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What's your Obscure RPG Poison?


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Ok. So we all have spent some time with the big names: White Wolf, FASA, D&D, Palladium (sort of), GURPS and whatever other BIG Game Name I'm forgetting....

But what are the little games that not everyone has heard of that you play in or storytell?

I'm just curious what good "other" games are out there that I haven't heard of.

My pick is the game from Stellar Games: "It came From the Late Late show." Basically everyone makes an actor and then is given a "role" for a film. Powers include walking off the set, bribing the director, breaking the camera, having a stunt double, and similar stuff. It's all about having roleplayers play actors playing characters. Out of Character Time is when the characters have to revert to their "actors"...

The first movie I ran was called: Cannibal Santa Explosion: Santa Go Boom!, followed by Commie Zombie Sis Boom Bah!. It's pretty fun when you don't want to be serious and beats the hell out of Toon.

So what obscure-ass games do you play, if any?

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Hmm.. Brave New World (which seems to have inspired Aberrant alot). In it, you play "Deltas" people with superpowers who started appearing since WW I. The power manifest generally at a time of great stress or what should have been death. You select one of dozens pre-made packages of powers.

There was an expansions called Glosy Days which covered WW II and the Delta's part in it. It is kind of a cross of Aberrant and Adventure with very simple, very quick rules.

In addition, All Flesh Must Be Eaten was also fun if you like amazingly simple zombie bashing games.

Mekton was fun (anime mecha combat game) which also had a suppliment called Jovian Chronicles which later became a stand alone game along with heavy Gear.

I played the Buck Rogers game that came out in the early '90's. That was pretty fun.

And then there is an amazingly fun game which a friend turned me onto about a year ago...

Ninja Burger!

It uses the "Sake" engine which stands for Strength, Agility, Ki, Endurance. In it, you play ninja who work for burger joints and must deliver the brugers to the home. You can pick a clan like "The keepers of the Secret Sauce" which help with abilities and you get a secret mission each game, which can end up pitting PC's against each other even. Much fun to be had by all.

I played an Aliens mod which used the Cyperpink 2020 system (great game) as well as briefly playing both Twilight 2000 and Human Occupied Landfill. You have to love a game with skills like "Make sharp thing." Heh.

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Amongst many obscure games:-

The incredibly tacky, sexist and un-PC...

'Macho Women with Guns' and it's supplement/s (?) 'Batwinged Bimbos from Hell and Renegade Nuns on Wheels'. Played it about 12 years ago, I believe that it was the same company that did Late-Late. The back blurb described it as a game mercifully free from the ravages of intelligence. there were skills like, run-in-high-heels, hit-things, hit-things-with-other-things. The disadvantage top-heavy, adavantages such as hotline-to-god and monsters such as Puppies of Tindalos that had an attack of whining piteously. Man that was funny.

WFRP, which is kinda obscure these days but is good, gothic, medieval/renaissance, gritty fantasy. Great career system you pass through different jobs to gain skills and stat advances. Possibly my favourite job being Rat-Catcher, part of the starting equipment is a small but vicious dog and a pole with D6 dead rats. Quirky humour but very atmospheric.

Dragon Warriors, very simple rules, a pseudo-real world at the time of the crusades, with a religion called the True-Faith, heathen monsters based on celtic/saxon/arabic/greek mythology and lots of dark age superstition. Another one good on atmosphere.

Likewise, Pendragon, very good Arthurian stuff especially the take on fairy-land, fairy-knights and the Pagan/Christian mythology surrounding the legends and stories. Horrendously lethal combat system but gaining glory for actions inspires heroism. You got glory even if you died (as long as it was heroically) and if you have a dynasty your son gains a portion of this glory once he comes of age. You could then play the next generation. Be warned, never-ever-ever play this with some one who has watched Monty Python's Holy-Grail. After several game sessions of 'Let's not go to Camelot, tis a silly place', 'None shall pass', 'It's only a flesh-wound', 'Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government', 'We've found a witch may we burn her?'... it started to fray even my sanity.

Traveller 2300, great aliens, good back-ground and it was nice to see them confine themselves to 30 or so well thought out worlds. Colonies from different earth nations was a good touch too rather than having one big empire/federation thing like most SF-RPGs.

Price of Freedom, let's play Red-Dawn survivalist types and go kick some godless commie invader butt. I remember the stinky reviews it kicked up when it first came out in Britain. Nuclear war is serious not for RPG's, this game is American right-wing reactionary rubbish etc. etc. Twilight 2000 caused a similar fuss as well. Not bad little games though.

Stormbringer, based on the Elric books. Has a great magic system that involves (virtually) no spells just summoning and binding elementals or demons. You want a fireball? Better summon a salamander first, try doing that in combat, hope you've bound a few already. I like the way that you get different stats and skills for different Young Kingdom nations. They remade this game as Elric! but I prefer the original.

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Quote:
Originally posted by Walker:
Amongst many obscure games:-

The incredibly tacky, sexist and un-PC...
'Macho Women with Guns' and it's supplement/s (?) 'Batwinged Bimbos from Hell and Renegade Nuns on Wheels'. Played it about 12 years ago, I believe that it was the same company that did Late-Late. The back blurb described it as a game mercifully free from the ravages of intelligence. there were skills like, run-in-high-heels, hit-things, hit-things-with-other-things. The disadvantage top-heavy, adavantages such as hotline-to-god and monsters such as Puppies of Tindalos that had an attack of whining piteously. Man that was funny..
I'll have to hunt this down somehow.

Btw I know it's not so Obscure but it isn't one of the Big names either. Isn't the game Paranoia great?

Another one I addictedly played when I was younger was Propaganda. You work as a Tabloid reporter with crazy "documented" powers...like levitation, "Geek swallowing skills", etc. You could tap into your past life while hunting down the Figi Mermaid and wearing your tinfoil hat to ward off the Reticulans and their mind-control communist rays. Great crash course in New-Age history and Tabloid Lore rolled into one book.
That and all the art and style of the book is authentic tabloid magazine style.
My favorite moment: not knowing what my Past life was (part of the game is figuring out who your past life is) and using it when I was cornered by a herd of Bigfeet (You know, plural for Bigfoot?). Apparently my past life was Ghandi and I was mercilessly pummeled in the name of peace.
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I remember once in Paranoia how the 'clone replacement capsules' came firing in from Alpha Complex (we were outdoors) landing on some of the surviving players. This of course caused more 'clone replacement capsules' to start raining down... Never mind the fact that the burst radius on a cone-rifle fired tac-nuke was bigger than the range of said rifle.

Funniest death of a fellow PC I ever saw happened in this game. They had a bad slip of the tongue that just had to be enforced as an in character mistake. They were still at infra-red level, couldn't find the mission briefing room so wandered up to a Violet Level Vulture Guard to ask directions. The conversation started and ended like this, 'Comrade.'

Good luck tracking down Macho Women with Guns. Watch out for She who Screams Without a Voice, Yoko-Ono and Drunken Fratboy monsters if I remember correctly.

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Don't forget filling out the forms to record how the R&D equipment performed...

Lava proof suit -Could do with a helmet- Swizz-R-OLL-2.

Rocket Boots - Could do with speed and direction control, warning do not use in confined spaces- Swizz-R-OLL-3.

I was always intruiged by Earthdawn but never got my hands on a copy, what's it like?

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Earthdawn is the bomb. It was FASA's shot at a fantasy game that worked in some elements from Shadowrun (IE - cyclical magical aura for the world). Except in Earthdawn, there's some nasty things called "Horrors" that invade the world during the "peak" peroids of the aura's power. One group of people (Thera) figured out what was going to happen and came up with a neato way to survive the Scourge (the nasty time when the Horrors are around) by making big fortresses (caerns) to weather the nasty times. Unfortunately, this group of people was essentially the Roman Empire and a bunch of a-holes. So after the Scourge "ended" (since it's kinda a gray zone), the other countries that had fallen under the Theran's heel before the Scourge decided to tell the Imperialites where to shove it.

So, because of the Scourge, the land is wild, marginally tamed, lots of nasty magical things to kill, a looming presence of oppression coming, and plenty of fallen caerns to loot and pillage.

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R.T. games like... Cyberpunk, Mekton and Teenagers from Outer Space are all cool too. Yes, yes I have played far too many RPG's.

I like the sound of Earthdawn. Got the sort of feel that I think I might like running, i.e. inflicting on my long suffering TT group.

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Earthdawn is a very interesting setting. It's supposed to be set in the far pre-history of the world (in Jordan speak, a few full turnings of the wheel ago). There are several high-fantasy races like elves (both normal pointy-eared-long-lifespan tolkien, and a variety called 'bloodwood' elves that are part plant elemental and have thorns growing out of their bodies), dwarves (the most common race in the basic setting, amusingly enough), orcs (barbarians with tusks), and trolls (like SR trolls, but more tribal, and with an amusing tendancy to pilot flying ships).

Plus some more obscure and interesting races like windlings (faeries crossed with toned-down kender), obsidimen (rock people, related to earth elementals), and t'skrang (lizard people who are wildly gregarious bad shakesperian actors). And of course human's whose completely uber special ability is to use magic they normally shouldn't be able to (and magic makes the world go round).

The flavor of the setting is pretty much high fantasy, with a bent towards epic heroism. Other kinds of stories can be done, and done well, but really the entire system (the more people hear about you and your adventures, the more powerful you become) is best suited for epic campaigns.

I especially like the mechanic. Simple, but very fun to play with.

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The precurser to the White Wolf system, Ars Magica has to be about the best magic system that I've ever seen in a game. Spells, Rituals, Magic Item creation, Spontaneous Magic, the ability to custom design your own "school" or specialties of magic. Man I love that game! Too bad I can't ever get anyone to play it...

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Quote:
Originally posted by Alchemist:
The flavor of the setting is pretty much high fantasy, with a bent towards epic heroism. Other kinds of stories can be done, and done well, but really the entire system (the more people hear about you and your adventures, the more powerful you become) is best suited for epic campaigns.
Damn do I miss playing that game. Obsidimen, steps... man, I liked the game so much I brought windlings in as a slave race in my old D&D game.

Funning thing was the first time we played it was with just the core book before the races got super-fleshed out, hence we had a t'skrang sky raider. Then we find out six months later t'skrang are deathly afraid of heights. shocked
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All Flesh Must Be Eaten is one of my favorites too - and it gets even better with the Enter the Zombie supplement. That adds supernatural martial arts and 'gun fu'-style combat to the game, as well as adding systems for playing a zombie yourself. Much fun.

Another offering from Eden Studios (guys who sell AFMBE) is Armageddon, a game in which a hugely powerful being from outside the cosmos is spreading its Taint across the modern world. You play one of the many people fighting this influence, including normal humans, magic-wielding humans, children of gods/avatars of gods/gods incarnate, immortals, half-angels, angels, demons ... might be forgetting something.

A really nice feature of that game is a sliding scale of character creation, allowing a dirt level game of humans (perhaps with some minor magical gifts), a world-shaking campaign of gods in the flesh, or anything in between.

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Quote:
Originally posted by Walker:
Funniest death of a fellow PC I ever saw happened in this game. They had a bad slip of the tongue that just had to be enforced as an in character mistake. They were still at infra-red level, couldn't find the mission briefing room so wandered up to a Violet Level Vulture Guard to ask directions. The conversation started and ended like this, 'Comrade.'
Ah, fun times. I remember the Paranoia convention game I played called "Troubleshooters of Penzance Quadrant. Paranoia pirate style! Arr!

Quote:
Originally posted by Walker:
Good luck tracking down Macho Women with Guns. Watch out for She who Screams Without a Voice, Yoko-Ono and Drunken Fratboy monsters if I remember correctly.
I know where a copy can be found. My university roleplaying club has a copy of Macho Women with Guns and Renegade Nuns on Wheels. Haven't read them yet, of course.

As for my obscure poison? Well, if it isn't plainly obvious, I love Nobilis, the game of gods. Not necessarily an amusing game (although certainly, I've had many laughs in the game I run), but bizarrely enough, not quite as difficult to run (or play!) as one might think. The power level's never the issue, I find - players tend to reach their equilibrium eventually...
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TFOS!!! It's all about the Boy/Girl gun! Great beer and cheets game.

Mekton... a little too number heavy for my taste, but still a fun thing. Nothing says badassssss like a 7 story destruction machine doing it's business on a main street of a big city.

"Oops. Sorry, I should have aimed mroe carefully with my heat-seekers."

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