grodog
Hero
My "wow" systems:
- Amber Diceless (by Phage; wonderful free-form stuff; pits you against other players by design and intent; great specific-setting emulation)
- Ars Magica (2e by Lion Rampant; for the magic system, troupe style role-playing, the covenant as a "group" character/unifying element, and the Mythic Europe paradigm)
- Blue Planet, 1st edition (Biohazard Games; more for the setting than the game system: it was a cyberpunk-ish world that I actually wanted to play in)
- Call of Cthulhu (3rd edition hc was the first I owned, by Chaosium/GW)
- Fading Suns, 1st edition (Holistic Design's attempt to create a non-epic-heroic RPG, based instead on the Passion Play as a model)
- Heaven & Earth (1e from Event Horizon Production; despite the late '90s metaplot baked into the game, it's the only book we published that I'm still particularly proud of---a diceless RPG system grounded firmly in the game's Twin-Peaks-meets-XFiles-meets-The Book of Revelation setting, with some pretty interesting game mechanics firmly grounded in the looming apocalypse; H&E 3e is still in print from Abstract Nova)
- Kult, 1st edition (Metropolis: what MtA should have been)
- Paranoia (1st and 2nd editions, from West End Games: dystopian black humor as the best beer and pretzels RPG ever!)
- Vampire: The Masquerade, 1st edition (White Wolf; a large element of the games we played featured variations on dramatic strutures [campaign as TV episodes, campaign as a literary tragedy, etc.] and with vicious inter-party politicking/allying/betraying/etc.)