Tell me about "Any RPG" from before 1990!

[Knightfall]

Time for a new thread topic yet related to my other "tell me" threads.

More and more I've been thinking about RPGs that existed before I began playing D&D. I cut my teeth on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition. Before that game, I neve knew much about gaming beyond seeing a friend's copy of 1e Oriental Adventures, which made me catch the gaming bug.

I knew nothing of other games. I lived in a small, isolated town with a very limited gaming scene. I knew nothing of Ars Magica, Battletech, Cyberpunk, Elfquest, GURPS, Harn, Palladium, Pendragon, Rolemaster, Runequest, Shadowrun, Skyrealms of Jorune (*), Space 1889, Talislanta, Thieves' World, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Warhammer, Wilderlands (*), etc. *I'm now a huge fan of these RPGs.

For me, AD&D 2e was gaming and that shaped my love of the game and gaming. I gained a lot of exposure to other game systems after I moved into the city in 1992, but I rarely bought anything besides D&D 2e.

I gained an interest in some of TSR's other RPGs. Gamma World was great, but I only bought a few of the sourcebooks for Fourth Edition. I soon knew what Boot Hill, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret were and Marvel Super Heroes as well. I bought books for Amazing Engine and Buck Rogers - XXVc The 25th Century but I eventually let them go, and the Gamma World books too. (I kept several "key" Alternity books, however.)

I dove into FASA's Earthdawn and dabbled with Battletech. However, I never convinced my friends to play those games. (I didn't push very hard. I had enough trouble getting them to play D&D.)

Now... it's 2009, and I'm starting to gain a real interest in Old School games. I've been delving into The Acaeum and Wayne's Books & Old School Games web sites.

However, there is so much that I'm getting lost in the maze of products, especially on the Wayne's Books site. There are still many of the RPGs listed on that site that I've never heard of (i.e. Bushido; High Fantasy; Living Steel; Man, Myth & Magic; Midkemia; Powers & Perils; etc). Plus, I know very little about the other games I've listed. I guess I've been a D&D fanboy for far too long.

So, what I'm looking for on this thread is advice. Tell me about your favorite RPG that came out before 1990. (Heck, tell me about your favorite non-D&D RPG that came out before the year 2000!) What was good? What was bad? What was so bad that it was good?

Let the mayhem begin,

Cheers!

Knightfall

 

[Hand of Evil]

Oh, the years run together...

Warhammer RPG - much the game today but rules tended to fall apart as characters advanced in their careers. What stood out, grit and know that a character could get kill, it put caution in the player's vocabulary. It also gave us a fantastic setting in the old world. It sort of gave me an alt to D&D, as I was questioning use of levels and hit point vs monsters, leaning to a skill point driven game and greater character diffentances.

GhostBusters - I had fun with this game, it was comic relief and just a good sit down and have fun game.

 

[Umbran]

Hm. My personal favorite was probably Marvel Superheroes.

Marvel Super Heroes (role-playing game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marvel Super Heroes

We were all comics geeks, and the game did a pretty good job of giving us the comics world in a way we could play.

 

[Mournblade94]

Oh, the years run together...

Warhammer RPG - much the game today but rules tended to fall apart as characters advanced in their careers. What stood out, grit and know that a character could get kill, it put caution in the player's vocabulary. It also gave us a fantastic setting in the old world. It sort of gave me an alt to D&D, as I was questioning use of levels and hit point vs monsters, leaning to a skill point driven game and greater character diffentances.

Fantastic game. I left D&D to play this for about 1 year (which is significant for a high school student). I like the new edition of WFRP and I have found that it is very easy to convert old modules to the new system. They did an excellent job with this edition.

Hm. My personal favorite was probably Marvel Superheroes.

Marvel Super Heroes (role-playing game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marvel Super Heroes

We were all comics geeks, and the game did a pretty good job of giving us the comics world in a way we could play.

Marvel Superheroes ranks as my #2 RPG of all time. THis was such a simple and fun system. Completely bad for simulationism, but that just did not matter with this game. I thought the advanced Marvel SH cleaned things up a bit.

West end games STAR WARS was an excellent system. It worked alot like shadowrun, though I am pretty sure this predates shadowrun. This was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of SW. The quality of source material I would say was better than anything for d20 or SAGA star wars, but that source material is really timeless, and you can port it over to the SAGA system easily. I would never go back to playing this d6 Star Wars as I like SAGA more, but it really was a fantastic game.

 

[Henry]

Call of Cthulhu and Marvel Super Heres were the only ones I had a lot of experience with prior to 1990; CoC was and is an excellently written game for non-powered gaming; the PCs are just as prone to die as people in real life, weapons are quite dangerous, skills are quite useful, and it's so easy to play you almost don't need a rulebook for it.

MSH really captured the feel of Marvel comics of its day; they supported the game with TONS of supplements (all of which I don't own any more) and the game system really flew in terms of combat rounds.

One of my favorite game sessions of all time was from a MSH one-shot I ran, where the players at the table made up marvel supers versions of themselves, using the random rolling charts from that back, and spent the entire game learning what their powers were, how they could go about using them, and what they could do to help the world. It was great fun. It was an "origin session" game, and though we never continued it, it was a lot of fun watching them come up with super-names for each other (Purple Haze, Nasty Guardsman, Super-Stud, and Steel Man) and doing some of their first heroics using our little town as a backdrop.

 

[adwyn]

I still remain quite partial to Metagaming's In the Labyrinth, their RPG version of the Fantasy Trip series. Something of a proto-Gurps I find it plays well even today.

 

[Totte]

favorites pr 1990

Hello,

I have a few favorite games from the 80s that I think you would like.

- James Bond 007 - The system is good, the game so fun to play.
- Daredevils - the adventures are very well written, enjoyable, you can still get it at RPGnow.com btw.

I could list 20-30 more RPGs that we played often.
But as others have mentioned some, and you wanted favs, these two are my pics.

 

[Bodhiwolff]

Bunnies and Burrows.

Essentially, the game where you played as rabbits, in a "Watership Down" style world.

I loved it because it took everything that I thought about RPGs and turned it on its (pointy) ears. It wasn't about the power fantasy, because as rabbits, you never really get that powerful. Sure, you could be the biggest, baddest, toughest guard in the entire warren, but that didn't mean that you could take on a badger!

It had this loose, open style of design that was unlike the other RPGs I played. It painted the game design in broad strokes, and then left it up to you and your players to find the style of game you wanted to play. You wound up defining for yourselves why the mystically-touched rabbit in your party was able to prophesy upcoming events, or how the healer in the party used berries and herbs and leaves to patch you back up after that big scrap with the fox.

It *forced* you, as a player, to think in non-violent terms. When you're a rabbit, you have to think your way out of a lot of situations. You couldn't simply get frustrated with a problem and start swinging -- you had to be cunning.

It wasn't the sort of thing you could play for years on end.

But after a short campaign of B&B, when we went back to D&D, I noticed a significant improvement in the playstyle of everybody at the table. Suddenly the fighter is taking more time to make decisions, weighing options and possibilities before wading into battle. The cleric isn't just mechanically pumping spells for a faceless god, but is instead finding the cool-factor in playing somebody with a mystical connection to the Divine.

You could argue that it was merely a bland, palate-cleansing cracker that made the flavours of other offerings pop out by comparison.

But I prefer to think that there was something very refreshing and cool about the little game where you played as rabbits, working to keep the warren safe from the big, scary world.

 

[rkwoodard]

V&v

V&V (Villains and Vigilantes).
You played yourself as a hero, which meant you decided what your stats were. It was random, so the power levels were across the board. Each power pretty much was its own sub-system.
Yet, it was the most successful longest running campaign my group in the 80s/90s had. But, I am a firm believer that Super Hero games should not have all players at the exact same power level.

RKW

 

[Ariosto]

I'll second FGU's Bunnies & Burrows, one of the great distinctive games!

Marvel Super Heroes seemed too "simplistic" relative to Villains and Vigilantes (still a favorite) and Champions -- until I actually tried it! It turned out to capture perfectly key genre aspects, and to be wonderfully well suited to seat-of-the-pants improvisation.

Empire of the Petal Throne was TSR's second RPG, and mechanically is basically a variant on D&D. Gary Gygax called it "the most beautifully done fantasy game ever created. It is difficult for me to envision the possibility of any rival being created in the future." That's remarkable praise from the Godfather of Fantasy Role Playing!

What sets EPT apart is the uniqueness and richness of its exotic setting, the planet Tékumel. Its creator, Professor M.A.R. Barker, was like Tolkien a linguist who spent a lifetime detailing a world in which his invented languages could live. Unlike Tolkien, his influences were far from the Northern European milieu.

It's a game of swords and sorcery and expeditions into a weird and perilous Underworld, but also of intrigue and social climbing. There are echoes of Medieval India and Pre-Columbian America, of the Mars of Leigh Brackett, of Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Planet of Adventure, and much more besides. There are no elves, dwarves, orcs or hobbits, and there are no stars in the night sky. There are more thoroughly nonhuman species living with or fighting against humanity, and relics of an advanced civilization that fell millennia ago. There are temples to Lords of Chaos and Lords of Stability standing side by side, appeasing the gods with sacrifice and other rituals. There are slaves bearing palanquins on roads like the Great Wall of China, alongside dinosaur-like beasts of burden. There are clan houses that look after their own. There are clanless barbarian adventurers who know that blue light, chime-like voices and the scent of cinnamon mean terrible danger is near.

Traveller and RuneQuest actually eclipsed D&D for me.

The former remains to SF gaming what D&D is to fantasy gaming. Character generation is a game in itself (one of several in the system). Dice rolls determine promotions and skills gained in a service, and one can keep trying to re-enlist for four-year terms. Age can take a toll on characteristics such as Strength and Endurance, one may be forced to muster out, and (unless one chooses to "nerf" the rule) death can end a career.

There are tables for rolling up stellar subsectors, and for generating creatures to inhabit planets. There's a system for designing space ships, and one for fighting space battles on the table top (treating thrust and gravity vectors, and the role of computers, simply but effectively). Personal combat is quick, and dangerous enough not to be the first approach to every problem, although single-shot kills are unlikely. There are "psionic" powers, if that's to your taste. Everything gets elaborated upon in supplements, but the first three books can be quite sufficient.

The focus of play is a bit different from D&D. Although characters can improve skills and learn new ones, that's not quick and easy and they tend to be quite competent from the start. Commonly, a group will start with a merchant ship -- and the mortgage that comes with it. Speculative trade and taking on passengers helps pay the bills. It also takes the adventurers from world to world, where patrons may offer more lucrative and "interesting" propositions.


RuneQuest is associated with the world of Glorantha, although there's not a lot of geography or history in the rule book. Little touches from money to magic and monsters manage to convey a distinctive "feel", though, even when treating such old standards as Elves and Trolls. Cults of Prax goes into more detail about a part of the world, as well as providing write-ups of cults that could be adapted to other settings.

Those religions play a big part in providing skills, magic and relationships as well as personality-shaping world views. Every adventurer can fight, cast spells, and sneak; there are no classes or levels as in D&D, nor is there a "character point" system as in other games. One can invest money and time in training, or learn from experience on adventures. Combat is gritty and magic low powered relative to most fantasy RPGs.

(There are super-heroes and other beings of demi-god status afoot in the Hero Wars, and high-level D&D can be a fine rules set for treating their exploits. RQ stats for such entities as the Crimson Bat seem to me to serve little purpose but to call for Sanity Checks on the reader's part!)

The "Basic Role Playing System" introduced in RQ formed the basis for a whole series of other games, Call of Cthulhu being the most famous. It is in my experience very easy to learn, fast-playing and flexible.

King Arthur Pendragon somewhat simplified that basis, for instance substituting d20 for d%. It's my favorite example of a blend of role-playing and story-telling, set within the epic cycle of legend. A Pendragon campaign thus has a beginning and ending, between which one generation gives rise to another. There are so many different versions of the Matter of Britain, so many component tales and possible interpretations, that each campaign can be quite different from the last.

The core rules focus on player-character knights. Everything from courtly romance to battle gets a good treatment. Personality traits and passions have ratings that can come tellingly into play. Magic is more amorphous than in a game with set lists of spells, potentially of awesome power but also time-consuming and taxing for magicians; it comes closer than any other game's treatment to magic as I have seen it in classic fantasy literature.

Supplements deal with such variations as legendary Ireland and the Scandinavia of Beowulf. The rules are in my experience well suited to scenarios set in Tolkien's Middle Earth or Howard's Hyborian Age.

Gangbusters lets one play a criminal (independent, gangster, or in an organized crime syndicate), law enforcement officer (honest or on the take), private detective, or reporter on the mean streets of a Prohibition era big city. It's unusual in breaking explicitly with the assumption that player-characters are all on the same team. The rules are very well designed and clearly presented, along with plenty of period background. Action is fast, striking a good balance between the realistic and the cinematic. The well-written modules cover a range of scenarios from a gang war to a murder mystery.