What's your favorite game that's too weird/obscure to ever gave its own thread about?

Did you see the recent Kickstarter to add Africa and the Middle East to the setting? Looks like some dope stuff.

Misspent Youth.

I didn't discover it soon enough, it seems. I only found out about it by the time Veeky Forums went off of it.

I played a game in that system once user.

Wat breddy gud. Although I played a mortal cause i could not wrap my head around angels.

I did not, I've only discovered the system for myself in the past few days.

I keep seeing a Firefly PHB in my FLGS but never on Veeky Forums

I actually own a copy of that.
Every few years I look up at it on my bookshelf and think 'I should use that to run a game'

And I wonder what kind of game I would run with it
And I come up with nothing
and so it stays up on the shelf.

Myriad Song would be one. A Sci-Fi game with the same core ruleset as Ironclaw and same authors.

But I can understand what nobody talks about it. The only things that really stand out as being different to other games are the ruleset (which gets discussed in Ironclaw threads) and the worldbuilding decision that reprogrammable computers basically don't exist so they could get a 70s/80s sci-fi feel.

It's got some creative ideas for some of the races though. Especially with the Myriad Aliens supplement.

>d say the skill list could be streamlined a little, since there are a few skills that are just 'what' (like digging) and one or two that could be consolidated (Search and Observation).

When they made Myriad Song they did consolidate the skill so that they made more sense.

Somewhere on the official forum there is a thread where someone wrote up house rules for converting an Ironclaw to the better skill list of Myraid Song, but I can't find it.

Oh, neat!

One of my very first thoughts looking at Ironclaw was that you could adapt the core rules to a sci-fi setting with aliens and robots and weird shit really well.

Pirates CSG.

Not only did Wizards discontinue it, but I've never seen anyone play it IRL anway.

Server Crash, an example of tg having a great idea!

But then not fucking finishing it... though I'm starting to work on completing it myself it'll take awhile

I have all the PDFs. It's okay.

I love MHRP. I should really get another game going.

It's not obscure, but Gamma World and other post-apocalyptic settings never saw enjoyed popularity. Gamma World has some pretty inconsistent writing though. Some editions have more serious overtones, while others are based entirely on absurdist humor.

>its own thread about

As long as it's not used as fodder for more cancerous generals or quest threads, I'd be all for more interest in Gamma World on Veeky Forums.

The 4e version was weird in a good way. It incorpororated a bunch of decks of cards for everything from character creation to loot. Felt a little board game-y and definitely more on the comedy side of things, but still fun.

I just wish Veeky Forums didn't hate Fate. There are some awesome settings for it.

Eagle Eyes is my favorite; it's gritty detective noir in the Roman Republic.

I came here to post this. It is such a fun setting. Too bad the system is pretty much dogshit.

I'll also toss Earthdawn into the ring. It was hugely ahead of its time.

Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness by Palladium Books. It's out of print but widely available.

>not playing TMNT After The Bomb

Fate probably has one of the highest ratios of Anglosphere popularity:amount of quality discussion on Veeky Forums of any system. The only one I can think of that beats it is Call of Cthulu.

I've been wanting to try Warbirds for a long time. The combat seems interesting.

Pretty sure Kenneth Hite has the best settings in rpgs. Night's Black Agents and Day After Ragnarok are brilliant concepts

Godlike! Never seen it mentioned here.

I just wish Veeky Forums could have a Reign thread where we talk about something other than female cavalry.

>Tfwyn find someone to play METW with
>Tfwyn be able to keep a thread about it going on Veeky Forums

Life truly is suffering.

Honestly, I've never even played it, but this seems like exactly the kind of game I love.

Godlike led to Wild Talents which is pretty well liked. It also recently got an Achtung! Cthulhu crossover book.

How is Reign? The "Romans trapped in the land of the fae" book coming out has me curious.

>How is Reign?

If you're familiar with the One Role Engine, it's just that + fantasy + Company/Kingdom rules.

If not, the system uses a dice pool of d10s and successes are based on getting matching dice results, not on hitting a target number. The big selling point of the ORE is, as its name implies, a single roll tells you if you hit, where you hit (each number on a d10 corresponds to a different body part), how much damage you did, and when you acted on the initiative. "Expert" and "Master" dice can be added to your pool and allow you to have more control over the results of your roll.

Since it's based on matching, it's very low on math. The result is super fast combat, tending on the lethal side.

Reign in particular's selling point is the Company rules. "Company" in this case meaning any kind of organization. They have five *heavily* abstracted stats (Might, Treasure, Influence, Territory, Sovereignty) rated 1-6, and combine two of those stats at a time to form their dice pool when acting. For instance, to send your army to attack another company, your dice pool is the total of your company's Might and Treasure attributes.

Companies in the game are designed to, on average, have relatively low dice pools. While a mid-high level PC is often going to be rolling 10 dice at a time (the maximum you can have in a pool), companies tend towards lower numbers. This means that they rely on the actions of PCs to survive. PCs can add dice to their company's pools by succeeding on an individual level. Pic related shows some examples from the text of how this can play out.

The result? When the PCs are in charge of a business/religion/kingdom/pirate fleet, gameplay toggles between two different "modes". The big-picture Company mode, and the zoomed-in adventuring-party mode wherein the PCs do their PC shit to assist the company. It gives a concrete, mechanical way for players to individually affect the fate of something much larger than themselves.

It's also received three settings thus-far.

The "Standard" Reign setting, which I love to death, with it's wonky physics, stationary sun and moon, crazy ass molten-lead demons, gravity relative to the surface you're standing on, and all that other Greg Stolze weirdness.

Not!Harry Potter (with a re-worked magic system that I have yet to try, based on learning magic words and stringing them together to cast spells)

And the attempt at a more standard fantasy setting, with Orcs and Elves and shit.

I prefer the standard setting by far. I'm intrigued by the Ninth Legion. I honestly wasn't aware of it until just now.

Ah. I'm vaguely familiar with ORE via some of the other games (Godlike, Better Angels, A Dirty World), but I love leading organizations. Mummy: the Curse, one of the lesser-known nWoD/CofD games, is all about having a subservient Cult who acts for you.

I'll probably buy Reign when Ninth Legion comes out. Thanks for the overview, user!

Paranoia

>an unfunny comedy game from years past with shitty rules on purpose

why

>ITT: a bunch of anons post the titles of games nobody is familiar with and nothing else, leading to zero discussion because the games ARE GAMES NOBODY IS FAMILIAR WITH

fuck's sake, guys

tell us a little about these games

You first.

This game looks awesome user, thanks for linking the pdf.

>being this storygame faggy
>ever

But GUMSHOE is really good, user.

Don't Rest Your Head
Question: What should be the general limits on how powerful madness and exhaustion talents should be? Current group one guy can control dogs (which we have a lot of), another creates any wearable item (mostly armor), another can transform into a giant spider, and another has boosts of "unstoppable force". As for exhaustion talents they picked barricading, stealth, eye for details, and sense of directions, respectively.

>Earthdawn

i really want to get into earthdawn, i really do. the rules just fight against me too much. i've had success translating a lot of the core concepts to Ryuutama; becomes more about trade and travel between cairns than fighting back against he badies.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten and/or Terra Primate.

I really like Unisystem Classic because beneath the Zombie/Ape apocalypse veneer it's a homebrewed GURPS heavily weighted toward the survival (horror) genre.

>The premise is that investigative games are not about finding clues, they are about interpreting the clues that are found.

This is already sounding fantastic.

One had a DRYH game where I started hallucinating. Me, not my character.

The GM made sure to sleep deprive us before we played.

You mean the cut out ships game? That shit was awesome. I have like 40 of those ships.

Burning Wheel.

Gumshoe is weird, in that the ethos that led to the system's creation is really the most valuable thing about it. Anyone who's played enough games knows the feeling of having players botch a mundane roll that they absolutely needed to succeed to keep the plot going, so either you keep rerolling until they get it or bend over backwards to rewrite shit. Gumshoe, PBTA, and a bunch of other game engines lately are taking fail-forward design into account...

and Gumshoe's not really all that good beyond forcing you to think about how to integrate it into a mystery narrative. Like, don't get me wrong, the clue system is fucking amazing, worth studying if you're interested in game design, and totally worth stealing or integrating into other stuff, but the system's extremely bare bones beyond that. Which is fine, because it's a hyper-focused system for mysteries, but still.

Night's Black Agents does a shitton if clever espionage genre things, and I'd argue the Preparedness skill is one if GUMSHOE's greatest additions to RPGs.

Oh damn, Preparedness was that whole "you have a pool of points to pull retcons out of your hat and say you saw this coming all along" thing wasn't it? I remember a few other systems doing that, so I'm not sure if NBA did that first.

Note my major experiences with Gumshoe are more with Esoterrorists, so later iterations may have added more meat on the bones.

A lot's been added since Esoterrorists: NBA added stuff like Network (making up contacts) and Cover as skills plus having Heat as a track of how much the authorities want the player characters dead, Mutant City Blues added superpowers, etc.

Trail and NBA also have "modes" that weak the gameplay to fit genre conventions. Trail switches between Purist (you see the monster, shit your pants, and go mad) and Pulp (you dynamite the Deep Ones), while NBA has modes for both the spy genre /and/ what your "vampires" are, with everything from Draculas to alien psychic parasites.

Neat! I'll have to check them out at some point then.

Houses of the Blooded

The only game I know of that tries to capture a mood of epic tragedy, and wager system allows for a level of player agency in the story that can lead to some really awesome shit.

Well I know what I'm grabbing copies of.

Thank you gentlemen.

>Earthdawn
All I know is that game inspired Dominions series of strategy games for mythology obsessed autists which I immensely enjoyed. Muh giant bloodthirsty Jews eating babies.

Pic related, the original R. Talsorian Games release. The novelty of using bog standard playing cards instead of dice, and keeping a journal as your character instead of a character sheet to record character progression appeals to me.

Pokemon Tabletop United

D&D 4th Edition.

C'mon Veeky Forums, it doesn'te even have a general thread.

This, or that necrololi game

Probably Runequest, Idunno.

Low Life

It's a Savage World setting where every apocalypse happened one after the other and earth is this weird floating ball of dirt, radiation, and what is left of human civilization occupied by the degenerate offspring of humans, animals, aliens, snack cakes, and bugs. It's definitely on the jokier side of things with stuff like Jesus and Elvis being misinterpreted as the same person or a giant, continent sized dead monster you can go exploring in, and a new extra magic source where you bottle up magic smells.

I've loved it since I found it randomly in a bookstore. The author is also the artist, and you can tell he put a lot of loved into the whole thing. Unfortunately it's a really hard sell to players, and it remained dead until a few years ago when Kickstarter of all things let the guy make a small miniatures line and a second edition.

Sounds intriguing. I should check it out.

If conversation happens that's great, but I'm enjoying learning about forgotten games.

Even if every user just posts a name of a game and leaves, I'm still gonna enjoy the thread.

For the second time this week, I get to throw this teaser for Mechanical Dream...

>Characters reside in the world of the dual world of Kaïnas and Naakinis, a 30,000 mile disk lit by a sun-like orb called the Pendulum. This disk is surrounded by the Sofe, a 40-mile-tall wall of black ether that kills that few, if any, have ever returned from. Kaïnas (the rational world) and Naakinis (the mythic world) exist with overlapping topography and ecosystems. Flora and fauna of Kainas are scaled normally by real-world standards, while Naakinis exists on a much larger scale (such as the "Kioux" trees that reach many miles in height).

>The Pendulum spends roughly ten of each day's thirty hours beyond the Sofe, creating night-like darkness. During this time, a phenomenon called "The Dream" manifests, becoming stronger as less and less light permeates Kaïnas. The Dream is a fabulous and dangerous world that overlaps with reality. It is initially hazy and hallucinatory, becoming as solid as reality during the darkest parts of the night. Areas where the Pendulum does not shine are affected by permanent manifestations of the Dream.

>The Aran world is a separate existence, accessible only in places the Pendulums' light cannot reach (underground or deep underwater). It is fiercely primordial, rejecting inorganic matter and operating by rules entirely different from reality. The creatures inhabiting Aran are unpredictable and poorly understood.

>The vast majority of the setting's population depends on the weekly consumption of the orpee fruit to survive. Without orpee, a rapid and excruciating death is guaranteed. Orpee naturally concentrates a life-force called "eflow" that fuels life. The politics and economics of Kaïnas are primarily driven by the collection and distribution of orpee, as it is an absolute requirement for life.

Attached is a setting overview. Link to PDFs is here -- mega.nz/#F!iwxRETYC!92YZNGq7TKlSeEFBCMOWYA

SenZar. It's what you get if RIFTS had a baby with every 80s metal album cover ever. Playable races include Predators, ayy lmaos, vampires, and the Sidhe. Endgame is becoming a god.

I almost love Low Life. I love the weird, acid trip reality of it, but it's just a bit too silly/retarded for me. I have to give it props for being very creative and memorable though.

I ran a campaign in that a looong time ago. The party was a group of bio-enhanced possums that was on the run from the lab that created them, and in particular, an enhanced tiger of theirs that was a killing machine. The campaign never really soared though. The rules were too clunky (so I just ended up improvising a lot) and the modern day setting was too restrictive. Gamma World was much cooler.

Fist of the north star RPG

I picked up Fading Suns and Blue Planet at a half-off sale and had a similar experience with them. They were both interesting and thought-provoking reading, but I felt zero compulsion to play either of them.

I've heard Burning Wheel called "the best-designed RPG no one's ever played." Easy to find people extolling its virtues, hard to find people to get a group together for it. I really like Roll20's Burning Wheel campaign, but that's honestly the closest I'll get to playing it myself, even if I own the books.

Relatedly though, I came here to say Torchbearer. It has the same basic framework as Burning Wheel, but adapted to a much more structured and narrow concept: emulating old-school dungeon crawls in tone and style.

I did actually get to run a short game of it once, for my normal group. I did the Dread Crypt of Skogenby with four of the premade characters between three players. One loved it and wanted to play more, one was ambivalent as usual. Would play more, but wasn't at the top of his list of favorite systems. One hated it so much that I've never actually seen him get that angry about it a game. So... mixed reactions to say the least.

Still want to play more of it. And I really really hope for an "Advanced Torchbearer" book at some point.

>no Obsidian: Age of Judgement threads
>ever

Kult. Admittedly the system is kind of wonky(I'm planning to port the important parts to BRP next time I try to run it), but the setting is amazing.

FFG's non-Netrunner LCGs. I like the Star Wars one for head-to-head and LOTR for either solitaire or co-op. But I've never got much response asking about either. Shit, I'm lucky if I get a reply about the Star Wars LCG in the Star Wars General.

In Nomine, Rolemaster, Pendragon, Ars Magica, Prime Directive, Star Fleet Battles, and probably Stormbringer. Seeing discussions about those could be interesting.

Mouseguard

I hosted a Burning Wheel game awhile back, and after playing it, and reading the books, the game would be good for a Tolkien campaign.

But yeah, like you said, it is really hard to find a group of players for it. Though the few friends that I had played with loved the combat and the skill progression. Now thinking about it, it could go well for an Elder Scrolls game, if I remember how skills get advanced and the magic mechanics.

>Burning Wheel
I've never done more than look it over, but it's way too crunchy to be a good game in my opinion. It isn't a computer simulation, so shit should be quick and easy, and favor the GM's ability to improvise and adapt over heavy mechanics that bog you down. Also, I hate dice pools. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

This is now an Ars Magica Thread.

>Crickets.
>Exactly.
You Pathfinder Cultists have no taste.

well said, friend, unless you were being sarcastic, in which case shut up.jpg

Spears of the Dawn (cool ooga booga African magic)

>GUMSHOE
Yeah it's pretty damn good

One system that is really really good is pulp alley which can be used for almost any setting

I've seen Ars Magica mentioned a few times on here, it's hella fun, but you're not exactly selling it with that attitude.