@PaulBaldowski OMG, I had forgotten about this. Thanks so much for reminding me. I now have to dig through the boxes in my basement to see if I still have mine.

#Games_of_the_Late_1900s

Pendragon is one of my all time favorite games. It's a game of Arthurian Romance, that does a brilliant job of contrasting the shimmering ideals of Arthurian glamour, with the shitty patriarchal reality of the British middle ages.

It also has generational play, where when your character dies you play their kids, or brothers. This leads to a deep family focus that most games can't touch.

Alas, it doesn't do women well. Which taught me some painful lessons.

#Games_of_the_Late_1900s

@deinol I was actually going to do this one as part of my #Games_of_the_Late_1900s -- but the box is up north with a friend and so I couldn't get a picture.

I'm not sure how it would hold up these days, honestly. A lot of the ideas that set it out at the time are now pretty common. But for me it was a revelation, and led to two fun campaigns.

Changeling: The Dreaming is a game about being a faerie in a world that doesn't believe in you. That disbelief will seep into your self, and poison you.

It's got many themes wrapped up in that: childhood and it's loss, how getting old sucks, dreams and art, class and anarchism, and a whole bunch more. TBH, its a bit of an incoherent, beautiful mess.

I met my wife playing Changeling, and the first gift I ever bought her was this copy of the 2nd edition.

#ttrp #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

Rifts is a game about... I have no idea what this thing is about.

For my group it was about dressing in bikinis and finding a girl/boy/faefriend who had a BOOMGUN, fixing small towns and shooting nazis.

For folks playing at the table next to us at lunch, it was about being the nazis. We had real world fist fights. Frequently.

It also had a system that was incoherent. Terrible.

So why did I keep playing it for two years? Why do I still have the book?

#ttrpg #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

Here's a thing about D&D and the myth that girls didn't used to play RPGs: In advertisements for D&D in 1980 there were boys and girls playing in the adds. In my 1981 Red Box, there are multiple pictures of female PCs, including one of a female player dreaming up her PC.

In the 80s marketing companies spent a fortune dividing "boys toys" from "girls toys." It was only after that folks started saying girls didn't play D&D.

It was a lie. Always.

#ttrpg #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1998 game from Hogshead. It immediately set off me yaydar.

In it you play an 18th century gent telling big lying stories and trying not to get tripped up by other's objections. As I've often been referred to as a "cranky and clever raconteur" I thought this would be a breeze.

Except it turns out I'm horrible at it. Just the worst, repellent to others. But I love it despite the fact I have never won.

#ttrpg #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

One of my greatest loves in RPGs is Tribe 8. This game is everything best and worst of 90s gaming distilled to its quintessence.

I wouldn't recommend the original to anyone, due to CONETENT WARNING EVERYTHING & no safety tools.

And yet, it is a game that changed my relationship with every person I played with. It remains the game that older queers, neuroatypicals, and POC folks will bring up randomly to me at a con, to talk about with love and regret.

#ttrpg #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

Lace & Steel is a late 80s game of swashbuckling, magic, and intrigue. It's got a card based system for dueling, magic, and repartee battles.

This game made me care about battles of wits, magic as something more than spell slots, and most of all -- clothes. We spent SO MUCH TIME finding the right clothes to boost their Self Image and give them that edge in those repartee battles.

It also had cool GM bits, like a way to use a tarot deck to make adventures

#ttrpg #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

The other 90s game that changed my gaming was Amber, a diceless game set in the multiverse of Zelazny's novels.

It was brain melting in focusing on family squabbles and interpersonal drama in an engaging way. It's a game where you can literally walk away, create your own world, and live there as a monarch. But you don't, you never want to. Because then your fucking sister would win.

It is also one of the games that introduced me to IC journaling.

#ttrp #Games_of_the_Late_1900s

One of the games that time forgot, but that left a lasting impression on me was Theatrix.

Theatrix was a 1995 diceless game. It was based on narrative structures for different plots, and used lots of flow charts to guide GMs through stories. It also gave players Plot Points to enable them to influence the flow of the game.

I only played the game for two campaigns, but it changed how I thought about RPGs. It was also a big influence on how I write scenarios.

#Games_of_the_Late_1900s #TTRPG