What alternate non- D&D, D20 Game do you recommend?

[Prest0]

Someone mentioned "Savage Worlds" to me. Anyone here know anything about this?

Savage Worlds is a very easy-to-learn-and-use game system. It's motto is something like "Fast, Furious, Fun!". It takes all of 15 minutes to roll up a character. As GM you spend a lot less time in prep work before each game.

Some of the other games already mentioned here (notably Deadlines) use the Savage Worlds system.

 

[Derren]

No one mentioned Dragonstar and Midnight yet? I'm shocked!

Hm, maybe they are to similliar to normal D&D...
What about Babylon 5 D20. Although I haven't played it extensivly, the setting sounds promising.

 

[shady]

Assuming D20 only ...

"Big" campaign games:

D20 modern - very flexible and well thought out rules. "Urban Arcana" is about halfway between Shadowrun and Buffy (imagine Buffy with D&D monsters) but there are several other perfectly good campaign backgrounds in the basic book.

Mutants & Masterminds - right now this is the best of the D20 supers games, though with Aberrant D20 coming in the summer it might yet be challenged. In this case the basic book definitely has enough to kickstart a campaign. The Freedom City sourcebook is great.

Call of Cthulhu - my personal view is that while the rules adaptation for D20 was great, the book was badly laid out and missing enough background info to kickstart a proper campaign, unlike the original Chaosium versions. Or rather, there is too much stuff spread too thinly, where it should have concentrated on the 1930s era. In which case if you aren't familiar with the background you are going to be chasing down alot of stuff just to get beyond the two starter adventures in the book.

Traveller - I read somewhere that the Traveller universe has had more words written on it than any other SF milieu, and it has a devoted fanbase (including me). I started writing up some stuff on Traveller at this point which grew so much I should post it separately. Suffice to say the background is great if you like Space Opera, it supports a number of different types of far future SF (exploration, military, trading, espionage, political, high tech, low tech, etc) and the adaptation for D20 is good. But if you want to further explore the milieu avoid the GURPS material and get hold of either the classic stuff in reprint or the Megatraveller stuff off of ebay.

Quiklink are also adapting other GDW games to D20 - 2300AD (which was great) and Twilight 2000 (which I disliked alot). Note - although 2300AD and Twilight are set in the same continuity, it wasn't the same one as classic traveller.

I haven't tried DragonStar but have heard good things about it. I recently acquired Adventure D20, which is the first of the White Wolf "ports" (to be followed by Aberrant and Trinity) ... at first sight I prefer the Dungeon Pulp Heroes minigame.

One shots and smaller games:

Several good games in back issues of Dungeon/Polyhedron - my favourite was Pulp Heroes (Dungeon 90). Also try Mecha Crusade (96), Iron Lords of Jupiter (101) and Omega World (92). Shadow Chasers (91) was a prototype D20 Modern with a Buffy type background. I've probably missed a couple ... Some of the others were good ideas half-heartedly executed, others (HiJinx) were just plain bad ideas, and seem to have killed the project.

I have all of FantasyFlight's Horizon line - Grimm (twisted versions of children's fairy tales), Virtual (think Tron), Redline (Car Wars) and Spellslinger (D&D in the Wild West). Mostly they are missing startup adventures though so may actually take some work to get them going ... The actual systems are all great though.

 

[Jeph]

I feel a need to pimp my own stuff...

Pagoda (zipped .pdf file) is a game of melodramatic martial arts Wuxia action. If you liked Crouching Tiger, A Chinese Ghost Story, and Bride with White Hair, this is definitely the game for you. Simple rules, chargen takes literally five to ten minutes, and best of all, a character's personality and motivations are just as important to task resolution as their talents and skills. Pagoda will be available in print form as part of the No Press Anthology at either Origins or GenCon Indy, depending upon the publisher's schedule.

Exemplar (.pdf file) is best described as a mix between Equilibrium, Star Wars, SG1, and Dune. A fast paced game of gun-fu, space dogfights, and psychic battles, with an intuitive resolution system and innovative contest rules. The players get to tell the GM what happens almost as much as the other way around! Also, the Exemplar universe is at once different, yet easy to grasp, with opportunities for political intrigue, survival adventure, information hunting, and, most of all, plain, good old action.

Legends of Middle Earth (.pdf file) is like it sounds. An RPG set in Tolkien's Middle Earth built for legendary play. The system is similar to Exemplar's, but more gritty in terms of character generation and more streamlined in terms of play. Every aspect of the game, from character creation to combat to magic, attempts to capture the feel of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with no holds barred, take no prisoners genre emulation.

Dark Spell (.pdf file) has been described as strongly reminiscent of the Earthsea and Black Company series of novels. Rules-light traditional fantasy with a focus on magic. The core book features over 60 spells that range from the intuitive (Sleep) to the spectacular (Tunneling Torpedo, which can destroy multiple buildings and large ships). A prime innovation is the mechanical separation between Active Combat--fighting for a purpose--and Reactive Combat--just fighting to stay alive.

Enjoy.
--Jeff

 

[Richards]

If you're just looking for something to tide you over for a one-shot gaming session, I'd try Giant Monster Rampage. It's loads of fun, fighting the other monsters and smashing your way through Lego buildings.

If you're a Jack Vance fan, check out the Dying Earth RPG. It's completely different from anything else you've ever played, I guarantee that.

Johnathan

 

[Djeta Thernadier]

Another vote for Star Wars.

Spycraft is pretty nifty too.

 

[mmadsen]

The Making of Savage Worlds

Someone mentioned "Savage Worlds" to me. Anyone here know anything about this?

Shane's The Making of Savage Worlds explains his design goals:

As a Game Master:

1) I want a game that it's easy to make up monsters, NPCs, magic items, weapons, etc. on the fly. If I have to look up lots of charts and tables, add up points (as a GM, not a player), and so on, it's too complicated.

2) I want a game where "mooks" are either up, down, or off the table. I don't want to keep track of wounds for lesser NPCs--only important bad guys, villains, dragons, and so on.

3) I want a game that easily handles vehicles. The vehicle rules in many games require a PHD to decipher.

4) I want a game a non-gamer friend of mine can look at and understand *at a glance.* The basic rules for Savage Worlds can be described in one sentence.

5) I want a game that has a "spine" capable of gaming any genre, but allows me to insert special rules to tailor specific genres. Horror needs detailed fright tables, for instance, and a pulp heroes game needs to be less gritty and deadly than World War II.

7) As a GM, I want to roll *one* attack die for my bad guys to see if they hit, and I don't want to do any math to it. If three orcs gang up on a hero, I want to roll 3 dice, look for hits, and be done.

As a player I want:

1) I want a game that provides real depth for characters. I want to see my character grow, gain new special abilities, and even increase my skills and attributes.

2) I want a game that handles large battles fast. If my sergeant in World War II persuades the villagers to fight beside him, I want them on the table-top, not glossed over.

Update: After going round and round on this one a bit, what I was really after was reasonable speed--but more importantly--ease. I just don't want to do a lot of bookeeping during a fight.

3) I want my NPC allies to have names and at least a "personality" trait for each. If my Lt. in Vietnam needs to send someone to scout a hill, I want to know who's "Gung Ho," "Reliable," "Shifty," "Lazy," and so on.

4) I want a little control over the dice--like Fate Chips or bennies--so the hero I've been working on for a year doesn't drop dead because of one bad die roll. Two or three I can handle, but not one.

5) "Open ended die rolls." If I get lucky and roll that high number, I want to keep rolling and feel like I just conquered the world.

 

[mmadsen]

There can be only one...Conan novel

If you are, then I can't recommend Conan by Mongoose highly enough. It is brilliant, and captures the feel of the novels superbly. True Sword and Sorcery!

[pedant]Novels? There's only one Conan novel -- Hour of the Dragon.[/pedant]

 

[shady]

To follow up Psion's post on Traveller (and this duplicates a little of it, apologies)

Traveller has been through 5 pre-D20 iterations:

- the original "classic" version from Games Designers Workshop (all of it available in reprint from Far Futures), set in a vast, long lived and stable human galactic empire of over 1100 worlds set 3600 years in the future. The original system had rules based on D6, and included a career/background generation system of which the one in the latest Unearthed Arcana is but a (largely unworkable and to my eye not well playtested) shadow.

- Megatraveller, largely the same as classic but (just about) recodified the original rules, added a much needed task resolution system (much like D20 skills resolution) and moved the milieu into a new period of galactic civil war following the assassination of the emperor. This version was largely developed for GDW by a third party called Digest Group Publications and most of this material has not (to my knowledge) been reprinted, for copyright reasons (the best stuff was actually published by DGP and there is an ongoing impasse about republication of this material, there is a possibility of republication of the - weaker - GDW material).

- The New Era, a new (and in my opinion awful) ruleset, where GDW retook command and which moved the milieu a few hundred years forward into a period of post collapse emergence

- T4 - yet another ruleset, post GDW's own collapse. From Imperium Games, Inc. Set at the dawn of the Imperium.

- GURPS - Steve Jackson Games used some new and original "classic" authors to adapt the Megatraveller period for an alternate timeline where the assassination never happened. SJG have published a lot of material for GURPS traveller but it rewrites alot of the canon stuff, either directly or (through its world generation rules) implicitly, and frankly I'm agin it.

The Quiklink adaptation is fine but thus far lacking in background material from the Traveller Universe itself. In fact there's next to nothing in the core book. But they now have a "domain" published in PDF, where a domain = 4 sectors = lots & lots of worlds ... as a guide you used to be able to spend an evening hand-generating a subsector, and there are 16 subsectors to a sector.

GURPS has re-published information for 2 sectors but they took so many liberties I personally would leave well alone. You can get the original Spinward Marches and Solomani Rim sectors as part of the "classic supplements" sets published by Far Futures. GDW originally operated a landgrab system so that third party publishers such as FASA, Judges Guild, etc could define their own sectors, you can get these on ebay in various places but most were declared non-canon in the Megatraveller period. DGP published a large number of sectors in its Traveller Digest magazine. And you can generate your own sector, system and world data however ... and you can get an excellent and free windows program from http://www.downport.com/wbd/HEAVEN_&_EARTH.htm which will generate systems and worlds according to any of the pre-D20 systems.

T20 is a good blend of classic and D20 rulesets. My biggest issue with the core Traveller's Handbook is lack of support for 3 of the 6 "major" races which dominate the Imperium background. Included are humans, vargr (uplifted wolves) and aslan (lion-like aliens), but not the very alien hiver (much like Niven's puppeteers), k'kree (militant vegetarian centaurs!) and the reptilian droyne.

I'd summarise by suggesting that Traveller D20 (or T20) is a great place to start, and to get the Classic reprints from Far Futures if you want more. Considering the first shipment of T20 sold out on pre-order at my local game store I'm really surprised that QuikLink aren't doing more to develop and support T20, maybe it could do with sponsorship from a bigger publisher.

 

[Wombat]

It's a very rules light system (IIRC your character consists of three broadly defined trats and a flaw) set on a fictional island in the Mediterrainean, full of occult wierdness.

I thought the setting was interesting, but the system was a flop with my group at the time.

My group had just the opposite reaction -- didn't like the setting, loved the rules (we love Rules Light systems in general).

Used it very succesfully for a base setting campaing (the comparative flop), a fantastic superhero campaign, and an even more superlative Pulp campaign.

Since the rules are very broad and open, it is easy to fit them to almost any setting where not all characters would have the same basic set of skills (bad for a Three Musketeers game, good for a Pulp campaign)