Obscure systems

Where would you even get the books though?

Abandon All Hope: future spaceship prison gone wrong. Now anarchy reigns in some part, and order in others. Great crafting rules for jailrigged items.

Legends of the Wulin: great narrative mechanics based weeaboo fightan (magic ish)

go away bizarro Veeky Forums

Sine Requie, italian.
Uses tarot and poker cards.
Same developers created Dawn of Cthulhu that is deep ones and mi-go as gangsters, same game system.

De Profundis. You just write letters to each other in character.

Start with yourself.

That wasn't a joke.

The only thing my group ever messed with like that was Dragon Storm from Black Dragon press (It's out of business now) I would say looking back it was so-so. What killed the game in the end was being a RPG released like a CCG. (Starter box / blind booster packs)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Storm_(game)
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3492/dragon-storm
rpggeek.com/rpg/1347/dragon-storm

Anyone wanna know more about Fellowship? Cause I can totally talk about that game.

Talialanta has one of the best magic systems I've ever seen in a game try it out, I reccomend 4th edition but 5th ain't bad and every book ever released is free on the official site!

Please, saw it mentioned in another thread.

Sens, self-labeled as a philosophy game about free will, determinism and solipsism.

It's about being one of the only humans (or maybe not humans) a supercomputer can't predict. You can go from the real world to the "simulation" of the world by those computers to solves enigmas like in a Zelda Oracle game.

The game is diceless, your skills as a (real) human can be used in the game for some advantage (like, knowing engineering IRL can help there), and breaking character too much is the only way to actually lose the game. But the DM is apparently encouraged to include the players within the game world.

The setting is a post-apoc earth with a dune-style government ruling from the Moon or Mars, (probably Mars) with the aid of the aforementioned supercomputer.

Interesting pattern: the only winning move is not to play

Dungeon World

It's pretty much objectively one of the best currently out there. It has fast easy to use mechsnics and is perfect for beginners, it's a lot cheaper than most of these other rules bloated systems that cost fifty dollars. There is no reason for extra rules when it is he role playing that matters. Dungeon World is fast and innovative and still feels exactly like the spirit of ADND before DnD 3.5 destroyed the hobby and ruined a generation of role players.

However it's pretty obscure and very few people actually play it. Mostly because most roleplayers are too shitty and can't handle a system that forces them to actually roleplay their characters beyond "dwarf knight" and "orc wizard"

I actually want to try it really bad. Maybe toning down either the restriction in OOC, or the player inclusion into the game - probablu the later, as the former feels really weird when you read the campaigns book, in an interesting way.

Fellowship is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that's a bit more tailored to its concept than say, Dungeon World.

In Fellowship you play as a group of people going out on an adventure to stop an evil Overlord from doing bad stuff, except the GM in this scenerio actually makes the Overlord as their "character". They still control the NPC's and such but players have the ability to control elements related to their race or people.

If you say, want your elves to be a highly-advanced technological race from outerspace then you can establish that at the first session or even potentially mid-session if you feel like.

The playbooks are: The Elf, The Dwarf, The Halfling, The Heir (think Aaragorn), The Harbinger (think Gandalf) and the Squire (think generic JRPG protagonist).

There's also a few additional official playbooks made like The Giant, The Dragon and the Constructed.

One thing that's really neat is how NPC's take "damage". Essentially each NPC has a quality to them that you have to hurt by subverting or removing it in some way. So if you're fighting a troll and it has a quality like "Really Big: The Troll can hurt two members of the Fellowship at a time" then you need to think of a way to render its size invalid.

This sounds like stupid shit. Dungeon World is far better and works for ANY fantasy setting including Lord of the Rings, so on a Venn diagram it basically blows this Fellowshit game the fuck out.

>ANY fantasy setting
Really now? Even space fantasy, western fantasy, cyberpunk fantasy, WW2 fantasy?

I have a copy of Abandon all Hope. I really love that character creation in that system is basically rolling up your prisoner number and determining why you're aboard the Gehenna. I've always wanted to run it for my real life group around halloween but haven't ever quite done it.

Other person: the art's pretty shit, but that's a trash reason to drop a game. Other than that, it's up there in terms of PbtA games. I'd run a game of it.

2/10 I responded while also responding to someone else. Work on it.

It's Tolkein the rpg. Literally.

Even to the extent that the section for elf character creation has a warning saying that they're completely unbalanced and that's entirely intentional.

Also, I love that as a dwarf you can start play with like a massive underground fortress/estate and piles of riches and just waggle your beard at everyone about how great the ancient dwarven kingdoms are until you go mad with greed like a proper dwarf.

Do you have the PDF so I can look through it? I know it's probably in the share thread, but I don't feel like digging through the index right now.

>It's Tolkein the rpg. Literally.
I can't find anything that says it's an official Tolkien thing at all

...

My bad, I misread Tolkein as Tolkien.

>Obscure but not really

Unknown Armies is an urban fantasy/horror game about people broken and fucked up enough to do magic trying to reshape the world. It has a lot of the same writing talent as Delta Green and is notable for having five Sanity meters.

>Unspeakably obscure

Noumenon is a game about human souls reincarnated into mantis bodies and sent by the Universe to explore a gnostic hotel outside of space and time. Most of the book is inexplicably just poetry or unrelated fiction.

Red Markets is a game that just got kickstarted and but isn't like exploded on the market or anything like that since, you know, still in the process of getting printed. It runs on a new system called Profit, which is based around economics and resource management, to really convey that classic Resident Evil feeling of "I have seven bullets and there's six zombies in this hallway - how many do I risk shooting?"

Degenisis and Unhallowed are fantastic for very flavorful adventures.

Seconding Red Markets, it's the first time I've ever not immediately hated a zombie setting.

Ryuutama.

While not really that obscure, Mini Six has become my go-to RPG of choice when I want to quickly throw something together. Ran a one-shot of a fantasy sky pirate adventure with minimal prep and the system ran fantastically smooth.
Planning on using it for a Final Fantasy Tactics-inspired game soon.

Fedora: The Tipping. It's rules-lite, has a premise that's very conducive to comedic roleplaying because it hits so close to home for the average fa/tg/uy (or fits someone they know so much that it has the same effect). You play the worst kind of neckbeard, a Fedora who has managed to turn their bottled-up autism, ineffectual rage and self-consciousness into actual magic. Sadly, these "Edge" powers, fueled by a pool of points that increase as you embarrass yourself, are universally petty and inefficient, being geared towards wish fulfillment in one of a number of "channels" (areas of focus, such as Hipsterism and Japanophilia) and it doesn't help that the player characters have less stats and skills than the average person in-game. However, creativity and the right string of coincidences can let you enact vengeance on society in a way momentarily satisfying. To you only, of course; everyone else still thinks it's horribly cringy.

Also comes with a weeb expansion for playing Fedoras in Japan, adding a few channels specific to that country.

Here's the 「出て行けリア充ども」expansion.

>The non-human races are interesting in that they each have a unique stat. Elves have Grief, it increases when they see the suffering of the mortal world, when it reaches 10 they either sail off to a distant land or it turns into Spite and they become Dark Elves. Dwarves have Greed, it increases when they pursue their desires and can be used to gain bonuses when perusing what they want, when it reaches 10 they shut themselves away in their hold with all their treasure. Orcs have Hate, it increases when they suffer and is the main stat for many of their unique skills (mostly torture, deforesting, and general destruction), when it reaches 10 they go on a blood-crazed rampage until they die.

This sounds really, really stupid.

You're telling me EVERY character has some internal "rage against my nature" angst as a by-the-book mechanic? Count me out.

Castle Frankenstein immediately comes to mind. The idea was that it was return is if it was made in the 1800s so dice were considered at 'common' past time, while cards were a respectable upper-class hobby.

That said a lot of older games include optional rules are you some playing cards because not everyone could find polyhedral dice.

I fucking love Degenesis but Aries help you if you're not a Yuro.

It's a wild wild ride. And it forces you to care about what your character cares about. It does tale getting over the initial 'am I that guy?' cringe to get the most out of it.

But seriously, it's worth experiencing just for the perspective change.

Does Shadow of the Demon Lord count as obscure? Doesn't seem THAT well known, but, aside from Degenesis, I haven't heard of anything in this thread. Anyone interested in a Dark/Horror Fantasy game that take cues from Dark Souls and Blood Borne? I think it's neato.

>that classic Resident Evil feeling of "I have seven bullets and there's six zombies in this hallway - how many do I risk shooting?"

So there are rules for cartwheel kicking all of the zombies after shooting one of them in the head and instagibbing them all, right?

Chris Perin's Mecha. Its a more abstract mecha game that can do various flavours equally well, has a traveller inspired combat map, meshes pilot skills and mech capabilities without getting overly complicated. Shit's dope.

3:16 Carnage is a military scifi hellhole story game that actually ends up creating tense cinematic battles against alien hordes, the tensions of the war wiiiithiinnnnn, and the chain of command being terrible, but has only 2 stats. Fighting ability and Not Fighting Ability.

While PARANOIA is fairly well known, they made a couple offshoots with the 25th anniversary editions. IntSec was interesting but basically the same, but High Programmers is incredible.

All your players are ULTRAVIOLET clearance, directing the complex through the everyday problems that appear. Of course, every player has a set of directives from their service group they have to complete (that usually conflict with others), and have secret society missions to complete (that are terribly treasonous), along with keeping the Big C happy. The rules are light and fast, and the players spend just as much time arguing over what to do next as actually doing things (this is a fantastic thing).

Even better, as a GM I'm surprised by the story each session. The story develops organically, and everything that goes right or wrong is because of the players. Every game is memorable and amazing fun.

Hell, the game is even episodic. It allows for players to jump in and out without difficulty (Big C just hasn't summoned them this time), and is stupidly easy to teach. And scarily enough, the game supports lots of players easily. When they're not actively doing something (calling minions and the like), they're usually scheming and talking with other players about the situation, trying to get people on their side.

(cont.)

Game preparation used to take a long time, mainly because I like props. Cards for minions, printouts for player's directives and missions, etc. I made a mission generator to do all the busywork for me, now prep is about an hour of creative work and printing it out and I'm good to go (or maybe just printing it out if I'm feeling lazy. Reusing previous crises still works, as players tend to ignore what caused them in the first place).

If there's one problem, it's that it takes an experienced improv GM to run. It's hard to plan for, so most of your work is setting knowledge and thinking on the fly. It also requires to you be able to subtly direct your players against each other, and keep track of a lot of things simultaneously.

All in all though, it's the system I've had the most fun with, ever. I have yet to have a bad, or even mediocre game of it. It's just been a ton of fun for both myself and my ever growing playerbase (Core of 4, with about 10 that rotate in and out depending on availability). Troubleshooter level PARANOIA is a lot of creative burden on the GM, but PARANOIA: High Programmers gives your players a lot of room to do the creative heavy lifting for you.

If you're a moderately experienced GM, you should try it out, even if just for a one-shot. It will work with as few as three players up to 9 players (and it actually works well with 9 players. Turnless systems are amazing).

>FFTactics
>not using DnD4e or Strike

Unless you mean the mood of Tactics, rather than the gameplay.

0/10

this was flavour of the month on Veeky Forums a couple years back, turns out that a game without any rules isn't a game and you're just writing fan-fiction with other people

In short the *world games are fucking garbage

Dungeon World is not a good *World game compared to Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts or World Wide Wrestling.

That said, saying it has "no rules" is pretty silly. Unless you think rules need to be a simulation of game world physics.

Does Strike! count? It gets mentioned on Veeky Forums but not a lot of threads or anything.

I played a session of Swords Without Master and really liked it, but didn't have a chance to play it again since. Never even seen it mentioned.

You don't have to counter troll, it just becomes a shit-flinging-fest.

mini six seems cool, cheers

>symbaroum
>obscure
But it's the most favorite rpg on Veeky Forums right after Degenesis.

Malifaux uses cards instead of dice and some mechanics are tied to specific suits.
I dunno if Through The Breach has the same level of interaction, never bothered to read it.

Is Symbaroum the game that said that old school "GM controls everything, you don't even NEED to know the rules as a player, it's a HIGHER FORM of roleplaying" or am I thinking of Shadows of Esteren? I get the two confused.

It's quite the opposite, if anything. GM rolls nothing, players just roll against their attributes adjusted depending on difficulty of task or opponent's stats.
So, you are probably mistaken.

I just read review on their site. 4th edition's archetypes seems to be even worse than dnd bullshit.
You'd better have good excuse to like it because I definitely don't like this thing already.

Sorry about the mispelling. I type faster than my brain can keep up with. I didn't mean it was an official licensed game, just that it's lotr with the numbers filed off. Not a good or bad thing, just something very clear from the setting details and character building.

For example, elf magic is singing, and when elves can't bear this world any more they get on boats and sail away. Dwarves go mad with greed. Orcs are just tortured and debased elves. That kind of stuff.

Also, one of the feats orcs can take is called Where There's a Whip, There's a Way, which is a song in the Rankin Bass film.

is runequest obscure

I think you're mistaken with Paranoia.

if you're playing a non-human you will eventually have to retire the character, unless you die first. They increase relatively slowly though so you can still play the character for a decent length of time.

Nah, Paranoia mostly operates on a meta level for comedy purposes. Also Paranoia is mostly a setting and system agnostic - you could play the game with coin flips as a randomiser and it would still work. Highly skilled at bootlicking? Flip twice instead of once!

I'm talking shit like "You don't need to know the rules. Only the GM knows the rules. The GM is the final word, obey the GM. This is the only only way you can become TRULY IMMERSED and have REAL ROLEPLAYING".

RQ6/Mythras is so based.

Polaris. It´s about a mythical past where there´s a kingdom in the North Pole, and everything is fine. But then came the Sun, and with the Sun came the Corruption. A giant hole to hell opened somewhere in the kingdom and demons came out. Some are like mindless beasts, others are the more subtle kind. And the Corruption also affected the minds of men.

As everything gets shittier and shittier, the people do nothing about it. They´re too selb absorbed in their lifes and petty problems.

The players are knights. The duty of the knights is to defend the kingdom against the Corruption. At the beginning the knights aren´t very experienced, but they make up for it with willpower and courage. As time pases and they gain more experience, they also start to get jaded. Eventually, there´s only two possible ends for a knight: either he dies a hero, or he lives long enough to fall into apathy or hate, and then become a demon himself.

There´s not a clear GM. The game is strictly for 4 players, though there´s adaptative rules for 3 or 5 players. Players sit around the table. One playes his knight, and says what he wants to do and how it happens. The one in front of him plays the Sun, and his duty is to make everything go wrong and to control opponents. The other two players help arbiter and handle disagreemnts, and control tertiary characters.

Gameplay is heavily ritualized. Every session starts reciting the same line, and ends with the same line too. During the game, there´s a set of sentences that you can say to negotiate and determine how the story goes on.
A (knight)- I slay the monster with my sword!
B (Sun)- BUT you also destroy the amulet you came to recover, and without it the princess will die
A-BUT it can be repaired
B-AND it´ll also irremediably corrupt the princess
A-YOU ASK FAR TOO MUCH!
B-AND it will slowly corrupt the princess, if nothing is done to stop it
A-SO IT IS
B-SO IT IS

Cooler than it sounds.

Cartoon Action Hour, the game where you can play that stupidly awesome 80's action cartoon you wish had existed. You could also use it to run a Kamen Rider RPG.

>I made a mission generator to do all the busywork for me
Post it plz

It really is.

Here is the free version for all.

Bump

>But it's the most favorite rpg on Veeky Forums right after Degenesis.
And yet we haven't had a symbaroum thread active since the end of the last kickstarter.

I backed the Krautfunding a few days back. Hyped to get the Books. Sadly prometheusgames doesn't seem to do the PHB yet. I'd much rather have backed the kickstarter but the price difference is just too huge. Not to mention that it would be more work to do, since I don't have a cc.

Bymp?

Or fft miniature battle game
fftrealm.com/content/fftinto.shtml

Or fft battle mechanics guide
m-l.org/~greerga/fftnet/fftmech/

Haven't played or read this, but got all the books a while back. What can you tell me about it?

Burning Wheel has been mentioned, but I'd say Torchbearer. To paraphrase someone reviewing it once, it treats dungeon delving like SCUBA diving or (appropriately) caving. You're not having a fun romp into a loot hole with some badass adventurers. You're a poor person who has no other recourse, entering an environment that's intrinsically opposed to human life, and you'll never forget that. No other RPG I've played has been able to portray that same feeling that you're mounting an expedition and slowly but surely being constantly worn down as long as you're adventuring.

Dungeons and what? What the fuck is a 'dragon?'

1st ed. gm here: awesome character choices (nearly 100, quite a variety, some redundancies), crazy awesome fantasy world (VERY different, no elves [but elf-like analogues], lottsa magic and uniqueness, very 'mixed bag' setting with historical depth to it), very dangerous critters, decent artwork, simple system, cool splatbooks with lottsa useful info/equipment/character types (again, I am speaking from 1st ed. experience).
Lots of fun - we played a campaign loosely stolen from Pirates of Darkwater and it was one of our most memorable experiences.
PC's felt the gameworld was dangerous as fuck, and loved it.

It’s a game that you buy and read but never get to play fruitfully. Your players might sound interested but they’ll never read through it and understand it on the level that’s needed to make the game interesting. Then you read more about it and find Mouse Guard, a game which uses a simplified version of the Burning Wheel, so you decide to try your players out on that. After three attempts at playing and your players not really understanding it, you give up and go back to reading the Burning Wheel and not playing RPGs. It’s fucking great though.

If you happen to be hankering for a game in which you play as the zombies, you pretty much can't beat Nechronica. You can try all you want to find a better system for it, but you just won't. The parts HP mechanic is pretty much the perfect expression of an undead that can keep functioning as its limbs get ripped off, continuing to use whatever isn't absolutely mangled to fuck your day up.

kek of truth

Is there a good translation of it yet? I've only seen one in broken English with no art.

tlwiki.org/index.php?title=Nechronica Here's the wiki, my man. About as good a translation as you can hope for, though it likes to go down. Also included is the best attempt at a .pdf, useful for those times when it is down.

Anyone play the burger games stalker game? I really like its FLOW system but I haven't gotten a group to play and don't have my book on me to describe FLOW from. Diceless system with a solid structure that rewards good ideas and role playing. Players don't need to see any numbers but they're still there.

OldSchool Hack

It's basically a hack of I think red box D&D from ye olden days in an attempt to modernize it.

oldschoolhack.net/

You are truly autistic.

I honestly diddnt like Dungeon World.
I ran a 3 session campaign with it and it was pretty mundane.
My two problems with it were
- Restricted to 6 sided dice. That honestly only leaves a little wiggle room for things to happen.
- Not enough rules to justify really even being a game, like the other user said
>You're just writing fan-fiction with other people

k

>doesn't have any rules

Dank meme, friend.

Is it still shilling if the Kickstarter is done?

He said CLASSIC Resident Evil, not post RE4 dumb action movie bullshit.

I personally think teenagers from outer space looks fun.

Disgusting, they''re underage, leave them alone.

Normality is a post psypocolyptic rpg...in theory. In practice it's basically unplayable, as its both incredibly pretentious and largely formed out of in setting documents from a world where everyone is (maybe) insane and real is (maybe) falling apart. It has some neat features, like encouraging the gm to actively confuse, lie to, and disorient players, and the fact that character gen is basically just picking as some words out of a random book, but overall its mostly useless

Just the mood of Tactics, I don't really want to emulate the system perfectly.
I'm mostly in it for the cute non-humans.

Saying something good about a thing you liked isn't shilling.
The rudest thing you can say at it is "shit taste", but why would you want to rudepost on this good board?

Artesia, Adventures in the Known World is a fairly crunchy, d10 based, life-path, low-fantasy rpg. (Rolls are either d10+Attribute (+/- modifiers) or d10+Attribute+Skill (+/- modifiers).
More on the simulationist side of things than anything else, but it runs pretty smooth, and I've had some fun with it.

And, hey, the comic series it's based off is pretty good, too. If he would just bloody finish the damn thing.

mediafire.com/download/f96qdqj7ydxmvbl/Artesia_Adventures_in_the_Known_World.pdf

Still sad this never got more material.