Tell me of this blue Rose Dungeon World - was that a campaign someone ran or a hack out there?
Which RPGs hold special value for you because of something other than the game itself?
Every once in awhile, I miss the extreme crunch of Champions but I don’t have the patience to go back to it.
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Same - I also thank it for a lot my maths skills. I learned more about long division from Champions and GURPS than I ever did at school 
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There is something really kind of cool about having super powers that are that specifically simulated that lets the players really lean into a specific power level. I kind of miss that with other systems but I’m not going to spend forever making up villains now. In High School, it was great, but now…
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@Pat_P kinda stole my answer. I bumped into Swords Without Master early in my journey out away from being an “I just play DnD” person. Played some games in the community, and now fast forward a couple years and I consider it my favorite game now. It’s exposed me to an entire world of people and other games I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered, and it’s been a lens through which I’ve come to understand game design a thousand times better than before. I’ve even wound up being the administrator for the SWM Discord server, with Ep’s blessing. That’s been a real growth experience in community management, even as small as it is.
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Both Dark•Matter and Star*Drive campaign settings were ones I got heavily into. The system has issues, but ran some fun stories. I don’t think I’d ever use Alternity again, but I’ve got those settings around just in case.
I also have The Great Pendragon Campaign which is a lovely book, but the kind of thing I’d probably never run as a GM with a short attention span and too many RPGs I’ve not yet run. Still, it’ll be a good weapon to take down burglars.
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The first printing of Ars Magica 4th Edition had my name in it as a play tester (the first time my name was in a publication!), and it had a spelling error because my last name has an umlaut (which you could write as an o with little dots or as oe … I guess I wasn’t very clear on the way it’s spelled, so it ended up being oë). I loved that book to bits, but I lost it somewhere, and in the later printings the spelling was corrected.
… but I really miss the first version. It had a story.
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I have a very soft spot for two game products: The Maze of Nuromen (now the Necropolis of Nuromen), one of my first OSR purchases, and which had amazing engraved illustrations by Harrly Clarke, a stained glass Artist, and drew me into eventually doing artwork for Blueholme Journeymanne. The other is John Stater’s Bloid & Treasure, which has an easy, funky style of play, and for which I have been contributing artwork for the second edition and for the Nod zine.
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I missed something important in my haste to cosign about Swords Without Master: Uncharted Worlds.
It’s a great game that does amazing things, but more importantly for me personally, I watched it being built. The creator, Sean Gomes, has been my GM since several years before he began development on UW, and our weekly play group served as alpha testers. I’ve been part of that group since something like 2011, and we still meet more or less weekly to this day, despite moves, military deployments, job changes, even new children.
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In Nomine.
I ran a game around the same time I was reading Sandman. Something just clicked. Plus, I had absolutely wonderful players.
The campaign ran for a few years real time. It had the perfect mix of weirdness, whimsy, and majesty.
I’m not a huge fan of the system. The setting is awesome, though there are some parts that are problematic.
However, because of that campaign, that game it holds a big place in my heart.
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Smallville will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game I ever played via Play-by-Post (PbP).
Not only did it introduce me to that beautiful realm of gaming, but it also introduced me to @RichRogers who welcomed me further down the PbP path and introduced me to even more awesome PbP gamers (and a game of Impulse Drive that had me crying more than once - in a good way; feeling all the feels). Today, all that has spiraled into a whole litany of games played and people met via PbP.
Smallville was my gateway to all of that, so it’s very special to me even though I haven’t played it since.
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Smallville’s my favorite game. I’m currently running a game in it and another group will be switching to it for a Persona game.
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GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Wildcards. I loved those weird, broken worlds so much. I lack the patience for GURPS these days, but I have fond memories of so many crazy games my friends and I built with those convoluted rules and all the hyper-technical sourcebooks.
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I ran it as a campaign, but we didn’t get very far. This was before I joined the gauntlet too. I originally wanted to try the Age system, and then got very bored with it and moved the setting to dungeon world.
Since then, I’ve been dabbling in making some custom moves for it and a couple playbooks, but so far Rose World is just an idea in my head. By what I’ve been doing, I’d add some monsterhearts type moves into the mix, to better reflect the settings’ focus on connections and relationships.
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I will always have place for Wraith the Oblivion. It is a game in reading and playing that got me through a lot of dark times. I still love the idea that this is a game of people who at that last moment said “Not yet”. For good or ill, they all have a reason to stay on and a voice of doubt and destruction inside that is still telling them that they made the wrong decision. It mirrors a lot of my interior dialogue, and seeing game that showed me that others really felt that way as well knowing I could play safely with others in that head space helped me more than anything else could have at that time.
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Grey Ranks was my introduction to story games in general and emotionally complex ones in particular, for which I have always been grateful.
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D&D 4E brought me back to gaming and introduced me to a lot of great friends in Korea.
Burning Wheel was my gateway drugs into indie games for me and the group I was then running games for. I also have the most memorable lone wolf game ever in the system.
Cthulhutech for crazy, eventually gonzo, 10-player, year-long campaign that was extremely fun and satisfying, especially since I know I’ll never be able to do something like that ever again.
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I have special feelings for Mutants & Masterminds (2e). My dad and I played together taking turns GMing for each other and he got to live out his Green Lantern fantasy (his favorite superhero alongside Batman) and I got to play my Flash-like computer scientist in turn. We had a lot of fun together and I hold those stories we told together close to my heart.
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Playing with the kids is great. I’m so proud that my kids started their own games, playing D&D, Blades Paranoia etc. My 12 year old had his first session as GM lately with Honey Heist for the whole family. I’m so proud of them and I hope those memories will stay with them 'til they’re old.
You give me hope that that may be possible. Thanks!
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Pendragon was the first original game I bought, when I barely knew about rpgs. Although I didn’t get a lot of gaming out of it, it still remains a remarkably good game and showed me how rpgs could innovate.
Mouse guard was the first original game I bought by myself, and the first indie rpg I GMed. It was amazing and so easy to run, and I still have the notes of the campaign I GMed with it.
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