Role Playing Games

Rough Magic Role Playing Game

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Rough Magic is an RPG with an interesting setting:

Rough Magic is a role-playing game of magic, mystery, and guns in 1960s Europe. Europe is united under the polished boot of the Franco-Prussian Empire, and hex use is ruthlessly regulated and (as a result) enormously profitable.

Think of a cross between Casablanca and Angel Heart.

Play is very loose, and players are encouraged to take initiative rather than simply hanging around and waiting for someone to kick in the door, guns a-blazing. Players are also encouraged to flesh out the setting and be creative, rather than passively accepting what has already been described.

Pulp Avengers: Game Mastering in the 1930s and 1940s

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Pulp Avengers is a sourcebook for role playing in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s perfect for providing a realistic background for your games of the Pulp era.

Imaginality Card Driven Universal Role Playing Game

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Imaginality is a universal RPG where the action is resolved by playing a card from a hand of seven. This adds an additinal element of strategy, because payers get to decide when they REALLY need to succeed, and when they can afford to take a risk, or live with a lesser success.

Mean Streets and Mean Villains 1970s Role Playing Game

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Mean Streets and Mean Villains is a role playing game set in the 1970s world of high fashion cops and robbers, such as such as Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Police Woman, Columbo, Kojak, Hawaii 5-0, Cannon, The Rockford Files, The Avengers and New Avengers, The Professionals, or films like Dragnet and the Dirty Harry series. It looks like a lot of fun, and there are even stats for “dress sense” and “coolness.”

Dark Age Role Playing Game

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Dark Age is an rpg set in 6th century Britain. Not entirely historical, it provides a nice infusion of myth. The author, Jon, writes that

The Dark Ages world is a distorted version of our own historical dark age Britain and Europe. The game is set in 610AD but things are not quite as they were in the real historical world. Major differences include:

  • More towns & cities survived the departure of Rome, so there are many urban areas.
  • Magic is much closer to the surface.
  • The power balance between celts, picts & Saxons is much more balanced, no single power has a significant ascendancy.
  • There is growing pressure from the continent, the Byzantine empire is not content to maintain itself but is beginning to develop an expansionist bent.
  • The Romano-British do not rule, but their great houses occupy positions of influence within British society.
  • Atlantis & Lemuria/Mu were real places. Atlantis and Mu were both magically powerful cultures who fought a great war. The magical remnants of this clash, tens of thousands of years ago, still reverberate through the known world.
  • Mechanisms are far more advanced than the real-world of 610AD, much roman and greek technology has been maintained and developed, partly with the assistance of lemurian and atlantean lore.

    • I personally really like games set in a mythic historical time. And I actually think that sometimes, mythic elements actually make a game MORE historical. After all, the people of ancient times believed in magic — and behaved as though it had an influence on their lives. If an army believed that toting out the relic of an ancestor made them more powerful, why not include that in the game?