Five Game Systems I Plan to Visit in Lieu of The Big Two (D&D and Pathfinder 2E)

 Okay, there's nothing wrong with either Pathfinder 2E or Dungeons & Dragons as rule systems....well, there may be issues,* obviously, but this is the year that I really want to do something different, other than play these two systems. Last year I enjoyed Call of Cthulhu (always a good staple), and Mothership reared its head. OSE was fun for a couple mini campaigns, and there are no doubt other games I ran in 2022 that I can't remember at the moment.

For 2023, I may wish to enjoy some fantasy gaming that's not the two top dogs. Here's the list I've compiled (akin to my SF list I posted a week or so back):

Forbidden Lands - first up, the Free League Year Zero Engine powered fantasy boxed set was once really hard to track down. I now have the core and all the supplements, as well as a couple sets of the lovely dice (you don't need special dice to run this, but I like having them anyway). I feel very comfortable with the system mechanically; it's got a nice reductionist approach to skills and talents with an elegant and distinct method of dice resolution. It's focus makes characters both pragmatic and effective but also fragile and always at risk. You are practically expected to engage with the world; building fortresses and settlements and finding mentors makes improvement through experience much easier, so there's an active mechanic for players to want to forge their own path in the world. The default setting is interesting enough for me to consider using it as-is, something that is honestly very hard for me to do with all of my own game worlds I like advancing in storyline.....but the good news is its written in a manner that lets me use it as I wish, with my own setting if I so desire. And it has a lot of fan support on Free League's page on Drivethrurpg.com. 

 Savage Worlds Using the Pathfinder Expansions or Fantasy Companion - The as yet soon-to-be-printed Fantasy Companion is a revision that takes a queue from the Pathfinder for Savage Worlds books. Its also compatible with those books, which means that you can run a lot of fantasy now with Savage Worlds, and itr finally can be said to have a lot of easy to use support for fantasy gaming. Savage Worlds' SWADE edition is a great mechanical update and restatement of an already fine game system, and I know my group is interesting in trying this all out....so I should probably prioritize this one.

Dragonbane (Drakar och Demoner) - This lovely kickstarter is a reimagining/revision to a classic era Swedish RPG that spawned out of a translated edition of the 1982 Magic World from Chaosium. Free League is in charge, and you can tell fom the design, but given I love their stuff so much its a small wonder I am keen on this. The print edition is not coming out until late in the year, but the working draft/playtest copy is quite functional and I definitely want to run this for a short test game soon. Plus, playable mallards that aren't from Glorantha!!!! I secretly hope this spawns more content and turns in to the spiritual Magic World successor we all deserve.

Those are the big three. I have contemplated to varying degrees the possibility of Mythras, but for various reasons I am stymied by the possibility, chiefly with the weird character sheet on Roll20. I then look to BRP's Magic World, but while I know we could have some fun with MW, it is am imperfect tome with a lot of errata (which did get in to the PDF, I think, but still). 

There is  a strong fourth contender, although I know the initial learning curve (mostly in PC generation) is steep: Dungeon Fantasy RPG (powered by GURPS)! I might indeed propose this last option, I have a deep and abiding love for GURPS and have gone far too long without running it. It is possible I might instead propose some GURPS historical gaming finally....I was working a lot on some GURPS Egypt campaign ideas last year, and those are still lurking in my files, waiting to be unleashd. 

*Okay yeah I am playing in a Pathfinder 2E game right now that reminded me in a hard way of why I don't want to run it anymore again.

Free League Publishing - Swedish Gaming on the Brain (Vaesen, Mutant: Year Zero, Alien and Forbidden Lands)

A few games on my "backlog" list I published what feels like ages ago -- since my last blog post I have both contracted and recovered from the latest variant of COVID (my first time! Thankfully I was on my fifth vaccine shot), and among the list is Vaesen, which after I dug it out of the backlog I have been reading quite a bit of. It's not nearly as grim and existential as, say, Call of Cthulhu, but it is an ambient and moody universe with lots of gothic potential. I am thinking hard of what I can do with it.

When I was in Florida earlier this year I stopped by a great game store and snagged most (but not all) of the Mutant: Year Zero lineup, with only some modules and Mechatron missing (a book which Ebay asserts only one copy was ever printed so be ready to pay hundreds of dollars for it--yeesh). Luckily every book in the Mutant series is a stand-alone take on a segment of the post-apocalyptic world, and the core book is pretty much "Gamma World, using the Free League rules." Genlab Alpha is for animal mutants, and Elysium is a rather interesting take on the idea of pure strain humans and the M:YZ idea of vaults....pre-cataclysm colonies beneath the earth who weathered out the bad times, but are in turn slowly depleting their resources and creating gruesome level of social strain on their internal social controls. Interesting stuff.

That's all to say that in addition to reading up on Vaesen I am prepping to run Mutant; Year Zero soon. Probably after the current Saturday Call of Cthulhu arc concludes and my co-GM runs the next arc of his Pathfinder 2E campaign, but it seems like a no-brainer to me. We had a lot of fun with my guest Gamma World games, but as seems to happen so often these days, I really do like a bit more meat to my game systems, and the old school stuff is fun for a palette cleanser, but no longer sustains for long term campaigns. Mutant: Year Zero appears to be just the fix I need.

Alien RPG is also still looming, and I also dragged Forbidden Lands out of storage, having all but forgotten I had been collecting it, too. Forbidden Lands looks genuinely interesting, but the problem with any fantasy game system is that I am so invested in my own worlds and pursuing their stories that I just haven't quite pieced together how I would cobble together my own style of campaign from what Forbidden Lands has to offer. The game straight up tells you in the opening chapter that it knows some GMs will use it for their own thing, but the rest of the game proceeds to provide you with such a setting integrated take that it is hard for me to imagine how to extract it in a useful way; made tougher by the fact that its own setting is sufficiently intriguing. What I am trying to do is reconcile my "desire to run my own fantasy world my way" with the book's cool built in setting and style, and see if I can somehow mesh the two. I worry if I simply try to run it straight that I will become disaffected with it and lose interest, but on the other hand I am trying to think of it more like how I run Call of Cthulhu, which is itself fully immersed in the mythos, but is my own specific take on modern day horror with a specific blend of features distinct to my take on what the mythos would look like in the 21st century, borrowing as I see fit from Delta Green, ufology, modern notions of the paranormal, and a reimagining of those things which made more sense in the 1920's and 30's but maybe less so now (example: K'n-Yan is not a giant cavernous realm below Oklahoma, but is an other dimensional space through which certain ancient portals found in Oklahoma can take you; Pluto may not be the actual Yuggoth, but it definitely is a staging ground for the mi-go; tcho-tcho are not a deviant asiatic humanoid species but are genetically modified subjects who's experimental history is ancient and cross-continental; stuff like that). 

If I can do that: take the cool stuff in Forbidden Lands and then transplant it to something I can make my own, I think I can figure out how to use it. Because I do like the system, and I like how it structures a distinct exploration style of gameplay, and I would really like to try that out. 

Free League also distributes (though did not write) Death in Space which I am still thinking about. I feel like I am too much into the "science" part of science fiction to fully appreciate Death in Space, which is a sort of eschatological space-fantasy treatment with the feel of grim SF wrapped around it. It has some core conceits I just don't like, in other words. You don't need all that stuff to make a good SF horror game, as Mothership proves again and again. 

Meanwhile, back in the reality of "what I can actually run and find players for," D&D high level begins, hypothetically, tomorrow! Live! I hope I am not jinxing it (again) by saying this on the blog, as every other time I have triumphantly announced the return to live it ends up getting interrupted by work or illness, so fingers crossed.....

2020 Gaming Plans

My tabletop gaming plans for 2020 are very consistent: keep gaming, as much as possible, on the two nights I have free to do it. My strategy toward this end remains simple: keep focused on the game systems that let me maximize my prep to play time, and cater best to my GM style of gaming. So far that means I can safely expect to play more Pathdinder 2nd Edition and Cypher System; indeed, these two games alone encompass almost everything I need in gaming right now for my above outlined requisites. There are other games I would like to try out soon though! These include:

Forbidden Lands - this boxed set which is really just a box to hold two enormous leatherette bound Player and GM guidebooks is an amazing product. It has old school design and a strong focus on exploratory hexcrawl-styled gameplay, with plenty of tools to evolve the story as you go. It's a product so good that even if I can't get my players to try it as a system, I will appropriate its GM content for use in another game.

Alien RPG - this came out in December so I've had no time in 2019 to play it, but for 2020 I would like to run a short campaign at minimum to try it out. I am very much hoping it does what I've always wanted an Alien RPG to do.

Starfinder - I would like to get back to this at some point, especially now that I am looking at the system through "PF2E lenses" which allows Starfinder to make more sense to me.

Cyberpunk Red - I have to be honest....I am not aware of any new games coming out in 2020 that are tempting me right now, other than the hoped for release of the Cyberpunk Red full product. My attempt to secure a print copy of the Introductory Cyberpunk Red has met with continuous failure, but I am very much counting on securing a copy of the final product. 90% of my gaming in college was split between Cyberpunk 2020 and AD&D 2nd edition, so there's a compelling interest for me to get this.

Savage Worlds Adventure Edition - while still being the same game, the new "SWADE" edition of Savage Worlds manages to fix so many little bits and bobs that it's sort of impossible not to love. It fixes things you never knew were broken, but once the fix is seen it cannot be unseen, and I am really eager to play Savage Worlds again, and soon. My only worry is it will take a long time for new updated genre books to arrive.

Outside of the above I keep a small stash of "ready to play" RPGs handy for pick up games, filler sessions, or "we need a break" moments. This bundle includes Traveller (and Cepheus Light by proxy), Swords & Wizardry Complete, White Star and of course Savage Worlds. One game missing from my collection I keep kicking myself about (since I sold it on EBay) was Beyond the Wall, a game which did such a great job of making B/X D&D into something literary and mysterious that I must order new copies again soon, especially now that my son is getting old enough to grokk this stuff properly.

In the end....it is entirely possibly 99.5% of my game time this year is spent with Pathfinder 2nd edition, but I am the GM; my word is law! I just need to put the time and effort into one of these other games to make it happen.

Year in Review: Tabletop RPGs of 2019

I've written a bit less than I have in prior years in 2019, so if you follow the blog you can probably guess where my energy and interest remains focused, more or less. So don't be too surprised by the  RPG products which I have found to be sufficiently compelling in 2019 that they have soaked up a nontrivial level of time and/or interest, a massive feat these days....rather than rehash how much I love Pathfinder 2nd edition, Cypher System and "other," I'll just point out some trends in the hobby I noticed this year:

The Year of Old Favorites Getting Facelifts

This was the big mark for 2019 as far as I was concerned. Savage Worlds got a facelift to a new, reorganized edition which didn't change much but helped consolidate the game into a cleaner edition. So far we only have a few books out for it, but Savage Worlds Adventure Edition looks like it will work a a good "one book standalone" for most people's needs.

Meanwhile, the Cypher System Revised which started as part of the "Your Best Game Ever" Kickstarter from Monte Cook popped out on time with --you guessed it-- a heavily revamped book with few to no rule changes but a ton of organizational changes and additional content.

Finally (well, for my focus in the hobby) we had the formal release of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, a clever revamp that feels more like a new system spun out of the D20 family more than a regular old 2nd edition of its predecessor. Pathfinder 2E quickly seems to have become my groups' favorite system, and as a result it has been almost entirely the only system we've been playing on Saturdays and Wednesdays since August.

There are old favorites out there which have yet to see their time in the sun (GURPS and Hero System both deserve a "modern day" treatment, if only to see what that looks like) but it's good to see that many systems can get a revamp without critical changes to their core mechanics (okay, well 2/3rds of such systems, anyway!)

The OSR Shifted a Bit from the OD&D Core

This year saw the release of The Fantasy Trip in print for the first time since it's death in the early eighties, as well as a slew of new content. It witnessed a return of Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes in a slick new reprint with additional material to bring the game into the 21st century without changing any of the original game. It has brought a range of interesting Swedish fantasy games in the OSR vein with a keen ability to handle hardcore old school dungeonering and hexcrawling without being distinctly D&D in the form of the Fantasy! RPG and the impressive Forbidden Lands boxed set (which I finally got a copy of).

It's not that classic-D&D focused content is gone, but more that there seems to be a branching of interest in what the OSR can offer, and that's a good thing.

The Bloggosphere Contraction

It's fairly evident when you look around: many blogs of old are now gone, or on life support. The old era of dedicated gaming blogs has dimmed a bit, probably due to the pervasive rise of vlogging through Youtube. 2019 was the year I first really noticed it, to be honest, but even I find more and more RPG vlogs creeping into my Youtube feed, which is where I'm finding most Pathfinder and Starfinder content these days, for example. Still, there remains a hardcore crowd that I believe is mostly made up of other bloggers keeping it all alive. Tragically, we old guard probably without much exception would find it hard to transition to a vlog environment....I have zero interest in putting my face or voice out there; the blog for me has always been a deliberate exercise in writing, not visual presentation.