Black Gate

And now for something more positive: ten awesome little moments in RPGs, beginning with a very self-serving one.

1) Ex Machina

Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Borgstrom, Christian Gossett, Bradley Kayl and Michelle Lyons’ 2004 Ex Machina was a cyperpunk roleplaying game, published by Canadian game company Guardians of Order. It got a very favorable review from BoingBoing. It was also my first professional editing credit.

It only took me a quarter century of playing and selling RPGs to get into the design end of things.

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By popular demand¹, ten WTF were they thinking moments from classic RPGs, which I admit is something of a target-rich environment. I will limit myself to games I’ve actually seen, which means I get to skip past that one.

[1: Well, a couple of people, anyway.]

1) Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (TSR, 1977)

The 1977 edition of D&D added an orthogonal good vs evil to the law vs chaos morality axis. While humans got freedom of choice regarding where on either axis characters fell, this was not true of some non-human races, which in turn means there are whole races good people are morally obligated to kill when possible. This is by no means unique to D&D but it gets special credit for being the one to establish it as a trope in table-top roleplaying games.

2) Cyberpunk 2020

This may be a misnamed series, because in this case the detail I am very sure I know exactly what the company was thinking.

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Empire of the Petal Throne (PDF version of 1975 TSR edition), Bunnies & Burrows (Frog God Press, 2019), and Stormbringer (Chaosium, 2nd edition, 1985)

People seemed to like old RPG covers. Here’s a more pointless variation: the first ten interesting RPGs I acquired but never found players for.

Empire of the Petal Throne

Number one: that classic, M.A.R. Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne, one of or possibly the first complex, non-faux Medieval European settings for an RPG. Professor Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker’s world of Tekumel predated roleplaying games by decades. The synergy between a complete game world and early RPGs was obvious; as a result TSR was one of many, many companies to try their hand at publishing it. While it had (and has) its avid fanbase, the game never caught on in a big way.

I’ve owned a number of editions. Never played a one!

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