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I'm wondering what games/versions of games (D&D or whatever) best capture a the feeling that you/ your character are in a strange wondrous land where anything is possible? And maybe what games most fail to capture that? And why?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619320I'm wondering what games/versions of games (D&D or whatever) best capture a the feeling that you/ your character are in a strange wondrous land where anything is possible?

Torg, hands down.

Shadowrun, to a lesser (though still pretty great) degree.

Talislanta hits that spot for me.  There is a plethora of races/cultures and not one of them is 'human,' and it all takes place on a single continent (well, for the most part).

OD&D (1974) for me.

Planescape for D&D, Transhuman Space from GURPS.

Talislanta was too weird for my tastes.

Thanks for the quick replies guys.

Quote from: Benoist;619329OD&D (1974) for me.

This one's interesting since most of the other games people have mentioned have a more defined exotic setting.
I think maybe I know what you mean, but feel free to elaborate. From a GM POV, out of all the D&Ds maybe this is the one with the feel you can make whatever you want with it, without having balance or RAW or whatever get in the way?

Some of the supplements and variants out there for it are fairly trippy too (e.g. Arduin)

Quote from: Yong_Kyosunim;619335Planescape for D&D, Transhuman Space from GURPS.

Talislanta was too weird for my tastes.

Fine line between wondrous and weird, maybe.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619356I think maybe I know what you mean, but feel free to elaborate. From a GM POV, out of all the D&Ds maybe this is the one with the feel you can make whatever you want with it, without having balance or RAW or whatever get in the way?

That's basically the idea yes, but not just from a GM's POV, from a player's as well. It's really the game that got the sense of wonder "lightning in the bottle" thing going, which you can take in all sorts of directions, from swords and planets to gritty pseudo-medievalism to post-apocalyptic mutant wars to whatever else you want at your game table, really. From a player's POV, I'm thinking immediately of Mike Mornard (Old Geezer) playing a Balrog in the original Greyhawk and the like. It's a liberating experience when you use the frame of the game as a launching pad and just go nuts with it from there (and not necessarily in "retro stupid" directions, mind you), instead of considering its set of rules as limits to what you can and cannot do with your game, really.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619356Some of the supplements and variants out there for it are fairly trippy too (e.g. Arduin)

For me they are perfect examples of different directions in which you can take the basic boxed game. Use them as inspiration, just create your own thing from there, and you can take the game in any possible direction you want.

best: palladium fantasy 1e

Quote from: Benoist;619365That's basically the idea yes, but not just from a GM's POV, from a player's as well. It's really the game that got the sense of wonder "lightning in the bottle" thing going, which you can take in all sorts of directions, from swords and planets to gritty pseudo-medievalism to post-apocalyptic mutant wars to whatever else you want at your game table, really. From a player's POV, I'm thinking immediately of Mike Mornard (Old Geezer) playing a Balrog in the original Greyhawk and the like. It's a liberating experience when you use the frame of the game as a launching pad and just go nuts with it from there (and not necessarily in "retro stupid" directions, mind you), instead of considering its set of rules as limits to what you can and cannot do with your game, really.

Yup. In a one-shot I ran for my Shadowrun group recently, one of the players rolled up a baby dragon. It was awesome!

Rifts does a great job of thinking that any damn thing can be over that hill.

This is kind of tough because what I think of as "sense of wonder" is the elation of having a new world unveiled before your eyes, that's so intrinsic to my enjoyment of the hobby as a whole.

Off the top of my head:

D&D, my first RPG. Bear in mind that I was 12 and had never read a fantasy book (only knew fantasy stuff via movies and the odd comic) so it was also my introduction to fantasy.

Rifts, for its genre-defying, kitchen-sink setting. This was long before the recursive memetic "ninja pirate zombie robot dinosaur Abraham Lincoln" Internet bullshit, and it was refreshing and honest and grabbed you and fired up my imagination like nothing before it.

Old World of Darkness, for being the first setting that I really got into.

Runequest, 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.

Tékumel, for demonstrating to my older, more jaded self that elaborate, consistent world-building and gonzo awesomeness were not mutually exclusive.

Eclipse Phase, for suturing tropes from all over transhuman SF into a very enticing game setting that, while not strictly hard SF (it's even got psionics), feels "hard SF" like no other game that I know of.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;619370Yup. In a one-shot I ran for my Shadowrun group recently, one of the players rolled up a baby dragon. It was awesome!

Here you go. That's the stuff I'm talking about. My wife played a Boggart like that in an OD&D game I ran. It was awesome as well. It's just really cool to hear the concepts players come up with and, aided by a frame like OD&D, just go "OK. Sure. Let's just do it." and not have to bother coming up with capacities-within-capacities with shitloads of rules caveats and feats and bullshit beyond the bare minimum needed to run the thing as a capable member of the group. It's awesome, really.

I would say, for me, it's AD&D and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play that really "do it" as far as a sense of wonder go.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;619382I would say, for me, it's AD&D and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play that really "do it" as far as a sense of wonder go.

I'm really curious. How do you define "sense of wonder" in that context? It's not that I disagree with you, it's just that I'm not seeing how you define the criteria to begin with, with such an answer at the exclusion of other games I know we both know.

To me, Ben, the sense of wonder comes in the expression of the rules (partially) and largely in the campaign worlds baked into both rulesets.  AD&D is somewhat firmly a "Greyhawk" game (first and foremost) - look at the various artifacts and magic items and spell names.  Stepping in to that world, or into the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play through the mechanisms of the rules of each game (1e AD&D, 1e WHFRP) really does bring a sense of "Wow, that's really cool".  It's not just the trappings of their campaign settings, but how the rules go about expressing those things.

More later, if you're interested.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;619384More later, if you're interested.

I get what you're saying, and it is a different way to define the "sense of wonder" than previous posts have assumed, including mine. I totally would love to see what further thoughts you have in that regard.

Quote from: The Butcher;619374Old World of Darkness, for being the first setting that I really got into.

Mage: The Ascension (2e) comes to mind, and especially its Book of Worlds supplement which details the different realms of the Umbra.

In the non-WoD department, I (of course) find Nobilis good for evocative beyond-the-fields-we-know weirdness.

Quote from: The Butcher;619374Eclipse Phase, for suturing tropes from all over transhuman SF into a very enticing game setting that, while not strictly hard SF (it's even got psionics), feels "hard SF" like no other game that I know of.

Yeah, Eclipse Phase blew my mind a little the first time I played it. While I was horrified by many of the implications/assumptions it was just so... not what I was expecting, in a good way. I think I spent most of that first session a little bit stoned on its concepts (the same thing happened to me when I went to see The Matrix without ANY idea what it was about).

EDIT: I'd also like to think Cadwallon would have some of that magic... the setting, Aarklash, certainly hits me that way. I'm not sure if it would carry through Cadwallon's baroque rules for tactical combat... or maybe they would push it further. It's a high magic setting... but the magic feels different... like fairy tales. It seems to me like if Warhammer's setting were reinterpreted through by Disney (without straining all the darkness out).

for me recently, B/X D&D. I just discovered it for the first time. I never got to play anything even remotely associated with D&D growing up (Satanic Panic), and never really got into D&D until 3.x. I'd owned copies of AD&D1e and 2e briefly, but never really got to play them (except 1e briefly), but those experiences werent enough to really sink in. A friend of mine gave me a copy of the Basic set, and I really need to get an Expert set at some point.

I would have to add DCC and ACKS to this list as well. DCC for the shear wacky/trippy/gonzo of it all, and ACKS for just being awesome rules.

As far as settings go, Mystara is in the top of my list. Followed by Birthright, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Dragon Age, Warhammer The Old World, Middle Earth. All of these have evoked a sense of wonder, and excitement.

Over the Edge. Easy to relate to and close to home as it is almost like the real world, which makes the settings utter weirdness that more exhilarating and wondrous.

I really hope Arrows of Indra will do this for some people. It did for me!

RPGPundit

Quote from: thedungeondelver;619382I would say, for me, it's AD&D and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play that really "do it" as far as a sense of wonder go.

I'd say Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay too, but only the 1st Edition with its quirks, folklore, weird creatures (Zoats, Fimir, Daemons of Law!), strange gods  expansive geography and mish-mash of Tolkien and Moorcock. I don't think people who play the 3rd Edition get this. Warhammer 1st Edition wasn't just grim and gritty - it was weird too, magical.

Quote from: elfandghost;619453I'd say Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay too, but only the 1st Edition with its quirks, folklore, weird creatures (Zoats, Fimir, Daemons of Law!), strange gods  expansive geography and mish-mash of Tolkien and Moorcock. I don't think people who play the 3rd Edition get this. Warhammer 1st Edition wasn't just grim and gritty - it was weird too, magical.

Yeah; I'd meant to say WHFRP 1e there...2e had a more streamlined rule system but was too Grimdark for me in terms of pure background.  3e is...not...erm, not to my taste as I can tell.  I don't know what they did/didn't do with the background.

Easily Palladium Fantasy and Rifts.

Fading Suns was pretty good for this, it struck the right note between mythic and technical. Also it didn't try to explain everything, the unexplained is an excellent way to generate a sense of wonder.

To me, a "sense of wonder" comes from the setting and not (very much) from the rules. As I tend to play and run game systems when the setting is not a part of the game system, I haven't played many games with a combined setting. However, if I had to pick a couple I'd say Empire of the Petal Throne (in most of iots incarnations) and TORG.

Interesting 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.

Yeah, I gotta say that for me "sense of wonder" and "anything can happen" are two different things.

I'm inclined to agree with Killfuck's examples and will also add one mild example of my own: I really kind of dig Larry Elmore's artwork for AD&D 2nd edition stuff. I think it captures the whole "step into a Ray Feist novel" aspect of that era of gaming nicely and whilst I know it isn't the most fashionable playing aim the fact is that's the style D&D had when I joined the hobby so that's the one which gives me the warm fuzzies the easiest.

Plus check this out (http://www.arthistory.cc/pics/larryelmore/8.jpg) - I love that picture in particular, it looks like a gang of adventurers dragged their kill to Larry's studio to get a portrait done. The combination of very realistic-looking characters, lush natural scenery, and this element of the fantastic in the middle of it at the one hand being clearly something beyond the normal but at the same time also looking like it's very much a part of this world, that pushes the "sense of wonder" button to me.

(Without precisely defining "sense of wonder").

When I was younger, I had a "sense of wonder" whenever I played other people's rpg games with their own homebrew worlds.  (ie. Something which didn't resemble Greyhawk or Dragonlance).

Since I got back into tabletop rpg games (after 3.5E was released), I didn't feel much (if any) "sense of wonder" whatsoever.  This was the case even for games I use to play a lot when I was younger (ie. TSR era D&D, Runequest, etc ...).

The only semi-plausible explanation I can think of, is that back in the day when I was 12 years old, everything seemed exciting.  As I got older, a lot of stuff became less and less exciting, and felt more like "going through the motions" more than anything else.

Quote from: Warthur;619496Plus check this out (http://www.arthistory.cc/pics/larryelmore/8.jpg) - I love that picture in particular, it looks like a gang of adventurers dragged their kill to Larry's studio to get a portrait done. The combination of very realistic-looking characters, lush natural scenery, and this element of the fantastic in the middle of it at the one hand being clearly something beyond the normal but at the same time also looking like it's very much a part of this world, that pushes the "sense of wonder" button to me.

That is one of my favorite pieces of fantasy art. When I think of fantasy gaming, that's what I want it to be like.

It rarely has been though...

Not to say that is bad, but it is something that I feel is "missing" somewhere in my gaming experience.

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 (http://www.dp9.com/tribe8) 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)

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 have the very first printing of all the books, including the Player's Guide. There's nothing like that in there, and nothing cut and pasted from any version of the rules. I think you're misremembering and confusing Hellfrost with another product. The explicitly listed trappings in Hellfrost are Acid, Air, Cold, Coldfire, Darkness, Light, Earth, Water, Electricity, Fire, Heat, Ice, Necromancy, Sound. There is no reference to rayguns anywhere in the book.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;619797I have the very first printing of all the books, including the Player's Guide. There's nothing like that in there, and nothing cut and pasted from any version of the rules. I think you're misremembering and confusing Hellfrost with another product. The explicitly listed trappings in Hellfrost are Acid, Air, Cold, Coldfire, Darkness, Light, Earth, Water, Electricity, Fire, Heat, Ice, Necromancy, Sound. There is no reference to rayguns anywhere in the book.

See my exact page numbers up thread.

Quote from: Simlasa;619435Yeah, Eclipse Phase blew my mind a little the first time I played it. While I was horrified by many of the implications/assumptions it was just so... not what I was expecting, in a good way. I think I spent most of that first session a little bit stoned on its concepts (the same thing happened to me when I went to see The Matrix without ANY idea what it was about).

I bought EP in 2009 because the Manhattan Compleat Strategist guys were nice to my foreign-accented, disheveled after-work suit-and-tie self, and because the book looked pretty, without knowing the first thing about transhuman SF, and having read only vague blurbs over at RPGnet. Boy, was I in for a treat.

And I too went to see The Matrix without knowing WTF it was about. Which brings us to...

Quote from: GrimGent;619391Mage: The Ascension (2e) comes to mind, and especially its Book of Worlds supplement which details the different realms of the Umbra.

In the non-WoD department, I (of course) find Nobilis good for evocative beyond-the-fields-we-know weirdness.

...Mage. I remember being awed by a beautiful eight-page spread inside an old Dragon magazine (late 100s to early 200s) which was a fancy ad for Mage: The Ascension 1e. It detailed each of the Traditions and specified two spheres for each (Hermetics got Force and Prime, Etherites hadMatter and Forces, Euthanatoi got Entropy and Spirit, etc.) and featured a lush color painting of Tradition mages in motorcycles and dragons and shit attacking a Technocracy spaceship on whose deck stood a shirtless, trenchcoated guy with a ponytail and an eyepatch and a cigarette in hand, the other hand draped over a child's shoulder, and a look of "I'm gonna corrupt the shit out of this kid" on his face.

Really. (http://d20darkages.blogspot.com.br/2012/12/in-retrospect-dragon-195-part-2.html) I actually had to Google it to make sure I wasn't hallucinating the whole thing.

A few months later I spotted Mage: The Ascension 1e at a local bookstore (yeah, a normal bookstore, lost in a shopping mall. Those were the days) and I got it, without quite knowing what I was getting. I couldn't make head or tails of the game, though, and didn't really run it until 2e came out. Ascension is actually the only White Wolf game of which I own all three editions, though it's not even my favorite oWoD line.

The Matrix actually went a long way in making me "get" Mage, and the Guide to the Technocracy did wonders (no pun intended) to allay my feelings about the ham-handed portrayal of science and technology as soul-crushing oppression. I still think it's a bold and beautiful game and I'll still play it if someone's running. But for the most part, I've shifted my attentions over to the uncharted waters of the nWoD, and I'm dying for an opportunity to run Awakening, a game which I feel touches on many of the same themes as Ascension, albeit in a far subtler manner.

Quote from: Drohem;6195243e RuneQuest:  Alright, Butcher's description is near poetry and I feel that my words would be a distracting mumble in comparison...

Thanks for the kind words, and for sharing this with us. I hope one of the Runequest guys gets to read this.

Quote from: Zachary The First;619629That's actually why I mentioned Rifts. Especially before the World Book bloat, there were moments of real immersion and wonder.

Oh God yes. If I was running Rifts today (in North America or Mexico) I'd be using World Books 1-2, Conversion Book 1, Sourcebooks 1-3, Mercenaries, and maybe select material from FoM and Psyscape. I'd also gladly run a NGR & Central Europe crawl campaign again (adding World Books 3-5 and Sourcebook 3 to the mix), and I'm told the Russia books are bitchin'.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;619797I have the very first printing of all the books, including the Player's Guide. There's nothing like that in there, and nothing cut and pasted from any version of the rules. I think you're misremembering and confusing Hellfrost with another product. The explicitly listed trappings in Hellfrost are Acid, Air, Cold, Coldfire, Darkness, Light, Earth, Water, Electricity, Fire, Heat, Ice, Necromancy, Sound. There is no reference to rayguns anywhere in the book.

He is right.

While no mention of rayguns, a dog can wield a shotgun with penalty according to the text. Sounds like sloppy copy-paste.  I'm sure it was an oversight, as it is only an example of play. If you change shotgun to crossbow, you have the same result.

The handcuffs example I can be a little more forgiving. Instead of handguns, I can change the idea into binding ropes or manacles.

Quote from: CRKrueger;619817See my exact page numbers up thread.

Those are the few modified powers I mentioned. They only changed them to make them fit the mechanics for Hellfrost magic. They tell you this explcitly in the beginning of the section on spells that this is what they were doing. It is probably a licensing thing. You'd obviously use the trappings listed for Hellfrost, especially since for each Arcane Background the trappings available for them are explicitly stated.

The overwhelming majority of spells in Hellfrost are entirely new (or were.. SWD added some that look to have originated in Hellfrost), around two dozen of them.  They explicitly list the trappings in Hellfrost at the very beginning of the section. There's a ton of setting rules and edges.

So I'm just not seeing your original point here, the spells and powers aren't all lifted from Savage Worlds, most of the spells are brand new to Hellfrost. A few that needed to be changed from power points to Hellfrost mechanics were re-printed with the rule changes. Ones that remained unchanged were not even listed in spell section (which is why I think it's licensing).

Every RPG I play does this, or I find another game. I wouldn't say any do it better than others, its just different flavours, like icecream.

Quote from: Crabbyapples;619834He is right.

While no mention of rayguns, a dog can wield a shotgun with penalty according to the text. Sounds like sloppy copy-paste.  I'm sure it was an oversight, as it is only an example of play. If you change shotgun to crossbow, you have the same result.

it's one thing to criticize poor editing. It's another to say that it doesn't have anything unique about it to evoke the setting because of a few editing errors. Hellfrost is one of the best done settings I've seen for Savage Worlds and most of the powers listed by a wide margin are brand new, unique to the setting, and aren't in Savage Worlds, only the ones reprinted are those that had their mechanics changed because Hellfrost doesn't use power points. I figured they couldn't change the text beyond mechanics due to licensing restrictions, but even if it's just a bad editing job, it's a bit hyperbolic to condemn over a hundred pages of great ideas because of a half dozen words out of place.

Quote from: The Butcher;619824...Mage. I remember being awed by a beautiful eight-page spread inside an old Dragon magazine (late 100s to early 200s) which was a fancy ad for Mage: The Ascension 1e. It detailed each of the Traditions and specified two spheres for each (Hermetics got Force and Prime, Etherites hadMatter and Forces, Euthanatoi got Entropy and Spirit, etc.) and featured a lush color painting of Tradition mages in motorcycles and dragons and shit attacking a Technocracy spaceship on whose deck stood a shirtless, trenchcoated guy with a ponytail and an eyepatch and a cigarette in hand, the other hand draped over a child's shoulder, and a look of "I'm gonna corrupt the shit out of this kid" on his face.

That same (hilariously over-the-top) artwork (http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd302/Kamelion69/01.jpg) actually appeared on the 1e Storyteller's Screen (http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=771). The illustration's been known to cause some serious mood whiplash with folks who came in with Revised later on. It's all very... "Whee!!!"

My original post and point was, that SW is a game IMO, that like any other generic toolkit, needs setting specific rules to reskin the toolkit into something resembling a system written for that purpose.  

In a dark Nordic setting, expecting a list of dark Nordic spells, I really didn't expect to see ray guns, handcuffs, glue bombs and dogs with shotguns listed as acceptable trappings for my dark Nordic magic.  I understand your licensing argument, but in that case, they should have developed new spells instead of cut-and-pasting.

I was hoping to use Hellfrost as is, when I found out I would have to edit the normal SW-gonzo out of the dark Nordic book I lost interest.

This was a chance to convert a SW skeptic, and by instead of delivering my hope (a complete reskin), they delivered my fear(a thin coat of paint over the mechanics).

Now not being a SW guru, I fully accept that there may be very deep changes which are not readily apparent to one who does not have system mastery of SW.  Unfortunately, seeing the cut and paste on the spells left the impression that this was a game that did not sufficiently change core SW for a dark Nordic setting.

Further expansions may have ended this trend, but I wasn't going to spend more money on a hope.

Quote from: GrimGent;619888That same (hilariously over-the-top) artwork (http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd302/Kamelion69/01.jpg) actually appeared on the 1e Storyteller's Screen (http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=771). The illustration's been known to cause some serious mood whiplash with folks who came in with Revised later on. It's all very... "Whee!!!"

Oh God, I totally forgot about machine-gun dinosaur in suit and tie.

Thank you for linking this. You made my day!

We should totally embed this here, BTW:

(http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd302/Kamelion69/01.jpg)

Original D&D, for sure. Why? It was the first RPG I ever saw or played, and the impression I had from playing was that it was both familiar and mysterious--like The Hobbit, which I'd probably read a year or so before, it simultaneously created a lifelike and fully-realized vision of fantasy (unlike "fairy tales" or tersely-narrated myths or biblical stories), while promising new things to explore just beyond the horizon. That's how it seemed when I played D&D with some older kids, and when I got my hands on the books & supplements, after I absorbed everything in them, I was starving for more. There were small allusions to things from the Greyhawk campaign which simultaneously hinted at a wider world--if only I could get find a proper reference--and suggested that it was up to me to create it.

Really, a very powerful lesson in the importance of allusion in both fantasy literature and games. People are often more excited by the things you hint at than the things you spell out. (Star Wars serves as a massive negative example, IMO.)

I agree that Talislanta also provides a great sense of wonder even though, if you have ALL the books, you do get the answers to pretty much all the mysteries. It's just that it fits together pretty damn well, and it's so baroque, plus with the exception of a few ill-advised modules from the 3e era, there's very little metaplot--so it promises a toybox filled with cool stuff that you can play with any way you like.

Another game in the "allusive" category: Shades of Fantasy. It's got a more specific setting than D&D, but with the exception of a map that wasn't published in the book itself, one must again infer a great deal from a bunch of cool details found in the game system. (The piece of history or setting overview is an account of the main religion of the setting, a sort of mix of Zoroastrianism and Christianity.) Everything else is a wild mix of the strange and the familiar. To quote myself from elsewhere, when it comes to character races & classes, "the Fey Folk are much more like the diverse creatures found in the classic Faeries than Tolkienesque elves. There’s a strong high medieval feel, with chivalry and knightly orders, but also unique races and monsters—characters can be “banruks”, who look like a cross between a bear and giant sloth; they can be penitent angels, or devilkin bearing boons and curses, etc."

And then at the other end of the scale, I'd put The Shadow of Yesterday. Yeah, I know it's easy to slag on a story game, but the system in itself seems pretty cool. The setting, though, is just a sketchy patchwork of high fantasy tropes combined with some obvious borrowings such as ratkin (skaven), and what appears to be a pastiche of colonial Southeast Asia.  The parts don't really seem to connect or interact much other than abutting each other on the map. There's a difference between allusive and threadbare, and TSoY's world of Near falls on the wrong side of that line.

Empire of the Petal Throne
LBB OD&D
Eclipse Phase

D&D 3/3.5 in general
Planescape
GURPS - I remember seeing a copy of GURPS Cyberpunk and GURPS Horror on the shelf near each other, and I almost peed myself thinking of the possibilities.

Quote from: CRKrueger;619889My original post and point was, that SW is a game IMO, that like any other generic toolkit, needs setting specific rules to reskin the toolkit into something resembling a system written for that purpose.  

In a dark Nordic setting, expecting a list of dark Nordic spells, I really didn't expect to see ray guns, handcuffs, glue bombs and dogs with shotguns listed as acceptable trappings for my dark Nordic magic.  I understand your licensing argument, but in that case, they should have developed new spells instead of cut-and-pasting.

But that's the point. THEY DID DEVELOP NEW SPELLS. They just didn't eliminate the core spells; they only updated them to use the entirely new mechanics. They did provide new Trappings, on page 79. There are nearly THIRTY new spells in the book. There's a bunch of setting rules.

You're misrepresenting the book by a wide margin. I don't know WHY, you're either being dishonestly or ignorantly obtuse, and I'm not sure which.

QuoteI was hoping to use Hellfrost as is, when I found out I would have to edit the normal SW-gonzo out of the dark Nordic book I lost interest.

There's nothing to edit out. Until looking up the specific entries, I never even noticed them. They're not part of the main text. There's a handful of odd things, and they're minor, a half dozen words, out of a book that's 126 pages long.

You're talking like this is the way the whole book is. It isn't. It's literally a handful of words in the whole damn book.

QuoteThis was a chance to convert a SW skeptic, and by instead of delivering my hope (a complete reskin), they delivered my fear(a thin coat of paint over the mechanics).

Sorry, but that's entirely false. The magic system is wholly unique and works nothing like that in the core SWEX. There's more than 2 dozen entirely new spells. There's about 20 new edges, there's a whole section of Setting Rules for the game setting itself. There's the Glory System. There's the new environmental rules. The way magic works mechanically. Everything.

QuoteNow not being a SW guru, I fully accept that there may be very deep changes which are not readily apparent to one who does not have system mastery of SW.  Unfortunately, seeing the cut and paste on the spells left the impression that this was a game that did not sufficiently change core SW for a dark Nordic setting.

Count the number of so-called "cut and paste" spells, please. Then count the total number of spells in the book. Then compare to the list of trappings provided on pg. 74. Then compare how every Arcane Background works compared to the core. Then look at the chapter on general setting rules. Then look at the Glory system. Then the Edges in the character creation section, both new and modified. And how Skalds work. And Kennings. And the Religion. Then compare this to SWEX. Then come back and tell me how it didn't sufficiently change the core SW.

Because frankly, you're flatly wrong about this.

Quote from: The Butcher;619979Oh God, I totally forgot about machine-gun dinosaur in suit and tie.

Thank you for linking this. You made my day!

We should totally embed this here, BTW:

I would definitely have played a lot more Mage if I'd ever seen this picture back in the day...
I can't stop looking at that guy's chest though (is that an 8-pack?).

Quote from: Reckall;620072D&D 3/3.5 in general
Planescape
GURPS - I remember seeing a copy of GURPS Cyberpunk and GURPS Horror on the shelf near each other, and I almost peed myself thinking of the possibilities.

Hmm you're the first one to say D&D 3E so I'm curious about this one. How does it get your juices flowing?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;620263Hmm you're the first one to say D&D 3E so I'm curious about this one. How does it get your juices flowing?

I think it is the rich, mature style it is written with. I like a lot of 3/3.5E fluff, and I bought many books for the pleasure of reading them. Draconomicon, for example, is a small masterpiece. The Malconvoker idea alone (a "undercover agent" among demons and devils) gave to me the basis for a whole part of my campaign; and so on.

I'm always miffed when a review doesn't touch the quality of the fluff, agonizing instead on system and number crunching. The ability of an RPG to open your mind to new "vistas" even in old landscapes (like D&D's one) is too often undervalued.

Quote from: Reckall;620317I'm always miffed when a review doesn't touch the quality of the fluff, agonizing instead on system and number crunching. The ability of an RPG to open your mind to new "vistas" even in old landscapes (like D&D's one) is too often undervalued.

Speaking to this, I can get "wonder" out of almost any game, but it's additional (and often obscure) material like _Manual of the Planes_ or _Ghostwalker_ that help me get into a space where I can bring it.

Vampire 1e, where you could imagine the WoD to come with all its promise of Ghosts and Faeries and Lupines and other terms which were later altered for print.  Before WW's supplement engine spoiled it.

I can think of two game systems that really brought out a "Sense of Wonder" for me by themselves.

The first was Traveller with all of its design sequences that worked together. I could use the rules to build a universe to my own liking. There was a game that I could use to emulate all of my favorite science fiction that I had read.

The second was D&D 3.x/Pathfinder, not solely because of the rules themselves, but because of what the OGL inspired others to do. From that d20 OGL Core came a wealth of new ideas and possibilities similar to what I had found with Traveller decades earlier. A veritable pre-Cambrian Explosion of new twists on old ideas. Yes, some were utter crap, but the awesome mixed in there was absolutely awesome.

Things just about forgotten, like Small Gods written about in FFG's books, where a relatively weak divinity could grant spells to Clerics based on how many worshippers it had - a whole campaign or three could be created from that alone. Things which became mainstream like the Iron Kingdoms with its steam powered fantasy mecha, now about to become its own non-d20 RPG.

WEG d6 Star Wars was great, but the "Sense of Wonder" that it brought about was the "Sense of Wonder" of the Star Wars universe  themselves and expanded on them in ways that nobody at the time could predict. Both for better and for worse, but it did not create it on its own.

Planescape.

Since my first experience was Planescape Torment, I knew everything was possible when a skull joined my party :)

Ok, my three sense of wonder games have already been named:

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;619492Some games that invoke that feeling for me are Dragon Warriors, for its connection with folklore,

Quote from: K Peterson;619523I think that Dream Pod 9's Tribe 8 RPG really held a sense of wonder and alienness,

Quote from: elfandghost;619453I'd say Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay too, but only the 1st Edition with its quirks, folklore, weird creatures (Zoats, Fimir, Daemons of Law!), (...) Warhammer 1st Edition wasn't just grim and gritty - it was weird too, magical.

But my biggest sense of wonder moment with regards to RPGs was when I found two issues of the French magazine Casus Belli at a game store in Hanover, Germany.
Suddenly, a whole new world opened up before me, in reviews, ads, news bits, and adventure modules. Nearly every page was a promise of a fully realized game or setting with its own range of sourcebooks and modules.

We foreigners are kind of blessed in that we usually have access to far more games than native English speakers. We have all those imports from the US and UK, plus our own country's output.
I already knew most English and German games - but discovering the whole French market (which felt both bigger and more diverse than the German one) on top of that blew my mind.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;621004but discovering the whole French market (which felt both bigger and more diverse than the German one) on top of that blew my mind.

Same here. The first time I visited the Starplayer shop in Paris (rue Lagrange 16 for those interested) I wondered if it was the Louvre :jaw-dropping:

The French market is something by itself. It cannot be described. I mean, their edition of Call of Cthulhu alone is a whole grade of magnitude above and beyond the original one by Chaosium.

Quote from: Reckall;621244Same here. The first time I visited the Starplayer shop in Paris (rue Lagrange 16 for those interested) I wondered if it was the Louvre :jaw-dropping:

The French market is something by itself. It cannot be described. I mean, their edition of Call of Cthulhu alone is a whole grade of magnitude above and beyond the original one by Chaosium.

I'm learning French this year. No kidding.

I think it could be said with no doubt that when it was first released, Amber filled me with a sense of wonder. It changed everything about how I looked at RPGs, and GMing.

RPGPundit

Tribe 8  would be the game that game me a sense of wonder more than most.

That game has some amazing fluff background material.