RPG Gallery 2
Twilight: 2000 – Although slightly older friends of mine continue to sing the praises of T2K, I only got to play in one brief scenario, in which we mistakenly attacked the convoy we were supposed to meet up with, ending the game. And leading up to that, we had to keep track of how many MRE’s and cans of water we were carrying on our convoy, and how much everything weighed. It didn’t strike me as a game I would want to try twice.
Toon – From the makers of, and using the same basic setup as GURPS; Again, I only got to play one brief session of this, and I was assigned the role of a hairy porcupine, rather than getting to make my own character, and we didn’t finish the game, so I can’t say that much about it, although I like the concept and almost bought the Lovecraftian Crawl of Cutchooloo (?).
Amazing Engine – Tabloid! Much as I learned quickly to dislike TSR as they slowly began ruining everything by shoveling complication on top of complexity in their games, I had high hopes for this, with such skills as “RPG Mind Control” and backgrounds like the Inivisble College, combining every myth, urban legend and conspiracy theory under the sun, and capping them off with tabloid headlines “Giraffe Boy Eats Nuclear Missile”, this should have been easy and quick, but its existance as part of the Amazing Engine system, which I’d never heard of before or since, meant characters were supposed to be movable from one AE game to another, so used a mind-boggling and needlessly involved double framework actor/character system, and I never cared enough to try to get this working.
Hahlmabrea – I cannot take the blame for this one – a friend of mine bought this used, as both he and I were wont to do, to check out the mechanics and equipment and skills lists. I usually wound up with most of the books my friend bought when he was done with them, which is fine by me but left me with a lot of random gaming odds and ends, and this one is no exception, as it takes the standard fantasy tropes of elves, dwarves, goblins, etc. and places them ALL on the same side, all living more or less in harmony, with the player-characters’ only true enemies the undead, and featuring the “so prosaic it was almost novel” idea of the Adventurer License. Mechanically, the game was nothing to write home about, cubed, so this never made it into the pile of potentially playable material.
Swordbearer, The Quick and the Dead and Masterbook were all castoffs either from my friend or exceptionally cheap used pick-ups done on a whim, and as such, were just as easily forgettable as they sound, though I do recall the Masterbook core book was for use with the RPG version of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope.
Prime Directive, the RPG variation of the Starfleet Battles tactical tabletop game, took the typical FASA Star Trek and messed things around a bit, leaving a bit of a different system and setup, which wasn’t necessarily bad, but if you’re going to change what is canon so much that none of the previous material (such as Star Trek episodes and movies) applies, why not just create an entirely new and different game? Anyway, we made characters for this (in some ways, not as complicated as FASA Trek) and might have began one game but that was it.
Palladium is certainly well-ingrained in gamer culture and history, but I never played a single Palladium game that I recall. Looking through it, it sure was an extremely thick AD&D ripoff, and if I recall, Rolemaster looked similar – fantasy heartbreakers I think they’re called now, trying to fix or make better, a different system, instead of coming up with their own.
Shades of Fantasy, speaking of fantasy heartbreakers, looked identical to Palladium, to my perhaps untrained eye, though it did have a few good bits of resource that I was able to use for other games. Never played.
Rapture I bought only a few years ago, just so I wouldn’t be left out of having a religious apocalypse RPG, but it turned out it wasn’t a Christian game at all, merely one that used Christian theology. Ah well. Never played.
It Came From The Late, Late, Late Show is, much like its cousin The Expendables, from the same company, Stellar Games, one of my favorite games I’ll probably never play. ICFTLLLS is a mix between standard RPGs owing their base to D&D, and some original content and ideas, tending toward the somewhat more rules-lite, though this is debatable when you look at the skills and stats. Designed to emulate crappy late night horror movies, supposedly, it does seem to have some mechanism for hitting around that target, though there are definitely parts left out that could have really put this one on the map.
Batman the RPG, from Mayfair Games, used pretty much the same system as D.C. Heroes, which could be a good or bad thing – the friend’s son I gave it too listed it in the “bad thing” column, as far too complicated and reference-heavy to be usable or fun, and I tend to agree. Never played.
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Prime Directive was, as you say, based on the Star Fleet Battles starship combat game. However, for legal reasons, the Star Fleet Universe (as it is called) had to separate itself from canon trek some years ago (before the movies, I think).
The concept of the “Prime Team” did fix one rather silly thing about the old show: Why did the top three or four people on the ship always beam down to the dangerous newly discovered planet? Now they have highly trained, but ultimately disposable, people to handle that for them.
It does seem like I had heard or read something about the reasoning behind the setup for Prime Directive being legal, rather than any intentional attempt to break from the known. I do agree that the idea of the Prime Team does make a lot more sense and would likely be how that sort of situation would be handled. Thanks for the comment!