does anyone have anything to say about RPG textbooks?

i'm not entirely sure why i care for the things. i recognise, now, that there's some pretty bad writing in there - recourse to cliche, hokey prose - but i could happily spend a week reading them. (i went to a couple meetings of the university roleplaying society for uh research purposes and may in fact join, not to play, but for access to their seekrit hidden library of the damn overpriced things.)

i think it might be how the way an adventure is set out - the foreword, and then the map, and then the room descriptions, you know - was really a bizarre experiment in form, at least to me at age eight, when most of my reading was fantasy novels. the D&D manuals - being, if you're not actually playing the thing, i) a compilation of every single fantasy trope and cliche, and ii) an attempt to reduce these to mathematical formulae - well, the first here is something like the pleasure of browsing the incredibly addictive tv tropes wiki i found the other night*; the second is the appeal of the first, rephrased as fun-with-math.

i have an excuse to buy a bunch of these, or at least to lock myself in a room with as many of the RPG society's copies of them as i can feasibly borrow, since i'm writing this novel about D&D players. so, uh - any recommendations?

*http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/

http://dwarfstar.brainiac.com/ds_index.html

Super-classic: Puppetland, Baron Munchausen, Unknown Armies but really D&D 1st edition is still my favourite, all those haunting tables you'd never need - pninny's point abt them being writerly is really amazingly true, Sade Fourrier Loyola Gygax kinda, anyone can create a world but to order it like that is something really special.

My favourite obscurities: green D&D Companion set - black Masters had some charm also; AD&D hardbacks Oriental Adventures (back cover: 'welcome to the mystic East!' etc) and ... The Wilderness Survival Guide!!!

Thinking about the Companion set really moves me, in fact.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/0399512934.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,32,-59_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Planescape is great.

how old is mr the pinefox?

jrdn i REALLY would love to read some of those; i read a Proper Academic book about RPing with relation to lots of performing arts theatre stuff that was totally tootally awful

i also recently reacquired the marvellous 'what is dungeons and dragons?', pub. penguin, written by three eton schoolboys

I am going to do a reading challenge of these later this year I think.

If you ignore the complete lack of females on this thread, then perhaps.

1. skyrealms of jorune
2. warhammer 40k
3. kult
4. all of the ad&d 2nd ed stuff
5. underground
6. some of the old white wolf mage books
7. castle falkenstein
8. shadowrun
9. earthdawn
10. lots of the battletech books

unfortunately i don't really find call of cthulhu to be a great read, compared to the original stuff, whereas obviously warhammer / ad&d / shadowrun / mage etc all blow doors on the original fiction they wrote for those games (even dragonlance! which was always garbage, no idea why so many people loved it).

similarly reading warhammer/battletech books is about 1x10^6 times better than actually playing any of that crap.

11. paranoia
12. gurps the prisoner

paranoia = lolz for days

the prisoner is a better guide to the TV show than any book they ever wrote for it! ever!

personal project: a bronze age RPG based on homer, alexander the great and my own researches into egyptology and so on. i want barbarians, phoenician long-boatsmen, persian archers on chariots, mounted combat against indian elephant-corps, scribes, wicked samaritans, hebrew religious zealots, burning bushes, sun boats, plagues of locusts, demigods, hieroglyphic magic, etc

Anyway, it is a really good guide to the show.

Sharereactor (which was a pirating site for the Edonkey network) once did a thread where people posted up very old RPG books. My mate who was very into his RPG stuff said they had some amazing and out of print stuff there. Dunno if it's still going or if they are still being shared.

Now I see that it's Vahid making a list.

and my god i spent about an hour the other day in a borders reading the new core rulebook of Mage. tons of cool ideas, names, relationships. and WW is canny enough to invent this huge creation/fall myth for their world and then be like "yeah maybe this didn't happen. have fun!"

let alone the hours i spent on wikipedia reading about all the old vampire stuff. so complicated and sort of strangulating. i can see why they finally scrapped all of it, started over, and have all their groups/factions/clans, whatever, be voluntary in the new versions. (never played it at all, or knew anyone who did...)

so what's the new mage mythos all about?

my guesses as to why things changed the way they did are: to make the 3 games more compatible with one another. each game seemed to have a totalizing cosmology that excluded all the others. like, you could sort of mash together maybe 2 out of 3 in campaign, but the big overrarching conflicts didn't make sense together. either the technocracy run tings, or the camarilla does, or [whatever big villain in werewolf was] does, but not all... from reading a few things about these games it seems like some of the ideas/forces/agents/etc are held in common between games, even if they are called different things.

the paradigm idea never really made sense to me cos it was contradicted by having real actual game rules for stuff!! and i liked the technocracy as a villain, but i (and many people) really didn't like the anti-science and anti-intellectual bent to the game. the romantic individualist reality-is-what-i-say-it-is stuff seemed sort of juvenile to me (and politically awful, if you want to take it that far).

so from a publishing perspective, making the games sync a little better is good sense. and tipping the focus a little away from improvised magic toward set rotes seems like much less headache for gm's, which is smart business too i think, with all this d20 stuff dominating the shelves these days...

anyway i'm about 2 hrs away from a full torrent of a bunch of this new stuff so if u want an email of any of it, vahid let me know.

the 2nd point also well-taken, although the "guide to the technocracy" seemed to iron that out nicely. i think it would have been nice if they'd really developed the hermetic order along the lines of "foucault's pendulum" or "crying of lot 49" or the rest of the lunatic fringe. they could have taken from alan moore and grant morrison, instead they went for neil gaiman. they could have done burroughs-esque marauders, instead they ignored the marauders and bigged up the nephandi as a wack werewolf/pentex-tie-in. if they'd played up the internal threat of rigidly old-school orders and the marauders more it would've made the game less anti-science/anti-intellectual. BUT THEY DIDN'T.

i hear you on overdoing the romantic individualism, too, but that's the curse of any product aimed at overgrown social misfits, right?

i am very curious about any torrents, of anything: t0m.w3st@gm41l.c0m

i'm tryna figure out a way to zip some the file up and send it but i don't know a good way to get a 40 meg file down under the 10 meg limit for gmail. or is gmail's limit bigger? i dunno. anyway, i'm a dunce with this stuff but if you want the files, i've got 'em if we can figure out something.

anyone else googling too, why not. nerdy book, many kinds! for you, i do for free, ok?

any chance you could YSI the WoD core rules + maybe the "antagonists" and "mysterious places" supplements too? my curiosity has been piqued!

Antagonists WARNING fucking huge for some reason

Myserious Places

that torrent was still working for me through til yesterday, by the way: i'd keep seeding but i'm off broadband for the next month or so /:

I just recently started looking into RP myself, and to be honest... I find most of todays "new" rp's to be bleak, to mathematical or simply copies of other works. Still, love'd D&D and Goblins. :)

the thing for the past decade or so seems to be on systems which enforce character, rather than systems which define physical traits and leave character as more or less optional

i could be talking outta the ass here

i wonder if there's a good history of it? i've only ever read a (not v good) academic book on RPing as performance theory

god, how did i even find that thing

the thing for the past decade or so seems to be on systems which enforce character, rather than systems which define physical traits and leave character as more or less optional

I think you might be right there... Pendragon is the big one of that that I am aware of. These things are good and bad, but maybe there is something for the characters to have drives and urges they must react against rather than be always able to do whatever they want. Or maybe not.

I am very fond of the Over The Edge game, with its very free form approach to all this... you want a character with strange urges they must battle against? fine. You don't want that? fine.

did anyone ever play Bunnies & Burrows?

No, all I know is that it gets mentioned a ton on Something Positive. But like I say, I never particularly played any of them. I tried to run a game of Toon once, and it was a disaster.

yeah? what happened?

My absolute and utter lack of imagination proved fatal.

Toon... I remember playing that once. I was given a character which was basically Gumby with breasts in a golden bikini. Surreal stuff.

I have this to say:

AD&D's original "modules" & the Monster Manual & Dieties and Demigods books are GREAT! Crazy arcane and imaginative, just as much fun to read as Borges "Book of Imaginary Beings" or the d'Aulaires wonderful "Norse Gods and Giants". Some of my favorite illustrators of the late 20th century published here and basically nowhere else: Erol Otus, David A. Trampier, etc. Also love some of the Chaosium stuff, especially Call of Cthulhu and all the weird-ass unauthorized D&D tie-ins that floated around in the late 70s and early 80s.

Okay, somebody sell me on Gamma World. I am a massive Fallout fan, and this looks fun, if rather toony.

I have a copy of WHAT IS DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS? here.

I also have a copy of DICING WITH DRAGONS by Ian Livingstone, same era.

I also have a lot more here, now.

I've thrown away several copies of WHITE DWARF.

I start to think I shouldn't have done that.

oh for fuck's sake man, u need a reason to play a gamma world?!?

here's 2:

1) there is a section in the first edition called HOPELESS CHARACTERS with this illustration

http://www.headinjurytheater.com/images/dndgamma%20hopeless%20character%204th.jpg

2) there is an adventure where you dodge mad butcher robots and deal with a cult of giant radioactive three-eyed chicken men, in the savage post-apocalyptic ruins of a chicken processing plant in nebraska. with THIS illustration

er THIS one

http://www.trollandtoad.com/images/products/pictures/153318.jpg

also you have free license to play viciously racist human hicks called THE KNIGHTS OF GENETIC PURITY, and make them fall in love with hapless / gentle / foolish / disturbing psychic plants with eyes, like something out of a philip jose farmer novel

the only three games that even compare to this are:

1) my homebrew mad max rules

2) my chaosium rules book of the new sun PBEM

3) paranoia, except paranoia has really shitty rules, and you always end up just laughing at the book while you make PCs instead of taking the game seriously, and then you just end up getting drunk and making shitty characters that get slaughtered in the first scene by a red-faced drunk GM

4) RIFTS

also toony means nothing to people who own copies of TOON

seriously though i usually run it less like fallout and more like an issue of HEAVY METAL with stories by moebius or jodorowsky and that seems to keep people satisfied

toony is like, mutants in orbit or something

toony being way too toony to be fun