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[SalmonGod]

Pnx mentioned in the happy thread about putting together a gaming group with a friend, but not knowing what to run.  I started putting together a list of unique games in my collection as potential inspiration and decided this deserved its own thread.

I'm just going to compile a list of interesting tabletop rpgs that don't get nearly as much attention as they deserve, mostly by virtue of being anything other than D&D or White Wolf.

The Burning Wheel -- Fascinating system.  It's a little cumbersome, but all the rules are geared towards interesting storytelling (on a far broader scope than what cool combat stuff you can do), rather than crunchiness for its own sake.  I think it's genius and desperately want to play it, but have never had the opportunity.  The base system is low fantasy taken almost directly from Tolkien, but there are books for fitting the game into a feudal Japan setting, a space marine type thing, or the world of Mouse Guard by David Petersen.

Amber is a great diceless system and a crazy awesome setting for roleplay, if you're familiar with the source material.

Obsidian: The Age of Judgement is kind of a Doom-like setting.  Apocalypse came and earth got taken over by demons.  The final remainders of humanity are holed up in a giant steel cube cyberpunk fortress city that is slowly being infiltrated by demonic cultism and such.  Very grimdark.

Little Fears -- A really neat little game where you play children and stuff like the boogeyman is real.  There's even a dimension of evil that is accessed through the closet.  Your favorite toys and security blankets and stuff have real powers by virtue of your belief.  Adults are incapable of recognizing all this stuff is going on.  You know... it would be perfect for a Slenderman story.

Gumshoe System:  A detective mystery game.  There are multiple settings and books for it, including Trail of Cthulhu.  The Book of Unrelenting Horror is one of the most amazing rpg sourcebooks I've ever read.  Their writing style in general is very immersive and inspiring.

Underworld -- This is one I picked up many years ago.  I think it was Gencon 2001.  Written by a group of designers that split off from White Wolf and made their own company.  I've never seen them after that year, and I'm guessing this book is probably a super obscure item now.  In fact... holy shit, this is the only reference to the book that comes up on a Google search of the company's name and book title.  It's an interesting system, though.  The only coin-flip system I've ever seen.  It's based on subterranean New York, where the superstitions and urban legends of the massive population above literally seeps into the ground and coagulates into a mystical living world in the labyrinthine sewer and train tunnels beneath the city.  Very open ended, imaginative, and fun character creation system.  I once made a graffiti artist who was just a weird sentient megaphone/spray paint/propeller contraption.

Reign: Enchiridion is a neat thing.  According to the author, it's designed to be an add-on to any game, providing rules for large-scale/long-term strategy and politics.  On a quick skim, it looked mostly geared towards fantasy kingdom management and mainly compatible with the author's other games, but like it could be used for just about anything with a little extra work.  Some good ideas.

Dread -- This is a game that's earned some notoriety.  It's a horror game.  The hook of it is that the rules system revolves around a game of Jenga.  Whenever you perform a check for an action, you remove a block from the tower.  When the tower falls, you fail... horribly.  Supposedly, it's an absolutely amazing mechanic for slow tension building.  I know little else about it... really need to give it a read.

Unhallowed -- This game takes place about 200 years after a zombie apocalypse happened in the Victorian era.  It markets itself as Frankenpunk.  It's kinda like steampunk... except there's less technology and more fucked up necromancy-type stuff.

Outbreak: Undead -- A zombie game that just game out last year.  Big and beautiful source book.  I've barely looked through it at all, so I don't know much about it... other than it's highly detailed and attempts a more serious tone than All Flesh Must Be Eaten, which always felt half-assed to me.

Qin: The Warring States -- A high quality game taking place in China's warring states period.

The Seventh Seal -- You play a Sentinel, which is basically a soldier of god.  Six of the seven seals holding back apocalypse have been broken, and you have for some reason been chosen to wield divine power to prevent the seventh seal from being broken.  Modern setting.  I bought it several years ago, and don't remember it well... other than it was decently interesting.




Got any more interesting games?  Write a little about them and add them to the list.  Personal experience with any games already on the list would be awesome as well.  I'll try to flesh this out some more later.

[Reudh]

You should try F.A.T.A.L just so you can boggle at the disgusting, unbridled horror that is that game.

[Hanzoku]

You... don't like SalmonGod much, do you?

Stay, far, far away from F.A.T.A.L. Or at least limit yourself to it'sTV Tropes page.

The Jenga system sounds fun, except for knowing at a certain point that even the simplest check is going to result in a horrific backfire as the Jenga tower wavers with a passing air current. The amount of backstabbing involved in making someone else have to make the check must get horrific.

I used to like EarthDawn as a setting, and it's a fairly minor player. The setting was well designed and the system of magic and levelling was fun. Also has points for allowing a range of options depending on where you go - it's very easy to be a standard adventuring game or a grim dystopian after the apocalypse setting.

[Neyvn]

I learned of one called BITN, Bump in the Night, you play as "Monsters" such as Vampires, Were Creatures, Ghosts and few other different monster creatures. Its quite interesting, but can sadly be quite broken with a few MinMaxers playing. Whats even more annoying would be if a few Meta Players are doing so, there is a Flaw which gives you a lot of points to put towards powers known as "True Name", a flaw which was sadly ignored and avoided within my small gaming group due to the DM normally caving to one MinMaxer/Meta Player who ALWAYS took Telepathy and Such cause she was a huge Jean Grey/X-Man fan. The moment you took True Name, the first action she would do would be to check everyone for such a flaw with her powers and annoyingly the DM allowed it. T_T Would LOVE to see this played again, it was so much fun in theory...

[Viken]

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be for generic systems, but I have two good sci-fi RPGs, the first being Stars Without Number and the second being Traveller. 

Stars Without Number is more generic; while Traveller allows everything from crafting/building custom spacecraft and space battles all the way up to armadda-level, running a group of scavengers to ruling a solar empire and all the other sort of goodies and options that people in Bay12 love. 

[NewsMuffin]

There's my personal favorite system The Riddle of Steel, but the only thing truly unique or different about it is the magic system, which is neat in concept, but the execution is a little flawed.

Geiger Counter is pretty interesting. It simulates a horror flick, and it's free. That should be enough to warrant a quick little inspection.

There's a game system that I found a couple days ago called Everyone is John, and it's exactly what it says on the tin; every player is John... well, the voices in his head. Every so often, they vie for control. I haven't had a chance to play it, but it looks fun.

Uh... There's Eclipse Phase. It has a unique setting and play style. Basically, all of the players are humans/uplifted animals that have uploaded their brains into a machine that they can put in other bodies. They use these bodies to do contracts for the secret space police. All in all, it's pretty cool.

Ars Magica, from what I've heard, has a really awesome magic system, but I haven't really read much of it, so I can't really tell you anything.

Dogs in the Vineyard seems good if you're into religious stuff.

Don't Rest your head is about insomniacs going insane trying not to sleep. I've heard good things about it.

There's a new game for ORE (the system Reign is built on) out called Monsters and Other Childish Things (or something like that). My friend has being raving about it for the past few days, but I haven't read it. It's apparently about little kids making friends with the monsters under the bed or something. I'll give it a look over, and see what it's about.

[Nadaka]

My favorite game system is d20 modern.

[Cthulhu]

Ones I've played or know about:

All flesh Must Be Eaten:  Not that great.  It takes rule zero a little too far and ends up with a lot of rules that just don't make any sense at all.  The hit location system is completely incomprehensible and I usually scrap and replace it when I run a game, which is rare because I don't like it.  Now that I think about it I'm not sure I've actually played it.  It's one of my perennial campaigns I never actually start because for some reason I feel like I have to fully map the entire city which is ridiculous and I don't know why I always tried to do that

Dark Heresy:  By far the best of the 40k RPGs.  You're acolytes in service of the Inquisition.  The ruleset isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.  Among other things, there's absolutely no reason to ever not use full auto, because full auto has such huge benefits.  The biggest flaw is the nature of things like Perils of the Warp.  Stuff like that isn't too bad in regular 40k because it's one-off games.  With persistent characters, playing a psyker or anything like that will inevitably get you killed.

Rogue Trader:  A decent 40k RPG.  Very open-ended which can be a problem depending on your GMing style and players.  Could probably be fun as hell with the right player and the right group, Rogue Traders have basically unlimited power and have to be egregiously heretical or disruptive to get in trouble.  Takes steps to mitigate psyker suicide and other flaws.

Deathwatch:  A not very good 40k RPG.  Space Marines can kill stuff and that's basically it.  The 40k system isn't robust enough for a pure combat game, so Deathwatch is often a slog unless you're a very good GM and can make it work.

Black Crusade:  An improvement over Deathwatch.  You finally get to be the bad guys.  In some ways it's cool, but it has some similar problems with rogue trader, namely odd rules that probably aren't necessary and kind of feel constraining.

Only War:  The newest one, it's not even out.  It actually sounds like it could be pretty fun.  Similar potential problems to Deathwatch, though the  PCs are automatically more relatable and better suited to non-combat encounters.

I know more, I'll try to remember them all and bring them up.

[Darvi]

With persistent characters, playing a psyker or anything like that will inevitably get you killed.

In a 40k game, just dying is a result.

[timferius]

Fiasco:
Haven't played it yet, but it is deffinitly interesting by the looks of things.
It's a GM-less RPG that plays in a few hours. Heavily story based. There's a video of Will Wheaton and a few other people playing it (from the web-series Table-Top http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/).

[Mephisto]

I've always been interested in Eclipse Phase but my group never got around to playing before we all moved away from each other. You know how Shadowrun is basically twenty minutes in the future? Eclipse Phase is basically twenty minutes in Shadowrun's future. It's also got a Creative Commons license and you can download most if not all of the books for free.

[Darvi]

Really, I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the Maid RPG yet.

[Boltur]

As a person who only ever played D&D,Warhammer and Neuroshima this thread is very interesting. Now, if only i had time to try them all...

[MaximumZero]

Shadowrun, BigEyesSmallMouth and the aforementioned MaidRPG were pretty good, even if all of them were more than a little broken.

[Solifuge]

Though it's just below White Wolf in its mainstreamness, might I suggest Shadowrun? It's cyberpunk fantasy with a gritty, dystopian setting. Corporations have essentially become the new government, the world is wired and overlaid by an electronic web of Virtual Reality known as the Matrix (Note: it coined both the term and idea before the movies), spirits and magic have suddenly reemerged, and a genetic plague has mutated a percentage of newborn humans into beings resembling elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, and other beings from myths and religions. The players play as a team of Shadowrunners; freelance mercenaries and specialists of all sorts, who act as deniable assets in corporate warfare and covert operations.

In my current group, we have a well-connected and cybernetically-enhanced troll bounty-hunter, a scrawny elf hacker and bio-mechanic who drives the team around in his house/van, a human private investigator who moonlights as a Faustian occultist, and an elf weapons guy and demolitions expert. The rules are robust and easy to learn; you roll a pool of d6s based on skill and circumstances, where each 5 or 6 counts as a success. Overall, it makes for some really gritty, realistic challenges; guns and weapons can be quite lethal even in the hands of the untrained, no matter how skilled or cybernetically augmented you are. The system and setting are tons of fun, and I'd highly reccomend them.

Also, NewMuffin, I might know your friend... a few years back a friend of mine ran a series of one-shots of all kinds of game systems, including Dogs in the Vineyard, Don't Rest Your Head, and Monsters and Other Childish Things, all of which were really enjoyable. The one-shots had an overarching story; we revisited the kids we rolled for MaOCT some 20 years later when we played DRYH, and plot elements from each session were tied into this big, surreal, non-chronologically organized storyline. It was really cool, but it might have colored my opinions of these systems a bit.