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Although we didn't get it recently, we did discover it recently... Unknown Armies first edition. Had it for 25+ years(!) but didn't know it. After consulting the Concordance of our personal histories, we sussed out that the Husband purchased it at a Denver rpg store 1998 (receipt used a bookmark in the core book). From the date, it was a few days before I was coming through town to visit for a few days whilst I searched for a place to live and work so I can legally stay in the country. Jokes's on the Husband. I never left.

As I was saying in a comment in the How faithful ... to ... premade settings? Thread (but didn't post; comment went divergent and crashed), we don't keep much canon in games, so already I'm laying out streets and building houses for our new game world. Not quite Delta Green but a whole lot of Nephilim; Scooby Doo reskinned by William Burroughs and the Davids Lynch & Cronenberg. Haven't been this excited about a "new" game in a while.

Long live the new canon.

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Unknown Armies is great. One of the few RPGs that I like every edition of and would play any just to be able to play UA :smile: First Edition is still great with a simple yet flavourful ruleset. Some of the setting details are pre-9/11 and firmly placed in the 90s, which is the main area the later editions improved on as time went by.
 
I see what they did there ...

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Unknown Armies is great. One of the few RPGs that I like every edition of and would play any just to be able to play UA :smile: First Edition is still great with a simple yet flavourful ruleset. Some of the setting details are pre-9/11 and firmly placed in the 90s, which is the main area the later editions improved on as time went by.
If I hadn't already read 3rd edition, I would certainly have liked reading 1st even more, but 3rd is what we'll play. While beginning our tale in 1996.

UA3 seems to be everything for Unknown Armies that OTE3 was not for Over the Edge.
Your weirdness mileage may vary.
 
Some WFRP 4E hardcover books arrived yesterday, Salzenmund and Sea of Claws.

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Not sure when I will get them to give these a good read, but I've been perusing their pdf versions for the past three months
There's an interesting review posted about both of them on this blog, which is more or less in line with my thoughts as well.
I'm almost up to date with WFRP 4E, just waiting on Lustria to be a pdf+print release (although I suspect I may never use Lustria, my WFRP campaigns will likely always be in The Old Empire)
 
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A friend contacted me recently: "hey, I don't have any more use for my Runequest stuff, do you want it? It's a gift!"
Quick-witted as I am, I immediately answered: "huh, oh, wait, uh, no, I mean no, I meant yes, YES!"

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This was the first french translation, I sold it when I was young and needed the money, so it was cool to get those book back on the shelf. If I don't use them during the next year, I'll give them away as well though. These are cool books that deserve better than collecting dust.

Running a Traveller campaign reignited my love for all 2d6-based related systems, one of them being Barbarians of Lemuria (I published the first french edition of the game back then). I realized I only had Dogs of W.A.R in PDF format which of course, sucks, it's described as "a real man's roleplaying game", and real men read books in physical form. Joking aside this is such a great game, you can go G.I Joe, Delta Force or Dogs of War with this one (and quite frankly any modern pulp adventure). It's clearly written tongue-in-cheek but it's a robust and fun system that plays great at the table. PDF on DTRPG, print on Lulu and it's worth every penny.

As I stated in another thread, I kinda gave up on finding The Valley of the Pharaohs boxed set at a reasonable price... But I managed to find a copy of the rulebook for a very reasonable 15$ (well and another 15$ for postage on top of that). It's as good as I expected, you can run a game set in ancient Egypt once you've read this slim 48 pages book. There's so much information packed in those pages, that makes me wonder how we came to consider book size as any indicator of quality, I've read 400 ages book that have less information than this one. Last book that gave me this feeling was Gangbusters!
It's also such an odd game in the Palladium game lines: still d20 for combat and d100 for skills but no levels, it's mostly historical, never going over the top. It's a nice, clean and simple game about a subject that the author seems to love very much. This will see some play this year.
 
I thought I’d pick up the Shining Kingdoms adventures for 2d20 Conan since the grace period of the licence expires at the end of June 2023. Frankly, they have no place in this thread. However, the “Isle of Eons” by Jason Durall alerted me to the existence of an eponymous Howard story that I’d missed. It’s an incomplete 1920s tale of two men shipwrecked on a mysterious island that reveals Secrets No Man Should Learn. It’s obscure but appeared in this 1970s collection. Acquired!IMG_3235.jpeg
 
this is such a great game, you can go G.I Joe, Delta Force or Dogs of War with this one (and quite frankly any modern pulp adventure). It's clearly written tongue-in-cheek but it's a robust and fun system that plays great at the table. PDF on DTRPG, print on Lulu and it's worth every penny.
The A-team is almost a perfect fit for it as well.
 
The A-team is almost a perfect fit for it as well.
I have wanted to run an A Team Dogs of WAR for years, I will do it in 2024 if not at a virtual con this year.

edit to say I may use Dicey Tales instead…
 
Did I ever tell anyone here that I was obsessed with Pirates? I bought this little beauty from Night Owl Workshop: Treasure Island!
It's a nice wee resource and gives you some random tables but also some nice history details of the port of Bristol.
You can play as is, just like the classic book, or use it as a resource and do your own thing (perhaps in your version Flint's ghost is real and stalking the crew!).

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Oh God, I remember seeing Underground in the bookstore as a teenager and chuckling... "Amendments 25, 26, 27, and 28 are sponsored by TasteeGhoul." They actually had rules for social change (you could improve education levels or decrease crime in your neighborhood), and improving one thing would cause problems with something else unless you spent more points.

I finally had the chance to buy it 30 years later in the discount bin. The person I was with at the time had no clue what I was raving about.
 
Adventures in Middle Earth was better suited for 5e than 5e was.
I should mention that I'm not really a fan of 5e per se. But I think it could work for LoTR, assuming you wanted that epic level of character. My own personal preference for ME would always be MERP or Against the Dark Master.
However, I'd certainly have a look at AiME. I presume that's the Cubical 7 one?
 
I should mention that I'm not really a fan of 5e per se. But I think it could work for LoTR, assuming you wanted that epic level of character. My own personal preference for ME would always be MERP or Against the Dark Master.
However, I'd certainly have a look at AiME. I presume that's the Cubical 7 one?
Yeah I loved it. It’s out of print now. I don’t know much about the new one, but if it is built off of the same core, I think it will be great.
 
I should mention that I'm not really a fan of 5e per se. But I think it could work for LoTR, assuming you wanted that epic level of character. My own personal preference for ME would always be MERP or Against the Dark Master.
However, I'd certainly have a look at AiME. I presume that's the Cubical 7 one?

I prefer the TOR original ruleset both 1e and 2e are well made for Middle Earth but AiME does the job of D&D for Middle Earth as well as it can be done.
 
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I have both TOR and AiME because I'm a Tolkien collector. I had the TOR first, but my mate was crowdfunding the D&D 5E version, and I just got caught up with him, heh heh.
To tell you the truth, they are very similar. Same artwork, and many of the same peripheral game mechanics. The core mechanics are different, but overall they feel similar. TOR use of Hope ports to D&D 5E Inspiration, but TOR does it better.

I prefer the D&D core mechanic however, I find TOR feels more clumsy actually, it's a bunch of dice and a wild dice, and I'm not sure how it does unskilled actions. At least D&D feels a bit smoother in that respect, and as a GM I'ld run it over TOR for that alone, as well as player familarity.
But in most other ways the experience of TOR and AiMe is more or less the same for evoking the Tolkien flavour, given that the same authors worked on both.

Actually, just to add to the Heresy, I greatly prefer using Fate Core as the engine, and using these TOR/AiME books for inspiration.
The Fate system is just more liberating when it comes to balancing Elves vs Hobbits vs Humans etc. Aspects really shine when you get them right, and cover alot of ground. Fate is also great for not having to stick to a Class structure like D&D promotes.

The narrative emphasis of the Fate Core rules tends to suit Middle Earth much better than a crunchy system (and no, it's not a storygame).

I usually make my own character sheets for Fate and retrap them for the setting, so it all tends to have just as much flavour as the TOR/AiME. I use TOR/AiME supplements for the main resources (along with some of my old MERP supplements). I ran the mini-campaign from TOR Bree book last year and it went great

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So that's my heresy, heh heh
 
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Wow, flash back to several years back at TBP, when anytime someone asked for a game recommendation, Fate was offered.

A game about professional wrestling? Fate
A game about underworld hustlers trying to trade corpses and souls? Fate
A game about superheroes who are powered by pantheons? Fate
A game about a grimdark future where mankind is ruled by a god emperor and the players goal in the gam ei s to collect gems 1 by 1 by defeating alien overlords? Fate
 
Anything gritty like Grimdark, Sword & Sorcery, or Hard Sci Fi would be a godawful fit for Fate Core.
Anyone who says otherwise may have been blinded by what they thought was the 'new shiny favourite game' , and many of them are probably still saying things like that now except they refer to PbtA instead of Fate Core. Just like if someone thinks they are edgey and old school, it's all Mork Borg.

Reality is there is no one size fits all

I was rarely on TBP during that period, I was more likely frequenting BRPCentral at that time before spending more time here.

So I'm use Fate Core on its own merits.
It certainly can't do everything, and I get a headache with trying to invoke Aspects at times.
Fate is not my favourite system overall, and these days I find Cypher System is also a good fit for that same niche, but different horses for different courses.

However Fate Core is still pretty good for Pulp Adventure/Action Flick (stuff like Savage Worlds, Broken Compass/Outgunned, etc) and turns out it can run Middle Earth just as good, if not better, than TOR and AimE (core mechanics only, not their peripheral rules and trappings, which I just ported across).

Replace Fate Pts with Hope Pts, make sure the Aspects feel in keeping with the setting, and its all good to go.
The fact that all of my group are big Middle Earth readers helped quite a bit, and we have been playing a weekly mmo session of LOTRO for donkeys years, so it's kinda just an extension of that. Not having to stick to canon rules, just having a framework to hang our thoughts on, that's also part of the appeal.

If you look at the characters posted, we went a bit off-road: a Hobbit Investigator, a Dunedain Ranger/Trader, and an ancient Nandorin Elven Wanderer.
Fate allowed us not to worry about any Classes so we felt quite free to create character concepts. Also having a group mix like that wouldn't of worked in many rpg systems, the Elf alone would have been too powerful for the rest of the group.
We set the game in the late Third Age (about 5 years before the War Of The Ring), so having a Nandorin is a big deal, the Nandor Elves were around in the First Age with the Noldor Elves, so they would be default high level characters in a level-based system, yet all that balances out nicely with Fate.

Does not mean I prefer Fate Core for a more gritty approach. My favourite gritty systems would be BRP/Mythras, WFRP, ICE (MERP/Against The Darkmaster), stuff like that, but Middle Earth with Fate Core runs surprisingly good.

Should never knock something until having a go at it I say, and I'm glad I followed my hunch and went down the rabbit hole with Fate Core trying to find something to hang all our Middle Earth lore from.

If TOR had a better core mechanic then I would have been happy with it (because everything else is really great). AiME is a step up for me in regards to core mechanics, and would be my go-to with most players due to it being D&D, but we wanted to feel a bit more free form, so Fate Core it was. With another group of players I would be happy with AiME/LOTR 5E.

I could actually see a Black Hack variant doing a great Middle Earth as well (especially if is not Class-driven, something like Black Sword Hack, but with Middle Earth trappings).
 
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I should mention that I'm not really a fan of 5e per se. But I think it could work for LoTR, assuming you wanted that epic level of character. My own personal preference for ME would always be MERP or Against the Dark Master.
However, I'd certainly have a look at AiME. I presume that's the Cubical 7 one?
Totally agree on the MERP angle. I have AtDM, but haven't had a chance to take it for a spin.
 
I have both TOR and AiME because I'm a Tolkien collector. I had the TOR first, but my mate was crowdfunding the D&D 5E version, and I just got caught up with him, heh heh.
To tell you the truth, they are very similar. Same artwork, and many of the same peripheral game mechanics. The core mechanics are different, but overall they feel similar. TOR use of Hope ports to D&D 5E Inspiration, but TOR does it better.

I prefer the D&D core mechanic however, I find TOR feels more clumsy actually, it's a bunch of dice and a wild dice, and I'm not sure how it does unskilled actions. At least D&D feels a bit smoother in that respect, and as a GM I'ld run it over TOR for that alone, as well as player familarity.
But in most other ways the experience of TOR and AiMe is more or less the same for evoking the Tolkien flavour, given that the same authors worked on both.

Actually, just to add to the Heresy, I greatly prefer using Fate Core as the engine, and using these TOR/AiME books for inspiration.
The Fate system is just more liberating when it comes to balancing Elves vs Hobbits vs Humans etc. Aspects really shine when you get them right, and cover alot of ground. Fate is also great for not having to stick to a Class structure like D&D promotes.

The narrative emphasis of the Fate Core rules tends to suit Middle Earth much better than a crunchy system (and no, it's not a storygame).

I usually make my own character sheets for Fate and retrap them for the setting, so it all tends to have just as much flavour as the TOR/AiME. I use TOR/AiME supplements for the main resources (along with some of my old MERP supplements). I ran the mini-campaign from TOR Bree book last year and it went great

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So that's my heresy, heh heh
We have another convert! I love those sheets too!
 
Anything gritty like Grimdark, Sword & Sorcery, or Hard Sci Fi would be a godawful fit for Fate Core.
In your opinion. It's worked well for me. I think anyone who says that X is not a good fit for anyone's game is pulling out the badwrongfun card. As long as your table likes it, it's the right choice, IMO.
 
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