Title kinda says it all.

I have Foundry so that's sweet. Oh yeah, and don't be afraid to recommend me some obscure ones as well as popular ones.

Let's see... I like Star Wars, Appalachia, labor movement, Star Trek, the Pathfindner games by Owlcat, Warhammer 40k (syke! but I may get into it due to its increased popularity recently), Arthurian legends, Lord Dunsany, horror, foreign shit (like, foreign novels, foreign games, foreign everything), Chinese stuff, Chinese web novels, etc.

What else, what else... Pluto and other space shti? Eh, idk. Africa, non-European fantasy, noir, neurodiversity/autism, desert fantasy, weird fiction, Gothic literature, Nintendo, dwarves, Ottoman empire, pirates, tropical settings, OMORI, ASOIAF book series, Assassin's Creed (ig? back then, but i don't know about now as I haven't played the recent ones), history in general, sociology, Elden Ring, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, anything like the upcoming Dolmenwood TTRPG, and I guess anything like the Enclave TTRPG.

No to: more Viking shit (Viking shit seems to everywhere and I hate it), Orientalist two-dimensional shenanigans, "you can be the bad guys in this setting... even though they're technically the good guys now but with a dark aesthetic to them!," Numenera (I hated the video game), Game of Thrones TV show, zombies, Bethesda Game Studios, and, err, yeah, I'll leave it at that.

So yeah, now that you know what my interests are, how about I dox myself, yeah?

Okay, look down to see what I look like:

spoiler

Show

lol jk

Okay, gimme your recommendations, of any kind, but mostly of anything that might pique my interest (based on the, well, interests I posted above).

  • barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    First things first, try to pirate everything you can from here before you buy anything (fair warning: it's from 4chan but it's too good a source to pass up). Since you seem to be fine with any of fantasy, sci-fi, or historical games, I think the two most important questions are how willing/able you and, more importantly, your players are to read rules/learn complicated systems, and what kind of gameplay the group interested in. A lot of the things you list off as likes are more things that you would build into the setting during your planning, where the system itself won't necessarily matter.

    • Pathfinder/D&D is super combat heavy and generally complex. You can run these in non-european settings with some work (PF has a few regions that are fleshed out IIRC).
    • Call of Cthulhu is a lot less focused on concrete rules and focuses on investigation into things beyond mortal comprehension, with combat usually resulting in horrible death because the party are rando investigators and not professional soldiers. Set in the 1930s, could easily swap out time period and location with some trimming of the skill list (eg probably no guns skill in the late Ottoman empire).
    • GUMSHOE systems have more concrete rules (and thus complexity) than CoC, and also primarily focus on investigation (Trail of Cthulhu for CoC, Night's Black Agents for modern-day vampire hunters, etc).
    • Traveller (Mongoose 2E) is about travelling between planets in space, with a focus on trade, which can go from background noise behind regular adventures to "spreadsheets in space".
    • Worlds Without Number/Stars Without Number are generic, rules light fantasy and sci-fi systems that focus heavily on providing the GM with material with which to make a sandbox setting for the players to get involved with.
    • Lancer is the communist tactical mech combat game.

    For properties you specifically listed off:

    • There are a bunch of Star Wars systems, from WEG d6 (very rules-light) to Saga d20 (basically D&D) to FFG's three systems (decently complex with a focus on narrative, uses weird dice).
    • Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius exists, but I've never played so no comment on quality.
    • There's an ASOIAF system out there where players play as one noble house, with things like hard-coded rules for social manipulation.
    • ReadFanon [any, any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Good advice.

      I feel like it would be better to invest in a tablet and to use pirated PDFs to trial out the different systems and then maybe to purchase a few books if you really like a system and you want a hardcopy of the system.

      I'm good at sourcing PDFs btw and there's a whole pile of game PDFs that ended up on LibGen because of... my friend who fulfilled requests. Lmk if there are any PDFs you're looking for that you can't find elsewhere and I'll go searching for them.