What RPGs genres are lacking?

[JConstantine]

Diesel Punk

Not quite in line with the rest of your post, but there's Tomorrow City (which happens to be on sale right now), and Age of Steel.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Tomorrow City struck me as very odd when I read it, and I can't really place my finger on why.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Spoilerizing it both for those who wish to skip + for skirting off topic

Spoiler

Fictional depictions also have the very big fatal (ie with real world consequences) flaw: it's depicted as being necessary, quick, and always producing true and actionable intel. That, and it shows up in media even geared towards younger children, thus creating this societal view that it's a legit thing to use and do. When, in reality, it often provides nothing or false leads or things of limited value, takes time, and also crosses any moral event horizon.

(Plus does a spoiler block make it feel more clandestine/spy-y? )

Spoiler: Hidden to prevent topic drift.

Hundreds of incidents performed by criminals each year prove your statement wrong. The moral dimension can't be argued, although there are few governments who don't practice it. Again, the role of extreme techniques is simply to get a subject talking. Sure, they will lie, but a lie from someone holding a secret is valuable. They mistake in fiction is ignoring that the key is picking the right person, and the interrogation techniques used once they start talking.

I don't know where the myth that 'torture doesn't work' came from; maybe from all the action heroes in movies taking a couple minutes of punishment and sneering it off. Back when I was in Iraq, we would waterboard each other just to see who was toughest. Believe me, even a simple procedure like that works.

 

[VelvetViolet]

I don't know if this counts, but there's a lot of rpg settings/premises I liked that got canceled and I've never been able to find suitable replacements from any settings that are still supported/still have fandoms. These seem to fall on genre lines, I think.

Universal Scifi rpgs. Not counting GURPS, the only universal scifi rpg I've ever found was Alternity, published by TSR/WotC from 1998 to 2000. (It was seemingly a spiritual successor to the previous Amazing Engine game and some of the material was later adapted to d20 Modern/d20 Future, but I'm not going to go into those separately.) Other scifi games restrict themselves to specific settings and their various idiosyncrasies, like Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and Traveller, but Alternity tried to be setting agnostic and account for other scifi tropes not accounted for by those games. It got sample settings in Star*Drive and Dark•Matter, as well as an edition of Gamma World. To this day, I still haven't found anything that scratches that itch. I did find rules online from Pyramid magazine for converting Star*Drive to GURPS Traveller, but I'm more interested in where the writers were taking the setting and the fandom discussions. Since it was canceled by WotC decades ago, the fandom is barely existent now.

Paranormal, occult and supernatural investigations that are not Cthulhu/cosmic horror/Lovecraftian/whatever. Back in the day there were a number of games in this vein like Chill, Dark•Matter, Tabloid!, Bureau 13, Conspiracy X, Chronicles of Darkness, Hunter: The Vigil, Nephilim, etc. Nowadays the only options are Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, or Laundry Files, none of which I'm interested in. I'm completely burnt out on the Cthulhu genre because it's so oversaturated and homogenous. I want to go back to the days of Roswell grays, Satanic cults, chupacabras, templars, etc. Similarly, I'm also tired of monolithic investigator organizations, especially if they're your generic oversaturated shadowy quasi-government MIBs or generic oversaturated government taskforces, and I would like more variety in terms of what organizations the PCs can be employed by.

Psionic espionage and other investigations. I remember back in the day that there were quite a few rpg settings that were either dedicated to psionic espionage or included it as a key component of their settings. Necroscope is probably the biggest I can remember, but I also remember that WotC had an "Agents of Psi" setting in their d20 Modern game and SpyCraft used psionics in their setting too. TSR's Star*Drive setting included psionic espionage as a detail of its setting: every military had a dedicated psi corps (which presumably included espionage) and psychic detectives were routinely employed in forensics.

Interstellar scifi settings that aren't generic oversaturated space opera. All the scifi games that I could find rely on the same set of generic oversaturated tropes dating back to about the mid-20th century, or are otherwise pastiches of some famous generic oversaturated scifi IP like Alien/Outland, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, etc. I'm completely burnt out on all of these due to them being generic, oversaturated and mismanaged, as attested to by all the mediocre offerings the corpos owning them have given in the decades since their creative peaks. The only scifi ttrpg I am not sick of is TSR's Star*Drive, because 1) it's a kitchen sink where you can play pretty close equivalents to characters from all those other settings combined, and 2) it was canceled after just a dozen books so it never outstayed its welcome like everything else did.

Urban fantasy that isn't WoD. During the 90s there was an explosion of urban fantasy games and they didn't feel like clones of each other. We had Nightlife, Nightbane, WitchCraft, Everlasting, Fireborn, Changeling: The Lost, Nephilim (particularly the French editions that were never translated to English), etc. All the games I ever liked or even thought vaguely interesting were canceled and nobody else has made anything similar since. I find this strange because urban fantasy is oversaturated in prose fiction. There should be dozens of urban fantasy games but there aren't. I bought Night Shift because it promised setting-agnostic rules and such (it is extremely difficult to find setting-agnostic games that aren't GURPS), but I found it underwhelming.

Universal genre rpgs that aren't GURPS. Some of my favorite games are All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Night's Black Agents. These are universal games without fixed settings, but unlike GURPS they're made to emulate specific genres. AFMBE emulates the zombie apocalypse genre for the most part, with various settings exploring different scenarios like alien zombies, nazi zombies, [historical period] zombies, cyborg zombies used as theme park employees, etc. NBA emulates the conspiracy thriller genre with a vampire twist, with various settings exploring different kinds of vampiric antagonists like genetically engineered viruses, aliens, and the lineage of Dracula. I really like this format because I've grown frustrated with the limitations of games that only support single settings, as this inevitably restricts the creativity of groups and ends up making the fandoms similarly feel stagnant and creatively dead to me. As a kid just getting into rpgs I was cyberbullied by cultists for not playing the "right" way and even roped into cultish behavior myself before I realized that fiction is fiction and canon is crap, so it's something that I really want to avoid encountering again. Otherwise, the lack of common ground for many genres has resulted in them being really fractured. I bought about ten different espionage games in the past year and they all felt like they could be settings for a single universal espionage rpg.

I've decided to just write my own stuff because I can't rely on others to do it for me, but wow is it time consuming and emotionally exhausting.

 

[Theory of Games]

Or, I mean ... everyone could just play GURPS

 

[Thomas Shey]

With no offense, @VelvetViolet, I can think of multiple examples of at least your second, fifth and sixth cases out there. A few of them are hardly unknown either, so I have to assume you're either using exclusionary criteria you haven't explained, are only counting things that are still in major physical product publication, or have not looked around much.

 

[VelvetViolet]

With no offense, @VelvetViolet, I can think of multiple examples of at least your second, fifth and sixth cases out there. A few of them are hardly unknown either, so I have to assume you're either using exclusionary criteria you haven't explained, are only counting things that are still in major physical product publication, or have not looked around much.

No offense taken. What are the examples you can think of? I’ll take a look when I get the time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know if this counts, but there's a lot of rpg settings/premises I liked that got canceled and I've never been able to find suitable replacements from any settings that are still supported/still have fandoms. These seem to fall on genre lines, I think.

Okay, let me see if I can find any suggestions here.

Universal Scifi rpgs. Not counting GURPS, the only universal scifi rpg I've ever found was Alternity, published by TSR/WotC from 1998 to 2000. (It was seemingly a spiritual successor to the previous Amazing Engine game and some of the material was later adapted to d20 Modern/d20 Future, but I'm not going to go into those separately.) Other scifi games restrict themselves to specific settings and their various idiosyncrasies, like Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and Traveller, but Alternity tried to be setting agnostic and account for other scifi tropes not accounted for by those games. It got sample settings in Star*Drive and Dark•Matter, as well as an edition of Gamma World. To this day, I still haven't found anything that scratches that itch. I did find rules online from Pyramid magazine for converting Star*Drive to GURPS Traveller, but I'm more interested in where the writers were taking the setting and the fandom discussions. Since it was canceled by WotC decades ago, the fandom is barely existent now.

This one's tricky, because most of the cases I know of are full-out generic game systems, not specifically focused on SF. I also think it turns on just how generic it needs to be; the couple examples I'll point at have some baked in technological assumptions and sample races, but then, so did Alternity.

The first example I'd point out is WOIN: NEW, the SF branch of the three game generic system the owner of this site created.

A second I'd point to is Sabre SF 3e, but that one may fail your criteria about being supported and having a significant fanbase.

A third one I might point at is Cepheus Deluxe, which is a Traveller offshoot but has less baked in setting and seems usable for a lot of SF games. I'm not clear on how large the fanbase is, but its of recent vintage.

Paranormal, occult and supernatural investigations that are not Cthulhu/cosmic horror/Lovecraftian/whatever. Back in the day there were a number of games in this vein like Chill, Dark•Matter, Tabloid!, Bureau 13, Conspiracy X, Chronicles of Darkness, Hunter: The Vigil, Nephilim, etc. Nowadays the only options are Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, or Laundry Files, none of which I'm interested in. I'm completely burnt out on the Cthulhu genre because it's so oversaturated and homogenous. I want to go back to the days of Roswell grays, Satanic cults, chupacabras, templars, etc. Similarly, I'm also tired of monolithic investigator organizations, especially if they're your generic oversaturated shadowy quasi-government MIBs or generic oversaturated government taskforces, and I would like more variety in terms of what organizations the PCs can be employed by.

Psionic espionage and other investigations. I remember back in the day that there were quite a few rpg settings that were either dedicated to psionic espionage or included it as a key component of their settings. Necroscope is probably the biggest I can remember, but I also remember that WotC had an "Agents of Psi" setting in their d20 Modern game and SpyCraft used psionics in their setting too. TSR's Star*Drive setting included psionic espionage as a detail of its setting: every military had a dedicated psi corps (which presumably included espionage) and psychic detectives were routinely employed in forensics.

I have a couple cases I could point at here, but they may fail the organizational criterion you mention above, since I think both of them are pretty organization-centric.

Interstellar scifi settings that aren't generic oversaturated space opera. All the scifi games that I could find rely on the same set of generic oversaturated tropes dating back to about the mid-20th century, or are otherwise pastiches of some famous generic oversaturated scifi IP like Alien/Outland, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, etc. I'm completely burnt out on all of these due to them being generic, oversaturated and mismanaged, as attested to by all the mediocre offerings the corpos owning them have given in the decades since their creative peaks. The only scifi ttrpg I am not sick of is TSR's Star*Drive, because 1) it's a kitchen sink where you can play pretty close equivalents to characters from all those other settings combined, and 2) it was canceled after just a dozen books so it never outstayed its welcome like everything else did.

I can give you some here.

Fragged Empire is set in the far future, after an internecine war has torn apart what was once an interstellar culture (there are some strong post-apocalypse vibes to part of it). The different "species" are all actually third (or in one case fourth) generation transhumanist creation made by the replacement species humanity made, except for one that's an accidental evolutionary result of a tailored bioweapon.

In some respects similar you have Eclipse Phase 2e, which is a relatively near-future transhumanist game set after Earth was largely destroyed in a war with hostile artificial super-intelligences. While primarily set in the Solar System, interstellar travel is possible using "Pandora Gates", apparently constructed by aliens and left in the system in the far past. While the game defaults to playing as operatives of Firewall, a privately operated group attempting to stop x-risks (existential risks to transhumanity and its uplift and artificial intelligence more or less allies) it talks about other types of campaigns of a more private nature or groups under corporate or other organizational sponsorship.

Termination Shock: a fairly rules-light game about a future where big chunks of humanity were rescued by aliens from conquest by their own artificial intelligence creations (which can only really operate near the solar system because of physical aberrations of that part of space). Makes some serious effort to have its major aliens be really kind of alien, and the "humans as interstellar gypsies" vibe is a bit unusual in its own right.

Urban fantasy that isn't WoD. During the 90s there was an explosion of urban fantasy games and they didn't feel like clones of each other. We had Nightlife, Nightbane, WitchCraft, Everlasting, Fireborn, Changeling: The Lost, Nephilim (particularly the French editions that were never translated to English), etc. All the games I ever liked or even thought vaguely interesting were canceled and nobody else has made anything similar since. I find this strange because urban fantasy is oversaturated in prose fiction. There should be dozens of urban fantasy games but there aren't. I bought Night Shift because it promised setting-agnostic rules and such (it is extremely difficult to find setting-agnostic games that aren't GURPS), but I found it underwhelming.

Monster of the Week is one of my few forays into the PbtA sphere and seems pretty well done for what it is. You can get a distinct Buffy style vibe depending on the playbooks chosen.

Part-Time Gods 2e has people playing characters who have been raised to divinity in various fashions, but are still trying to keep some connection with their mortal lives. Add on books have provided rules for playing some Outsiders (various mythical monsters that may have originally been created as weapons to use against the old traditional gods before war tore them apart).

There are a few others I have but they're either fairly obscure, ramble off into Shadowrun style cyberpunk fantast (Vault) or meander off into broader oddness (The Strange).

Universal genre rpgs that aren't GURPS. Some of my favorite games are All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Night's Black Agents. These are universal games without fixed settings, but unlike GURPS they're made to emulate specific genres. AFMBE emulates the zombie apocalypse genre for the most part, with various settings exploring different scenarios like alien zombies, nazi zombies, [historical period] zombies, cyborg zombies used as theme park employees, etc. NBA emulates the conspiracy thriller genre with a vampire twist, with various settings exploring different kinds of vampiric antagonists like genetically engineered viruses, aliens, and the lineage of Dracula. I really like this format because I've grown frustrated with the limitations of games that only support single settings, as this inevitably restricts the creativity of groups and ends up making the fandoms similarly feel stagnant and creatively dead to me. As a kid just getting into rpgs I was cyberbullied by cultists for not playing the "right" way and even roped into cultish behavior myself before I realized that fiction is fiction and canon is crap, so it's something that I really want to avoid encountering again. Otherwise, the lack of common ground for many genres has resulted in them being really fractured. I bought about ten different espionage games in the past year and they all felt like they could be settings for a single universal espionage rpg.

Well, right at the start here, The Hero System comes to mind; it might have got its start as a the superhero game Champions, but its been presented as a universal system for decades now, and while its in sort of a latent stage, you can still buy all the relevant PDFs for the last edition (6e) and there's a relatively large remaining fanbase for it.

Heroes and Hardships is a fairly recent foray into generic game design, and makes at least an attempt to do something new. I find it a bit crunchy even for me, but that hasn't stopped me buying the pdfs of a couple supplemental books.

And of course both well known and with (by the standards of anything but D&D) a fairly massive fanbase is Savage Worlds, which besides its corebook and supporting fantasy, sf, horror and supers companions, there's a massive number of third party setting add-ons to be found, some of which go into the weeds fairly far in supporting subgenres.

 

[VelvetViolet]

This one's tricky, because most of the cases I know of are full-out generic game systems, not specifically focused on SF.

Yeah. I know GURPS is the biggest and even though I don't use the system, I find their books useful due to all the non-game info they provide. It saves me a lot of time on doing research.

I also think it turns on just how generic it needs to be; the couple examples I'll point at have some baked in technological assumptions and sample races, but then, so did Alternity.

Yeah, this is one of the main flaws with that system. It's not universal like GURPS or AFMBE or NBA or whatever, it's "universal" like D&D. It was literally created to be D&D but for scifi, even down to the implicit setting assumptions of its flagship setting Star*Drive being baked into the core rules even though these weren't branded with the SD logo. d20 Future and its supplements sheds these assumptions for the most part, I guess, not that WotC gave it much love.

It's hard for me to blame them. D&D had a much stronger foundation built on Tolkien and various other authors listed in Appendix N, but scifi doesn't have any single genre-defining work like LotR that overshadows the entire genre. It has multiple famous subgenre-defining franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Dune, Foundation, Mass Effect, Starship Troopers, Warhammer 40,000, etc. It's impossible to create something that feels like generic scifi to the supermajority of scifi fans. Even if you tried making a list of criteria found in "most" scifi, any particular setting you point to as a good example is probably not gonna neatly hit more than about half of your criteria. You would need to make multiple settings. What settings would you make? How would you decide what tropes get focus? How do you distinguish yourself from popular competitors like Traveller and Star Wars?

Even if you try anyway you're gonna run into the problem that there aren't any generic scifi races like there are generic fantasy races. D&D was able to ripoff Tolkien's races by invoking public domain folklore and fairy tales even though we all know they were ripping off Tolkien, but you can't do the same for the scifi genre because there aren't any widely recognized scifi aliens that are also public domain besides ufology cliches like grays, reptilians and nordic aliens. How many of these public domains aliens do you recognize or would consider appropriate as basic player character races in a scifi game made now? Vulcans and Borgs are iconic but they're copyrighted by Paramount, so TSR had to cheat by combining them into an original species and naming it "mechalus".

Be that as it may, I've found it to be good enough. It's a pastiche of all the scifi tropes that the writers could fit in at the time, such as mutants, cyborgs, aliens, bug wars, roswell grays, everything including the kitchen sink. I find that this makes it feel pretty distinct from all the other settings I listed. I still carry a candle for it because it wasn't driven into the ground like all those franchises have been and I haven't found newer settings that make similar assumptions. If it wasn't canceled and had gotten support continuously into the present until the quality went down the drain, then yeah I probably would be equally tired of it now but we don't live in that timeline.

While Alternity/SD is certainly idiosyncratic and the worldbuilding is quite frankly absurd, I found that its deliberate genericism makes it way more open-ended in terms of character options. Within its limitations, it can support a wide range of character concepts without the rules/setting fighting you like it would in all of the other settings I mentioned. It's hard to describe this without going into a long-winded tangent on the specific conceits.

The first example I'd point out is WOIN: NEW, the SF branch of the three game generic system the owner of this site created.

Neato. Do you have a link to the specific product? The terms you provided don't have good SEO.

A second I'd point to is Sabre SF 3e, but that one may fail your criteria about being supported and having a significant fanbase.

Google found the page easily enough. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/456433/sabre-rpg-3e-scifi-player-s-manual Wow, this came out in 2023? I'm surprised it's already canceled and forgotten. 15 alien species? Hmm... I'll have to read that.

A third one I might point at is Cepheus Deluxe, which is a Traveller offshoot but has less baked in setting and seems usable for a lot of SF games. I'm not clear on how large the fanbase is, but its of recent vintage.

I remember that! I bought it, but I don't remember it being a particularly good replacement for Alternity/d20 Future. It has a decent run down on customizing FTL for your setting, whereas d20 Future bizarrely had no rules for FTL engines at all despite the sample settings assuming casual FTL travel. It's a trade-off, I guess. Better in some ways, inferior in others.

You left the space under "Paranormal..." blank?

I have a couple cases I could point at here, but they may fail the organizational criterion you mention above, since I think both of them are pretty organization-centric.

Yeah, that's a common thing I noticed. The spy games I picked up are pretty organization-centric. If you want to play a different organization, then you have to buy a different game.

I can understand the reasoning behind this: different organizations are unlikely to play well together so you'd be writing content that is increasingly unlikely to get used by all the groups who buy your book, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Adding more options, even ones unlikely to be used in tandem, can still increase the appeal of your game to more groups.

Fragged Empire is set in the far future, after an internecine war has torn apart what was once an interstellar culture (there are some strong post-apocalypse vibes to part of it).

Neato. I've noticed that there's a number of post apoc interstellar settings popping up. A galactic FTL explosion is a pretty common explanation. I first recall seeing this in the backstory for 40k, but since then I've seen it pop up in Stars Without Number and even Star Trek Discovery.

In some respects similar you have Eclipse Phase 2e, which is a relatively near-future transhumanist game set after Earth was largely destroyed in a war with hostile artificial super-intelligences.

Ooh! I know of that, as well as similar games like Transhuman Space. I read Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom and a few other books in the transhuman nightmare world genre. It is very freaky and unsettling, even when the author isn't trying to gross me out with descriptions of body horror.

Termination Shock: a fairly rules-light game about a future where big chunks of humanity were rescued by aliens from conquest by their own artificial intelligence creations

Oh, another post apoc in space game?

I'll add those to my reading list, but I have to admit that I never developed an interest in interstellar post apoc or transhuman nightmare worlds. I do enjoy watching Monkey Wrench on youtube, but I have yet to develop an interest in playing games like that.

Monster of the Week is one of my few forays into the PbtA sphere and seems pretty well done for what it is. You can get a distinct Buffy style vibe depending on the playbooks chosen.

I bought that! I've never been able to wrap my head around PbtA, but I thought it was interesting when the book made 1:1 comparisons between its classes and various characters in tv shows. Some of it confused me as some of the classes felt redundant to one another or covered wildly different power levels (e.g. it has a different class for Willow in the earlier seasons of Buffy and then another class for her dark witch arc, both of which are available at character creation).

I picked up the supplement that included settings, but I don't remember being wowed. The shadowy quasi-governmental and morally ambiguous at best MIB setting was specifically one of those settings that I'm not interested in because it's oversaturated. Maybe not in ttrpgs, but MIBs are oversaturated in prose fiction. I find the worldbuilding highly questionable because it combines both the trope of keeping magic arbitrarily secret from the public (which is questionable by itself) and the trope of the secret shadowy organization being maybe evil too and definitely morally questionable. I already burnt myself out on that by reading those early 2010s creepypastas where a shadowy MIB organization performs horrific experiments on people by exposing them to dangerous magical objects, creatures and less definable phenomena for unexplained reasons that resemble Nazi science. I'm not a fan. It's fine as an option, I guess, but the only option? Sorry, no thanks.

Part-Time Gods 2e has people playing characters who have been raised to divinity in various fashions, but are still trying to keep some connection with their mortal lives. Add on books have provided rules for playing some Outsiders (various mythical monsters that may have originally been created as weapons to use against the old traditional gods before war tore them apart).

I'll need to check that out.

ramble off into Shadowrun style cyberpunk fantast (Vault)

I don't know why, but I never developed an interest in Shadowrun or similar settings that combine urban fantasy and cyberpunk. My first introduction to the idea was actually in d20 Cyberscape where the writers mentioned on one page that you could play a cyberpunk version of Urban Arcana where the various D&D races install cybergear (with image of a drow with robotic spider legs). I thought it sounded neat when I read it, but I just never developed an interest. No idea why.

I actually had no idea that this mixing of genres even had more than one setting beyond Shadowrun. I'll have to check that out.

meander off into broader oddness (The Strange).

I love all the weird fantasy that Monte Cook makes, but I have to agree that he makes it so weird that it becomes inaccessible.

Tides of Torment Numenera was his chance to break into the mainstream by using the medium of video games and piggybacking off the cult acclaim of Planescape Torment, but unfortunately it didn't work out.

It's a pity. I've seen so many cool ideas that appear in one rpg supplement and then get forgotten, while stuff I consider in need of being pruned somehow gets kept around for decades.

The Hero System

Heroes and Hardships

Savage Worlds

I'll have to check those out.

Overall, I keep getting the impression that rpgs are ironically not the best place for writers to be creative and they should be writing prose fiction or making video games instead. Trying to get gamers to try a new rpg is like herding cats because of the high investment cost of learning rules and settings, whereas it's probably way easier to get someone to read a short story you wrote.

I think a good example of this is the Magnus Archives. It originally started as an anthology short story series presented in a podcast, then was later adapted to a ttrpg. I bought the rpg but haven't listened to the original stories. From perusing the bestiary, I definitely get the feeling that these monsters work a lot better in the original stories rather than the game descriptions.

Another, probably more pertinent, would be Star Wars. Much of the setting as fans recognize it now was actually invented by the West End rpg, to the point that Zahn used it as his reference while writing the famous Thrawn books.

A lot of creators tried to turn their series bibles into ttrpgs without success, when they really should've tried prose fiction instead. That's what I've decided to do. I have a lot of ideas rattling around my head, but it's probably better to write them in prose rather than a ttrpg. It's much easier to convince someone to read a short story than to learn and play a ttrpg.

I think it's a tragedy because ttrpgs were what exposed me to the variety of genres that exist in the first place, but such is life.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Universal Scifi rpgs. Not counting GURPS, the only universal scifi rpg I've ever found was Alternity, published by TSR/WotC from 1998 to 2000. (It was seemingly a spiritual successor to the previous Amazing Engine game and some of the material was later adapted to d20 Modern/d20 Future, but I'm not going to go into those separately.)

I don't even understand how these can exist without just being generic RPGs. Everything Everywhere All At Once, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Expanse, Inception, and Looper are all Scifi but are such different films/shows in tone and themes and even in tech that I don't understand why any system that can cover them all and not just be a full on generic RPG.

Paranormal, occult and supernatural investigations that are not Cthulhu/cosmic horror/Lovecraftian/whatever.

Monster of the Week. And I haven't paid attention to what Gumshoe is doing because I don't like it but it's definitely there. I don't know Cubicle 7's Laundry Files RPG but from the books it ought to be one. Brindlewood Bay of course.

Interstellar scifi settings that aren't generic oversaturated space opera.

Do I dare mention the 40k games here? I'm mostly a fan of Wrath and Glory as the games go - but the Warhammer 40k Universe certainly isn't generic. Doctor Who of course.

Urban fantasy that isn't WoD.

Urban Shadows. Monsterhearts. Monster of the Week (There's a lot of PbtA on this list). Dresden Files Accelerated. Laundry Files and Brindlewood Bay I think both also qualify.

Universal genre rpgs that aren't GURPS. Some of my favorite games are All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Night's Black Agents. These are universal games without fixed settings, but unlike GURPS they're ma

Fate. I'm sure there are others.