Death Bat's Top Five Tabletop RPG Books for 2014

To match my video game awards this week I offer up the top five game books for tabletop RPGs that took my fancy in 2014. This list is going to look a little biased...you have been forewarned!

#5. Blood Tide
The hefty Basic Roleplaying tome on the world of magic and mystery in the Caribbean is a fantastic and well-researched effort at making pirates accessible as both a mythic genre and a historical setting. If you liked those movies and also know what I mean when I say that On Stranger Tides was one of the best books ever written (Tim Powers, check it out) then you should investigate this book.

#4. 13th Age Bestiary 
This amazing monster book and one of the only such tomes I've enjoyed reading in quite a long time. Every entry is loaded with ideas and concepts about using the monsters in 13th Age games. Every stat block is concise and to the point, a trademark of 13th Age's style, with system-specific tricks and gimmicks to make the monster interesting. Invaluable resource for 13th Age games.

#3. Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion
This amazing book, as as slim as it is, shows just how good Savage Worlds is at doing fast and furious multigenre, and was the source of a great SF campaign and a lot of blog inspiration last year.

#2. 13 True Ways (13th Age)
13 True Ways is the quintessential expansion for 13th Age, this book is a magnanimous addition to that system. From the way it managed to introduce devils into the game and show a multitude of ways to "make them your own" to the six new classes and plethora of setting material 13 True Ways is a real hoot. I got a lot of good gaming out of 13th Age in 2014.

#1. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (Player's Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide)
These three books swept in and in one fell swoop brought the game back to where I wanted it, while stealthily introducing new concepts and expectations for how D&D should play that have already become so comfortable at my gaming table that stepping back to older editions without these changes feels like a regression. Who knew I'd grow to love the advantage mechanic, bounded accuracy, and a hefty ephasis on "less is more" when it comes to modifiers and variable? This is the last D&D I want to buy, and it's the first edition I feel could be the one I game into my old age with. Please don't eff this one up, WotC.

Honorable Mention:

Lots of good stuff came out this last year, but especially interesting to me were the following books. If only I'd found time to run them, these games might have made it into the top 5:

Interface Zero 2.0 - a fantastic and deep cyberpunk world for Savage Worlds. Possibly too deep for the kind of game SW is, this book could have done just fine if it was half the size it is right now.

Shadowrun 5th Edition - I am not qualified to compare this version of the game to prior editions, as I didn't even decide I wanted to care about Shadowrun until the new android/PC RPGs came out and motivated me to investigate this book. It sold me on the idea of mixing fantasy and cyberpunk, though, and the 5th edition mechanics seem very sound.

Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition (alias Blood & Smoke: the Strix Chronicles)
Bet this one took you by surprise. Far and away the most interesting read of 2014, the revision of the Vampire: The Requiem runs deeper than just a sound reworking of the mechanics, adding in a new metastory about the ancient Strix and a strong emphasis on a more...2014ish take on vampires (still with 100% less glitter, thank you). Appears to have recently been re-repackaged as Vampire: the Requiem 2nd edition, perhaps due to the insane level of confusion I am sure the original title caused people, for a product which you can only find if you know that it is available online through rpgnow.com, being published by Onyx Path and not White Wolf. I would have made this a top contender if I had just found the opportunity to run it.

The Last Parsec Kickstarter

Pinnacle is doing a Kickstarter of note in the form of The Last Parsec, a setting for Savage Worlds Sci Fi. As many of you may recall I am rather fond of the new Savage World Science Fiction Companion (see Savage Space) so I'm looking forward to what they do with this new universe. Previous Pinnacle Kickstarters seem to have worked out rather well (Weird Wars: Rome, for example) so I think Peginc. is worth it.

I have a rule of thumb now that I don't back Kickstarters because frankly I feel bad for all the developers who get deathly ill not long after their Kickstarters complete (my theory is that successful Kickstarters are the leading cause of illness and Ebola in the US), so I won't be backing this one, either; but it's definitely on my "I will buy this when it is available for public purchase" list.

Cool news over....KS rant ahead!


Pinnacle is not on the list of disease-affected KSers so far as I know; it's more like the handful I have backed have taught me that I do not want to be a backer for any project, ever, simply because I think the entire KS model lacks the sort of oversight a normal agreement with someone putting money down on a product should offer. There's too much cool stuff coming out now for me to throw money down on hypotheticals for the future.....by the time I'm ready to stick some money on The Last Parsec, it will already be out. That's something I can appreciate: here's some money, send me my books.

By contrast, if I hadn't backed Legends of Dawn I wouldn't be experiencing the crushing disappointment of a computer game that was poorly designed and badly tested. If I had not backed the T&T Deluxe set I would not be wondering why I haven't seen any of the print products that have been produced and which I ordered as part of my KS pledge but which are still not in my hands (my pledge covered pretty much print copies of everything), despite being sold at Cons and available on Ebay right now. Stuff like that really sours you on the KS process, and that's from a team I trust will deliver. I continue to hold faith in Flying Buffalo and co. that I'll eventually see all the stuff I ordered and the DT&T set, but I wish I wasn't in this position; I'd much rather have waited until the final product was out and ordered it directly from FB instead, it turns out. I'm not a collector, and I don't like being a backer; I'd rather just play a finished product.

Now, there is an argument that some of these projects wouldn't be possible without Kickstarter, and I'll grant you that. But Kickstarter really only works for certain types of creators: people who have the good business sense to manage the KS funds properly, and to apportion the necessary time and effort to get the project done; this approach is shockingly uncommon in our tiny corner of the gaming universe. It seems like the most successful RPG KSes are those which use the medium as a preorder venue, rather than as a way to back the project and prop it up from the start. I suspect I could back those with confidence (and I did, with Fantasy Hero), but honestly? I'd rather just do a real pre-order, or buy the finished product. Someone needs to be there at the tail end, sending them money for a job well done; I'll let all the aspiring entrepreneurs chuck their money in at the inception, instead and save my cash for the "reward" at the end.

Savage Worlds Deluxe

This is a very nice definitive edition of the Savage Worlds system. I'll be writing more about Savage Worlds soon....I think it's won out as my "go to" game for multigenre gaming for 2014. I acquired the Horror Companion along with the Deluxe hard cover edition of the rules, Weird War II, Nemezis, and of course I have Realms of Cthulhu. The Fantasy Companion and Supers Companion are on the way. I downloaded the Science Fiction Companion from rpgnow since it's not out in print...yet.

These new Companion tomes to the new(ish) Deluxe edition are excellent full-feature toolkit books. Savage Worlds seems to rest perfectly on that line between "ease of access" and "robust detail" that I like. I've run earlier versions of it in the past, and enjoyed the campaigns I did get to run quite a bit: one was a Space Marines adventure that demonstrated that Savage Worlds was a natural fit for space opera. The other was a weird sort of "A-Team goes to the Lost Island" theme with a mix of zombies and dinosaurs...it was a brief campaign but crazy fun.

My motivation to get back to Savage Worlds is simple: I was tired of noticing that every time I saw a really interesting new campaign setting for an RPG it was invariably for Savage Worlds. GURPS, much as I love it, is all but dead except for some "fan maintenance" PDFs and a semi-annual single print release. I don't know what's going on with Hero System and it was always a hard sell anyway. Savage Worlds, however, pumps out an endless array of gorgeous, genuinely exciting settings with a lot of adventure and imagination baked in, and a majority are available in print. Hard to resist....I'll do some reviews of these SW books soon so you can get an idea of what you may be missing if you're not up to speed on Pinnacle's multi-genre system.