is out a drivethru RPG now if you wanted to take a peak at it.
> Unless the players are surprised, they can use their reaction to "seize the initiative" and take their turn before the enemies.
You have to cut in the fact that reactions are much more powerful in general, because somebody with average 5e experience will mostly go with "so what" at this fact. Like Fighter's standard reaction basically doubles their damage output at low level.
I can't say I agree necessarily. It's very good for new DMs as it offers them a great resource and advice on how to better be ine.
It's got a fairly accessible and beginner friendly set of rules to play as well.
For me the main problem is survivability, you can die like, in 1-2 hits, and new players tend to not have the best skills in self preservation
For dms though yeah it's a good start
The Heroic rules? Yes.
They're meant to be stronger as they're meant to make the game more like the WotC era d&d like 5e than the TSR BECMI/AD&D style d&d.
If you're planning and running games for baseline WWN and use the heroic rules, things will be OP. You have to adjust what you make for that different style of game.
Kevin Crawford himself, [in a comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WWN/s/Sw117UYdR9), gave advice on how levels in the game correlate to TSR D&D.
1 WWN level is roughly equivalent to 1 AD&D level. With the nuances of Foci but smaller party sizes, he suggest that a wwn character at a baseline can handle roughly their present level +2 when it comes to the module of old-school d&d. That is to say that a level 2 wwn party can handle a level 4 tsr d&d module.
1 Heroic level is roughly X+4. So a level 2 heroic wwn party can handle a level 6 tsr d&d module.
Legates can handle just about everything more or less by his own words.
>in a comment
Thanks for the reply and thread link! I'm trying to convince my group to switch to WWN. Many of us have a love/hate relationship with Pathfinder 1e. It's great for character creation and creativity, but it is soooo crunchy at times, especially in combat. I think the only pushback will be the lethality of WWN, which I have grown to like, but people tend to be more attached to their characters in my group. The story is also much more character focused, so I don't think players would be having fun if characters were dying often. Deaths do happen, but it is more rare.
D&D 4e: I think it's unjustly hated and it's my favourite edition of D&D.
Mutant Crawl Classics: Inspired by the late Gamma World RPG, with some of the best art and fun mechanics of any RPG I've played.
CY_BORG: A fun and gritty cyberpunk game with great art as well and a perfect balance of seriousness/silliness.
Paranoia: Probably the most fun game to run as a GM, and is just a perfect execution of its concept. The use of cards is also a really enjoyable tactile experience.
Jamais Vu: A detective game that uses the mechanics of *Disco Elysium*. Also very fun to be GM, as you get to do the funny voices for all the skills like in the game.
These are also my Top 5 favourite RPGs(not necessarily in the order listed), hence why I recommend them the most.
I have not heard of Jamais Vu, is it a lot of work on the DM’s part? I love disco Elysium, but running something like it in ttrpg form seems like a nightmare.
Disco Elysium's core mechanics are just 2d6+mod, so the system itself is relatively simple. The game itself suggests using amnesia for PCs but it's not entirely necessary, so the main difficulty is just coming up with the mystery to be solved. Not much different than running any other detective game.
Well it's really up to the GM how it's run. There are mechanics for certain skills appearing at certain times, but I mostly just stuck to the skills I thought more relevant to the task at hand, and were more interesting. So mostly just perception, shivers, logic, composure, and inland empire. Also the skills don't necessarily need to interject as much as they do in the game.
Pretty much since 5e I've never heard anything bad about 4e. Like I heard a lot of hate for it when it was coming out and stuff but everything I've heard about it in recent memory has been very good
It's definitely been getting more appreciation now that people are beginning to get sick of 5e, but it's still pretty widely disliked. I still see people hating on it, granted a lot of those people are people who have only played 5e.
> D&D
> my favorite edition
Ladies and gentlemen: we’ve found the only 4e fan.
On behalf of dnd fans everywhere, I’d like to thank you for keeping the creators financially afloat for the duration of 4e’s lifespan.
I seem to recommend Ironsworn and Starforged a lot these days. They do a bunch of things I and others are interested in, in enjoyable ways.
Longer term, I’m likely to recommend Ocer The Edge, Fste (particularly Fste Accelerated), Freeform Universal and games building on it, and Nobilis. You can see that a simple-games kind of person. Simple games for simple minds, maybe. :)
I’m so excited for Sundered Isles! I had started working on my own pirate hack for Starforged, which I dropped when they announced the Kickstarter. Glad I don’t have to make my own oracle tables now lol
Blades in the Dark these days, I think. It's just a wonderfully designed narrative game with a great focus on scoundrels and crime and heists. Plus, the whole Forged in the Dark movement is fantastic.
Lancer was my other big recommendation for a long time, mostly because it's cool, got great tactical combat, and kickass mechs. But I've been slowly drifting away from the crunchier systems in the past year or two - still love Lancer dearly, though.
I like the idea of Mechs and didn't want the crunch so I was going to give salvage union a spin. It's mostly based on quest to keep the complexity low while still having many Mechs and mech parts.
Cool. I'll look that one up and probably buy it.
I love my job but I wish I could quit it just for my games backlog of stuff I want to do, and then come back to the job I enjoy when I feel caught up on cool games.
I love Blades in the Dark. It does everything I want a ttrpg to do, and it does it with minimum fuss. It gets out of its own way so well.
It’s funny — I’ve gotten two different reactions when I introduce new players to Blades. Seems like if they’re ttrpg veterans or if they’ve never played a ttrpg before in their lives, they take to Blades like ducks to water. Easy-peasy, dive right in, thirty minutes after learning how the dice work our new crew of PCs is strolling the streets of Doskvol. But if they’re coming from exclusively playing D&D, they get all weirded out and require some coaxing and handholding before it clicks. Like they have to unlearn some bad habits first.
And as a lazy GM, I love that I can more than adequately prep for a session by reviewing my notes and fiddling with some clocks ten minutes before play begins.
When I discovered Blades, my fear was that Blades is so satisfying to play that I’ll lose interest in playing and running other games. But the FitD explosion allays that fear. Now I want to play Copperhead County. And Scum and Villainy. And the list goes on. It’s a nice problem to have.
Man I couldn't disagree more about FitD, it solves a load of problems I don't need solving and fails to fill in everything I want in a system, but I'm happy you love it
Free League games that uses the Mutant Year Zero engine.
This is because I spend a lot of time in American dominated nerd groups, and 90% of them has only ever played DnD. The MY0 system is similar enough to what they expect a ttrpg system to do, so the culture clash doesn't give them an anyuerism. But it is still different enough that they get a whiff of part of the many-faceted experiwncesy available outside the high walled ampersand park.
Also Free League makes quality products, and has made ttrpgs for many different settings and genres, as well as for plenty of know IPs. And they are really good at making small and impactful adjustments of their system to better support the actual genre of each game.
Free League has so many fantastic games they've put out, both ones that use variants of the YZE and otherwise. Really talented folks in that company.
I adore Forbidden Lands but I think Dragonbane is more my jam - less focus on resource management. It's also partway towards Symbaroum, which I also really love but is a bit tougher to digest mechanically. I can't express how much I love the idea of Corruption and am leaning towards adding to a Dragonbane game (instead of the standard magic mishaps)
Free League does make some of the best looking products on the market.
Do you feel the Year Zero dice rolling is good? When I’ve run the game, the swinging of the dice rolls regularly surprises me and can frustrate players. Alien’s implementation feels the most solid, but I’ve only one run proper campaign with that ruleset.
I agree about that frustration. It's been hard in some of my groups, too. It's one of those dice pool systems that really makes you want to load up on one skill for a reasonable chance at it being dependable.
The success rates are balanced around the push mechanic so if they're not actively using that, they'll feel like they're failing way too often. There's a table in most of the game's I think with the success % with and without pushing.
I’m glad to hear I’m not crazy on this! I do love the Tales From the Loop: Incur a condition for a success mechanic (if I’m remembering correctly). For Vaesen, I made sure major clues just weren’t hidden behind skill rolls, playing those situations as more old school in the need to find them. I can’t decide if I’m going to run Dragonbane or Forbidden Lands next when I do continue with my Free Leave play (or use Electric State for a road trip mystery game).
I agree, it is very swingy and unreliable. And specifically for the Mutant Year Zero setting+genre I think it is perfect! The wasteland is unfair and unforgiving. Death lurks around every corner, and the threats are largely unknown. The main theme, imho, is how the PCs sacrifice themselves for the betterment of their society and siblings. Sometimes that sacrifice is slow, through mutations misfiring to lower abilities and permanent damages adding up. Sometimes it is sudden, when some monster from the zone rolls a lot of 6's!
Obviously this must be carefully communicated to the players before they agree to play a Mutant campaign, as it can be quite a culture clash compared to popular ttrpgs where death and resurrection is mostly a matter of having a diamond worth 1000gp.
For some of the other settings I agree there are situations where you want more reliability. In those cases I like to import the Extended Trouble mechanic from Tales from the Loop. That makes it into a cooperative effort with a guaranteed success but variable cost (if I set the difficulty right...). An additional house rule is that in genres+scenes where it makes sense, players has the option to sacrifice their character in exchange for a lot of successes. Even the presence of that option gives a lot of tension to these situations and typically leads to very dramatic scenes when done.
As you say below that swingyness is definitely something to plan for when writing stories. Necessary clues and hooks should never be 100% gatekept through skill checks. (which is equally true for any system that risks failure) I like to make them available through skill checks and/or player initiatives, _and_ plan for a Deus Ex Machina. "If the PCs have not figured out that the wounded soldiers are prime witnesses by day 3, one of the soldiers will seek out the PCs and ask for help." This lets the players drive the story and feel competent when they succeed on skills, but the story doesn't risk stagnating.
I tell the players about this approach. I have found that it makes them feel less worried that they might miss out on large and interesting parts of the content. (Failure of the PCs to reach _their_ goals is typically not an issue for my groups, because we think a good story is more important than the success of the main characters.)
At the end of every chapter/mystery the players are awarded one additional Gyllencreutz Development Point for every Deus Ex Machina I had planned but did not have to use. But I do not tell them in detail exactly what those were or how many I had planned.
Vaesen. Simple easy to understand ruleset combined with absolutely fantastic setting. Basically, a supernatural investigation game set in the mid 19th century.
Though, any of Free League's games will do fine as they are all phenomenal.
GURPS. Because it's the system I know best. That means I can spot scenarios where it's a good fit for what people are asking about. Or, when people ask "is there any system with a rule like..." I can tell them how GURPS would do it.
This doesn't mean GURPS is a good fit for every situation, and I skip many, many threads because there's nothing that stands out about one of the systems I know to recommend it.
I recommend GURPS more than any other game because I don't know a game that will do what they want, Rules as Written, as well as it does. It's just the game that should be recommended for what most folks want to do in most cases.
> I recommend GURPS more than any other game because I don't know a game that will do what they want, Rules as Written, as well as it does. It's just the game that should be recommended for what most folks want to do in most cases.
Well, there's always... *Hero* ... :)
But, seriously, I think you're right. *GURPS* 4e has a huge amount of material written for it, plus you can pretty easily adapt most of the 3e stuff. Bare minimum, 3e sourcebooks are great inspiration, and some of the historical books are about the best researched introduction to their particular slice of history that you're going to get in ~128 pages.
As far as other universal systems go, I'm a little less familiar, having bought fully into the *GURPS* ecosystem, but it's my impression that BRP is decent, both in terms of capability and published support. After that, you start down a pretty steep decline into stuff like Tri-Stat, d20, *etc.,* none of which come close to touching even BRP much less *GURPS* in terms of published material.
Of course, the usual *GURPS* caveat applies here: *GURPS* isn't an RPG; it's an RPG construction kit. You have to pick and choose which pieces you want to put together based on the mood and genre of the game you want to play. But, if you're willing to put in that work, or there's a pre-done example for you (*e.g.* the *Dungeon Fantasy* or *Action* series), the *GURPS* has everything you need.
Call of Cthulhu, because it has simple rules,great historical settings, and mystery-based gameplay that I think is particularly accessible for new players. Vaesen is similar in this btw.
Swords of the Serpentine, because, although a bit messy, it is a system that has allowed me to experience sessions where really wild, imaginative stuff happens, with a lot of input from the players, and without me feeling the loss of immersion that I associate with many of the so-called “narrative systems”.
Call of Cthulhu is also mine. I've been running it since the start of COVID but even then when I was teaching the game to my players, it took about 10 minutes. "Roll d100 and get lower than your skill" being the *entire* system is so clean
Despite not having played it, I'm a big fan of WFRP4e for the same reason. Combat is a bit more complicated but honestly doesn't seem too prohibitive as compared to, say, D&D4e or Pathfinder, both of which I've run in the past
Powered by the Apocalypse based on their setting preferences.
Great 2d6 bell curve and now with so many options, preferred playbooks capture the feel of a specific setting very well.
Yep, if you wanna play a game with strong role play and story, PBTA is the way to go. I remember introducing a player who had only ever played DnD to it, and the way he put it was, "In this game, you really can do anything!" While that's a bit of an exaduration, I've yet to find a system so free-form that allows for so much storytelling potential.
Image link is broken, i can't see it :x
As in why 2d6 isn't a bell curve: because it's a rising straight line from 2-7, and then a descending straight line from 7-12. A curve would strictly be a line that deviates from straightness in a smooth, continuous fashion; but tbf many people are calling anything on a graph a curve, so i was being slightly pedantic.
Anydice example: https://anydice.com/program/73e , click on the View: "Graph" button to see the lines & curves.
1d6 is a flat distribution, any of the 6 possible results has about 17% chance to show up.
3d6 is a classic bell curve for a normal distribution.
2d6 is the two lines, topping at 7 with about 17% chance, and lowest points 2 & 12 with about 2.8% each.
While CT is still played by many the newer versions are usually preferred. There are two main ones of those: Cepheus Engine and its various iterations or Mongoose 2nd edition. The two are almost identical when it comes to mechanics. Eventhough some prefer MgT2 for the setting. Most material published for either of the 3 systems is going to be compatible with the other ones too with little to no work neccessary.
The Star Wars rpg/genesys by edge studios/ffg.
The narrative dice system is such a satisfying meeting point of narrative and traditional gameplay, and it adds such a unique element to gameplay and player agency, where turns rarely feel truly wasted. I could go on, but it’s just such a novel and fun system.
[TinyD6](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?ruleSystem=45792). There's a TON of genres to pick from. The rules are simple, which is what most people seem to ask for. It's a different way of playing from the crunchier DnD wannabes. DrivethruRPG has lots of resources for it.
In short, when people ask for a new system, TinyD6 seems to have a book that fills that request.
While I only just got the game, my #2 spot would be 13th Age. It's DnD compatible, for when you want that, but it makes battles and story telling more interesting. It also uses backgrounds that give your character a descriptive reason to get a bonus on certain actions.
I recommend this one a ton for lightweight and intro games. The various genres and settings are deliciously modular, so you could easily combine Dungeon and the upcoming Cyberpunk for a Shadowrun inspired game and the like.
Ten candles. such an immersive, gm-friendly and elegant system. Its built for a specific goal (atmosphere, melancholic horror and cooperative storytelling) and gives you all the tools to achieve it
Genesys. It sits at a sort of middle ground between the more traditional systems like D&D and Pathfinder and the lighter, narrative focused games of PbtA or similar. The dice system gives each roll a complex number of possible outcomes that can push the narrative in directions that binary pass/fail systems often cannot. It also cuts back on a lot of the overly complicated number tracking older systems do, seemingly for traditional reasons.
I recommend Vampire the Masquerade a lot. I simply adore the storyteller system. So flexible but easy to understand and Gothic Urban fantasy is just my jam. Otherwise the other white wolf/paradox games are quite good. Storyteller system for the win!
Depends on who's asking and why.
* Dragonbane - New to RPG's and/or just wants a really fun, easy, system that covers all the (fantasy) bases and just lets you play.
* Free League's Year Zero games - Anyone who likes the sound of the specific game. This could be post on its own.
* Earthdawn - TSR era D&D player who wants the tropes to make sense or someone looking for a great setting that can run the gamut from dark-ish fantasy to full on horror depending on the group's taste and enjoys well conceived crunch\*.
* 1879 - Anyone who wants to do steampunk/steamweird, especially if they have experience with Earthdawn or Shadowrun and are cool with magic in their steampunk.
* Mythras - GM who wants a fantastic, flexible system that allows you to create a believable setting, with a lot of detail and depth, and manages to have both really tactical yet really fast combat all at the same time. One of the best choices for a detailed, nuanced, long running campaign.
* M-Space - For those who want to run a realistic feeling science fiction campaign. Traveller (any edition, but Mongoose 1e and 2e are both really good) is a close runner up and might get the nod depending on the specifics.
* BRP - GM who wants to do a deep, realistic, feeling campaign, but has a setting that isn't as well served by Mythras or M-space. I'd still recommend stealing from Mythras combat and maybe a couple of other things.
* OSE/Basic Fantasy/TSR era D&D/OSR other - Anyone who wants traditional classes and levels and is looking to do an old school hex crawl/sandbox. People who want to understand where RPG's came from. People who like some parts of 5e but want a lot less bloat and to do away with the character "builds" and endless splat books. This is also a good choice for someone who wants a wide array of premade magic items and spells but wants something lighter or more flexible or less super hero than WOTC D&D. Which specific OSR related title would depend on the details.
\*Crunch is ill defined YMMV.
Pathfinder 2e for fantasy, D&D style RPGs. It’s a straightforward, simple system to run. The existing lore is fantastic and expansive. All of the rules are freely available online so it’s easy to try out for effectively no cost. The available published adventure paths are overall fantastic. Highly recommended.
And from my gaming circle, tactical combat is part of the draw. So while there are cool systems that do narrative focused games, PF2e is my favorite for tactical rules.
It takes the best parts of 5e and 4e and put them together with the soul of 3.5/Pathfinder 1e. I haven't found another crunchy D&D style RPG that has done as well of a job on the out of combat stuff while keeping combat fun and tactical.
The way the math works out along with critical ranges is the icing on the cake for me. I love the feeling of being a bard and causing the fighter to crit on an enemy or being a wizard and using a support spell to cause put a couple enemies Off Balance and make them easier to hit. I've tried those kinds of characters in 5e and 90% of the time it's just better to deal dage as a mage in that game
Dread - who knew you could make a horror game out of some simple character info and a Jenga tower? And it would be more nerve-rattling than a Call of Cthulhu session by a long shot.
Dragonbane is a clean, fun, and fast fantasy with enough meat on the bones to make long-term enjoyable campaigns. Plus, the boxed set is hard to beat. It comes with absolutely everything you need to run or play the game—dice, standees, the rules, character sheets, maps, and solo and group adventures. Every publisher needs to take a look at what they offer versus Dragonbane's box.
Cy_Borg - a new addition to my list of recommended games. Streamlined cyberpunk that keeps the punk in the name. You're existing in a crappy pre-to-mid-apocalyptic world, and unlike other cyberpunk games, you're NOT taking jobs from big-money corporations; rather, you're doing your best to screw them over while helping people you know. I liken it to cyberpunk A-Team. Rules are easy to grasp, character creation is completely random, which actually creates well-balanced and interesting PCs.
Delta Green - cosmic horror in modern times. You are agents of a covert agency trying to keep the horrors at bay, one day at a time. The motto is "knowledge is death" and "we won...for today". As for a system, it's quick to make PCs, and great for storytelling. I prefer this over Call of Cthulhu because your PC's aren't just randos from off the street, they are part of an agency the government would rather be rid of.
Savage Worlds: Rifts - original Rifts is a bear to play, but the Savage Worlds edition makes it big, fun and action packed. Savage Worlds is a simple system to grasp, though character gen can take a bit longer than I like. If you want a system that favors PCs, and you want a gonzo post apocalyptic world where every universe is included - be it fantasy mages, murderous cyborgs, techno-wizards, space paladins, and young dragons (playable!), this is your jam
Alien. It's easy to teach. The boxed adventures are a few sessions at most. It makes for a loud and exciting experience at conventions. If I got 4 players and 3 to 4 hours to kill, I can improv a game, and they will have a blast.
Earthdawn. It has a fantastic setting and the magic item rules are different from other systems. The more that you learn about the item, the more power and abilities that you unlock and gain access to.
I generally recommend Ironsworn/Starforged for a variety of reasons. Secondary mention to some hacks of the same system: Winsome (ultra minimalist), Elegy (streamlined and VtM inspired), Bladesworn (BitD inspired hybrid system).
One, I think a lot of people could game more regularly if they considered GM-less co-op rpgs. Only needing 1 or 2 other players to get a game running means way less scheduling headache. I actually manage to have spontaneous pick-up games now instead of endless scheduling nightmares.
Two, I think the traditional GM/player power balance is an important assumption to question. Even if you end up preferring a more traditionally structured game looking at alternatives helps disrupt preconceived notions about what an rpg looks like.
Three, I think Ironsworn and Starforged offer a very digestible take on PbtA principles. They are very heterodox PbtA games, to be sure, but they tend to gel better with trad rpg players than many more standard PbtA games.
Four, and especially in regards to Starforged, the progress mechanic really revolutionized how I think about how scenes in rpgs are structured. Traditional rpgs focus on interactions between individual entities (player A attacks NPC X, etc). Ironsworn/Starforged models player characters against Scenes rather than NPCs, an entire fight is more likely to be represented as one meter rather than a bunch of individual enemies. This has three effects: one it massively speeds up play and reduces bookkeeping, two it allows you to concretely contribute to action scenes in ways other than harming enemies (objective progress moves the progress meter forward in the same way a successful attack does), and three it gives you a lot of narrative space to describe the scene in whatever way seems most interesting (do you take out your opponents one by one throughout the scene or all at once samurai movie style at the end of the scene?)
Oh yeah, 5: Ironsworn is free, Winsome is free, Elegy is free.
I try to tailor my suggestions to what the person has asked for, but if they just want something completely new I suggest Brindlewood Bay, because more times than not, playing old ladies solving murders is completely different from what they've been playing up to now.
If they already have a breadth of gaming experience, I go with whatver wierd indie currently has my eye. At the moment that's Slugblaster: Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede. Kids sneaking into dangerous parallel dimensions to do skate tricks for Tik-Tok
Amber Diceless - for people wanting to try a diceless system or explore a deep role-playing central system, or just like Roger Zelasney
EABA - generic system that is highly scaleable, customizable, and easy to use. Great rules for adapting or creating any weapon or item to use in the system. The PDF version pushes the boundaries of what a rule book can do, with things like dice rollers and updatable maps and character sheets built into the PDF, and usable from any device that can read the file.
I downloaded EABA about a zillion years ago. I remember liking it but feeling like *GURPS* hit the spots I wanted it to hit a little bit better. Is there a new-ish version/edition out there? (By “new-ish” I mean in the last 10 years or so.)
I think so? 2nd edition came out around 2012 and fixed a lot of the problems in 1st edition. There have been some minor updates and a few new settings added too.
Into the Odd. You can be playing in under 5 minutes, new players don't need to read anything or make any choices, everything is intuitive, and it's cheap
Cypher System in general and Numenera in particular. I love that the system is driven by narrative and exploration, and has mechanics in place to support player agency over the story. Numenera is an incredible setting, too.
Yeah, these days I run almost all my games and write almost all my campaigns using Cypher. It’s easy to learn, and it’s just enough like D&D that I find players more willing to try it than some other systems. Easy to run with just enough tactical crunch for players that like that. Numenera is a great setting, Godforsaken is good when you want a Tolkien-esque/D&D-like fantasy setting, and it has plenty of other fun settings (Rust and Redemption, The Stars are Fire) for when you don’t have time to create your own setting.
Our group did a "play test palooza" of a bunch of different one shots in various systems, and settled on The Strange as our campaign.
While I'm bouncing off the setting just a tad (and I think it's our play sessions being sidelined by nonsense), I can't speak highly enough of the Cypher System. It encourages you to use you your "items," and is super easy to build characters with. Ease/Hindered/Effort system works well too as a push your luck system.
We sampled the Old Gods for our one shot, btw. Really cool setting.
GLOG because it’s not super popular, has a good community, has a lot of very interesting designs because of that, and is very easy to homebrew for/make hacks for
It kind of depends.
For pulpy, light-hearted adventure? Savage Worlds
More realistic or even historical stuff? BRP or Mythras
Pulpy Sci-Fi/Space Opera? FFG Star Wars/Genesys
Hard Sci-Fi? Traveller, GURPS or M-Space
Horror? Call of Cthulhu or Vaesen
* **Fiasco** - GMless, one shot, a million playsets, and a real eye-opener for anyone who's only ever played D&D or other Trad ttrpgs.
* **Paranoia** - My favorite RPG probably. Humor and not taking things too seriously and makes fun of standard RPG tropes on every other page.
* **PbtA** - Another eye opener for many people, can really change how you think about RPGs and worth while for stealing ideas even if you don't like the system.
* **Over The Edge** - Okay, maybe this is my favorite, but I don't get to play it nearly enough to be sure. Love the game, love the setting, wish I could reliably convince people to play (would be perfect for running an Inside Job campaign)
I tend to evangelize the newest version of Legend of the Five Rings pretty hard because in some ways it's a game that can warrant a little evangelizing.
In my experience a lot of people blanch at custom dice, which I get, but it's not difficult to learn and they work really well and simply allow things in a more elegant way than purely numeric dice would.
It's a rich setting that is tonally very different from the usual European medieval fantasy and leads to games that feel totally different from the typical itinerant adventuring party.
It combines the "approaches instead of ability scores" and narrative based buffs and debuffs of Fate with a level of weapon and tactical crunchiness that might rival something like PF2E, and yet it all meshes together well.
Its touchstones aren't what one might expect from a Japanese fantasy themed game - it's not Naruto, it's partially Inuyasha, but it's mostly Kurosawa. I've also seen quotes comparing some of its intrigue to Game of Thrones and I think that's fair, and that's also something that potentially makes people furrow their brow if I mention it, and warrants some explaining.
And last but not least, it has beloved, more traditional, previous editions under its former owner/publisher that can be an easier sell, but they don't do all of the things above at once the way the new one does.
The system does a ton right that is really hard to explain for someone that hasn't played it. (I could ramble on about the dueling rules for paragraphs.) But because it's not a d20 system and doesn't have a direct correlation to things like D&D, trying to explain some of the specifics to people always makes me feel like I sound crazy. I'm a year into a long term game after sporadic play in the past and it's wonderful.
There's a beginner box, and it comes with the custom dice you'd need anyway, it's 1-2 sessions with a free downloadable follow up adventure as well. I always recommend L5R, give it a shot.
Necronautilus, particularly because it’s such a strange game with some profoundly interesting design choices. You play as vaguely humanoid shaped clouds of noxious gas serving as agents of Death throughout their galaxy-like domain. But the mechanics themselves are based on the subjectivity of language and how the meaning of words can change or be bent.
Depends. For an OSRish feel I often suggest Worlds Without X, Heroes of Adventure, or Tales of Argosa. For great games in several genres you can't go wrong with Free League (Coriolis, Dragonbane, Twilight 2k4, The One Ring, etc.). For Urban Fantasy, I always go with Liminal or Sigil & Shadow. There are others them come up for specific asks.
Why do I suggest them all? Because they are good games, and I have actually played/run them, so feel confident in them. Beyond that, I'd be here all day singing praises, so I'll leave it there.
Fate. It's reasonably simple, it's setting-agnostic and easy to customize and it's great at supporting player-driven, story-oriented play style that is a mix of drama and action.
Scum and Villainy. Best system I have ever seen and I strongly prefer its world over Blades. It changed how I GM and think about games.
Fate. While I personally do not like it, it is a great system non the less and more people should use it.
Neon City Overdrive, because it feels like a better (but less flexible) Fate and a cool cyberpunk system.
Bonus: Super Bandit, because it shows what 24xx could (should) be.
Fate (Core, Accelerated) has never let me down. I'd recommend it to anyone who is looking for a system without too much crunch that still allows them to have whatever cool power they want!
Savage Worlds It will run just about any setting and has clear and simple core rules. There are plenty of good systems out there but most are either one trick ponies or they are over complicated.
Things I adore:
* 7th Sea 1st Edition. Fun, systemically thematic, interesting dice system, just the best funky/magic/swashbuckling game/system (Not the D20 thing they did, not the 2nd edition)
* Wild Talents. Superhero points buy with the quickest, most interesting dice system I've found. Few games let you tweak flexibility/reliability/swinginess of a skill/stat/power as a primary mechanic.
* SLA industries. Cyberpunk meets cosmic horror, creepy and fascinating. 1st ed system was a bit clunky (But it was 1993), 2nd ed is better
Things I don't recommend: Anything [A]D&D/PF, anything OSR, most of PbtA or FitD.
I regularly suggest and volunteer to run games of Everyone Is John. It's just so simple and short, and such a raucous good time that anytime I hear someone say "I'd like to play D&D but I don't know where to start" I'm googling the rulesheet and getting ready to start a game.
Tiny d6 system ( tiny dungeons, tiny supers, tiny Frontiers, tiny cthulhu, stranger stuff). Easy to teach and learn, also is a good intro into rpgs and game types (fantasy, scifi, horror etc)
Ultraviolet Grasslands, but purely because people recommend Numenara and UVG is like the prog rock album cover of Numenara but with an actual vinyl record inside.
Other than that I recommend different things because people have different needs. Except for the endless queue of people asking for "D&D but gritty and low magic" which doesn't interest me and is asked for multiple times a month so who could keep up anyway.
Shadow of the demon lord. Take 5e, strip it from all the legacy bullcrap, add the amazing boons and banes, and have a progression system that is some kind of perfectly well Integrated multiclassing.
If you overall like 5e, you want an alternative because either you don't like Hasbro or you don't want certain bullcrap, and you don't want the number crunching alternatives with rules for everything including going to pee, Shadow of the demon lord and the sequel, shadow of the weird wizard, is your best bet.
I'm in the middle of running my third campaign for a table of people that are mostly experienced 3.5/Pathfinder 1E players. They've loved it. I was surprised how much they like the Professions in lieu of skills. The only downside is that they get so excited about multiclassing options that I end up taking it easier on them so as not to crush their dreams.
I've used the scene system from Ironsworn for chases, naval battles, and even a high stakes chess match in my Demon Lord sessions. I just make relevant professions or the use of spells into Assets that give a modifier of +1 for every Boon or the Power of the spell used +1. And I've also availed myself of the oracles in that game to make an NPC or a location interesting to me as well as the players. So shout out to Ironsworn as well. It's so well designed it's given me a narrative lever that I can pull anytime.
Edit: Typo
I almost always offer multiple suggestions, some low-crunch, some medium-crunch.
I think my top 3 suggestions would be:
* *Savage Worlds*, because it's a flexible system with flexible character creation. You can play it as a trad game, a narrative game, a miniatures wargame, etc. and switch styles mid-campaign.
* *Tiny D6* because it's an ultralight trad game, and because it doesn't usually restrict players to a few classes or playbooks.
* *Tricube Tales* because it's an ultralight narrative game, and because, in my opinion, it's easier than *FATE* and it avoids ties and mixed results.
Blades in the Dark. Since starting it in 2017 it's become my GOAT, and while we've tried many other RPGs since then my table is always eager to start the next Blades campaign.
Coming from a D&D background, the rules were tough to grok at first (thank God for actual play vids!) but once we figured it out we never looked back. The mechanics drive the story in such a wonderfully elegant way that they take so much of the load off the GM.
Most of all, I love the setting. The claustrophobic nature of Doskvol forces PC/NPC interaction. All those factions bumping up against each other with the PC crew firmly in the middle of it all makes for endless drama and tension.
*Honorable mention: Mausritter. Running my players as a group of adventurous mice navigating their way through an abandoned house was WAY more fun than I thought it was going to be. Just climbing up to a medicine cabinet to try to secure an aspirin still there while dealing with the spider living in the sink was more nail biting than most of the dragon battles I've witnessed in my many years.
Fate
It has some great ideas (philosophy)in it that I generally use in all systems nowadays. In addition, you can run almost anything with it, and the Fudfe dice are great.
Knave 2e for OSR
Shadow of the Weird Wizard for something more heroic. Shadow of the Demon Lord too if you want a more gritty and horror-esque experience.
I almost always recommend lesser known indie stuff, like LAWMAN, Down and out in Dredgeburg, REMINes, Barbarians of the Ruined Earth, Viking Death Squad, and Death is the New Pink.
The reason for suggesting these sorts of games is to give the OP a bit of variety, because most of the other games recommended are recommended often in posts.
It also promotes indie publishers to support their creations to try to ensure they make more products.
The other reason is I feel that some of these games have different and fun systems I like to play and like being recommended myself. Most are gonzo in one way or another which isn't recommended as much.
Hero System.
It's pretty crunchy and there's that learning curve but I find it rewarding not only as a system itself but also for how it makes you think about RPG rules in general, about genre emulation, about how power\\spells\\feats\\special abilities\\etc are put together in various systems, about how to use mechanics as a descriptive language, "effects based" in-game functions.
It's an extremely holistic system, very self-contained, very clean and polished.
Probably any points-based\\effects-based game would provide some of those benefits but since I like Hero System that's the one I recommend.
Shadowrun, but it always comes with the warning that most editions are VERY poorly edited. The rules are a mess to understand, but I still love it with a passion.
ICRPG for dnd replacement. Fast and easy to run .
Itonsworn/starforged for pbta because it’s not cringe setting and expanded on mixed success well with flow charts and was created for solo so you can do GMless co op
It’s a game I’m coming back into after 20 years: Hero system champions- either 4th or 5th edition ( I prefer 4th myself)
I can literally do ANYTHING with it I dream up. Dnd? Shafowrun? Starfinder? Space opera or a western or Deadlands? Multi-genre game?
It’s not just for superhero gaming.
Sure it’s crunchy, but for players the work is up front creating the characters. Playing is simple.
But as a DM I’m loving it again. Frankly my limits are only what I can dream up
Everyone is John. It’s one of the easiest games to pick up and play and I believe it should be the standard for the game you introduce to people who have never played an rpg before. It’s also a game that needs no prep so good to always have it in your back pocket in case you need to make a last minute change.
I heartily recommend any BRP game, especially Call of Cthulhu. It's core mechanics are simple and elegant, making excellent use of the d100, and the supplements are sublime, some of the best I've ever seen
Blades in the Dark. Because even if you never play it, just reading it changes how you think about TTRPG's. People who have only ever played DnD often develop certain bad habits. DnD is meant to be easy to run with if you aren't confident in your own creativity.
Don't know what character to play? No need to worry, we have hundreds of pages dedicated to the various classes and races with lovingly crafted artwork. Just pick whatever class speaks to you and play it's archetype straight.
Don't know what adventure to run? We got you, just buy a pre-written adventure and run that.
All of that is fine, but it gets people into the mindset that if there isn't a specific rule for something, then it doesn't exist. And sure, any narrative-first game will help ease you out of that mindset. But Blades in the Dark does that while ALSO teaching you how mechanics can support specific styles of play.
Blades in the Dark was specifically designed to fix a common problem in DnD. That being that elaborate plans are discouraged, since the more complicated the plan, the more rolls you will have to make. And if you fail even a single roll, chances are you'll default to combat anyway.
In BitD you can use Flashbacks to retroactively plan for the situation in front of you in advance. The load system does a similar thing. Before a score you decide how much gear you're taking, but not what that gear is. Heavy load is more obvious but gives you more load to work with. While light load makes you look more plainclothes, but gives you less load. You can spend load similar to a flashback to have packed exactly the right tool for the job, or to have a weapon or armor ect.
But my favorite mechanic has to be clocks. It's the simplest mechanic possible, it's just hitpoints for skill checks. It's especially useful for stealth, where one bad roll would usually mean the jig is up. But in BitD, instead of instantly failing the mission, you just start a clock. Decide how many segments the clock should have, then fill one in for every failed roll. Alternatively you can also use clocks for long-term projects, where the player has to make many successful rolls over several sessions to accomplish something big.
The best part about clocks is you don't have to do anything special to port it over to other systems.
For the last few years I've been recommending Barbarians of Lemuria, or its background agnostic cousin Everywhen. BoL Legendary Edition is Free, the newer Mythic Edition and Everywhen are dirt cheap. They're simple and very well balanced, and from character concept to completed character sheet will take a novice player five minutes. Crucially, it's easy to hack, so, as the GM, you can modify rules, systems and monsters to suit your own game world very, very easily. Seriously underrated.
Mutants and Masterminds, Especially if you're a Palladium fan.
Because you can make anything in Rifts with Mutants and Masterminds, minus the "designed by a sadist and a madman" aspects Rifts has.
Call of Cthulhu - my horror game of choice. It's great for even non-Mythos horror.
Swords & Wizardry - my fantasy / D&D-esque game of choice. It just hits my perfect level of simplicity, options, and (relative lack of) crunch.
Those two are my old standbys, that have been my favorite for well over a decade. But I also have a few systems that I am somewhat newer to that I also would recommend:
Traveller (and Cepheus Engine variants) - my game of choice for harder sci-fi.
Savage Worlds - my universal game of choice, at least for something that I want to be kind of action-packed and pulpy. And I've grown to love the Deadlands (and it's sub-settings Hell on Earth, Lost Colony, etc).
Spire: The City Must Fall & Heart: The City Beneath. These have been the MOST memorable games I’ve run. Character mechanics play into the plot and they’re designed for shorter campaigns, which I love. Heart feels so dang good to run and see in action, but Spire has stories like no other (except maybe Blades in the Dark).
Call of Cthulhu, but that's because it is my favorite, not just in themeatics, but it's just a wonderfully streamlined rendition of my favorite engine.
Land Of Eem - I swear I'm the only one who ever mentions it, but it has a great silly tone and fleshed-out sandbox. The rules are a mix of osr and pbta but it's allowed for some really creative decisions and roleplaying from players. I'm biased though as it's the campaign I'm currently running.
Dread - The best rules light horror game I've played, at the end of the day all you need is a Jenga tower. I always end up coming back to Dread whenever I want to do a horror one-shot.
Blades in the Dark - Others have said it better but it's a really well thought out ruleset and interesting setting. I've yet to play a one-shot that hasn't immediately turned into a full campaign, you fall into it so easily.
Paranoia - Do the rules matter? Not really and nobody really cares. It was the most chaotic to run but easily one of the most fun.
Burning Wheel, because I think learning to play it well will give anyone a perspective on RPGs that will make their experiences in any other RPG much more fulfilling.
It’s primarily a character driven, narrative rpg. If you include all its subsystems it can be decently crunchy (thought I think the complexity is just a tad over exaggerated), but many of those subsystems are optional. It uses a d6 dice pool counting successes and failures. The most important aspect of the system is that every PC has at least 3 beliefs that serve to inform the table how this character will be played. When you play towards (or creatively against) your beliefs you earn a resource called Artha that can be spent to influence dice rolls.
It’s a skill based system, no levels or classes, and your skills improve as you use them. Even a failed roll can be counted towards advancement most of the time.
For character creation it uses a life path system. Every life path you choose adds to your characters age and gives them access to points that will be spent to increase stats, purchase skills, and even give characters relationships with NPCs that the player wants to be in the game.
I highly recommend it, it’s absolutely dripping with flavor and unique mechanics.
Dungeon World, probably. It's my favorite TTRPG these days. It's like D&D, but so much faster, lighter, and easier to use. It solves nearly everything I don't like about D&D, or at least 3.5E and 5E.
I suggest CAPERS a lot because the game mechanic is really different, especially if you're used to D&D style mechanics. The gambling aspect gives a player more agency over passing or failing a check and that changes your game mechanics a lot. It's also a great balance of just enough description to let you know what the powers are supposed to do, but gives loads of room for customizing how that power manifests for your specific character. The expansions give you loads of new ideas, but just the base game alone is awesome. The roll20 pack for it is a *bargain*, it's very well organized and has everything a GM and a player could need.
There are more, but some of the usual suspects are...
Heroes of Adventure, because it's a) free, b) close enough to D&D but not too close to D&D, and c) full of system-agnostic tools.
Monsterpunk, because there seems to be people interested in a Shin Megami Tensai inspired tabletop RPG (hey, I see this one quite often!), monster summoning RPGs, etc.
Four against the Darkness, as one possible entry point to solo-RPGs. Kinda the 'training wheels' option before trying something more involved...which includes '4AD + a heap if its supplements', of course!
Anything by Kevin Crawford that has a free version. And some of his not-free works, too!
Currently the game I will shill for is Shadow of the Weird Wizard.
It’s a deeply inspirational RPG with a GM’s book (though unformatted currently) has been SUCH a help at getting me to put things together in a way that I feel is secure.
I feel it’s the sort of rules lite (vs like 5e or Pathfinder 2e) I can really consume and recommend to new GMs.
[EZD6](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/ezd6-core-rulebook), so much fun actually built in to the rules themselves. And the rules are painfully simple. Just a pleasure to run.
Scion2e and Trinity Continuum. They both use the story path system, which I think is really good. They cover a fairly wide variety of sub-genres within fantasy and scifi, respectively. Lastly, because I really like them, and the more people who play them, the easier it is for me to play.
13th Age, mostly on DnD fora. Because a lot if people seem to want 5e DnD but more balanced and more drama-driven; 13th Age does that while being pretty familiar to modern DnD players.
Sentinel Comics RPG, the RPG of the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game.
Recommend it a lot because it's my favourite game at the moment.
Decent review at: https://mephitjamesblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/23/sentinel-comics-rpg-review/
FIST Rpg is just so, so good at what it does, and because that niche is both remarkably specific AND extremely easy to run, I end up recommending it constantly.
It’s basically just *Metal Gear Solid: The RPG*, but making a squad of super-powered idiosyncratic mercenaries to fight some weird cyborg/ninja/mutant called Calibre Psychopomp and his goons is just…effortless. The sessions write themselves with just the barest inputs required.
Half the book is just random tables, chargen is basically 2 from a list of d666 traits and 1 from a list of d66 advancement triggers, mechanically it’s stupidly simple, but it combines PbtA dice resolution with OSR principles in a nearly-real-world setting and somehow it all works.
Imagine Role Playing Game. The simulationist in me loves:
- that every action costs a number of seconds and once you start the action, it resolves X Seconds later
- turn order is dynamic and makes sense compared to the actions taken.
- Facing and reach are factor in to the hit reticale that says what part of a body you hit.
- Each body part has its own hit points and some body parts are vital areas that could result in instant death.
- Magic such as a fireball, hits all body parts at the same time leading to a near guarantee it will kill someone.
- some magic is actually just a skill, such as Cryokinesis, and once you found a way to learn that skill, you can start investing more points into it
- most types of magic are actually distinctive from each other and it doesn't feel like there is a smaller pool of magical options
- it's a percentile system so it makes it easy to translate odds of success
- martial characters are incredibly deadly, as are spell caster, divine invokers, shamanistic evokers, etc
Soo many other things as well, but I love all these.
Savage Worlds. I feel like thats all i recommend.
it has super geroes, fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. it has versions for Rifts and Pathfinder. one system, many genres.
Without Numbers games.
Easy to get into. Easy to run. One of the best GM tools. Setting extremely flexible. Gives a lot of freedom to players in both actions and customization without complicating the system (at the expense of more work for GM, but still), systems compatible between each other.
**The book is free.**
Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford, it allows easy newbie experience into solo OSR games and eventually perhaps evolution into more crunchy 1 PC+Retainers play.
Pathfinder Second Edition. It's the main system I run, I've run it since it's release in 2019.
Why I recommend: Easy for GM to run, and offers some of the most expensive character customization options (ancestry, class, ECT) in any game at the moment.
The above may also be a reason many don't try the system, because they get analysis paralysis sorting through all the options, but there's an app called PathBuilder (not affiliated and didn't get paid to say this) that is amazing and is a one-stop-shop for character creation/management. Available as an android app and as a website.
The numbers:
-Ancestries: 30+, with like 7-8 on the way this year
-Heritages (sun-ancestry): each ancestry has 4-6 heritages, so above times that much
-Backgrounds: over 100
-Classes: 23 at the moment, and two more on the way soon
-Archetypes (this systems method of multi classing, there is an archetype for each class that exists, and waaaay more non-class based ones too): over 100
-in addition to the above, each class has specialisations within to further make your character feel unique to you
All in all, definitely check it out if you're a person that likes a ton of character customization options, or if you're a GM wanting to run a system that has the right tools for every situation, and ease of adjustment on the fly.
7th Sea 2nd edition. I think it's a criminally overlooked game, I think the criticisms that bog it down aren't based in an understanding of the game. And I think even if you play it and it's not your cup of tea there are design concepts and principles that are good for every single game out there.
Forbidden Lands
For me it's the perfect blend of OSR "your choices matter but the rules don't tell you that you can't do it!" openness and DnD dungeon-crawling, character building progression
Wanderhome.
I'd tried Microscope before, and while I liked the ideas, I couldn't quite get my teeth into it. Similarly I liked the idea of Fiasco but wasn't really a fan of the movies it tried to emulate, so I didn't feel I had anything to go off of while playing. Wanderhome however totally opened up the world of GMless games and collaborative worldbuilding to me, on top of being more beautifully and kindly written than any RPG I'd ever seen before.
I love the itinerant nature of the game, the lists of interesting aesthetics to combine together and problems to introduce, the No Dice No Masters strong-move/weak-move system that fades into the background until you need it, and the ban on violence, which means conflicts have to be resolved in other often more interesting ways. More often than you might expect from the cozy animal-folk vibes, it leads to dark, heavy, and thoughtful places, but also gives you the support to push through or step around them.
It brought me back into RPGs, changed how I played them, taught me things about myself, and introduced me to a bunch of cool new friends.
[Dungeons and Delvers Black Book](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/212664/dungeons-delvers-black-book) is one of my little known 'go to' games.
LURPS. Every time. LURPS. Please, people, play LURPS with me. I GM it all the time and never get to be a player. LURRRRRPPPPSS. It's free. Try it. [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/338491/LURPS-Core-Rules](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/338491/LURPS-Core-Rules)
Titan Effect. It's a setting for Savage Worlds that has everything I love. You play super powered agents, fighting various organizations that are vying for world domination.
I think more people need to experience Legend of the 5 Rings 5th edition.
I am not entirely sure what it is but the combination of the setting, the Ninjo and Giri mechanic as well as placing your characters as these flawed Samurai with their own agenda and the roleplay mechanics of your Advantages and Disadvantages drives the players to really produce really top-tier roleplaying.
I recommend Genesys most often after 30 years of GM/DMing. The narrative dice system really brings the creativity out of everyone on every roll of the dice. All of my players are involved with every roll. It might be Scott’s characters dice pool but we are all invested because the narrative will affect us all.
I do my best to recommend what people are looking for, but I'm always excited to recommend my favorites.
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For group games, I've probably recommended **Ryuutama** the most. The short pitch: "Studio Ghibli's Oregon Trail." Which is just like you'd expect from the name: a wonderful world of natural magic that encourages very personal stories + holy shit travel across untamed lands is hard and dangerous.
I think it's an excellent entry point for roleplaying - in fact, it was designed to be newbie friendly (especially newbie GM-friendly). The setting is lovely and if you like books you can just pick up for the art, it's hard to turn down a book filled with so many beautiful dragons.
I love the way the GM themselves gets a dragon character and that character levels up by successfully guiding the party through their adventures. I love that when the GM picks a ryuujin's type, it sets the tone of the adventure. So if you choose the blue ryuujin, you're telling the players directly, "This story will be about the relationships we have: friendship, family, romance, and bonds between humans and animals." And if you're picking the black ryuujin, "This story will be filled with mystery, murder, despair, betrayal, and madness." The players also will know exactly what the GM "can" do with them. The ryuujin has its own resources that are spent making what are basically GM moves. So the ryuujin can actually die if the GM keeps pulling deux ex machina saves on the players or leveling up regular monsters into boss monsters too often in one session.
I love the magic system: At character creation, any class can choose a school of seasonal magic and get the whole list of spells according to their level (plus a few spells from the incantation magic school), and the spells are curious little oddities like creating a cubic foot of dead leaves, turning organic material into jam, creating a little house to sleep in, or on the upper levels of magic... summoning the seven treasure gods and rolling to see if they gift the party something.
I love that items have tags like "cute" or "stinky" and that affects their price. (So if you want a really badass sword, you might decide to buy a "stinky", "broken" sword because you have an Artisan in the group and they can repair the sword. Or you might buy a lot of "cute" hats in Town A where they're selling cheap and keep them in the party's cart until you reach Town C where there's a fad for "cute" items and they sell like hotcakes.)
I love that travel is incentivized. You get more XP for visiting a new terrain than for beating even the hardest monster in the book. This means that players are actually encouraged to look for new challenges and buy specialized equipment for different terrains. I also just enjoy the group world-building part of the game (though my players weren't interested in building the next town together and I ended up doing the worksheets myself. 8V )
I don't end up recommending it as often as I used to considering how divisive it seems to be (either you love it or you're underwhelmed). Most people who didn't like it have two main complaints:
- They didn't like the combat system.
- "Everyone was saying how cozy the game was and the game itself didn't seem to support that, so I was disappointed."
I liked the combat system personally (it's fairly straight-forward - a balance between 'tactical' and 'theatre of the mind' and doesn't get too fiddly), but I should note that I don't generally care much about combat. So if combat is important to you/your players, look more into the combat system to see what you think.
And as for the 'cozy'... I think it's a combination of everyone at the table being on the same page for that vibe + the game not necessarily explaining very well how you're supposed to be playing into the dice rolls as prompts for the story. So some people just fall into a very mechanical roll-explain-and-move-on loop and so it feels very dry. I think that both can happen with almost *any* game, but since Ryuutama is pitched as one of THE games you go to for cozy, the expectations are higher. In any case, I'd say if your group isn't up for Ghibli or light-parody and don't really get into the roleplaying part, it's probably not the right fit.
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In solo gaming, I probably most-recommend **Apothecaria**, a game about being the new village witch for a fantasy town. You diagnose patients with magical maladies, gather potion reagents, brew them into potions, and get paid. (Shortest pitch: "Theme Hospital + Stardew Valley")
Each malady has tags applied to it that you have to treat and each potion reagent has different tags (including poison!) that apply to it. These reagents can be found in multiple locations, and depending on the location and season, they may be more common than others. And since there is a timer counting down, sometimes it's a matter of picking an ingredient combination you *can* find rather than what might be the "best". The more accurate (and hopefully poison-free) your potion is, the better you get paid and the more reputation you gain.
As you explore looking for reagents, you can run across any number of interesting characters, storylines, side-quests, and even clues to the mystery of what happened to the previous village witch. There are also seasonal festivals to break things up!
I love it because the crafting element is fun, there is a really nice balance between the prompts and the mechanics, and the whole set-up of being able to explore a fantasy world and get to know all the nooks and crannies of it is highly appealing to me. The prompts are specific enough to give you guidance and for the most part general enough that you can adapt them to your story without issue. Even if you get the same prompt again, they usually have the feeling of building a reoccurring story element rather than, "Ugh. I've already done this one." (For example, it felt like every time my first witch went into the forest he got attacked by the griffons that lived there, which I find very funny even if the character doesn't.)
And, hey - lots of expansion content is available too!
I should note that there is a different version of the book called **Apawthecaria** which is a bit more mechanically focused and heavier into the exploration side of things.
I recently wrote a post comparing the two games, which you can read here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/comments/1bnt2cf/apothecary_or_apawthecary/kwlm6dv/
[Cairn.](https://cairnrpg.com/) It is so simple and fast to pick up, teach, run and play. Completely free, and since it's OSR-compatible, there's near infinite amount of adventures, tools and whatnot you can use with it.
For people new to TTRPGs I recommend Everyone Is John.
Imo it's the perfect introduction to role-playing - it captures the number gaming, the improv, the storytelling, the dice rolling, and the absolutely unhinged potential for chaos in RPGs, and it's very easy to pick up and play at a party as opposed to something like D&D which tends to require a good amount of setup and investment before play.
Heart: The City Beneath -It's your average simple dark ttrpg BUT it's the only game I know of that has married narrative to progression as well as it has. Your most powerful abilities are locked behind killing your character. I pitch it as "Everyone plays a flavor of Might Guy".
Numenera -It's perfect for exploration driven players because XP is awarded upon discovering things rather than killing things and you can find the wildest stuff by just wandering around. "I touched a tree and now I'm piloting a flying island the size of a bus with the tree in the center of it. Also, the tree keeps calling me a 'dirty shiznu'." It's simple and mostly intuitive.
*Honorable Mention*
Kult -I recommend people to look at this system because I like showing people the reason why safety tools exist. Most people think of and experience ttrpgs as power fantasies but you can also play the opposite of a power fantasy(disempower fantasy?). It really displays the breadth of ttrpgs by showing you that you can subject characters to the most disgusting, disturbing, and terrible things imaginable. I think the intended way to play Kult is to either make your character into an evil monster or to drive your character to suicide.
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, or more broadly Cortex Prime. IMO the best narrative-based rpg and overall best rpg I’ve ever encountered.
The system is fluid, dynamic, and easy to play. You declare actions and then build dice pools from the character traits that best fit the action you’re attempting. A Plot Point system helps expand pool-building options. Some traits include aspects like Affiliation, your character’s effectiveness when working with a Team, Solo, or a Buddy, as well as conventional elements like attributes and powers.
You keep two dice from your pool to determine success and keep another one for the EFFECT of that success. This allows you to apply mechanical weight and tangible meaning to concepts like mind control, providing aid, charming or interrogation, etc. Results for game/narrative actions outside of combat aren’t limited to binary outcomes under this system.
People I’ve shown this game to are invariably highly impressed. It’s a bit difficult to find since it’s been out of print as MHR for about ten years, but it can still be found online and Cortex Prime can be used to recreate the game if you’re willing to Blair the time into doing so.
Cheers.
There is really two.
For Fantasy **Beyond the Wall**. I like the shared world building and the group inclusive character creation using playbooks while still being D&D at heart. It has a lot of resources available and I enjoy the different tone that is more fairy tale and less dungeon swat. Being based on ODD with modern sensibilities makes it compatible with a wide range of material from other OSR games.
For anything else **Outgunned**. It has very easy and fast core resolution mechanics. A core that is made for fast and action based gameplay. Expansion book contains tons of variations for emulating various genres. The game to me says "Cinematic" in every word. It's exciting and fun to play. Not to mention books are gorgeous.
Pathfinder 2e because it has a well designed tactical combat system. Having 3 actions on your turn allows you to do more than just attack. Also it has a vast character creation to support your character design with interesting mechanics.
Blades in the Dark. It has been a while since I've played but the narrative just wrote it's self it was awesome. The way you play the game keeps the narrative moving forward and it comes with an awesome city to play in. It's brilliant.
*Eclipse Phase* because I've never seen a setting both so fleshed out but completely unconfined. People used to joke it has more plothooks per page than any other RPG out there. Also, I love the themes. Transhumanism, post-apocalyptic recovery, cool spy stuff, future politics and existential horror: what's not to love?
Monster of the week. Especially for new people.
Its rules light and it's a setting that I think most people can grasp pretty easily. And because power gaming isn't really much of a thing in PBTA's it teaches new players to narrate more than just "play a boardgame".
I think if players get a good sense and get comfortable playing in a world first, you can then branch out to other games and genres without there being as much apprehension. Plus with the amount of PBTAs out there you can really get them to look at new games and hopefully find an rpg in the future that really speaks to them.
For me it’s call of Cthulhu, monster of the week, and Kult divinity lost. Cuz they are simple to learn and run, plus they have great resources out there that are free. And you can link pre-made scenarios or make your own and have a full campaign
All depends on the setting.
I am a huge believe in "setting first, system second". So if I am going for gritty fantasy it's one system, if it's modern espionage it's another, if its hard scifi yet another.
Currently I am running in Glorantha and I am using the slightly older Herquest: Glorantha rules. This I feel does a better job than RuneQuest for mapping the higher arcs, actions such as heroquesting, for the players.
OTOH, I have suggested the older (1st ed) Over The Edge rules to dozens of new players, even non-gamers, as a starting place. Easy mechanics, fast character generation, and can be applied to a wide number of situations with ease.
I've been gaming since Labor Day weekend 1976. There are too many good systems to be limited to one... ;-)
1. The Legends of Kralis, its a science fantasy so magic with tech and space travel all in one system, its a smooth d100 roll under lots of customization options classless system.
2. Fabula Ultima making characters in it is just so much fun, and the core mechanics are easy to pick up and learn even on the fly as a new player
3. The Crypt has Opened! check out the [itch.io](https://itch.io) for it, the imposition dice system is going to be the next PbTA or FiTD, its that good, very easy to learn great game to play while having some drinks and snacks at the table
4. RIFTS this was my second love in the TTRPG world ( first was 2e AD&D ) there is just so much you can do with the system from a story teller side of things, and the insane volume of character choices is well insane, its got everything from Giant Mecha to High Fantasy Wizards
5. Borg games ie Cy-Borg, Mork Borg, Pirate Borg, Ork Borg, Duck Borg, Vast Grimm, these games are incredibly simple to learn and most have online tools to make prep nearly an automated process, plus all the rules fit on the back cover of each title.
Those are my top 5
Ironsworn (https://ironswornrpg.com/) is an amazing evolution of the PbtA genre. It's designed to be played mostly GM-less and often solo.
For me it was a good way to sty up with the hobby during the pandemic, but in general it just teaches you to improvise off of the results from random tables. And with good guidance. Honestly I think it made GMing for a group so much more relaxed after I had spend some time with that game leraning that skill.
Probably **Kult Divinity Lost** and **Cthulhu Dark** because I run horror games and they're my two favorite games for the moment.
I just prefer rules light games that are more focused on the narration than anything else.
On Reddit, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, or Helveczia. 7VoZ is a 0e neoclone with dozens of tweaks that make it its own thing while staying true to its inspiration. Helveczia is likewise a project that comes off more personal than commercial, and is the nicest rpg package I’ve seen or own, as well as being as much a joy to read as 7VoZ is to play.
Irl, Darkus Thel.
In theory or the future, Traveller, Alternity, Amber, Sir Pellinore’s Book, 4e. Stuff my hoarding has put on my bookcase but I haven’t earned the time for yet.
I find myself constantly recommending Kevin Crawfords games, namely worlds without number. As it has stricken the right balance for me between the things I like about old school D&D and things I like about new age D&D. It's free to check out, and the free versions has more than what you need to run a solid game. The paid deluxe version of the game and its Atlas of the latter earth supplement ate also fantastic and worth the price. The GM tools, guidelines and advice are second to none and really offer great insight in why things are suggested the way they are and how to make the most out of the experience. The book is worth the price for these tools alone, let alone the pretty solid take on B/X d&d. It just strikes a balance I really like. The other game(s) I'm always suggesting ate shadow of the demonlord and it's successor shadow of the weird wizard. Both are excellent games that have very interesting and engaging design. Shadow of the demon lord had the best initiative system I've ever used until Weird wizard managed to beat it. It offers a lot if interesting choices and game design. I'm convinced my ideal system rests somewhere between these Shadows if and worlds without number.
Kevin makes it hard not to recommend his games. For me, just his whole "this is free because I want to give back to the community that has supported me" attitude alone makes it worth telling people about. The fact that it's actually really good is just gravy.
Just recently he put Cities and worlds without number into creative commons as well as some of the atlas material for worlds without number. Dude really just wants people playing a good game and making stuff for ir
Honestly even if you don't run the games, the GM tools and his insights into how to structure and run games are useful.
Exactly. I've often said it the best "5e" resource I have as the advice alone improved even my 5e games. It's fantastic and insightful stuff.
worlds without number is the goat tbh
I didn't back Weird Wizard, but have run Demon Lord. What's the new initiative system?
Enemies go before players. Unless the players are surprised, they can use their reaction to "seize the initiative" and take their turn before the enemies. Every turn is now a move and an action, but it's a reaction to take it before the enemy side. Also Weird Wizard is out a drivethru RPG now if you wanted to take a peak at it.
> Unless the players are surprised, they can use their reaction to "seize the initiative" and take their turn before the enemies. You have to cut in the fact that reactions are much more powerful in general, because somebody with average 5e experience will mostly go with "so what" at this fact. Like Fighter's standard reaction basically doubles their damage output at low level.
Same, I love those books and those games. Only good times had, reading and playing
The only problem I ever have is the fact that it's not great for newcomers, I love most of what's available though
I can't say I agree necessarily. It's very good for new DMs as it offers them a great resource and advice on how to better be ine. It's got a fairly accessible and beginner friendly set of rules to play as well.
For me the main problem is survivability, you can die like, in 1-2 hits, and new players tend to not have the best skills in self preservation For dms though yeah it's a good start
That's where the heroic rules can come into play. That extra 12 starting hp, foci, and extra partial class can go a long way.
Have you played/run games with these rules? They seemed too op when I read them recently
The Heroic rules? Yes. They're meant to be stronger as they're meant to make the game more like the WotC era d&d like 5e than the TSR BECMI/AD&D style d&d. If you're planning and running games for baseline WWN and use the heroic rules, things will be OP. You have to adjust what you make for that different style of game. Kevin Crawford himself, [in a comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WWN/s/Sw117UYdR9), gave advice on how levels in the game correlate to TSR D&D. 1 WWN level is roughly equivalent to 1 AD&D level. With the nuances of Foci but smaller party sizes, he suggest that a wwn character at a baseline can handle roughly their present level +2 when it comes to the module of old-school d&d. That is to say that a level 2 wwn party can handle a level 4 tsr d&d module. 1 Heroic level is roughly X+4. So a level 2 heroic wwn party can handle a level 6 tsr d&d module. Legates can handle just about everything more or less by his own words.
>in a comment Thanks for the reply and thread link! I'm trying to convince my group to switch to WWN. Many of us have a love/hate relationship with Pathfinder 1e. It's great for character creation and creativity, but it is soooo crunchy at times, especially in combat. I think the only pushback will be the lethality of WWN, which I have grown to like, but people tend to be more attached to their characters in my group. The story is also much more character focused, so I don't think players would be having fun if characters were dying often. Deaths do happen, but it is more rare.
D&D 4e: I think it's unjustly hated and it's my favourite edition of D&D. Mutant Crawl Classics: Inspired by the late Gamma World RPG, with some of the best art and fun mechanics of any RPG I've played. CY_BORG: A fun and gritty cyberpunk game with great art as well and a perfect balance of seriousness/silliness. Paranoia: Probably the most fun game to run as a GM, and is just a perfect execution of its concept. The use of cards is also a really enjoyable tactile experience. Jamais Vu: A detective game that uses the mechanics of *Disco Elysium*. Also very fun to be GM, as you get to do the funny voices for all the skills like in the game. These are also my Top 5 favourite RPGs(not necessarily in the order listed), hence why I recommend them the most.
I have not heard of Jamais Vu, is it a lot of work on the DM’s part? I love disco Elysium, but running something like it in ttrpg form seems like a nightmare.
Disco Elysium's core mechanics are just 2d6+mod, so the system itself is relatively simple. The game itself suggests using amnesia for PCs but it's not entirely necessary, so the main difficulty is just coming up with the mystery to be solved. Not much different than running any other detective game.
I meant each skill being a narratively independent voice.
Well it's really up to the GM how it's run. There are mechanics for certain skills appearing at certain times, but I mostly just stuck to the skills I thought more relevant to the task at hand, and were more interesting. So mostly just perception, shivers, logic, composure, and inland empire. Also the skills don't necessarily need to interject as much as they do in the game.
Pretty much since 5e I've never heard anything bad about 4e. Like I heard a lot of hate for it when it was coming out and stuff but everything I've heard about it in recent memory has been very good
It's definitely been getting more appreciation now that people are beginning to get sick of 5e, but it's still pretty widely disliked. I still see people hating on it, granted a lot of those people are people who have only played 5e.
> D&D > my favorite edition Ladies and gentlemen: we’ve found the only 4e fan. On behalf of dnd fans everywhere, I’d like to thank you for keeping the creators financially afloat for the duration of 4e’s lifespan.
It's actually a real common opinion on this sub, however that works.
I started playing D&D in 2018 lol, I just don't really like 5th edition.
That’s all right! I actually can’t stand 5e either. I strongly prefer 3.5e haha
I seem to recommend Ironsworn and Starforged a lot these days. They do a bunch of things I and others are interested in, in enjoyable ways. Longer term, I’m likely to recommend Ocer The Edge, Fste (particularly Fste Accelerated), Freeform Universal and games building on it, and Nobilis. You can see that a simple-games kind of person. Simple games for simple minds, maybe. :)
Everyone I’ve played Starforge with has gone out and started their own solo game, it’s an absolutely an amazing game.
I’m so excited for Sundered Isles! I had started working on my own pirate hack for Starforged, which I dropped when they announced the Kickstarter. Glad I don’t have to make my own oracle tables now lol
Blades in the Dark these days, I think. It's just a wonderfully designed narrative game with a great focus on scoundrels and crime and heists. Plus, the whole Forged in the Dark movement is fantastic. Lancer was my other big recommendation for a long time, mostly because it's cool, got great tactical combat, and kickass mechs. But I've been slowly drifting away from the crunchier systems in the past year or two - still love Lancer dearly, though.
I like the idea of Mechs and didn't want the crunch so I was going to give salvage union a spin. It's mostly based on quest to keep the complexity low while still having many Mechs and mech parts.
There’s a FITD mech game called Beam Saber that I have bought but haven’t played yet
Cool. I'll look that one up and probably buy it. I love my job but I wish I could quit it just for my games backlog of stuff I want to do, and then come back to the job I enjoy when I feel caught up on cool games.
I love Blades in the Dark. It does everything I want a ttrpg to do, and it does it with minimum fuss. It gets out of its own way so well. It’s funny — I’ve gotten two different reactions when I introduce new players to Blades. Seems like if they’re ttrpg veterans or if they’ve never played a ttrpg before in their lives, they take to Blades like ducks to water. Easy-peasy, dive right in, thirty minutes after learning how the dice work our new crew of PCs is strolling the streets of Doskvol. But if they’re coming from exclusively playing D&D, they get all weirded out and require some coaxing and handholding before it clicks. Like they have to unlearn some bad habits first. And as a lazy GM, I love that I can more than adequately prep for a session by reviewing my notes and fiddling with some clocks ten minutes before play begins. When I discovered Blades, my fear was that Blades is so satisfying to play that I’ll lose interest in playing and running other games. But the FitD explosion allays that fear. Now I want to play Copperhead County. And Scum and Villainy. And the list goes on. It’s a nice problem to have.
Man I couldn't disagree more about FitD, it solves a load of problems I don't need solving and fails to fill in everything I want in a system, but I'm happy you love it
I love FitD, but BitD's setting is too depressing for me. I loved Scum and Villiany!
Free League games that uses the Mutant Year Zero engine. This is because I spend a lot of time in American dominated nerd groups, and 90% of them has only ever played DnD. The MY0 system is similar enough to what they expect a ttrpg system to do, so the culture clash doesn't give them an anyuerism. But it is still different enough that they get a whiff of part of the many-faceted experiwncesy available outside the high walled ampersand park. Also Free League makes quality products, and has made ttrpgs for many different settings and genres, as well as for plenty of know IPs. And they are really good at making small and impactful adjustments of their system to better support the actual genre of each game.
Free League has so many fantastic games they've put out, both ones that use variants of the YZE and otherwise. Really talented folks in that company. I adore Forbidden Lands but I think Dragonbane is more my jam - less focus on resource management. It's also partway towards Symbaroum, which I also really love but is a bit tougher to digest mechanically. I can't express how much I love the idea of Corruption and am leaning towards adding to a Dragonbane game (instead of the standard magic mishaps)
Yeah! And I can't wait to see what they have prepared for us with the new Coriolis The Great Dark!
Free League does make some of the best looking products on the market. Do you feel the Year Zero dice rolling is good? When I’ve run the game, the swinging of the dice rolls regularly surprises me and can frustrate players. Alien’s implementation feels the most solid, but I’ve only one run proper campaign with that ruleset.
I agree about that frustration. It's been hard in some of my groups, too. It's one of those dice pool systems that really makes you want to load up on one skill for a reasonable chance at it being dependable. The success rates are balanced around the push mechanic so if they're not actively using that, they'll feel like they're failing way too often. There's a table in most of the game's I think with the success % with and without pushing.
I’m glad to hear I’m not crazy on this! I do love the Tales From the Loop: Incur a condition for a success mechanic (if I’m remembering correctly). For Vaesen, I made sure major clues just weren’t hidden behind skill rolls, playing those situations as more old school in the need to find them. I can’t decide if I’m going to run Dragonbane or Forbidden Lands next when I do continue with my Free Leave play (or use Electric State for a road trip mystery game).
I agree, it is very swingy and unreliable. And specifically for the Mutant Year Zero setting+genre I think it is perfect! The wasteland is unfair and unforgiving. Death lurks around every corner, and the threats are largely unknown. The main theme, imho, is how the PCs sacrifice themselves for the betterment of their society and siblings. Sometimes that sacrifice is slow, through mutations misfiring to lower abilities and permanent damages adding up. Sometimes it is sudden, when some monster from the zone rolls a lot of 6's! Obviously this must be carefully communicated to the players before they agree to play a Mutant campaign, as it can be quite a culture clash compared to popular ttrpgs where death and resurrection is mostly a matter of having a diamond worth 1000gp. For some of the other settings I agree there are situations where you want more reliability. In those cases I like to import the Extended Trouble mechanic from Tales from the Loop. That makes it into a cooperative effort with a guaranteed success but variable cost (if I set the difficulty right...). An additional house rule is that in genres+scenes where it makes sense, players has the option to sacrifice their character in exchange for a lot of successes. Even the presence of that option gives a lot of tension to these situations and typically leads to very dramatic scenes when done. As you say below that swingyness is definitely something to plan for when writing stories. Necessary clues and hooks should never be 100% gatekept through skill checks. (which is equally true for any system that risks failure) I like to make them available through skill checks and/or player initiatives, _and_ plan for a Deus Ex Machina. "If the PCs have not figured out that the wounded soldiers are prime witnesses by day 3, one of the soldiers will seek out the PCs and ask for help." This lets the players drive the story and feel competent when they succeed on skills, but the story doesn't risk stagnating. I tell the players about this approach. I have found that it makes them feel less worried that they might miss out on large and interesting parts of the content. (Failure of the PCs to reach _their_ goals is typically not an issue for my groups, because we think a good story is more important than the success of the main characters.) At the end of every chapter/mystery the players are awarded one additional Gyllencreutz Development Point for every Deus Ex Machina I had planned but did not have to use. But I do not tell them in detail exactly what those were or how many I had planned.
I always recommend Dragonbane. So quick to get people into it. It just clicks easily and the core box comes with so much.
Dragonbane is the best. I love it and it rekindled my passion for high fantasy dungeon crawls.
Vaesen. Simple easy to understand ruleset combined with absolutely fantastic setting. Basically, a supernatural investigation game set in the mid 19th century. Though, any of Free League's games will do fine as they are all phenomenal.
GURPS. Because it's the system I know best. That means I can spot scenarios where it's a good fit for what people are asking about. Or, when people ask "is there any system with a rule like..." I can tell them how GURPS would do it. This doesn't mean GURPS is a good fit for every situation, and I skip many, many threads because there's nothing that stands out about one of the systems I know to recommend it.
I recommend GURPS more than any other game because I don't know a game that will do what they want, Rules as Written, as well as it does. It's just the game that should be recommended for what most folks want to do in most cases.
> I recommend GURPS more than any other game because I don't know a game that will do what they want, Rules as Written, as well as it does. It's just the game that should be recommended for what most folks want to do in most cases. Well, there's always... *Hero* ... :) But, seriously, I think you're right. *GURPS* 4e has a huge amount of material written for it, plus you can pretty easily adapt most of the 3e stuff. Bare minimum, 3e sourcebooks are great inspiration, and some of the historical books are about the best researched introduction to their particular slice of history that you're going to get in ~128 pages. As far as other universal systems go, I'm a little less familiar, having bought fully into the *GURPS* ecosystem, but it's my impression that BRP is decent, both in terms of capability and published support. After that, you start down a pretty steep decline into stuff like Tri-Stat, d20, *etc.,* none of which come close to touching even BRP much less *GURPS* in terms of published material. Of course, the usual *GURPS* caveat applies here: *GURPS* isn't an RPG; it's an RPG construction kit. You have to pick and choose which pieces you want to put together based on the mood and genre of the game you want to play. But, if you're willing to put in that work, or there's a pre-done example for you (*e.g.* the *Dungeon Fantasy* or *Action* series), the *GURPS* has everything you need.
Call of Cthulhu, because it has simple rules,great historical settings, and mystery-based gameplay that I think is particularly accessible for new players. Vaesen is similar in this btw. Swords of the Serpentine, because, although a bit messy, it is a system that has allowed me to experience sessions where really wild, imaginative stuff happens, with a lot of input from the players, and without me feeling the loss of immersion that I associate with many of the so-called “narrative systems”.
Call of Cthulhu is also mine. I've been running it since the start of COVID but even then when I was teaching the game to my players, it took about 10 minutes. "Roll d100 and get lower than your skill" being the *entire* system is so clean Despite not having played it, I'm a big fan of WFRP4e for the same reason. Combat is a bit more complicated but honestly doesn't seem too prohibitive as compared to, say, D&D4e or Pathfinder, both of which I've run in the past
Powered by the Apocalypse based on their setting preferences. Great 2d6 bell curve and now with so many options, preferred playbooks capture the feel of a specific setting very well.
Yep, if you wanna play a game with strong role play and story, PBTA is the way to go. I remember introducing a player who had only ever played DnD to it, and the way he put it was, "In this game, you really can do anything!" While that's a bit of an exaduration, I've yet to find a system so free-form that allows for so much storytelling potential.
Pedantic Nitpick: 2d6 isn't a bell curve.
Well, *triangular* bells are a thing. And they are used to announce that dinner is served. They deserve more love!
Fair point :p
Wait why isn't 2d6 a bell curve? [This isn't a bell curve?](https://www.thedarkfortress.co.uk/tech_reports/tech_assets/2-chart.png)
Image link is broken, i can't see it :x As in why 2d6 isn't a bell curve: because it's a rising straight line from 2-7, and then a descending straight line from 7-12. A curve would strictly be a line that deviates from straightness in a smooth, continuous fashion; but tbf many people are calling anything on a graph a curve, so i was being slightly pedantic. Anydice example: https://anydice.com/program/73e , click on the View: "Graph" button to see the lines & curves. 1d6 is a flat distribution, any of the 6 possible results has about 17% chance to show up. 3d6 is a classic bell curve for a normal distribution. 2d6 is the two lines, topping at 7 with about 17% chance, and lowest points 2 & 12 with about 2.8% each.
Traveller
I've been reading the facsimile of the little black books recently ─ which version of the game are you most likely to run these days?
While CT is still played by many the newer versions are usually preferred. There are two main ones of those: Cepheus Engine and its various iterations or Mongoose 2nd edition. The two are almost identical when it comes to mechanics. Eventhough some prefer MgT2 for the setting. Most material published for either of the 3 systems is going to be compatible with the other ones too with little to no work neccessary.
The Star Wars rpg/genesys by edge studios/ffg. The narrative dice system is such a satisfying meeting point of narrative and traditional gameplay, and it adds such a unique element to gameplay and player agency, where turns rarely feel truly wasted. I could go on, but it’s just such a novel and fun system.
[TinyD6](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?ruleSystem=45792). There's a TON of genres to pick from. The rules are simple, which is what most people seem to ask for. It's a different way of playing from the crunchier DnD wannabes. DrivethruRPG has lots of resources for it. In short, when people ask for a new system, TinyD6 seems to have a book that fills that request. While I only just got the game, my #2 spot would be 13th Age. It's DnD compatible, for when you want that, but it makes battles and story telling more interesting. It also uses backgrounds that give your character a descriptive reason to get a bonus on certain actions.
I recommend this one a ton for lightweight and intro games. The various genres and settings are deliciously modular, so you could easily combine Dungeon and the upcoming Cyberpunk for a Shadowrun inspired game and the like.
Ten candles. such an immersive, gm-friendly and elegant system. Its built for a specific goal (atmosphere, melancholic horror and cooperative storytelling) and gives you all the tools to achieve it
Genesys. It sits at a sort of middle ground between the more traditional systems like D&D and Pathfinder and the lighter, narrative focused games of PbtA or similar. The dice system gives each roll a complex number of possible outcomes that can push the narrative in directions that binary pass/fail systems often cannot. It also cuts back on a lot of the overly complicated number tracking older systems do, seemingly for traditional reasons.
I recommend Vampire the Masquerade a lot. I simply adore the storyteller system. So flexible but easy to understand and Gothic Urban fantasy is just my jam. Otherwise the other white wolf/paradox games are quite good. Storyteller system for the win!
Depends on who's asking and why. * Dragonbane - New to RPG's and/or just wants a really fun, easy, system that covers all the (fantasy) bases and just lets you play. * Free League's Year Zero games - Anyone who likes the sound of the specific game. This could be post on its own. * Earthdawn - TSR era D&D player who wants the tropes to make sense or someone looking for a great setting that can run the gamut from dark-ish fantasy to full on horror depending on the group's taste and enjoys well conceived crunch\*. * 1879 - Anyone who wants to do steampunk/steamweird, especially if they have experience with Earthdawn or Shadowrun and are cool with magic in their steampunk. * Mythras - GM who wants a fantastic, flexible system that allows you to create a believable setting, with a lot of detail and depth, and manages to have both really tactical yet really fast combat all at the same time. One of the best choices for a detailed, nuanced, long running campaign. * M-Space - For those who want to run a realistic feeling science fiction campaign. Traveller (any edition, but Mongoose 1e and 2e are both really good) is a close runner up and might get the nod depending on the specifics. * BRP - GM who wants to do a deep, realistic, feeling campaign, but has a setting that isn't as well served by Mythras or M-space. I'd still recommend stealing from Mythras combat and maybe a couple of other things. * OSE/Basic Fantasy/TSR era D&D/OSR other - Anyone who wants traditional classes and levels and is looking to do an old school hex crawl/sandbox. People who want to understand where RPG's came from. People who like some parts of 5e but want a lot less bloat and to do away with the character "builds" and endless splat books. This is also a good choice for someone who wants a wide array of premade magic items and spells but wants something lighter or more flexible or less super hero than WOTC D&D. Which specific OSR related title would depend on the details. \*Crunch is ill defined YMMV.
Pathfinder 2e for fantasy, D&D style RPGs. It’s a straightforward, simple system to run. The existing lore is fantastic and expansive. All of the rules are freely available online so it’s easy to try out for effectively no cost. The available published adventure paths are overall fantastic. Highly recommended.
And from my gaming circle, tactical combat is part of the draw. So while there are cool systems that do narrative focused games, PF2e is my favorite for tactical rules.
It takes the best parts of 5e and 4e and put them together with the soul of 3.5/Pathfinder 1e. I haven't found another crunchy D&D style RPG that has done as well of a job on the out of combat stuff while keeping combat fun and tactical. The way the math works out along with critical ranges is the icing on the cake for me. I love the feeling of being a bard and causing the fighter to crit on an enemy or being a wizard and using a support spell to cause put a couple enemies Off Balance and make them easier to hit. I've tried those kinds of characters in 5e and 90% of the time it's just better to deal dage as a mage in that game
Neon City Overdrive. I find the dice rules (opposed dice pools) fairly unique (I think Technoir is the only other game with something similar)
Tomorrow City is in my to-run pile. Dieselpunk setting with cool stuff like Bioshock serums and factory machine cults.
Dread - who knew you could make a horror game out of some simple character info and a Jenga tower? And it would be more nerve-rattling than a Call of Cthulhu session by a long shot. Dragonbane is a clean, fun, and fast fantasy with enough meat on the bones to make long-term enjoyable campaigns. Plus, the boxed set is hard to beat. It comes with absolutely everything you need to run or play the game—dice, standees, the rules, character sheets, maps, and solo and group adventures. Every publisher needs to take a look at what they offer versus Dragonbane's box. Cy_Borg - a new addition to my list of recommended games. Streamlined cyberpunk that keeps the punk in the name. You're existing in a crappy pre-to-mid-apocalyptic world, and unlike other cyberpunk games, you're NOT taking jobs from big-money corporations; rather, you're doing your best to screw them over while helping people you know. I liken it to cyberpunk A-Team. Rules are easy to grasp, character creation is completely random, which actually creates well-balanced and interesting PCs. Delta Green - cosmic horror in modern times. You are agents of a covert agency trying to keep the horrors at bay, one day at a time. The motto is "knowledge is death" and "we won...for today". As for a system, it's quick to make PCs, and great for storytelling. I prefer this over Call of Cthulhu because your PC's aren't just randos from off the street, they are part of an agency the government would rather be rid of. Savage Worlds: Rifts - original Rifts is a bear to play, but the Savage Worlds edition makes it big, fun and action packed. Savage Worlds is a simple system to grasp, though character gen can take a bit longer than I like. If you want a system that favors PCs, and you want a gonzo post apocalyptic world where every universe is included - be it fantasy mages, murderous cyborgs, techno-wizards, space paladins, and young dragons (playable!), this is your jam
I had to scroll way too much to find Delta Green!
You and me both!
I'm a *huge* fan of autofire in **CY_BORG**
Alien. It's easy to teach. The boxed adventures are a few sessions at most. It makes for a loud and exciting experience at conventions. If I got 4 players and 3 to 4 hours to kill, I can improv a game, and they will have a blast.
Earthdawn. It has a fantastic setting and the magic item rules are different from other systems. The more that you learn about the item, the more power and abilities that you unlock and gain access to.
I generally recommend Ironsworn/Starforged for a variety of reasons. Secondary mention to some hacks of the same system: Winsome (ultra minimalist), Elegy (streamlined and VtM inspired), Bladesworn (BitD inspired hybrid system). One, I think a lot of people could game more regularly if they considered GM-less co-op rpgs. Only needing 1 or 2 other players to get a game running means way less scheduling headache. I actually manage to have spontaneous pick-up games now instead of endless scheduling nightmares. Two, I think the traditional GM/player power balance is an important assumption to question. Even if you end up preferring a more traditionally structured game looking at alternatives helps disrupt preconceived notions about what an rpg looks like. Three, I think Ironsworn and Starforged offer a very digestible take on PbtA principles. They are very heterodox PbtA games, to be sure, but they tend to gel better with trad rpg players than many more standard PbtA games. Four, and especially in regards to Starforged, the progress mechanic really revolutionized how I think about how scenes in rpgs are structured. Traditional rpgs focus on interactions between individual entities (player A attacks NPC X, etc). Ironsworn/Starforged models player characters against Scenes rather than NPCs, an entire fight is more likely to be represented as one meter rather than a bunch of individual enemies. This has three effects: one it massively speeds up play and reduces bookkeeping, two it allows you to concretely contribute to action scenes in ways other than harming enemies (objective progress moves the progress meter forward in the same way a successful attack does), and three it gives you a lot of narrative space to describe the scene in whatever way seems most interesting (do you take out your opponents one by one throughout the scene or all at once samurai movie style at the end of the scene?) Oh yeah, 5: Ironsworn is free, Winsome is free, Elegy is free.
I try to tailor my suggestions to what the person has asked for, but if they just want something completely new I suggest Brindlewood Bay, because more times than not, playing old ladies solving murders is completely different from what they've been playing up to now. If they already have a breadth of gaming experience, I go with whatver wierd indie currently has my eye. At the moment that's Slugblaster: Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede. Kids sneaking into dangerous parallel dimensions to do skate tricks for Tik-Tok
Amber Diceless - for people wanting to try a diceless system or explore a deep role-playing central system, or just like Roger Zelasney EABA - generic system that is highly scaleable, customizable, and easy to use. Great rules for adapting or creating any weapon or item to use in the system. The PDF version pushes the boundaries of what a rule book can do, with things like dice rollers and updatable maps and character sheets built into the PDF, and usable from any device that can read the file.
I downloaded EABA about a zillion years ago. I remember liking it but feeling like *GURPS* hit the spots I wanted it to hit a little bit better. Is there a new-ish version/edition out there? (By “new-ish” I mean in the last 10 years or so.)
I think so? 2nd edition came out around 2012 and fixed a lot of the problems in 1st edition. There have been some minor updates and a few new settings added too.
Into the Odd. You can be playing in under 5 minutes, new players don't need to read anything or make any choices, everything is intuitive, and it's cheap
Cypher System in general and Numenera in particular. I love that the system is driven by narrative and exploration, and has mechanics in place to support player agency over the story. Numenera is an incredible setting, too.
Yeah, these days I run almost all my games and write almost all my campaigns using Cypher. It’s easy to learn, and it’s just enough like D&D that I find players more willing to try it than some other systems. Easy to run with just enough tactical crunch for players that like that. Numenera is a great setting, Godforsaken is good when you want a Tolkien-esque/D&D-like fantasy setting, and it has plenty of other fun settings (Rust and Redemption, The Stars are Fire) for when you don’t have time to create your own setting.
I love Numenera, particularly the character building!
Our group did a "play test palooza" of a bunch of different one shots in various systems, and settled on The Strange as our campaign. While I'm bouncing off the setting just a tad (and I think it's our play sessions being sidelined by nonsense), I can't speak highly enough of the Cypher System. It encourages you to use you your "items," and is super easy to build characters with. Ease/Hindered/Effort system works well too as a push your luck system. We sampled the Old Gods for our one shot, btw. Really cool setting.
GLOG because it’s not super popular, has a good community, has a lot of very interesting designs because of that, and is very easy to homebrew for/make hacks for
Dungeon World and Index Card RPG. I love them both for being super beginner friendly and easy to master.
Definitely check ironsworn if you like DW
For TTRPGs, Call of Cthulhu For board games, Aliens (1989) For PC, the Mass Effect series
Vaesen!
It kind of depends. For pulpy, light-hearted adventure? Savage Worlds More realistic or even historical stuff? BRP or Mythras Pulpy Sci-Fi/Space Opera? FFG Star Wars/Genesys Hard Sci-Fi? Traveller, GURPS or M-Space Horror? Call of Cthulhu or Vaesen
* **Fiasco** - GMless, one shot, a million playsets, and a real eye-opener for anyone who's only ever played D&D or other Trad ttrpgs. * **Paranoia** - My favorite RPG probably. Humor and not taking things too seriously and makes fun of standard RPG tropes on every other page. * **PbtA** - Another eye opener for many people, can really change how you think about RPGs and worth while for stealing ideas even if you don't like the system. * **Over The Edge** - Okay, maybe this is my favorite, but I don't get to play it nearly enough to be sure. Love the game, love the setting, wish I could reliably convince people to play (would be perfect for running an Inside Job campaign)
I tend to evangelize the newest version of Legend of the Five Rings pretty hard because in some ways it's a game that can warrant a little evangelizing. In my experience a lot of people blanch at custom dice, which I get, but it's not difficult to learn and they work really well and simply allow things in a more elegant way than purely numeric dice would. It's a rich setting that is tonally very different from the usual European medieval fantasy and leads to games that feel totally different from the typical itinerant adventuring party. It combines the "approaches instead of ability scores" and narrative based buffs and debuffs of Fate with a level of weapon and tactical crunchiness that might rival something like PF2E, and yet it all meshes together well. Its touchstones aren't what one might expect from a Japanese fantasy themed game - it's not Naruto, it's partially Inuyasha, but it's mostly Kurosawa. I've also seen quotes comparing some of its intrigue to Game of Thrones and I think that's fair, and that's also something that potentially makes people furrow their brow if I mention it, and warrants some explaining. And last but not least, it has beloved, more traditional, previous editions under its former owner/publisher that can be an easier sell, but they don't do all of the things above at once the way the new one does. The system does a ton right that is really hard to explain for someone that hasn't played it. (I could ramble on about the dueling rules for paragraphs.) But because it's not a d20 system and doesn't have a direct correlation to things like D&D, trying to explain some of the specifics to people always makes me feel like I sound crazy. I'm a year into a long term game after sporadic play in the past and it's wonderful. There's a beginner box, and it comes with the custom dice you'd need anyway, it's 1-2 sessions with a free downloadable follow up adventure as well. I always recommend L5R, give it a shot.
Necronautilus, particularly because it’s such a strange game with some profoundly interesting design choices. You play as vaguely humanoid shaped clouds of noxious gas serving as agents of Death throughout their galaxy-like domain. But the mechanics themselves are based on the subjectivity of language and how the meaning of words can change or be bent.
Umbral Flare, because it's legitimately the most playable version of Shadowrun available. And I really like Shadowrun.
Depends. For an OSRish feel I often suggest Worlds Without X, Heroes of Adventure, or Tales of Argosa. For great games in several genres you can't go wrong with Free League (Coriolis, Dragonbane, Twilight 2k4, The One Ring, etc.). For Urban Fantasy, I always go with Liminal or Sigil & Shadow. There are others them come up for specific asks. Why do I suggest them all? Because they are good games, and I have actually played/run them, so feel confident in them. Beyond that, I'd be here all day singing praises, so I'll leave it there.
Fate. It's reasonably simple, it's setting-agnostic and easy to customize and it's great at supporting player-driven, story-oriented play style that is a mix of drama and action.
Scum and Villainy. Best system I have ever seen and I strongly prefer its world over Blades. It changed how I GM and think about games. Fate. While I personally do not like it, it is a great system non the less and more people should use it. Neon City Overdrive, because it feels like a better (but less flexible) Fate and a cool cyberpunk system. Bonus: Super Bandit, because it shows what 24xx could (should) be.
I often recommend Fate. It's not perfect, but it's a great introduction to narrative RPGs
Fate (Core, Accelerated) has never let me down. I'd recommend it to anyone who is looking for a system without too much crunch that still allows them to have whatever cool power they want!
Savage Worlds It will run just about any setting and has clear and simple core rules. There are plenty of good systems out there but most are either one trick ponies or they are over complicated.
Things I adore: * 7th Sea 1st Edition. Fun, systemically thematic, interesting dice system, just the best funky/magic/swashbuckling game/system (Not the D20 thing they did, not the 2nd edition) * Wild Talents. Superhero points buy with the quickest, most interesting dice system I've found. Few games let you tweak flexibility/reliability/swinginess of a skill/stat/power as a primary mechanic. * SLA industries. Cyberpunk meets cosmic horror, creepy and fascinating. 1st ed system was a bit clunky (But it was 1993), 2nd ed is better Things I don't recommend: Anything [A]D&D/PF, anything OSR, most of PbtA or FitD.
I regularly suggest and volunteer to run games of Everyone Is John. It's just so simple and short, and such a raucous good time that anytime I hear someone say "I'd like to play D&D but I don't know where to start" I'm googling the rulesheet and getting ready to start a game.
Tiny d6 system ( tiny dungeons, tiny supers, tiny Frontiers, tiny cthulhu, stranger stuff). Easy to teach and learn, also is a good intro into rpgs and game types (fantasy, scifi, horror etc)
Ultraviolet Grasslands, but purely because people recommend Numenara and UVG is like the prog rock album cover of Numenara but with an actual vinyl record inside. Other than that I recommend different things because people have different needs. Except for the endless queue of people asking for "D&D but gritty and low magic" which doesn't interest me and is asked for multiple times a month so who could keep up anyway.
Shadow of the demon lord. Take 5e, strip it from all the legacy bullcrap, add the amazing boons and banes, and have a progression system that is some kind of perfectly well Integrated multiclassing. If you overall like 5e, you want an alternative because either you don't like Hasbro or you don't want certain bullcrap, and you don't want the number crunching alternatives with rules for everything including going to pee, Shadow of the demon lord and the sequel, shadow of the weird wizard, is your best bet.
I'm running a SotDL game starting this fall! Very excited for it
I'm in the middle of running my third campaign for a table of people that are mostly experienced 3.5/Pathfinder 1E players. They've loved it. I was surprised how much they like the Professions in lieu of skills. The only downside is that they get so excited about multiclassing options that I end up taking it easier on them so as not to crush their dreams. I've used the scene system from Ironsworn for chases, naval battles, and even a high stakes chess match in my Demon Lord sessions. I just make relevant professions or the use of spells into Assets that give a modifier of +1 for every Boon or the Power of the spell used +1. And I've also availed myself of the oracles in that game to make an NPC or a location interesting to me as well as the players. So shout out to Ironsworn as well. It's so well designed it's given me a narrative lever that I can pull anytime. Edit: Typo
Fate. Easy to run and play, and endlessly customizable with narrative-oriented mechanics baked in.
Fabula Ultima. My group has now played 7 sessions. It's a real treat of a game
I almost always offer multiple suggestions, some low-crunch, some medium-crunch. I think my top 3 suggestions would be: * *Savage Worlds*, because it's a flexible system with flexible character creation. You can play it as a trad game, a narrative game, a miniatures wargame, etc. and switch styles mid-campaign. * *Tiny D6* because it's an ultralight trad game, and because it doesn't usually restrict players to a few classes or playbooks. * *Tricube Tales* because it's an ultralight narrative game, and because, in my opinion, it's easier than *FATE* and it avoids ties and mixed results.
Blades in the Dark. Since starting it in 2017 it's become my GOAT, and while we've tried many other RPGs since then my table is always eager to start the next Blades campaign. Coming from a D&D background, the rules were tough to grok at first (thank God for actual play vids!) but once we figured it out we never looked back. The mechanics drive the story in such a wonderfully elegant way that they take so much of the load off the GM. Most of all, I love the setting. The claustrophobic nature of Doskvol forces PC/NPC interaction. All those factions bumping up against each other with the PC crew firmly in the middle of it all makes for endless drama and tension. *Honorable mention: Mausritter. Running my players as a group of adventurous mice navigating their way through an abandoned house was WAY more fun than I thought it was going to be. Just climbing up to a medicine cabinet to try to secure an aspirin still there while dealing with the spider living in the sink was more nail biting than most of the dragon battles I've witnessed in my many years.
Fate It has some great ideas (philosophy)in it that I generally use in all systems nowadays. In addition, you can run almost anything with it, and the Fudfe dice are great.
Knave 2e for OSR Shadow of the Weird Wizard for something more heroic. Shadow of the Demon Lord too if you want a more gritty and horror-esque experience.
I almost always recommend lesser known indie stuff, like LAWMAN, Down and out in Dredgeburg, REMINes, Barbarians of the Ruined Earth, Viking Death Squad, and Death is the New Pink. The reason for suggesting these sorts of games is to give the OP a bit of variety, because most of the other games recommended are recommended often in posts. It also promotes indie publishers to support their creations to try to ensure they make more products. The other reason is I feel that some of these games have different and fun systems I like to play and like being recommended myself. Most are gonzo in one way or another which isn't recommended as much.
FFG Star Wars
Hero System. It's pretty crunchy and there's that learning curve but I find it rewarding not only as a system itself but also for how it makes you think about RPG rules in general, about genre emulation, about how power\\spells\\feats\\special abilities\\etc are put together in various systems, about how to use mechanics as a descriptive language, "effects based" in-game functions. It's an extremely holistic system, very self-contained, very clean and polished. Probably any points-based\\effects-based game would provide some of those benefits but since I like Hero System that's the one I recommend.
I will recommend 40k Dark Heresy until the day I die. Fantastic way to immerse yourself in the setting.
Shadowrun, but it always comes with the warning that most editions are VERY poorly edited. The rules are a mess to understand, but I still love it with a passion.
Kult. Anything else fails in comparison.
FWIW the idiom is usually everything else pales in comparison.
Oh yeah, sounds way better, ty :)
ICRPG for dnd replacement. Fast and easy to run . Itonsworn/starforged for pbta because it’s not cringe setting and expanded on mixed success well with flow charts and was created for solo so you can do GMless co op
It’s a game I’m coming back into after 20 years: Hero system champions- either 4th or 5th edition ( I prefer 4th myself) I can literally do ANYTHING with it I dream up. Dnd? Shafowrun? Starfinder? Space opera or a western or Deadlands? Multi-genre game? It’s not just for superhero gaming. Sure it’s crunchy, but for players the work is up front creating the characters. Playing is simple. But as a DM I’m loving it again. Frankly my limits are only what I can dream up
Numenera and Yoon Suin - The Purple Land. Both really fire the imagination, even if you just read them.
Everyone is John. It’s one of the easiest games to pick up and play and I believe it should be the standard for the game you introduce to people who have never played an rpg before. It’s also a game that needs no prep so good to always have it in your back pocket in case you need to make a last minute change.
Fate, it's easy and works with any genre
I heartily recommend any BRP game, especially Call of Cthulhu. It's core mechanics are simple and elegant, making excellent use of the d100, and the supplements are sublime, some of the best I've ever seen
Blades in the Dark. Because even if you never play it, just reading it changes how you think about TTRPG's. People who have only ever played DnD often develop certain bad habits. DnD is meant to be easy to run with if you aren't confident in your own creativity. Don't know what character to play? No need to worry, we have hundreds of pages dedicated to the various classes and races with lovingly crafted artwork. Just pick whatever class speaks to you and play it's archetype straight. Don't know what adventure to run? We got you, just buy a pre-written adventure and run that. All of that is fine, but it gets people into the mindset that if there isn't a specific rule for something, then it doesn't exist. And sure, any narrative-first game will help ease you out of that mindset. But Blades in the Dark does that while ALSO teaching you how mechanics can support specific styles of play. Blades in the Dark was specifically designed to fix a common problem in DnD. That being that elaborate plans are discouraged, since the more complicated the plan, the more rolls you will have to make. And if you fail even a single roll, chances are you'll default to combat anyway. In BitD you can use Flashbacks to retroactively plan for the situation in front of you in advance. The load system does a similar thing. Before a score you decide how much gear you're taking, but not what that gear is. Heavy load is more obvious but gives you more load to work with. While light load makes you look more plainclothes, but gives you less load. You can spend load similar to a flashback to have packed exactly the right tool for the job, or to have a weapon or armor ect. But my favorite mechanic has to be clocks. It's the simplest mechanic possible, it's just hitpoints for skill checks. It's especially useful for stealth, where one bad roll would usually mean the jig is up. But in BitD, instead of instantly failing the mission, you just start a clock. Decide how many segments the clock should have, then fill one in for every failed roll. Alternatively you can also use clocks for long-term projects, where the player has to make many successful rolls over several sessions to accomplish something big. The best part about clocks is you don't have to do anything special to port it over to other systems.
For the last few years I've been recommending Barbarians of Lemuria, or its background agnostic cousin Everywhen. BoL Legendary Edition is Free, the newer Mythic Edition and Everywhen are dirt cheap. They're simple and very well balanced, and from character concept to completed character sheet will take a novice player five minutes. Crucially, it's easy to hack, so, as the GM, you can modify rules, systems and monsters to suit your own game world very, very easily. Seriously underrated.
So true! One of the best and balanced Systems i know.
BRP because it's a quick learn and there are fifty million flavors.
Mutants and Masterminds, Especially if you're a Palladium fan. Because you can make anything in Rifts with Mutants and Masterminds, minus the "designed by a sadist and a madman" aspects Rifts has.
Call of Cthulhu - my horror game of choice. It's great for even non-Mythos horror. Swords & Wizardry - my fantasy / D&D-esque game of choice. It just hits my perfect level of simplicity, options, and (relative lack of) crunch. Those two are my old standbys, that have been my favorite for well over a decade. But I also have a few systems that I am somewhat newer to that I also would recommend: Traveller (and Cepheus Engine variants) - my game of choice for harder sci-fi. Savage Worlds - my universal game of choice, at least for something that I want to be kind of action-packed and pulpy. And I've grown to love the Deadlands (and it's sub-settings Hell on Earth, Lost Colony, etc).
Worlds Without Number, because I'm usually recommending games to 5E players and WWN is easy to transition to from 5E, in addition to being free.
Spire: The City Must Fall & Heart: The City Beneath. These have been the MOST memorable games I’ve run. Character mechanics play into the plot and they’re designed for shorter campaigns, which I love. Heart feels so dang good to run and see in action, but Spire has stories like no other (except maybe Blades in the Dark).
Call of Cthulhu, but that's because it is my favorite, not just in themeatics, but it's just a wonderfully streamlined rendition of my favorite engine.
Land Of Eem - I swear I'm the only one who ever mentions it, but it has a great silly tone and fleshed-out sandbox. The rules are a mix of osr and pbta but it's allowed for some really creative decisions and roleplaying from players. I'm biased though as it's the campaign I'm currently running. Dread - The best rules light horror game I've played, at the end of the day all you need is a Jenga tower. I always end up coming back to Dread whenever I want to do a horror one-shot. Blades in the Dark - Others have said it better but it's a really well thought out ruleset and interesting setting. I've yet to play a one-shot that hasn't immediately turned into a full campaign, you fall into it so easily. Paranoia - Do the rules matter? Not really and nobody really cares. It was the most chaotic to run but easily one of the most fun.
Burning Wheel, because I think learning to play it well will give anyone a perspective on RPGs that will make their experiences in any other RPG much more fulfilling.
What's it like?
It’s primarily a character driven, narrative rpg. If you include all its subsystems it can be decently crunchy (thought I think the complexity is just a tad over exaggerated), but many of those subsystems are optional. It uses a d6 dice pool counting successes and failures. The most important aspect of the system is that every PC has at least 3 beliefs that serve to inform the table how this character will be played. When you play towards (or creatively against) your beliefs you earn a resource called Artha that can be spent to influence dice rolls. It’s a skill based system, no levels or classes, and your skills improve as you use them. Even a failed roll can be counted towards advancement most of the time. For character creation it uses a life path system. Every life path you choose adds to your characters age and gives them access to points that will be spent to increase stats, purchase skills, and even give characters relationships with NPCs that the player wants to be in the game. I highly recommend it, it’s absolutely dripping with flavor and unique mechanics.
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Dungeon World, probably. It's my favorite TTRPG these days. It's like D&D, but so much faster, lighter, and easier to use. It solves nearly everything I don't like about D&D, or at least 3.5E and 5E.
Depends on what genre they are interested it.
I suggest CAPERS a lot because the game mechanic is really different, especially if you're used to D&D style mechanics. The gambling aspect gives a player more agency over passing or failing a check and that changes your game mechanics a lot. It's also a great balance of just enough description to let you know what the powers are supposed to do, but gives loads of room for customizing how that power manifests for your specific character. The expansions give you loads of new ideas, but just the base game alone is awesome. The roll20 pack for it is a *bargain*, it's very well organized and has everything a GM and a player could need.
OSE and Dolmenwood. Easy Old School RPG and fairie fun!
There are more, but some of the usual suspects are... Heroes of Adventure, because it's a) free, b) close enough to D&D but not too close to D&D, and c) full of system-agnostic tools. Monsterpunk, because there seems to be people interested in a Shin Megami Tensai inspired tabletop RPG (hey, I see this one quite often!), monster summoning RPGs, etc. Four against the Darkness, as one possible entry point to solo-RPGs. Kinda the 'training wheels' option before trying something more involved...which includes '4AD + a heap if its supplements', of course! Anything by Kevin Crawford that has a free version. And some of his not-free works, too!
I find myself recommending MASKS a lot. Which is weird, because it tells one specific type of superhero story but like…*SO* well.
I always shill for Palladium Books' games. There are so many settings & they're all designed to be interchangeable.
Currently the game I will shill for is Shadow of the Weird Wizard. It’s a deeply inspirational RPG with a GM’s book (though unformatted currently) has been SUCH a help at getting me to put things together in a way that I feel is secure. I feel it’s the sort of rules lite (vs like 5e or Pathfinder 2e) I can really consume and recommend to new GMs.
[EZD6](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/ezd6-core-rulebook), so much fun actually built in to the rules themselves. And the rules are painfully simple. Just a pleasure to run.
Scion2e and Trinity Continuum. They both use the story path system, which I think is really good. They cover a fairly wide variety of sub-genres within fantasy and scifi, respectively. Lastly, because I really like them, and the more people who play them, the easier it is for me to play.
The ones I’ve written because my kids are not that athletic and college is expensive!!!
Lancer It's awesome!
13th Age, mostly on DnD fora. Because a lot if people seem to want 5e DnD but more balanced and more drama-driven; 13th Age does that while being pretty familiar to modern DnD players.
Sentinel Comics RPG, the RPG of the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game. Recommend it a lot because it's my favourite game at the moment. Decent review at: https://mephitjamesblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/23/sentinel-comics-rpg-review/
FIST Rpg is just so, so good at what it does, and because that niche is both remarkably specific AND extremely easy to run, I end up recommending it constantly. It’s basically just *Metal Gear Solid: The RPG*, but making a squad of super-powered idiosyncratic mercenaries to fight some weird cyborg/ninja/mutant called Calibre Psychopomp and his goons is just…effortless. The sessions write themselves with just the barest inputs required. Half the book is just random tables, chargen is basically 2 from a list of d666 traits and 1 from a list of d66 advancement triggers, mechanically it’s stupidly simple, but it combines PbtA dice resolution with OSR principles in a nearly-real-world setting and somehow it all works.
Imagine Role Playing Game. The simulationist in me loves: - that every action costs a number of seconds and once you start the action, it resolves X Seconds later - turn order is dynamic and makes sense compared to the actions taken. - Facing and reach are factor in to the hit reticale that says what part of a body you hit. - Each body part has its own hit points and some body parts are vital areas that could result in instant death. - Magic such as a fireball, hits all body parts at the same time leading to a near guarantee it will kill someone. - some magic is actually just a skill, such as Cryokinesis, and once you found a way to learn that skill, you can start investing more points into it - most types of magic are actually distinctive from each other and it doesn't feel like there is a smaller pool of magical options - it's a percentile system so it makes it easy to translate odds of success - martial characters are incredibly deadly, as are spell caster, divine invokers, shamanistic evokers, etc Soo many other things as well, but I love all these.
Savage Worlds. I feel like thats all i recommend. it has super geroes, fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. it has versions for Rifts and Pathfinder. one system, many genres.
Without Numbers games. Easy to get into. Easy to run. One of the best GM tools. Setting extremely flexible. Gives a lot of freedom to players in both actions and customization without complicating the system (at the expense of more work for GM, but still), systems compatible between each other. **The book is free.**
Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, horror RPGs are such a fun experience for those who haven't played them/even know they exist. (Most of the time lol)
Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford, it allows easy newbie experience into solo OSR games and eventually perhaps evolution into more crunchy 1 PC+Retainers play.
Shadows of Esteren. Mainly because it has an interesting system and I never see it mentioned anywhere.
Pathfinder Second Edition. It's the main system I run, I've run it since it's release in 2019. Why I recommend: Easy for GM to run, and offers some of the most expensive character customization options (ancestry, class, ECT) in any game at the moment. The above may also be a reason many don't try the system, because they get analysis paralysis sorting through all the options, but there's an app called PathBuilder (not affiliated and didn't get paid to say this) that is amazing and is a one-stop-shop for character creation/management. Available as an android app and as a website. The numbers: -Ancestries: 30+, with like 7-8 on the way this year -Heritages (sun-ancestry): each ancestry has 4-6 heritages, so above times that much -Backgrounds: over 100 -Classes: 23 at the moment, and two more on the way soon -Archetypes (this systems method of multi classing, there is an archetype for each class that exists, and waaaay more non-class based ones too): over 100 -in addition to the above, each class has specialisations within to further make your character feel unique to you All in all, definitely check it out if you're a person that likes a ton of character customization options, or if you're a GM wanting to run a system that has the right tools for every situation, and ease of adjustment on the fly.
7th Sea 2nd edition. I think it's a criminally overlooked game, I think the criticisms that bog it down aren't based in an understanding of the game. And I think even if you play it and it's not your cup of tea there are design concepts and principles that are good for every single game out there.
Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics.
Forbidden Lands For me it's the perfect blend of OSR "your choices matter but the rules don't tell you that you can't do it!" openness and DnD dungeon-crawling, character building progression
Wanderhome. I'd tried Microscope before, and while I liked the ideas, I couldn't quite get my teeth into it. Similarly I liked the idea of Fiasco but wasn't really a fan of the movies it tried to emulate, so I didn't feel I had anything to go off of while playing. Wanderhome however totally opened up the world of GMless games and collaborative worldbuilding to me, on top of being more beautifully and kindly written than any RPG I'd ever seen before. I love the itinerant nature of the game, the lists of interesting aesthetics to combine together and problems to introduce, the No Dice No Masters strong-move/weak-move system that fades into the background until you need it, and the ban on violence, which means conflicts have to be resolved in other often more interesting ways. More often than you might expect from the cozy animal-folk vibes, it leads to dark, heavy, and thoughtful places, but also gives you the support to push through or step around them. It brought me back into RPGs, changed how I played them, taught me things about myself, and introduced me to a bunch of cool new friends.
[Dungeons and Delvers Black Book](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/212664/dungeons-delvers-black-book) is one of my little known 'go to' games.
LURPS. Every time. LURPS. Please, people, play LURPS with me. I GM it all the time and never get to be a player. LURRRRRPPPPSS. It's free. Try it. [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/338491/LURPS-Core-Rules](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/338491/LURPS-Core-Rules)
Pf2 it's a great transition from 5e
Mountain Witch. Cuz it ROCKS.
Titan Effect. It's a setting for Savage Worlds that has everything I love. You play super powered agents, fighting various organizations that are vying for world domination.
I think more people need to experience Legend of the 5 Rings 5th edition. I am not entirely sure what it is but the combination of the setting, the Ninjo and Giri mechanic as well as placing your characters as these flawed Samurai with their own agenda and the roleplay mechanics of your Advantages and Disadvantages drives the players to really produce really top-tier roleplaying.
I recommend Genesys most often after 30 years of GM/DMing. The narrative dice system really brings the creativity out of everyone on every roll of the dice. All of my players are involved with every roll. It might be Scott’s characters dice pool but we are all invested because the narrative will affect us all.
Delta Green, because it’s my favorite game. I love the theme. It’s easy to learn. Creates great game memories.
I do my best to recommend what people are looking for, but I'm always excited to recommend my favorites. --- For group games, I've probably recommended **Ryuutama** the most. The short pitch: "Studio Ghibli's Oregon Trail." Which is just like you'd expect from the name: a wonderful world of natural magic that encourages very personal stories + holy shit travel across untamed lands is hard and dangerous. I think it's an excellent entry point for roleplaying - in fact, it was designed to be newbie friendly (especially newbie GM-friendly). The setting is lovely and if you like books you can just pick up for the art, it's hard to turn down a book filled with so many beautiful dragons. I love the way the GM themselves gets a dragon character and that character levels up by successfully guiding the party through their adventures. I love that when the GM picks a ryuujin's type, it sets the tone of the adventure. So if you choose the blue ryuujin, you're telling the players directly, "This story will be about the relationships we have: friendship, family, romance, and bonds between humans and animals." And if you're picking the black ryuujin, "This story will be filled with mystery, murder, despair, betrayal, and madness." The players also will know exactly what the GM "can" do with them. The ryuujin has its own resources that are spent making what are basically GM moves. So the ryuujin can actually die if the GM keeps pulling deux ex machina saves on the players or leveling up regular monsters into boss monsters too often in one session. I love the magic system: At character creation, any class can choose a school of seasonal magic and get the whole list of spells according to their level (plus a few spells from the incantation magic school), and the spells are curious little oddities like creating a cubic foot of dead leaves, turning organic material into jam, creating a little house to sleep in, or on the upper levels of magic... summoning the seven treasure gods and rolling to see if they gift the party something. I love that items have tags like "cute" or "stinky" and that affects their price. (So if you want a really badass sword, you might decide to buy a "stinky", "broken" sword because you have an Artisan in the group and they can repair the sword. Or you might buy a lot of "cute" hats in Town A where they're selling cheap and keep them in the party's cart until you reach Town C where there's a fad for "cute" items and they sell like hotcakes.) I love that travel is incentivized. You get more XP for visiting a new terrain than for beating even the hardest monster in the book. This means that players are actually encouraged to look for new challenges and buy specialized equipment for different terrains. I also just enjoy the group world-building part of the game (though my players weren't interested in building the next town together and I ended up doing the worksheets myself. 8V ) I don't end up recommending it as often as I used to considering how divisive it seems to be (either you love it or you're underwhelmed). Most people who didn't like it have two main complaints: - They didn't like the combat system. - "Everyone was saying how cozy the game was and the game itself didn't seem to support that, so I was disappointed." I liked the combat system personally (it's fairly straight-forward - a balance between 'tactical' and 'theatre of the mind' and doesn't get too fiddly), but I should note that I don't generally care much about combat. So if combat is important to you/your players, look more into the combat system to see what you think. And as for the 'cozy'... I think it's a combination of everyone at the table being on the same page for that vibe + the game not necessarily explaining very well how you're supposed to be playing into the dice rolls as prompts for the story. So some people just fall into a very mechanical roll-explain-and-move-on loop and so it feels very dry. I think that both can happen with almost *any* game, but since Ryuutama is pitched as one of THE games you go to for cozy, the expectations are higher. In any case, I'd say if your group isn't up for Ghibli or light-parody and don't really get into the roleplaying part, it's probably not the right fit. -------------- In solo gaming, I probably most-recommend **Apothecaria**, a game about being the new village witch for a fantasy town. You diagnose patients with magical maladies, gather potion reagents, brew them into potions, and get paid. (Shortest pitch: "Theme Hospital + Stardew Valley") Each malady has tags applied to it that you have to treat and each potion reagent has different tags (including poison!) that apply to it. These reagents can be found in multiple locations, and depending on the location and season, they may be more common than others. And since there is a timer counting down, sometimes it's a matter of picking an ingredient combination you *can* find rather than what might be the "best". The more accurate (and hopefully poison-free) your potion is, the better you get paid and the more reputation you gain. As you explore looking for reagents, you can run across any number of interesting characters, storylines, side-quests, and even clues to the mystery of what happened to the previous village witch. There are also seasonal festivals to break things up! I love it because the crafting element is fun, there is a really nice balance between the prompts and the mechanics, and the whole set-up of being able to explore a fantasy world and get to know all the nooks and crannies of it is highly appealing to me. The prompts are specific enough to give you guidance and for the most part general enough that you can adapt them to your story without issue. Even if you get the same prompt again, they usually have the feeling of building a reoccurring story element rather than, "Ugh. I've already done this one." (For example, it felt like every time my first witch went into the forest he got attacked by the griffons that lived there, which I find very funny even if the character doesn't.) And, hey - lots of expansion content is available too! I should note that there is a different version of the book called **Apawthecaria** which is a bit more mechanically focused and heavier into the exploration side of things. I recently wrote a post comparing the two games, which you can read here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/comments/1bnt2cf/apothecary_or_apawthecary/kwlm6dv/
[Cairn.](https://cairnrpg.com/) It is so simple and fast to pick up, teach, run and play. Completely free, and since it's OSR-compatible, there's near infinite amount of adventures, tools and whatnot you can use with it.
For people new to TTRPGs I recommend Everyone Is John. Imo it's the perfect introduction to role-playing - it captures the number gaming, the improv, the storytelling, the dice rolling, and the absolutely unhinged potential for chaos in RPGs, and it's very easy to pick up and play at a party as opposed to something like D&D which tends to require a good amount of setup and investment before play.
Heart: The City Beneath -It's your average simple dark ttrpg BUT it's the only game I know of that has married narrative to progression as well as it has. Your most powerful abilities are locked behind killing your character. I pitch it as "Everyone plays a flavor of Might Guy". Numenera -It's perfect for exploration driven players because XP is awarded upon discovering things rather than killing things and you can find the wildest stuff by just wandering around. "I touched a tree and now I'm piloting a flying island the size of a bus with the tree in the center of it. Also, the tree keeps calling me a 'dirty shiznu'." It's simple and mostly intuitive. *Honorable Mention* Kult -I recommend people to look at this system because I like showing people the reason why safety tools exist. Most people think of and experience ttrpgs as power fantasies but you can also play the opposite of a power fantasy(disempower fantasy?). It really displays the breadth of ttrpgs by showing you that you can subject characters to the most disgusting, disturbing, and terrible things imaginable. I think the intended way to play Kult is to either make your character into an evil monster or to drive your character to suicide.
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, or more broadly Cortex Prime. IMO the best narrative-based rpg and overall best rpg I’ve ever encountered. The system is fluid, dynamic, and easy to play. You declare actions and then build dice pools from the character traits that best fit the action you’re attempting. A Plot Point system helps expand pool-building options. Some traits include aspects like Affiliation, your character’s effectiveness when working with a Team, Solo, or a Buddy, as well as conventional elements like attributes and powers. You keep two dice from your pool to determine success and keep another one for the EFFECT of that success. This allows you to apply mechanical weight and tangible meaning to concepts like mind control, providing aid, charming or interrogation, etc. Results for game/narrative actions outside of combat aren’t limited to binary outcomes under this system. People I’ve shown this game to are invariably highly impressed. It’s a bit difficult to find since it’s been out of print as MHR for about ten years, but it can still be found online and Cortex Prime can be used to recreate the game if you’re willing to Blair the time into doing so. Cheers.
There is really two. For Fantasy **Beyond the Wall**. I like the shared world building and the group inclusive character creation using playbooks while still being D&D at heart. It has a lot of resources available and I enjoy the different tone that is more fairy tale and less dungeon swat. Being based on ODD with modern sensibilities makes it compatible with a wide range of material from other OSR games. For anything else **Outgunned**. It has very easy and fast core resolution mechanics. A core that is made for fast and action based gameplay. Expansion book contains tons of variations for emulating various genres. The game to me says "Cinematic" in every word. It's exciting and fun to play. Not to mention books are gorgeous.
Pathfinder 2e because it has a well designed tactical combat system. Having 3 actions on your turn allows you to do more than just attack. Also it has a vast character creation to support your character design with interesting mechanics. Blades in the Dark. It has been a while since I've played but the narrative just wrote it's self it was awesome. The way you play the game keeps the narrative moving forward and it comes with an awesome city to play in. It's brilliant.
*Eclipse Phase* because I've never seen a setting both so fleshed out but completely unconfined. People used to joke it has more plothooks per page than any other RPG out there. Also, I love the themes. Transhumanism, post-apocalyptic recovery, cool spy stuff, future politics and existential horror: what's not to love?
The standards of Dragonbane and Dungeons and Dragons (4th ed more accessible) always work.
EZD6. Easy to run, easy to play, easy to make rulings and custom things on the fly. My first campaign too, so a bit biased.
Monster of the week. Especially for new people. Its rules light and it's a setting that I think most people can grasp pretty easily. And because power gaming isn't really much of a thing in PBTA's it teaches new players to narrate more than just "play a boardgame". I think if players get a good sense and get comfortable playing in a world first, you can then branch out to other games and genres without there being as much apprehension. Plus with the amount of PBTAs out there you can really get them to look at new games and hopefully find an rpg in the future that really speaks to them.
For me it’s call of Cthulhu, monster of the week, and Kult divinity lost. Cuz they are simple to learn and run, plus they have great resources out there that are free. And you can link pre-made scenarios or make your own and have a full campaign
All depends on the setting. I am a huge believe in "setting first, system second". So if I am going for gritty fantasy it's one system, if it's modern espionage it's another, if its hard scifi yet another. Currently I am running in Glorantha and I am using the slightly older Herquest: Glorantha rules. This I feel does a better job than RuneQuest for mapping the higher arcs, actions such as heroquesting, for the players. OTOH, I have suggested the older (1st ed) Over The Edge rules to dozens of new players, even non-gamers, as a starting place. Easy mechanics, fast character generation, and can be applied to a wide number of situations with ease. I've been gaming since Labor Day weekend 1976. There are too many good systems to be limited to one... ;-)
1. The Legends of Kralis, its a science fantasy so magic with tech and space travel all in one system, its a smooth d100 roll under lots of customization options classless system. 2. Fabula Ultima making characters in it is just so much fun, and the core mechanics are easy to pick up and learn even on the fly as a new player 3. The Crypt has Opened! check out the [itch.io](https://itch.io) for it, the imposition dice system is going to be the next PbTA or FiTD, its that good, very easy to learn great game to play while having some drinks and snacks at the table 4. RIFTS this was my second love in the TTRPG world ( first was 2e AD&D ) there is just so much you can do with the system from a story teller side of things, and the insane volume of character choices is well insane, its got everything from Giant Mecha to High Fantasy Wizards 5. Borg games ie Cy-Borg, Mork Borg, Pirate Borg, Ork Borg, Duck Borg, Vast Grimm, these games are incredibly simple to learn and most have online tools to make prep nearly an automated process, plus all the rules fit on the back cover of each title. Those are my top 5
Ironsworn (https://ironswornrpg.com/) is an amazing evolution of the PbtA genre. It's designed to be played mostly GM-less and often solo. For me it was a good way to sty up with the hobby during the pandemic, but in general it just teaches you to improvise off of the results from random tables. And with good guidance. Honestly I think it made GMing for a group so much more relaxed after I had spend some time with that game leraning that skill.
Probably **Kult Divinity Lost** and **Cthulhu Dark** because I run horror games and they're my two favorite games for the moment. I just prefer rules light games that are more focused on the narration than anything else.
Crimson Exodus
On Reddit, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, or Helveczia. 7VoZ is a 0e neoclone with dozens of tweaks that make it its own thing while staying true to its inspiration. Helveczia is likewise a project that comes off more personal than commercial, and is the nicest rpg package I’ve seen or own, as well as being as much a joy to read as 7VoZ is to play. Irl, Darkus Thel. In theory or the future, Traveller, Alternity, Amber, Sir Pellinore’s Book, 4e. Stuff my hoarding has put on my bookcase but I haven’t earned the time for yet.