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About OgreCave and its staff
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 12 RPG Gifts in 2010 |
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Twelve RPGs for Christmas By Demian Katz, Ken Newquist, Matthew Pook, Allan Sugarbaker, Mike Sugarbaker, and Andy Vetromile So perhaps your friends enjoy the escapism that comes from a good roleplaying game, or maybe you desperately need to forget all the holiday madness for an evening. Either way, 2010 has spawned several excellent RPGs to give (or receive) this time of year. As per our annual list-giving tradition, we've put together the following suggestions for RPG gifts:
Smallville
Before you soar down to your local game store, be sure to observe OgreCave's full review of
Smallville.
Dragons at Dawn: The First Fantasy Game System
Apocalypse World
The Laundry RPG
Want to hear more of the organization protecting
us from otherdimensional god-like beings? Regardless of your clearance, feel
free to read OgreCave's Random
Encounter with Gareth Hanrahan regarding The Laundry RPG.
FreeMarket
Legends of the Five Rings, Fourth Edition
Blowback
Love in the Time of Seið
The Armitage Files
Wait, you haven't found the trail yet? See OgreCave's full review of
the Trail of Cthulhu core game.
The Dresden Files
Space 1889: Red Sands
Savage Worlds: Super Powers Companion
Yes, we've already given you twelve choices to pick from – but we just can't help ourselves. It's bonus round time:
Gamma World
We'd never advise you to make a "Big Mistake" in your gift giving. As proof, read our full review of
Gamma World.
All of the RPG products we've listed here would make excellent giftage
for the right gamer. However, if you're still searching for gift inspiration, you
should have a look at our other 2010 gift
lists, or even browse OgreCave's review index. You're welcome.
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Fans of Smallville know better than to look up in the sky: Clark
Kent hasn't learned to fly yet. You can, though, in the Smallville
Roleplaying Game. It's everyone's chance to play a superhero or one
of their cohorts in a rich and detailed setting that beautifully
recreates the social dynamic of the TV show, where Kent is learning to
accept his destiny as Superman. A variation of the Cortex System,
characters rate their Traits and even their relations with other
characters through dice. When
there's back-and-forth between people, whether a debate over the
Vigilante Registration Act or just a knock-down drag-out donnybrook, it
becomes a game of one-upmanship, taking turns trying to get a bigger die
roll than your opponent. Whoever gives up first suffers
Stress – he loses the argument, or the fight ends with him
half-buried in Metropolis Park, and Watchtower (the GM) gets extra dice for use against the players. Players get Plot Points for their trouble, to activate powers and get
better rolls. A simple yet revolutionary system, one that maps perfectly
to the feel of the TV program, and a great GMing advice section make the
Smallville Roleplaying Game, well, super.
You haven't seen "old school renaissance" quite like this: Daniel Boggs
did extensive research to reconstruct the system Dave Arneson used for
the Blackmoor campaigns that led to the invention of D&D.
Perhaps inevitably, the game he's put together from that research does
contain some new design work to stitch the bits together, but maybe
historical reenactment isn't the point: Dragons at Dawn's text,
and its plentiful snippets of Arneson wisdom, put the focus of creating
the game back at the play table. It's low budget and looks it, but if
you want something as raw, unpolished, and passionate as the gaming of
the era to which it looks back, this one is tough to beat.
How can a game feel so straightforward and so revolutionary at the same
time? That's the zen of Vincent Baker working for you. The Dogs In
The Vineyard designer is back with what's arguably his first major
design since, and it's a showstopper from its arresting cover all the
way out to the gaggle of indie designers who can't seem to build
anything but AW hacks anymore. The game's central innovation of
Moves, discrete actions that each given character type take in the
system whenever they take them in the fiction, aren't just a
so-brilliant-it's-obvious distillation of what traditional RPGs do.
They're also a wonderful way to convey the game's
band-of-sexy-nomads-against-the-creepy-unknown setting (think "Firefly:
Beyond Thunderdome"). Don't sweat that price tag: this one is geared for
campaigns and will be a touchstone for the next five years or more.
Modern twists on Lovecraftian mythos are not an entirely new idea, but
when given a healthy coating of Cold War spy missions and bureaucratic
red tape. Based on the Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross,
The Laundry RPG drafts players into duty within the UK's
more secret division of the secret service – the folks
tasked with holding back the Great Old Ones from crossing into our
dimension and ending, well, everything. Laundry agents will employ the
latest in occult weapons and smartphone sorcerous countermeasure programs, but
the danger out in the field will still require them to be ever vigilant.
Part Delta Green, part Paranoia, and all powered by a
tweaked Basic Roleplaying System, this is a Cthulhu-style game fans should not miss. But if
you want those out-of-pocket expenses back, you'd better keep your
receipts.
FreeMarket is also in the "revolutionary" department, but you
will not be finding it in the "straightforward" section. It's a bit more
"throwing both birds while confounding your every expectation." On the
orbital toroid FreeMarket Station, you're immortal (from backups),
everything is free, and there is no law except "make people like you."
It's colorful, hilarious, difficult and – let's use the word once more
before the decade is out – awesome. And no, it's not really about free
markets. This lavish box set with cards, full-color rules, tokens and
lovely art makes a big-box-level gift for the forward-thinking
roleplayer – get it while it lasts.
Fifteen years after John Wick's classic first
edition, AEG brings the premier RPG of oriental fantasy back into print
with a beautiful core book. While the core "roll and keep"
mechanics remain the same, the rest of the rules have been streamlined
and standardized to make for easier gameplay. Apart from making it
timeline neutral to again make it easier to play, the L5R setting of Rokugan
remains unchanged. The Great Clans send their samurai bushi to wage war
against each other during the Summer, the courtiers to jockey for power
at court during the Winter, ably supported by the shugenja who call upon
the Kami for their divine aid. All the while a great evil lurks behind
the Kaiu Wall in the Shadowlands, seeking to subvert the honor and
heart of every samurai loyal to the Emperor. A game of manners and
culture as much as conflict and war, Legends of the Five Rings is a
classic '90s RPG made all the better by its contemporary redesign.
Pardon me, but you got some Burn Notice on you. For those unfamiliar,
this full-color indie game is about locked-out spies trying to make ends
meet and keep their loved ones safe while staying out of sight and maybe
figuring out who got them fired and why. The relationship mechanics,
focused on favors and stress, is of a kind we've never seen before and
is totally in tune with the setting, and the caper-planning minigame is
satisfying too. Elizabeth Shoemaker's game makes an excellent gift for
gamers who like to shoot people in the face literally and metaphorically.
Is it possible to be such an indie RPG that you turn the corner and
become the perfect system for hardcore system-hating immersionists? Perhaps not on
purpose. Matthijs Holter's game Archipelago is so unconstraining it's nearly an improv exercise,
with rules that almost boil down to "safe words" for when someone would otherwise be jolted
out of the fiction – do this differently, say more about that. It's been met with enthusiasm
from some surprising corners, but its parallel character stories can make the game as
disconnected as, well, a bunch of islands. Jason Morningstar of Fiasco fame borrowed it
and made this scenario, a tightly interwoven and ripe-for-tragedy scenario of Viking magic and
power. It's perfectly priced for a one-shot, and as a bonus all proceeds from the game's sales go
to the 
Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying has always been clue orientated,
and never more so in Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu by authors Kenneth
Hite and Robin D. Laws. Now Mr Laws has pushed the use of clues even
further by presenting not a fully fledged campaign, but a campaign frame
built around first a set of letters, and then a series of organizations
and persons, places and tomes, that either have an interest in or links
to the letters. The aim of the book is not to follow a campaign, but to
build a campaign around the letters, with helpful advice aplenty on how
the Keeper can work with his players to improvise. In an age when the
appearance of a new Cthulhu campaign is all too rare, The Armitage
Files provides a new approach that can be enjoyed and created by Keeper
and players of Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu alike.
Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series of novels explores a world in
which vampires, faeries, werewolves, and wizards are real, but as is
traditional in the Urban Fantasy genre, remain hidden from the populace
at large. In Chicago, the private eye and wizard Harry Dresden sees it
as his duty to not only see that such mythical creatures remain hidden,
but that humanity is kept safe from their machinations. The conceit of
Evil Hat Productions' The Dresden Files RPG is that it has been written
by colleagues of Harry Dresden himself, describing not only the Chicago
of the books, but also how the players and GM can collaborate together
to create both their characters, their relationships, and the fantastic
nature of their home city together. This is perfectly in keeping with
the FATE 3.0 mechanics first seen in the publisher's Spirit of the
Century RPG, which encourages player character interaction with each
other and the world described by the GM.
If Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were to write an
RPG, Space 1889 would be it. Originally published in 1988
by GDW, it begins with Thomas Edison inventing the "Ether Propellor" and
traveling through the "luminiferous aether" to land on Mars in 1870. By
1889, the Great Powers have colonies on Mars and Venus, and Ether Flyers
are probing the limits of the asteroid belt. With the Great Powers come
the tensions between them, with small wars fought through proxies as
they seek to expand their empires. While dinosaurs have been found on
Venus, and the Martians stand in the way of colonial expansion, every
right and proper gentleman and lady adheres to
the prim, stiff attitudes of the Victorian Age. The original rules
never quite lived up to the setting, so the appearance of a new version
of Space 1889 using the Pulp action Savage Worlds rules is
welcome indeed. All you need are those rules, because Red Sands is very
complete, including the "Red Sands" campaign, which takes our stalwart
adventurers across the Solar System. So doff your hat
to the ladies and curtsey to the gentlemen, because Space 1889: Red
Sands really does offer "Science Fiction Role Playing in a More
Civilized Time."
Most superheroes games are crunchy, rules-heavy constructs that take
hours to create characters and custom-built spreadsheets to run them at
the game table. Savage Worlds ditches all of that to keep things
fast, fun, and furious in its Super Powers Companion. Published in a
digest-format that matches the Savage Worlds Explorers Guide, the
slim book contains a complete, easy-to-use, easy-to-scale super powers
system, a cool chapter on building your own secret lair, and dozens of
ready-to-run heroes and villains. The rules aren't crunchy enough to
accommodate ultra-complex characters like Batman or Ironman, but they
handle street-level and mid-level super heroics beautifully.
Gamma World is an apocalypse in a box, including almost
everything you need to play hyperintelligent empathic trees or
telekinetic mutant roach swarms adventuring their way through a world
remade by the "Big Mistake". Embracing the gonzo side of
post-apocalyptic fiction (rather than the more realistic Mad Max
or Darwin's World), Gamma World uses streamlined D&D
Fourth Edition rules to give players a fixed set of reality-warping
powers, alpha mutations that flux with every combat, and omega tech to
overawe their enemies. The box contains a digest-sized rulebook, two
maps, monster tokens, character sheets and a few booster packs of
alpha/omega power cards – but sadly, no dice. We're confident you
can find a few, though.