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[Logical2u]

In continuing with my habit of starting threads I can't keep up with later, let's try a thread for compiling obscure pen-and-paper RPGs - think Dungeons and Dragons - that you own (i.e. that have physical books) or that you've found online. Obviously there's no definitive standard for 'obscure', but it's probably safe that the big systems (Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Eclipse Phase, Fate, etc) probably aren't obscure, at least any more.

This is in part inspired by the "Obscure and/or Mockable RPG books" thread from Something Awful, but I'm sure B12 either has their own RPGs to contribute or a unique take on this. I'll start with the two ones I'm currently most interested in...

A running list of discussed RPGs

• This post: Touhou: Tale of Phantasmal Land, Magical Burst
• Pathfinder???
• MORE Pathfinder???
• Neuroshima
• Everyone is John, Disapora
• A Wicked Age, Microscope, How to Host a Dungeon, Nobilis, Legend of the 5 Rings, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Creepy Wall [No links to rulebooks, though]
• Microscope again, All outta Bubblegum
• Powers and Perils
• Encounter Critical
• Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7th edition

Touhou: Tale of Phantasmal Land

I'm currently GMing this RPG! Touhou: Tale of Phantasmal Land is a tabletop RPG game written by a user by the name of Bahamut from Something Awful. However, the book has not been updated in some time due to the author being busy with a "to be sold in stores" tabletop RPG called Treasure Hunters. Even more unfortunate is that the last release of the book has major errors, omissions, or is just plain too dense. However it's clearly workable, although play-by-post is maybe not the best option.

If you can get through the rulebook, character creation is relatively quick, once you know what each stat means and what FP are and can do for you. Combat is also relatively fast, until spellcards go off, and then everything slows down. Out-of-combat things are either flushed out too much or not enough in the rulebook. If you want to run this, you should make sure you have a good GM (which I am not yet, maybe) so that things aren't just... well, a Touhou game, with only shooting.

Requires a penchant for producing engrish and some basic knowledge of Japanese culture. Touhou knowledge not required though recommended since your PCs might expect elements from the games to appear.

Uses only D6s, so you don't need to buy any fancy dice. No other equipment required though the Touhou Wiki is recommended. I personally think this game works best by having players having hidden character sheets, so that means playing in person is somewhat more difficult...

Magical Burst

Don't let the name fool you: this is basically "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" the tabletop RPG. Think a super-depressing, soul-crushing, world-changing version of Sailor Moon and you're on the right track. The rule-book is pretty light, thankfully... well, light on rules, heavy on depression-inducing random tables. I hope you like terrible curses!

I haven't played this yet (though I kind of want to...), so I'm afraid for this one I can't offer any experiences of my own. It seems light-enough on rules and heavy enough on random tables to allow new GMs and players to quickly start playing, although the episodic nature and the requirement for storycrafting by the entire group means that play-by-post isn't going to be as effective in this case: you'll probably want to meet in person, or use something like IRC or d20.net to run this one.

Requires the ability to survive trauma and inflict it on others, it seems. Might require the ability to survive thousands of half-assed references to Puella Magi Madoka Magica jokes, internet memes, image macros, and Texts from Walpurgis Nacht.

Again uses only d20s, has a few tokens but you can print them off from the web. Also has a random character generator.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hint: I really like digitally available playbooks because it means everyone can at least read them, and owning physical copies of rulebooks for games that I meant never play has felt weird to me. It's hard to find groups to play games with!

Also, yeah, gonna start it off with some weird ones, I know, I know!

[Girlinhat]

*Doesn't read any of the post and blurts out loudly*
HEY WHAT ABOUT PATHFI- oh. :|

[Logical2u]

*Doesn't read any of the post and blurts out loudly*
HEY WHAT ABOUT PATHFI- oh. :|

_{Glad we got that out of the way early.}

Pathfinder even has its own MMO now, hence why I claim it's not obscure. Eclipse Phase is debatable though.

For people who want to play Pathfinder, though, try here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/. It's most of the game's rules set out in a relatively-easy-to-navigate way. However some rules are hidden on the wrong pages, for example, and there's not much in terms of character building rules there.

Having played Pathfinder, though, I will say that 1. Strength is good. Skimping on strength is not the key to victory if you roll badly. 2. If you have at-will spells USE THEM. Use them all the time! 3. For god's sake keep your spell list handy. 4. Like any other Dungeons-and-Dragons like, how much you enjoy the game is very much dependent on your GM, your party, and how good the two of them are at improvising.

There's nothing especially broken about the game that I recall, except maybe Colour Spray, wizards in general, and two-handed fighters sometimes.

[Girlinhat]

I wouldn't -exactly- call Pathfinder a 'Dungeons and Dragons-like' because it is DnD.  Like, literally 90% of the material is copy-pasted from 3.5.  Because DnD was done under open-source licenses, Paizo was able to essentially rip out all the gameplay and put it in their own book, but weren't allowed to use any of the pictures, settings, long-details about creatures, etc.  Just summarize or make their own content, but the 'meat' of the game they could use directly.  Many times the 3.5 rulebook has the exact same material as the Pathfinder rule book.

Also the Paizo PRD is a little disorganized.  Or rather, organized wrong.  If you want to look up 'what special materials can I make a weapon out of?' you need to look in Core Rulebook, Ultimate Equipment, and I think Ultimate Combat as well, which in Paizo site is 3 different entries.  However, at d20pfsrd.com all the materials are listed on the same page - they essentially took all the Pathfinder books and put them all together on the same relevant pages, so it's a LOT easier to find things and browse for things.

Also Pathfinder is done under a very similar, if not identical license as DnD, which is to say they're allowed to print and sell books and maps and stuff, because that has extra pictures and details, but the core rules MUST be free access - hence Paizo's PRD and d20pfsrd.com are both free access rules, but don't have any of the really nice pictures or scenery.  Because the core rules are under free license, the MMO they're making isn't allowed to be Pathfinder - after all, you'd be paying to access the core rules.  So instead it's 'pathfinder based' and has more in line with WoW than it does DnD, simply because they're not allowed to use the core rules for profit like that.  (Or at least that's how it's been explained to me.)

EDIT: Yeah, thread derailed at 2nd post.  I know I'm ranting now

[Mesa]

Neuroshima
(atm only in Polish)

You could compare to kinda to Fallout, but it's a tabletop RPG. (I am playing it with friends lately, although on Skype ).
I have a digital copy of the rulebook, while two of my friends have physical editions. God, they're thick!

The game is fun, but we have generally slow progress (GM of mine said that we've been only through 3 or 4 "arrows" on his mind map he wrote on half a A3 paper sheet at the time of 3rd session.)
But it's not the game's fault, though.

[Mephisto]

One of my old professors was running a class about traditional gaming. He asked for a short-form (don't ask what it means - it's never defined anywhere) roleplaying game that could be taught to his students, some of whom have never touched tabletop roleplaying games, quickly and easily.

I pointed him to Everyone is John and it worked perfectly. If you're introducing someone to the extreme basics of roleplaying games, it can't get much simpler than this.

My old GM pointed Diaspora out to us. It sounds great to me, but I've never had a chance to play.

[Cthulhu]

From another thread:

On the weird and obscure RPG front:

In a Wicked Age is a single-session roleplay heavy game with a very simple ruleset involving dice and cards, most of the scenarios that come out of it have a pulp fantasy vibe a la Conan the Barbarian (Or Gor, if you're playing with the wrong group)

Microscope is a system for collaborative worldbuilding, taking its name from the way focus shifts from overarching plots inward to actual roleplayed encounters.  One playtest involved a galaxy-spanning Juggalo empire.

EDIT:  The name is How to Host a Dungeon.  A single-player dungeon building RPG.  You use big layered sheets of semitransparent wax paper, or other contrivances if you don't want to buy weird paper, using dice to set up an initial cave system and then again using dice to play through the history of whatever race built the dungeon (Dorfs by default, but there are other options with more complex rules).  Can get a little unwieldy later in the game.

Nobilis is one Janet showed me but it wasn't my kind of thing.  I'm not sure how to describe it, something vaguely in the neighborhood of Exalted.  The players are demigod-esque entities with a theme that can be pretty much whatever you want.  One combat description involved the Power of Squares, who did things like blocking attacks with a big square and throwing lots of small sharp squares.



Legend of the Five Rings is pretty cool.  I had a plan for a bitchin' one-shot but it never came together, for one because somehow one of the premade characters was literally identical to a character in the example adventure I never read, though I guess that isn't such a big deal.

Basically it was gonna be set up as a murder mystery, all the players are using premade characters, holding winter court with a Lion Clan daimyo.  He gets murdered and nobody knows who did it.  There's a tacit assumption one of the players is the killer, and since all the characters are premade I had engineered things to go all Hamlet by the end.  One player was the Daimyo's favored vassal, who effectively has no alibi since his alibi is that he was on a forbidden tryst with the daimyo's daughter, who is engaged to another PC.  Third PC is a scorpion clan shugenja with his own motives, who secretly saw the encounter.  I can't remember what the other PCs were going to be, but those three alone are enough to pretty much guarantee an intra-party drama clusterfuck, which is exactly what I wanted.  Icing on the cake, the killer is an NPC.  What a tweest!

The vassal's dilemma is identical to that of an NPC in the example adventure, murdered daimyo, mackin' on his daughter, no alibi, obviously hiding something, which for some reason bothered me a  lot because I came up with my idea without knowing this guy existed.

----------

Some more I just remembered:

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is a post apocalyptic RPG where dinosaurs are around.  I got this as some kind of /tg/ prank, a rar file that was supposed to be something else.  Never played it, obviously.  The ruleset sucked.

Creepy Wall is something /tg/ cooked up, I never actually had access to the rules, they seem to have vanished.  Based on a story about an RPG a guy ran where the players were guards posted on a giant wall.  The enemy never showed up, they  never saw anyone else, and things steadily became more surreal and dreamlike.

[Geen]

Microscope is bloody fantastic, not to mention potentially hilarious.
Also, check out this. http://wso.williams.edu/~msulliva/campaigns/bubblegum/
It's about as hilarious as you would expect from a game called 'All Outta Bubblegum.'
Paranoia is great, too.

[E. Albright]

My first (and still favorite) would have to be the glorious sack of numbers that is Powers and Perils. Flavor-wise it straddles high and low fantasy; I'd say it falls just on the low side of the divide, but YMMV. It was (and is) very daunting in terms of its learning curve, but IMO it's worth the effort. Very intricate character creation, very rich background and mythology, and also pleasingly gritty mechanics. I started out with the pen & paper version, but it's all available online (with Hasbro's blessing, since P&P is one AH property they have not even a trace of desire to exploit) and has gotten some additional revision/development from its original author.

[gimlet]

True Scientific Realism!  Edible Poo mutation!  Of course it has dwarves.

"Encounter Critical" is like the uber weird/obscure RPG - here's a brief play report: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?219163-Actual-Play-Encounter-Critical

And http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/encounter-critical.htm has a download page where you can dl a copy of the rules and some other stuff.  There's even a yahoo group, with a fair amount of activity http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/encounter-critical/  that I look at once in a while for luls.

Wow looking at the links on that pair.com site, there's actually kind of a lot of recent activity - like go here to automatically generate a character: http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/encounter-critical/ - I got a Bionic Vulkin (Cyaborg) Doxy, a Cave Wooky with armor piercing fists, and a Cave Frankenstein Warlock...

[joey4track]

I remember some game I think it was just called 'Toon' where you would be a cartoon character and you had all these perks and stuff. I didn't play that much of it, I would mostly just make characters and read the manuals but I remember the system being pretty cool. Now that I think of it, it might be a really cool thing to base a pc game on.

[Scoops Novel]

I'm uncertain as to whether it's obscure, but paranoia sounds Excellent on every level.

[Lectorog]

Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition. Arguable obscurity and taste, but it's fully playable and amusing so I wanted it to be mentioned here.
Better than a pure PTW, at least.

[Neyvn]

I remember finding a Serenity PnP RPG...
Ah here we go...
http://stupidevilbastard.com/2005/10/serenity_the_pen_and_paper_rpg/

I never get to try these things as I live in a small town where no one plays them...

[DrPoo]

I remember finding a Serenity PnP RPG...
Ah here we go...
http://stupidevilbastard.com/2005/10/serenity_the_pen_and_paper_rpg/

I never get to try these things as I live in a small town where no one plays them...

Same boat here, tohugh that might change soin. Found this creative/social hangout where alot of people hang out, both people willing to learn how to play and experienced PnPers