Sweet friend, I almost loved thee

[seneschal]

Teenagers From Outer Space. Very simple TOON-ish game mechanics and feel. But by the time I ran across it, my gaming group had dissipated. Plus it was a hard concept to get across to combat-oriented players: what the lives of Judi and Elroy Jetson might have been like.

Daredevils. Loved the well-written scenario modules, which truly captured the pulpish flavor, but the game mechanics were incomprehensible. So I used the modules but converted the NPCs to Justice, Inc.

Danger Quest. A quirky take on pulp with a fun character generation system. But the actual play mechanics were confusing, and the publisher vanished soon after the core rulebook came out. It seemed as if I were the only fan who visited Torchlight Games' web site.

[Owl]

In Harm's Way - you play a naval officer, a sailor and a petty officer in the british, french or american navies during the napoleonic wars. Excellent stuff, based on the Aubrey/Maturin novels and Hornblower of course. Adventure! Dastardly enemies! Ship to ship action!
So what's the problem with it? The art is photoshopped photographs of what seems to be reenactors. There's a busload of free art to use out there from the period, and... photographs. Ack!

[OooMatron]

Originally Posted by Shaira

...but really, I mean REALLY, have a problem with the fact that Traveller space is FLAT.

I loooove Traveller. I just took the 'flat' space to be 'galactic plane 0' so to speak, leaving all those lovely star system generation rules to be used to create the planes above and below it.

That way I can have the rich background, and do my creative thang too.

[tzunder]

Tekumel. Setting is heaven, but the systems are cursed..

[camazotz]

Originally Posted by OooMatron

I loooove Traveller. I just took the 'flat' space to be 'galactic plane 0' so to speak, leaving all those lovely star system generation rules to be used to create the planes above and below it.

That way I can have the rich background, and do my creative thang too.

I fixed...no, really, patched....my problem with Traveller mapping by adding the third up/down axis to each hex. Then I threw out the jump drive rules anyway and worked out something else entirely. Then I ditched it all and did GURPS Space....that fixed it.

So I guess add Traveller to my list! Same with Tekumel/EPT; I love it, have read it all, even have M.A.R.Barker's two fantasy novels in Tekumel, but have not, for the life of me, been able to coerce, convince, or threaten one living mammal in to trying it out.

[rust]

Camazotz, may I ask where you live ?
I had exactly the same problem with EPT, and perhaps ... at least we would
be two mammals interested in playing EPT ... ?

[Zane]

Originally Posted by camazotz

Same with Tekumel/EPT; I love it, have read it all, even have M.A.R.Barker's two fantasy novels in Tekumel, but have not, for the life of me, been able to coerce, convince, or threaten one living mammal in to trying it out.

There are five novels.

* The Man of Gold
* Flamesong
* Lords of Tsámra
* Prince of Skulls
* A Death of Kings

[TrippyHippy]

To be honest, the one game I couldn't ever quite love, was Unknown Armies.

I thought it was wittily written, had a nice set of rules, and lots of interesting ideas, but....

It was always so heavily US-centric in all it's references whilst, honestly, I'd been playing with a lot of these ideas and storylines in previous games already (CoC, OWoD, OtE, even WFRP) for years. Unknown Armies kinda felt like yesterday's news when it came out. For me, it wasn't really doing anything new.

[Ars Mysteriorum]

Originally Posted by TrippyHippy

To be honest, the one game I couldn't ever quite love, was Unknown Armies.

I thought it was wittily written, had a nice set of rules, and lots of interesting ideas, but....

It was always so heavily US-centric in all it's references whilst, honestly, I'd been playing with a lot of these ideas and storylines in previous games already (CoC, OWoD, OtE, even WFRP) for years. Unknown Armies kinda felt like yesterday's news when it came out. For me, it wasn't really doing anything new.

Despite my initial scoffery at reading this, I can actually understand it. Still, Unknown Armies manages to breathe new life into the game on a daily basis as though it were still brand new. If you haven't checked out the website (which I'm sure you probably have), please do.

As for me, I'm still trying to figure out a way to run Unknown Armies. There's a lot there!

[deleriad]

It was Nephilim for me. When I saw it I was hooked. I loved the potential it seemed to offer for layers of deceit. I thought the magic in it was an interesting attempt to model western occultism and the game system was an interesting variant of BRP. And yet, try though I did, I couldn't persuade anyone else to get interested and came up short when finding anything playable to do with it.

Jorune was another. A friend kept trying to run a campaign and we kept trying to get our heads around it and nothing ever happened.