By Any Other Name

Like most people who got into the hobby in the late 1970s or early '80s, my first roleplaying game was Dungeons & Dragons. However, my second RPG was Gamma World and one of the things that struck me about it at the time was that it didn't have a special name for its referee. For some reason, I'd assumed that, just as D&D has a Dungeon Master, Gamma World would have something equally distinct, perhaps a Mutant Master. That it didn't was a bit of a disappointment. 

I don't know where I'd gotten the idea that the referee in every RPG should have a special name for its referee, because most of the games I encountered in those first years after I'd discovered D&D did not. Generally, they used Game Master, Referee, or even Judge. There were exceptions, of course, like Top Secret's Administrator and Call of Cthulhu's Keeper of Arcane Lore, but they were actually few and far between.

Are there any other notable examples of RPGs from prior to 1990 or so that use an unusual name for their referees?