Besides D&D, what are you playing?

[Cadence]

#5 Traveller and that is purely for nostalgia. I don't think it is a brilliant system, but in the old days we had access to so many great campaigns with the developers at GDW right down the road. Probably will never run it again, but a lot of good memories from my younger days.

There's something special about system where characters can die during character creation

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Top 5 games (whether D&D or not):

1. Blades in the Dark - brilliant mechanics, love downtime, evocative setting...it's been an amazing experience for me and my players. I want to try more Forged in the Dark designs soon.
2. Beyond the Fence, Below the Grave - OSR-esque noncombat investigations in the Old Norse world, and every adventure I've run has been a banger.
3. Night Witches - an exemplar of PbtA design that has led to engrossing campaign play every time. And it's inspired a whole wave of good military fiction RPGs: The Watch, MASHED, Blackout, Flying Circus...
4. Cthulhu Dark (4 pager) - tight horror game design that creates focused play, and also has springboarded some terrific games from its systems: Cthulhu Dark (KS edition), Cthulhu Deep Green, Trophy, Chalice...and a game I designed myself (Pipedream).
5. 13th Age - when you want to roll into the best kind of d20 combat with a bunch of fun classes and smash some wild monster stat blocks. This is still a classic.

Honourable mentions to GUMSHOE RPGs, Warbirds, and the Call of Cthulhu line (as well as Delta Green).

 

[Campbell]

Freebooters on the Frontier is everything I personally wanted out of Dungeon World. It captures the feel of early D&D while being more about the story of the characters. Even in a funnel you still care about who these characters are. The moves do a much better job of capturing the spirit of that B/X era.

It's also much more compatible with exploration and module play.

 

[Cadence]

13th Age - when you want to roll into the best kind of d20 combat with a bunch of fun classes and smash some wild monster stat blocks. This is still a classic.

I'm not sure our GM will do that one for us again given the amount of joking we did about the length of days (for getting abilities back). I think I'm a bit too crunchy and some of the modern games push my buttons.

 

[pemerton]

Tried to get a Call of Cthulhu game going a couple of winters ago. I tried having the game combined with dinner parties. I thought it was brilliant and a lot of fun. My wife did not appreciate the amount of work for the pay-off in fun. SO that died.

For Cthulhu play I would strongly recommend Cthulhu Dark. Though some like the GUMSHOE version (Trail of Cthulhu).

#5 Traveller and that is purely for nostalgia. I don't think it is a brilliant system

Now those are fighting words! The only bit of Classic Traveller that I've found not to work is on-world exploration - this is lacking a tight system.

 

[Campbell]

@pemeton

My favorite take on mythos investigation is Sine Nomine's Silent Legions. I feel the classes capture the relevant tropes better than other takes.

I also really appreciate that it does a good job of separating madness from contact with the mythos from mental illness.

Finally it has excellent tools for creating custom mythos elements and its adventure templates are excellent guide rails for preparing mythos situations.

I would reccomend it even for people running other CoC type games.

 

[pemerton]

My favorite take on mythos investigation is Sine Nomine's Silent Legions. I feel the classes capture the relevant tropes better than other takes.

Is the system for Silent Legions able to be pigeon-holed within any well-known framework? (Eg D&D-ish, PbtA, etc?)

I also really appreciate that it does a good job of separating madness from contact with the mythos from mental illness.

This is a tricky area.

Clearly HPL (like many of his contemporaries) saw mental illness through a very different conceptual lens from the one that we tend to use now. But he also had multiple competing conceptions within his own literary works: eg madness as a result of a "tainted bloodline", vs madness as a result of trying to comprehend "things man was not meant to know". The first comes from the same general intellectual context as 19th century "scientific racism" and 20th century eugenics. The second seems at least in part to be HPL's version of the wider response to relativity combined with a reaction against modernist culture (see eg his strange (=atonal?) pipings, non-Euclidean geometries that also seem to correlate in some fashion to developments in the visual arts, etc).

I don't think he fully grapples with post-WWI "shell-shock"/PTSD, though this could also be fitted into the second category.

When we've played Cthulhu Dark recently we haven't tried to be very scientific or contemporary in our treatment of "insanity", nor overly lurid. But I do feel it's important to keep mythos-induced madness in the general category of human response to unexpected/intolerable experiences and ideas. Otherwise I think it becomes a bit arbitrary, or just another version of magic-induced debuff.

I hope that makes some sense.

 

[Esau Cairn]

I play this game naming the first that spring to mind instead of ruminating & calculating

Top Five—played since 2014
• Twilight: 2000 (w/mostly Delta Green rule set)
• Delta Green
• Conan 2d20
• Coriolis
• GenLab Alpha
•• (recent play test)

Top Five—1977-present
• Twilight: 2000
• Traveller (Classic/Proto)
• Nephilim
• Stormbringer
• Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green

 

[Jd Smith1]

Degenesis setting using a 5e conversion by Spilled Ale Studios, with a few tweaks. Face-to-face every week, but we've just started (only 9 sessions in).

We've been playing weekly since 2002, changing campaigns every 50-70 sessions. This is our first go at the Degenesis setting, and everyone loves it.

Dark Lands | Obsidian Portal

Dark Lands is the story of mankind’s struggle in the wake of Earth’s greatest catastrophe: a rain of massive asteroids in 2073 known as the Hammerfall. History v

darklands-5.obsidianportal.com

 

[aramis erak]

Please elaborate.

Running a game about a macroscopic vector pandemic during a real world microscopic vector pandemic was just a little too close to home.

System's excellent. PC's acquire PTSD, too. (mechanically, at least.)
Vaessen is less "doomed to die horribly" and more "Unlikely saviors." I may run that soon.