As I turned 50, I decided to make a list of my 101 favourite TTRPGs. I return, to finish off the 90s, and have strong hopes I will complete this in time for turning 100, and starting my 101 TTRPG I played between 50-100 list. Because that will definitely happen.
Staring at the existential horror of non-existence? That sounds like a cue for…
The classic 1990s update of the Lovecraftian mythos, replacing tweed-suited professors with increasingly burned-out government agents.
I’ve previously said this is the sort of game I don’t exactly rush to get to the table, so you may be surprised it’s even on the list (though perhaps less surprised it’s this low). If so, pay attention, chums. That article is about GMing games? Not playing. If I haven’t played something “classic”, I will absolutely grasp the chance, if only to have an opinion. If folks dig it, I figure there’s something to dig.
So I took the chance to join a 3-session online scenario as a fun chance to taste a deeply unfun universe. I was instantly out of my depth, in a real world setting with a firmly procedural approach.
I was asked how I was going to enter a building without being noticed and I realised that I was desperately unprepared to play a real-world government agent. The previous years of storygames or OSR had left me weak. In a storygame, a move would have moved me to where I needed to be. In an OSR game, I’d have done some ridiculous Lucasarts adventure solution based around combining whatever bits of string I had lying around. Here, I had to actually know what I had to do to be a criminal. I don’t know that. I barely know how to get into my own house.
I didn’t mind that. I quite liked that. A procedural game based around player skill and willingness to commit to learning about the topic in hand? It’s a barrier, but I could also see the appeal. I don’t mind a game that asks more of a player.
In other ways, my ignorance was an absolute boon. I didn’t know anything about the wider Delta Green mythos or, in fact, Lovecraftian monster stuff significantly – I tend to confuse all the various agglomeration of syllables. Is Chr’rttttlel’u’x the one with the tentacles under the sea or is it the one who’s deep in space and eating everything?
This made me a really Lovecraftian character, wandering into hell without a clue. Even the Delta Green organisation itself, with its and faux-techno-thriller terminology, was unknown to me. I really was someone entering a world who knew as little as my character. There’s something to that – the awareness that this is a well developed place with so much I could discover.
So, why so low?
Half way through the second session the GM made a joke. The group laughed. Now, I’d been playing it bone dry, as the game demands. However, as he made a joke, I did a follow up line, which got a laugh. And then the GM told me off for making a joke, as that isn’t appropriate in a game of Delta Green.
I nod – because I know that – but you just made a joke. I decide to to bring it up after the game, as it didn’t seem really right. You started it.
Except I have to leave this game an hour early. Then the next and final session, due to life changing suddenly, I couldn’t make. So that was it.
Now every time I think of Delta Green I just think BUT YOU MADE A JOKE FIRST, YOU BAST!
So it’s not a favourite game.
There’s three things you should take from this.
- A game’s position in this list says very little than other how I feel about it now. This is autobiography as much as criticism. Maybe a game really low down on the list would be much higher if I play it again, but that doesn’t change how I feel about it now.
- Games I’ve played rather than run (and so likely read) are going to have a harder time in the list. My experience is what was on the table, and that’s the only filter I can see the game through. If I’ve read a game, I can see (and love) stuff which didn’t quite work out. If I don’t, I can’t.
- I am amazingly petty. Astoundingly so. My brain is a torture device of the silliest, stupidest nonsense.
I put Delta Green this early in the list because being told off very mildly is such an amazingly minor reason to be annoyed with a game. That makes it safe. There’s been things in games which were genuinely upsetting, many which have never had any closure. To tell the story of my time with these games involves telling them… but to tell the story just risks becoming score-settling, right?
I don’t actually want to do that, so when I do, I’m going to try and approach with empathy of where else other people were coming from, and what I didn’t do, and what I could have. At least one reason why I chew over things is working out what went wrong, and what I could have done better. I suspect the GM just wanted to make sure I understood jokes were not part of the game. I think they should have made it clear they had made an error too. That’s something we could have talked about, and me not written an essay about years after the fact.
We could have, but we didn’t. I think we’ll see what we learn. Players are different, and where we meet is interesting – and interesting need not mean good.
So I won’t be just turning this into a series of RPG Horror Stories.
Unless it’s funny.
96) An Unnamed Animal-Themed Resistance Game
Another early playtest, and this ending up this low is how brutally hard this list is going to be. Unless a playtest is lucky enough to do what it’s trying to do instantly its going to find it hard to beat finished games, right?
This ends up here out of me being a bit bemused with it. The idea is a classic Blacksad-esque set-up of animal-folks in a realistic WW2-y plot – in fact, not a million miles away from Rick Remender and Daniel Acuna’s current comic, Escape.
Which sounds great, but the problem in the playtest is that the “you’re humanoid animals” just didn’t come up in play at all, and without any visuals, this just led to being a straight resistance game. All of which is fine, but I did spend the whole session wondering why I was a bunny.
95) Hobbit Tales From The Green Dragon
Right at the border of what counts as a TTRPG is this storytelling game. It got an Ennie, so I figure that gets it in. You play hobbits, stoned out of their tiny little brains, taking turns telling a story, prompted by cards, and playfully derailed by the others.
Lovingly put together, it just didn’t give enough to shape an interesting story. I suspect just getting stoned and improvising a story inspired by whatever was lying around the room would have been as effective. I don’t remember any story we made at all, which is fatal.
My biggest memory was playing with my wife and my brother. We found that while my brother happily spurted out a stream of perfect “Daisy Merrywater”-esque hobbit names, my wife and I – professional writers – found that neither of us could actually improvise a Hobbit name better than “Bumbo”.
That said, you have to remember that Tolkien wasn’t great there one too – one of the best bits in thedrafts of Lord of the Rings is where he reaches Bree and suddenly realised “Bingo Baggins” is a terrible name for a lead, so let’s call him Frodo instead.
94) Amble
If you were wondering if I was going to include my own games, here’s your answer. Of course, I am. What kind of navel gazing exercise would this be without that?
During the Covid lockdowns, I went on a lot of long walks while on calls to my friends. Amble was a game designed for those calls, where you play two people who have just met up in the flesh, and each describe the trials and tribulations they faced on the way. These are prompted by the tale-teller being prompted to look left and use what they see as inspiration for the problem and then later to look right to see what got them past this problem.
It’s a game about the fantasy of meeting up with people in a time we couldn’t meet up with anyone, and transforming an environment with an act of imagination and all that. This is this low down the list because what kind of arsehole would I be if I put it much much higher than Hobbit Tales, while it has exactly the same “I suspect just getting stoned and improvising a story inspired by whatever was lying around the room would have been as effective” problem.
That said, at least it never expoded my inability to create hobbit names.
Classic storygame of soldiers trapped behind Confederate lines trying to get out of there, and it ending as poorly the name suggests. It’s not called the Carolina Heroic Escape Rush, after all.
This ends up here because of what I’m going to call the Flower Court Ruling – as in, I don’t remember enough of the night I spent in the swamp, so it can’t be one of my favourite games.
92) Dungeons & Dragons 3.5
Remember the caveat earlier about not dunking on games?
“Unless it’s funny.”
Suffice to say, I will always remember the campaign of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5. It featured the worst single bit of GMing I’ve ever seen in my life. I almost wanted to applaud.
This is in the early 00s, where I’m a few years into working at PC Gamer, and a few years out of being in touch with the RPG scene. One of the Edge writers suggests running a D&D game for an assortment of folks – including Jim [Our first TTRPG session, ever! – Jim]. I jump at it, curious on multiple levels. I’d never actually played a game in the lineage of Advanced D&D, for a start. Yes, that panel about RPG elitists in DIE where all the characters roll the eye at D&D may have been autobiographical.
There was also at least one player who’d never done an RPG, so I wanted to be part of introducing it to them. This is one of my common threads across my life. If someone is curious, I try to satisfy them.
But really, it just seemed a fun thing to do. And it was, in the basic level that spending time with your friends is. We had some fairly standard fantasy adventures. This is the period when I was teaching myself to write comics, so I used each session as a writing challenge to myself How could I edit that evening to become a story that fits in a 22 page comic, and takes a narrative shape as adventure fiction? What do I keep, what do I lose, what to pump up what to reduce, how to balance characters and so on.
They were terrible, I stress. It’s an exercise. Here’s a random page.
Oh, Kieron. A splash page on an odd numbered page? You were a child.
The useful thing is more the page by page breakdowns and synopsis, of working out what is that reflected story. I never actually did a full issue for everything, and I’d have probably stopped soon enough, but we never found out.
The campaign only lasted three sessions. In the third, we found ourselves trying to find some goblin lair, which was an incredibly awkward to get to. By the time we were there, we figured we wouldn’t go back, so camped. We were all killed in our sleep.
After a few minutes, the DM has second thoughts, and says the goblins captured us. Fine. So we’re all now in the bottom of the dungeon, in a prison cell. We manage an escape and start exploring, tensely. Session ends.
Next morning, the DM has mailed everyone, saying actually they’ve changed their mind again – you should have all died in your sleep, so we’re going with that.
Sure.
Obviously, we never played another session.
I had viewed that as the end of the story, and my last roleplaying experience until the late 00s when I moved to London. Except, I was wrong.
I’d forgotten that I was so frustrated by the experience, and the impression it gave of RPGs to the new player, that I’d run a one-off of Feng Shui. Jim writes about it here, and notes that it directly led to his adult interest in TTRPGs and thus this blog.
Which shows good things can come from even the worst games. Unless you hate this blog, of course, in which case, no, it doesn’t, we all died in our sleep.
Classic (yes, we’re sponsored by “classic” this time) weird-western game. Played a short campaign in my Colorado group, and all I remember is one player being very sulky when the rolls went badly for them.
That was the first time I ever played with someone who was so obviously emotional to really temporary quirks of fate, and found it strange to see someone who was a decade older than me act with less emotional control than my younger brother.
When that’s the weirdness that I most remember about the weird western, that’s not ideal weirdness.
But talking about ideal weirdness…
90) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And Other Strangeness.)
I looked at my list and realised I’d fucked up. My 101 games list actually only had 100 on it. I’d pruned a bunch for various reasons, and now had to add one back in. The problem being is that I pruned them for good reasons, and adding one means I’d likely have to add several. Dilemma.
And then a stroke of fate. Someone on Blue Sky posts that they had got a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and other strangeness) and he had been chatting to my old teenage friend Maz, who said we played it back in the day.
Wait… we played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I thought I never got it to the table.
I chat to Maz and discover that we may have only done a session or two, but he thinks we did – or, at least, we made our characters. He was an angry badger.
TMNT is a stroke of luck in another way – a licensed game of the original dark indie-press Miller’s Daredevil-and-X-men parody TMNT comics which caught the sales wave from the kids cartoon. You can only imagine what the kids made of it. There was nary a cowabunga in sight.
Instead, there was the most amazingly intricate system for making your mutant animals, a pure burst of Erick Wujcik looking at the material and thinking “you know what you need to capture a comic about ninja turtles – a system where you start with an entirely normal animal, and then spend your points on mutating them, like some kind of hyper-specific GURPS fever dream”
It’s not even just spending points on cool stuff. It’s spending points on everything except being the out-the-ark animal. Small animals have less of the mutation points than large ones, but large ones can reduce their size to gain points – in fact, pretty much have to, unless they just want to just be an Elephant with minimal ESP. Small ones have to spend their points on being bigger. Everyone has to spend points on how much they pass for humans, and whether you have hands or not (and how good the hands are). Unless you don’t want to. It’s a game where you can sit down and design a 3/4 size elephant who has psychic powers, or have a mutant mouse, who looks identical to a human being, except for being the size of a fucking mouse.
Basically, if Maz and I only did chargen when we were teens, we had actually played the best bit of TMNT, as the game is the Palladium system, and the Palladium system is the single worst RPG system that I’ve bought multiple games for. I read it amazed, fascinated, bemused. With retrospect, I can see what I was missing – as in, a knowledge of AD&D – but I didn’t see how any of these subsystems were meant to tie together. Say what you want about Rolemaster (I certainly have) but you read it, and you know how to play it, and can guess how many lifetimes it would take to do so.
That’s the thing which most surprised me about the random Bluesky message – I thought I had never got any Palladium game to table, because I didn’t think I knew how. I am also relieved, as it gets me just a chance to talk about Palladium system games in this list.
Apart from the general mess, it’s also got this wonderful “wait… what?” stuff in there, in all the games. Like the Alignment system, which has a variety of types, under the umbrellas of “good”, “selfish” and “evil.” Now, to condense a longer argument, alignment systems are nonsense, but the Palladium one is some extra special sauce, if only for this bit…
Which makes me imagine sitting down to play TMNT and someone says “surely neutral is just shorthand for avoiding extremes, like ‘centrist’ or something?” then Kevin Siembieda bashing down the door while wielding a giant pair of scissors and cutting your manual to pieces for breaking the terms and conditions. .
TMNT is a game that, for better or worse, is just so berserkly filled with creators own idiosyncratic perspectives on what games are, you have to applaud. I mean, not play, but certainly applaud.
A couple of ironies here.
Firstly, when I realised my 101 games list was only 100 games? I was wrong. It was actually 101. I’d forgotten my number one was off the list. So me adding TMNT takes me to 102, and now I’m going to go and edit to see who gets booted.
Secondly, while I didn’t think this game I had ever played, I did actually plan to play it, in the years before I wrote DIE, in the group of the critic, the curious, the designer, the dilettante and me.
That group imploded before we could get there.
That’s another story, but one I felt it was about time we teased.
Previous entries: 101, 100-98.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.
Leave a Reply