My Top 10 Non-D&D RPGs (Part II)

Part I of this list can be found here. 

5. Star Trek the Role Playing Game

Star Trek is my original fandom. I started watching the Original Series in reruns on a local TV channel growing up and instantly fell in love with it. As a kid, I read everything about or related to the show that I could and one of my proudest possessions was a gold Starfleet uniform shirt that I probably wore far too often. Consequently, the appearance of FASA's 1982 was a major event for me. I bought a copy as soon as I could and immediately started refereeing a long-running campaign with my friends. In most respects, FASA's rules were nothing special – a fairly basic percentile-driven system – but they included two things that set them apart in my opinion. The first was the lifepath character generation system, which helped players get a handle on who their characters were before the campaign began. The second was a character-based starship combat system that nicely evoked the feel of ship-to-ship combat from the TV series. These, combined with the obvious love the game showed toward its source material, makes Star Trek the Role Playing Game one of my favorite RPGs even today.

4. Gamma World

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings, so it was natural that Gamma World would appeal to me. Nowadays, it's pretty common among gamers to make fun of GW and its rather, shall we say, idiosyncratic take on the End Times. On the one hand, I can understand that. From the vantage point of the present, Gamma World, with its mutant chicken-men and rabbits that can turn metal to rubber with a touch, certainly might appear silly. On the other hand, I think what's often misunderstood about the game is that it actually owes a lot more to the "dying earth" fantasy sub-genre than straight science fictional speculation. Gamma World postulates that the End Times come several hundred years hence, when all sorts of technological marvels exist and have made Earth quite unlike our own age. After the Fall, Earth becomes genuinely weird, thanks to artificial intelligences, mutagenic substances, and reality warping weapons. That's precisely why I continue to love it and why I hope to have the chance to referee another campaign of it one day.

3. Call of Cthulhu

Like Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu is another "perfect" game in the way that it marries its game mechanics and its source material. Of course, despite its original subtitle – "Fantasy Role-Playing in the Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft" – Call of Cthulhu's source material is much broader than simply the works of HPL. As I have argued before, CoC owes a great deal to Lovecraft's admirer, August Derleth, whose literary vision is far less bleak than that of his hero. An RPG based solely on Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmicism would certainly be horrific, but would it be fun to play? I personally don't think so, which is why Sandy Petersen was wise to have leavened the existential gloom of Lovecraft with healthy doses of Derlethian optimism. In any event, I've played a lot of Call of Cthulhu over the years and hope to do so again in the future. It is, hands down, my favorite horror roleplaying game and yet another reminder that Chaosium is one of the great publishers of our hobby

2. Empire of the Petal Throne

This is the only game on this list that I didn't play in my youth. Indeed, I never had the opportunity to play Empire of the Petal Throne until a few years ago, when I began my House of Worms campaign. Now, just shy of eight years of continuous play with a consistent group of players, there can be little doubt that EPT is one of my favorite RPGs. Naturally, its remarkable setting, Tékumel, is a big part of why, but there have been several other Tékumel games released over the years and none of them has ever had the staying power of Empire of the Petal Throne. In large part, that's because EPT is so simple. Its rules are easy to remember and use, which is important when playing in a setting as complex and detailed as Tékumel and I suspect my players would agree. 
1. Traveller
Surprising precisely no one reading this blog, Traveller is at the top of this list for too many reasons to list. For our present purposes, I will focus on two. First, Traveller is the only game besides D&D whose rules I know well enough that I can play it without having to refer to any rulebooks. After so many years and so many campaigns, slipping back into Traveller is effortless. Second, Traveller is the game that served as my gateway to professional writing. Way back in the early '90s, when I was still in college, I made the acquaintance of other Traveller fans who encouraged me to submit articles to GDW's Challenge. I was not only successful in this, but doing so eventually opened the door to my writing not just for Traveller but for many other games as well. Traveller is and probably always will be my "true love" when it comes to RPGs. I am absolutely certain that I will play many more campaigns of it in the years to come.