The Recommendation Thread

This is the thread where you can recommend sites, games, television shows, books and so on.

Pathfinder; a table top RPG system

On the previous site we regularly posted our Pathfinder adventures, like so, which might make you tempted to try your own, the problem however is that you might not want to invest in the needed books. Luckily for you, most of Pathfinder is published under the OGL, meaning that you can find free online copies of essentially both the core book, and many supplements.

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document is the official copy of all the OGL stuff. But a better place to get your sauce is Pathfinder_OGC which not only contains the official rules but also many third party additions (clearly marked as such.)

Finally, there is PFBeginner, it's based on the content of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box, and gives an excellent introduction to the Pathfinder system.

The next thing you need is an actual scenario, to play. You can either make your own, which can be both daunting (especially when you start out,) and time consuming. Luckily there are many pre-made ones out there, some of them free. Just Google around.

Fringe.


Watch Fringe.

It's on Netflix.

It's like .... The X-Files meets other stuff.

Black Books, Father Ted, The IT Crowd, and 'Allo 'Allo!.

All British comedies (or written by Irish people to appeal to a British audience) that I've mentioned to people before, who almost invariably responded with "this is awesome, how have I not seen this before", so... yeah. Watch them.

Also, something I wouldn't recommend - getting stuck in a lift. Again.
Hooray for mobile internets.
(HALP)

Maw hunting is interesting. To watch, i mean, if you have the kajones to actually do it, i want to watch.

The virtual lounge is out of character just so you know :P.

Going to back up Dip's recommendation of Pathfinder; I've been running various campaigns in it ever since it came out, and I love the system (even if it can be a bit clunky at times).

Now, if we're going to stay on topic with tabletop RPGs - and we are, because I am an obsessive bastard - I'm going to suggest Call of Cthulhu. I know it seems obvious, but I also know that few people actually play the game and just look at the book, make bad Lovecraft jokes, and then decide to play something else instead. There's no system better at inducing black humor and schadenfreude from your players than CoC. Additionally, if you want to play it straight (or at least with more background than "you're all strangers in the 1940's when SOMETHING HAPPENS"), track down and use the Delta Green setting from the 1990's. PDFs are littered throughout the web for the brave to find. Print copies are exceedingly rare and worth hundreds to the right collector.

As long as we're in tabletop, I'd like to talk about my favorite one : Mage : The Ascension.
Set in the old World of Darkness (like Vampire : The Mascarade, Werewolf, Changeling, Wraith and such) it lets you play modern day enlightened human beings able to impose their will on reality and their own paradigm, their view of how things work.
The main (and playable) factions of mages are the traditionalists, who practice various schools of magic, outside of the rigid laws of science. You have the traditional european mages, shamans, death mages... They're united by their belief that reality should be flexible and allow each human to reach their full potential.

On the other hand we have technocrats, the inventors of science. They didn't discover maths, biology or physics, they made up the rules together, and then shared it with the masses to help them live better and protect them from the things in the dark. It was a genius move, since when humanity's latent potential is on board, made up "science" starts working for everyone. And a mysterious force called paradox starts hitting those outside of the consensus hard if they don't hide themselves.
We owe them a lot, but ever since the industrial revolution they kind of took a turn, and became intolerant of anything that doesn't fit in their view of reality, whether it's mages, other supernatural creatures, or citizens who just won't play along...

Add to that Nephandi, mages set on unraveling reality, and marauders, who are trapped between our reality and theirs and made absolutely crazy as a result, and you get a four way war for reality itself.

The main draw of Mage is that each character gets to invent his powers. No list of spells, you do have premade rotes but they're only examples. The players are expected to come up with their own, and give an absolutely unique feel and esthetics to his character.

Of course it's pretty hard to make up a whole paradigm, so at first a player would mostly roll with the views of their tradition or convention on the view of the world (primal energy? Well it's like magic juice right?) and with time make their own theories (Well I see it as raw data in the universal matrix). The better is their paradigm, the better are the rotes they'll invent, the more powerful their character will be! Mage is fueled by imagination, and that is awesome.

It also has the biggest setting in the world of darkness, since everything is accessible to mages. All umbra realms (depending on your kind of mage), all supernaturals, if a mage set his mind to it he'll get there.

Gotta back this up. Delta Green is the ****. And by 'the ****', I mean 'the shit.'

On that note - the 40k RPGs have always held a special place in my heart. Particularly Only War and Rogue Trader. But, Dark Heresy stands out as a notable low-power (at least initially) one that I've been toying with the idea of running for a campaign idea I once had that could loosely be called 'Shadowrun in space.'

The system's relatively simple and not-always-clunky, and the critical hit charts are to die for. With some relatively-simple tweaks, you could use it as a decent modern-times or near-future RPG without needing to involve the 40k setting, if you're not into that.

Okay, we're talking RPG systems. That's cool, I can get behind that.

But we're all dancing around the elephant in the room. And that elephant in the room is:

Unknown Armies.

I'm not overstating it when I say that UA will literally change how you look at the world. The strange will stand out all the more, and the ordinary will take on sinister meanings. The game itself is elegant, simple, and lends itself readily to any kind of combination of the real world, horror, and magic.

It's also a very personal, and forces you to actually think about your actions. There's a lot more to consequences than most games have.


Unknown Armies: the best, hands down.

Oh, holy crap.

I need to get into UA.

That sounds awesome. I have no idea what it is, but it sounds awesome.

Dungeon World: another RPG system.

I didn't mean to turn this into 'recommend a tabletop RPG system' thread but here we are, and as such I present to you the awesomeness of the Dungeon World system based on the (Apocalypse World engine).

This system has very easy rules compared with the more 'serious' systems that tend to have a lot of crunchiness (number crunching and rules) to them.

The rules can be surmised as following If the player want to do something that needs to be resolved (like finding a place on a map, asking the right question or kicking butt,) they just roll 2d6 and add/subtract any bonus/penalty. If the total is ten or over, they succeed, between seven and nine, they still succeed but some other (less good) stuff can happen, six or lower (bad) stuff happens. That's half of it, sometimes the players also get to roll damage when applicable, but you as MC (the name the GM gets in this system,) don't have to roll, unless you want to, I tended to roll the damage the antagonist dealt.

All actions players and the MC can take are codified in 'moves', these can be very specific like 'casting a spell' or very broad like 'hack and slash' when they attack. There's no initiative rolls or anything like that, everything inside of combat is as free-flowing as outside of it. This means it resolves very quickly and organically. The main aim of the system is to have awesome stories to tell.

Like the time when Aphin's druid/lead vocalist tried to turn into a giant squid during a ship to ship battle, but rolled a five, in a 'normal' system the spell would fail and that would be it. In this system however it meant I (the MC) am allowed some fun so the druid still turned into a giant squid, only he forgot who he was, so...



And before you ask, he was lead vocalist of BLUDMAJE, Heavy Metal band in a fantasy post apocalyptic fantasy setting in a Pirates of the Caribbean pastiche. With Spiza's Orc Bard as the base player, Tom's character (a lizardman) at the drums and Harrad's elven thief, is just getting pulled along in the misadventures of the band.

Interested? You can find the rules here(The different rule sections can be accessed from the top menu-bar).

Bringing this thread back with a computer game I played to death during my 'post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre' kick back in high school.

That computer game? Armageddon Empires.



In the year 2025, mankind makes hostile first contact with two alien civilizations. The Machine Empire and the Xenopods have been enemies locked in a death struggle for over 10,000 years. As the battle for control of the solar system and the earth rages with unimaginable fury, neither group pays the insignificant natives of the planet much attention. Within a month of first contact, much of the human race is wiped out by thermonuclear fire, kinetic weapon strikes, genetically engineered plagues and starvation.

The survivors scurry like cockroaches to stay out of the aliens’ way. A little over 20 years later, the fighting stops as suddenly as it started. A shift in the tide of battle moves the Machine/Xenopod war to other star systems and all that remains on the devastated Earth are scattered groups of human survivors and the stranded remnants of the aliens’ ground forces. Isolated groups of Machine and Xenopod forces, along with human survivors, continue to battle for survival against each other. The Earth fell into a period of warring states that has lasted for 300 years and continues to the present day.



In short, shit got fucked up. And you're going to fight over what's left in the wasteland with the rest of those fuckers.



Armageddon Empires is a turn-based post-apocalyptic strategy game where you play on a hex-grid, with some interesting game mechanics. It's like a cross between Settlers of Catan, a CCG, a 4X game, and some sort of tabletop wargame. The gameplay emphasizes resource scarcity and budgeting of equipment and supplies among your forces, as well as budgeting your army itself, and the resources you use to build it. The artwork is exceptional, and the game is chock full of references to a lot of older post-apocalyptic series and games (the War OGR vehicle you can salvage, Vault 13, etc.). You pick a faction, make a deck of units, facilities, and other such things (based on a point budget, resulting in you needing to limit the army you make based on point values and perceived tactical necessities), and then pick a deck for a game where you pick what other faction(s) you're up against, how big the map is, and how much in the way of resources and special encounters/loot you can run into. If you have Cults of the Wasteland, you also pick which cult you want to go up against.



Your goal is to conquer the Wasteland, and all game maps are randomly generated, leading to a lot of replay value. Different independent factions you encounter will respond differently depending on which faction you play as - the Empire of Man, Mutants, Xenopods, or the Machine Empire. Some will attack on sight, others will agree to work with you for free and become units under your control, and others will agree to hire themselves out to you in exchange for resources - usually mercenary factions like Slade's Marauders or Casca's Rangers. This is a great way to assimilate territory and bulk up your numbers, especially in the early game (and ESPECIALLY if you're hard-up for a decent hero unit who can lead your troops and set up resource-collection outposts).



There are four major weaknesses this game has, and those are a lack of multiplayer, an admittedly-clunky user-interface, and the fact that the gameplay mechanics are fairly unique and take some getting used to, and no tutorial. It takes some effort to learn to navigate the user-interface and resource-acquisition system, and other such things. That's the primary learning curve, and once that's gone, the sole weakness becomes the lack of multiplayer.

Expect to get your ass kicked for two or three games before you finally get into it, and if you can find other people who play it, ask for tips on how to work the interface. If you guys want to get into it, feel free to ask me over the IRC or something, I'll help.

But once you get into it and start playing, you always feel like you just walked away from some heroic story. It's nothing short of phenomenal. Between the insane level of replay value, the ability to customize your own army and the fact that (especially with the mini-expansions, Tip of the Spear and Cults of the Wasteland, both of which add new gameplay elements that add to tactical and strategic considerations) you can customize individual units to an exceptional degree with all sorts of upgrades, bio-augmentations and new equipment and training (special abilities you can give your infantry to counteract and balance out the sheer firepower of tanks and power armor and such), you always get that feeling that, to borrow a quote from an EVE Online ad, 'you were there.'

The game's emphasis on resource-allocation, conservation and scarcity really hammers it home that you are not working with an infinite budget or army - if you draw an infantry squad from your deck, play it, and then lose it in a fight later, you don't get to just build another one like in a lot of RTS games. That squad is gone, period, and you need to work without it. It really emphasizes that you need to be careful, even in situations where your army holds a distinct numbers advantage.

If you guys want a memorable experience reminiscent of an awesome X-COM after-action report or even a 'tale from the table' in the vein of a story from a tabletop RPG you played in the past, I have to suggest Armageddon Empires.

The link above has a demo, so I really want to hear what you guys think. Give it a shot.