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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1656006" data-attributes="member: 6777">Some obscurity...In my nascent days as a gamer, I picked up a book at the local grocery store by John Coyne called "Hobgoblin". It was a "Mazes and Monsters" style horror/thriller about a teen whose obsession with gaming gets him invovled in a wacky murder mystery in an old Irish castle thad been hauled, brick-by-brick to Connecticut. It was typical Pulling-era scare-mongering, but it was a good, trashy page-turner.What stuck with me was the description of the ficitonal RPG that the boy was obsessed with, Hobgoblin (hence the title). It was obvious that Coyne didn't really know a lot about gaming (no surprise), but he did seem to know a bit about Irish mythology (the game's setting), and he also came up with the concept that the game used special cards as well as dice... and this is a good decade-and-a-half before M:tG or Everway. And the adventures he described we the kind of stuff they cream over at RPG.net and indie-rpgs.com. Very fairy-tale-like, or else very character and story-focused. One adventure featured a young female prostitute dealing with a mentally handicapped boy (i.e., the "village idiot"). No dungeon-crawling at all.Just about every campaign I ran for the next ten years tried in some way to capture the Irish fairy-tale feel he described, and I tried to work in cards all the time. My signature AD&D PC was a paladin named Brian Boru, a legendary Irish king and also the protagonist's main PC. If Hobgoblin actually existed, I buy it in a heartbeat.Anyway...I also have to give props to Joss Whedon. The Buffy/Angelverse is like a textbook on running a campaign that features tons of butt-kicking but also features memorable, three-dimensional characters.Other than that, I'd just be repeating mroe of the authors already named here.</blockquote>

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