Nexus: the Infinite City... both in "gonzo" terms and in "staring at the stars on the mountaintop" sense.

For those unfamiliar, the setting is a city comprised of chunks of other realities that literally stretches on forever and links to an infinite number of other realities as well.

I think for me;

1.) RIFTS - before all the world books, especially, as some of them threw a wet blanket on the imagination, but the world as described in the core book gave a somewhat familiar but largely alien version of Earth, transformed by catastrophic multi-dimensional magic

2.) Hollow Earth Expedition - A very imaginative take on what a hollow earth might be like with familiar elements but alot of really inventive and wonderous places, a whole untamed, primordial world to explore filled with cyclopean ruins and strange peoples.

3.) Savage Worlds: Low Life - though tongue-in-cheek, it really does have a sense of wonder when you can explore a city inside the bowels of a dead and rotting enormous giant monster.

4.)  Warhammer 40k. Fantasy, too, to a lesser extent. There's so much epicly gonzo awesomeness in Warhammer that I can't help but to walk away a little awed. My mind boggles with the possibilities that lie in the Expanse or the Chaos Wastes.

5.) Hellfrost. A glass desert. Coldfire Volcanoes. A mile high wall of ice. Lost civilizations. Ancient ruins. Imminent gods. A landscape shattered by unfathomable magical power. Lost relics. Insane golems. Mysterious lands across the sea or over the mountains. Exploration and re-discovery. Immortal foes. Seas of ice. It's one of the few game worlds I think I could spend the rest of my life gaming with, and never run out of ideas or places to explore.

I think that Dream Pod 9's Tribe 8 RPG really held a sense of wonder and alienness, at least when I first encountered it. (The 1st edition version). The world was vaguely sketched out; the background given from first person accounts, leaving a lot of room for GM interpretation. It was an interesting representation of a mystical, magical, post-apocalyptic world.

Then, the supplements were released.... many of which codified the world too tightly, and put into a play a metaplot the likes of which I hadn't seen before. An earth-shaking metaplot of the most obscene and intrusive kind. And the game line, IMO, went down the shitter.

To expand my list from just Talislanta...

2e Gamma World:  This was my gateway RPG and figuratively cracked open my brain-pan and released the pressure of my teenage bulging imagination.  I don't even remember my character's name these days, but I do remember how we inadvertently destroyed a Gren village by stumbling across it.  The village elders detained us while deciding what to do with us, but we didn't like being detained and made a successful escape attempt.  However, in the course of the escape we accidental set fire to a hut which quickly spread throughout the village.  Ah, good times!

Star Frontiers:  Immediately after introducing me and another buddy to GW, our GM introduced us to SF.  My buddy played a Yazirian demolitions expert who had a touch of the pyromania, and I played a Dralasite doctor who was addicted to pain meds.  The GM let us play our characters as we willed, but we had to face the consequences of our actions in game.  

Justifiers:  The setting of this game just 'clicked' for me on a number of levels.  It is, for the most part, a hard sci-fi setting.  I loved the concept of how the Betas were developed and created.  I liked the concept of Betas being owned by the Corps and are struggling for civil rights under the crushing oppression of mega-corps greed.  I liked how interstellar travel is possible through matter transmission rather than standard FTL space ships.

3e RuneQuest:  Alright, Butcher's description is near poetry and I feel that my words would be a distracting mumble in comparison...

Quote from: The Butcher;619374Runequest, which takes an apparently unintuitive combination of brutal and gritty combat and out-there Campbellian metaphysics, and somehow the result is bigger than the sum of its parts. Gary and Dave might be our hobby's patron deities, but Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin are fucking wizards.

In the early days of being a gamer, RQ saved me from quitting the hobby in disillusionment.  I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with 1e AD&D at the time for various reasons, and then I was introduced to RQ.  It opened my eyes to the world of non-TSR RPGs, but more importantly, the fact that RPGs can be done and handled in wide variety of ways.

Mentzer BCM (you read that right) and here is why: all I had to start with was the 91 "black box" and soon after, photocopies of Companion and Master given to me by a high school senior, who graduated before we ever had the chance to play together.  These two hinted at the larger world(s) of D&D, but without Expert (as well as a mentor), there was a lot of blank space full of possibility, which my imagination quickly filled in.

I have to say, as much as I love AD&D 2e, its settings, and other cool RPGs*, sometimes I wish that I had never moved beyond the weird triumvirate of products I started my RPG journey with.
 

* Which all have an initial sense of wonder

Quote from: Doctor Jest;6195175.) Hellfrost. A glass desert. Coldfire Volcanoes. A mile high wall of ice. Lost civilizations. Ancient ruins. Imminent gods. A landscape shattered by unfathomable magical power. Lost relics. Insane golems. Mysterious lands across the sea or over the mountains. Exploration and re-discovery. Immortal foes. Seas of ice. It's one of the few game worlds I think I could spend the rest of my life gaming with, and never run out of ideas or places to explore.

I read the original Hellfrost book and was disappointed that the spells and abilities seemed to be cut and pasted directly from the SW book, for example Raygun given as an example Trapping of some kind of Blast, handcuffs listed as a Trapping for a Shackle spell, etc...  I consider SW as a system that needs a definite setting appropriate coat of paint to even be palatable, and the main Hellfrost book didn't do that.

How have the supplements gone?  Have they done a better job of "reskinning" SW to the Hellfrost setting?

Quote from: CRKrueger;619532I read the original Hellfrost book and was disappointed that the spells and abilities seemed to be cut and pasted directly from the SW book, for example Raygun given as an example Trapping of some kind of Blast, handcuffs listed as a Trapping for a Shackle spell, etc...  I consider SW as a system that needs a definite setting appropriate coat of paint to even be palatable, and the main Hellfrost book didn't do that.

Rayguns? You must be thinking of another setting, maybe Slipstream?

None of that stuff is in Hellfrost. Hellfrost is an Epic Norse Mythology inspired dark fantasy setting, it doesn't have rayguns or handcuffs. It does have awesome spells like Animate War Tree and Bladebreaker and Sphere of Might. It doesn't reprint any spells from the core, but does modify a handful to use Hellfrost's magic system which doesn't use power points. In those cases, only the modifications are printed, not the entire power description.

Hellfrost has alot of unique setting rules and setting specific edges and spells which are very flavorful and really evoke the genre very effectively. It probably has one of the best divine magic implementations I've seen anywhere.

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;619492Interesting that some people associate "sense of wonder" with the gonzo, anything-is-possible idea and thus bring up Torg or Rifts. That's a fair take, but to me it's more like the sense of wonder I get when hiking in the mountains or looking into space, something atavistic. A sword, a dark forest and a rustle in the bushes, or alternatively a vast, cold void.
 
Some games that invoke that feeling for me are Dragon Warriors, for its connection with folklore, OD&D for its mythic, bare-bones underworld-delving feeling, and Traveller, for its vision of a few tonnes of steel sliding past the stars holding a few fragile souls squeezing as much cash and life out of existence as they can.

ooo good points.
I had trouble trying to articulate what I was asking in the OP so...maybe by asking there what games make you feel 'anything is possible' there I've biased the answers?...its hard to tell. Games that 'giving a feeling of the fantastical' might have been a better way to word it.
 
Oh and I can agree with Dragon Warriors too... I think it does a good job adding mystery and an element of the fantastic even on the standard elements like elves or hobgoblins. (Perhaps as much from the writing style as the setting...?).

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;619492Interesting that some people associate "sense of wonder" with the gonzo, anything-is-possible idea and thus bring up Torg or Rifts. That's a fair take, but to me it's more like the sense of wonder I get when hiking in the mountains or looking into space, something atavistic. A sword, a dark forest and a rustle in the bushes, or alternatively a vast, cold void.

Some games that invoke that feeling for me are Dragon Warriors, for its connection with folklore, OD&D for its mythic, bare-bones underworld-delving feeling, and Traveller, for its vision of a few tonnes of steel sliding past the stars holding a few fragile souls squeezing as much cash and life out of existence as they can.

That's actually why I mentioned Rifts. Especially before the World Book bloat, there were moments of real immersion and wonder. I remember a game where we reached Colorado, and saw the plains leading into the foothills, with the Rockies off in the distance. The GM described a band of not-quite-earth-native herbivores lazily wandering and grazing in the distance. The remains of a small town or city were just visible, rusting, and (from a distance) completely still. No one spoke at the table for a full minute, I think.

It's not all gonzo and crazy. There's a beauty to some of Rifts Earth, a sort of quietude you only catch here and there. But if the immensity and potential of this familiar, alien, thriving, desolate, and utterly changed world catches you just right, wow.

Quote from: Zachary The First;619629No one spoke at the table for a full minute, I think.

This is what the game is all about. Some don't get that, some have spent their career trying to make out that it doesn't exist, but this is it. Ah!

Quote from: Doctor Jest;619549Rayguns? You must be thinking of another setting, maybe Slipstream?

None of that stuff is in Hellfrost. Hellfrost is an Epic Norse Mythology inspired dark fantasy setting, it doesn't have rayguns or handcuffs. It does have awesome spells like Animate War Tree and Bladebreaker and Sphere of Might. It doesn't reprint any spells from the core, but does modify a handful to use Hellfrost's magic system which doesn't use power points. In those cases, only the modifications are printed, not the entire power description.

Hellfrost has alot of unique setting rules and setting specific edges and spells which are very flavorful and really evoke the genre very effectively. It probably has one of the best divine magic implementations I've seen anywhere.

Hmm I had one of the early printings and in the "Trappings" sections of the spells there were a host of definitely non-Hellfrost Trappings there, as if the spells were simply cut and pasted from the Core.  Raygun and Handcuffs were definitely in there as Trappings.  Maybe that got revised out?

My choice is RuneQuest 3. It made fantasy real.

Quote from: CRKrueger;619641Hmm I had one of the early printings and in the "Trappings" sections of the spells there were a host of definitely non-Hellfrost Trappings there, as if the spells were simply cut and pasted from the Core.  Raygun and Handcuffs were definitely in there as Trappings.  Maybe that got revised out?

I've never encountered this problem. Hellfrost is considered, in my eyes, the best setting book for uniqueness for powers and spell-casting. Every Arcane Background feels different. The game oozes wonder. If I would have discovered the game, say, 10 years ago, it would have been lost in the feel of the setting.

I mean, you cannot use Hellfrost without the core Savage Worlds book, perhaps you had an early flawed copy of Hellfrost or perhaps you are confusing the two books together?

Even the magical materials, such as dwarven ice mined from deep glaciers and metal that naturally dispels magic users.

Hellfrost Player's Guide page 83 Bolt Spell. Bolt is a standard attack power for wizards and can also be used for ray guns...

Page 85 Entangle Spell.  Trappings : Glue bomb, vines, handcuffs, spider webs

Page 91 Shapechange spell " a shaman in dog form might be able to pull the trigger on a shotgun."

There's lots of this stuff.  2009 printing.

Transhuman Space

Tekumel

Exalted (1st edition)