People have been sharing the 10 RPGs that most influenced them. Here’s a handful of mine–they aren’t the ones that I like the most or played the most, but have certainly had the biggest impact on how I think about table top games and gaming.
If You Knew Now the Fullness of Your Coming Regret, by Constance Hughs
The entirety of the game consists of the names and brief biographies of 100 characters in Plangence, a small South Dakota town. Its first and only print run was taken from shelves when the remains of 24 of the people named in the book were found in the author’s South Dakota home.
Chrysanthemums, by Anonymous
A simulationist take on Heian-era romance distributed in the early 90s by floppy disk. Its complex flower-based resolution system was derided by critics as inaccessible and expensive, but it accumulated a cult following.
Cradled in the Holy Hollows of His Hands, by Josiah Jameson
A diceless system based around accurate recollection of Bible verses. Its author claimed playing the game was an act of worship, drawing censure from a variety of Christian spiritual leaders. Publication rights have lapsed since its distribution in the 80s, and the author’s estate disavows knowledge of the game.
Supplement V, by M.M. Batiste
An unsanctioned fifth supplement to Original Dungeons & Dragons featuring extensive rules for what the author describes as games in the “Grand Guignol style”. An expansively cruel and gruesomely scatalogical tract claiming inspiration from 100 Days of Sodom, L’histoire de l’œil, and of course the shows of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, its appendices included “rules modules” well ahead of the booklet’s time, describing options for ascending armor class and damage on a miss.
The Whole of the Law, by Anonymous
A series of allegedly false documents that loosely outline a modern fantasy horror setting in which a revanchist neopagan splinter sect stages a successful coup in the United States in the late 1990s. Sold loose-leaf in a shrink-wrapped manila folder, it was pulled from shelves in the early 2000s, perhaps the real string of arrests in West Virginia towns in which must of the metaplot’s action takes place.