I tend to ignore ‘pingbacks’ or ‘trackbacks’, because nine times out of ten they’re from RSS-scrapers who are linking back to where they stole the original content from, so they can die in a fire. However, very rarely, I get a genuine blog post at the other end; even more rarely, I get a blog post I actually take an interest in.

Witness: 100 Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games You Should Play Before You Die, an impressive inaugural blog post on Games Info Depot’s Games Information Blog. (Looks to me like someone’s been reading hints on making catchy blog headlines. Hey, it worked!)

It’s a pretty good list, admit stretched a bit to get to that catchy one hundred figure; as well as a lot of old favourites there’s some new indie stuff in there too, along with a few titles I’d never heard of, so kudos for the research.

No clue why I got linked for Marvel Heroes (sic) though – if you’re after Marvel Super Heroes stuff (thanks, Pedant Man!) then you should head over to Classic Marvel Forever for everything you’ll ever need.

I thought about compiling my own list of roleplaying games that I’d rate a ‘must try’, but me being me, what started as a simple list turned into a long trip down memory lane, and a lot of research into games I’d never even played.

So in an attempt to give you something that might be a bit more personal, instead of just rehashing Wikipedia, what follows is a look at five noteworthy RPGs I’ve at least played, and figure that hey, you might enjoy too. I’ll get to five more before too long.

1) Dungeons & Dragons

I don’t really care which edition of Dungeons & Dragons you play, but you can’t really call yourself a roleplayer if you haven’t tried D&D at some point in your life. I mean, we all did. It’s the training wheels.

Roleplaying was born in this game, and regardless of which setting, adventure, class or race you play, there’s still something magical about venturing into the dark depths of a dungeon on the search for adventure.

The good news is, if you want to just roll some dice and kill some creatures, your options are myriad. As well as the current, official Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition – which seems to be fairly popular with ‘these kids today’ – you won’t have to look much further than your local charity shop, or the nostalgic’s friend, eBay, to find a copy of an old ruleset.

If you’re completely new to the phenomenon, I recommend the classic ‘Red Box’ Basic Set, c. 1983 (pictured), as an amazing starting point. It was expressly designed to introduce new players to D&D, and remains unrivalled to this day. A quick eBay trawl tends to turn up plenty of copies at reasonable prices.

If you don’t want to hunt down a physical copy, for just $4.95 RPGnow.com will sort you with a PDF version in the time it takes you to download 40Mb of scanned imagery. Heck, if you’ve never read the Basic Set it’s worth the five bucks just for the education.

If it’s a sturdy set of rules you’re after though, the ‘definitive’ version of the original D&D – the Rules Cyclopedia – is just $5.95. It’s got everything from the Basic/Expert/Companion/Master sets in it. And yes, that’s the version I have sitting on my shelf in real-life printed form.

UPDATE: Literally the same day I posted this, Wizards of the Coast decided to pull all PDF material from all outlets. My post on that’s here. Maybe they’ll put them back up on a store of their own, and maybe not.

Your final option – if you’re feeling really cheap because Wizards took away your other options, except piracy – is to try one of the various free ‘retro-clone’ RPGs that are out there on this wonderful internet.

I’ve got a stupidly in-depth post coming that discusses these, but for now, just know that if you want ‘original’ D&D, you want Swords & Wizardry; ‘original’ AD&D is well covered by OSRIC; and ‘Basic’ era D&D inspires Labyrinth Lord.

2) Skyrealms of Jorune

From plain vanilla fantasy that you can get almost anywhere, to something utterly esoteric that you won’t find easily: Skyrealms of Jorune.

Created in the 1980s by Andrew Leker and Mark Wallace, Jorune was a revelation to my gaming group. Introduced casually by a prospective GM with a sly grin on his face, it took us about two minutes to agree to play. After all, we’d never seen a game like it. Just look at the second edition cover (pictured; click to enlarge); it was a classical style painting with a giant monster and an alien in it! Before we even opened the box, we knew we were in for something unusual.

Inside, the incredible illustrations of Miles Teves and the ‘in-world’ writing of Leker created an unreal, yet oddly comfortable setting to adventure in. It helped that the classes and conventions of the game were unlike any you’d seen before; hell, the GM was even supposed to be known as a ‘Sholari’, or in English, ‘teacher’.

By reading the ‘Tauther Guide’ we got introduced to some of the basics of the game world; by looking at the illustrations we learned of the various races of Jorune, many of which were uniquely alien. It was a strange place, indeed, and in the end, a little too much for our GM to handle. Once he’d established that portals existed within Jorune, we dived through one and came out in the city of Lankhmar – another excellent setting but much more ‘vanilla fantasy’ in flavour.

It was a bit of a shame, as I never really got to know the Jorune setting as well as I’d like. Ultimately Jorune is a science fantasy. After the world was colonised by humans, a civil war broke out that near-destroyed both the colonists and Jorune’s alien natives. Thousands of years later, human technology is indistinguishable from magic, and the players explore a world that’s wholly alien, as they slowly come to realise their own origins. It’s a great mix, and you can understand why people are still obsessed about it twenty-odd years later.

Sadly, all three editions of the game are long out of print, but you might be able to snag a copy on eBay if you’re lucky. There are still fans out there producing material for the game, as well as conversions for other popular RPG systems – but honestly, I doubt many will take you into the world of Jorune as well as that boxed set did. Leave your world behind, indeed.

3) Traveller

Leaving the fantasy – or science-fantasy – games aside and going full-on into science fiction, you owe it to the founding fathers of science fiction roleplaying to have played Traveller at least once.

For me, Traveller’s always been something of an oddball system, but that’s definitely an idiosyncratic view. Y’see, my science fiction upbringing was based pretty much around one thing: Star Wars. With that heady mix of lightsabers, the Force, space smugglers and villains who looked best in black, no wonder Traveller’s world of mustered-out merchant marines – drawn from Asimov, Niven, Anderson and the like – seemed a bit dull.

Nonetheless, after my first couple of years playing Dungeons & Dragons I was ecstatic to get my hands on something set in space, and Traveller, as far as I knew, was pretty much the only game in town. I started with the slightly more kid-friendly Starter Traveller in 1983 (pictured, left), which was a bit less intimidating than the three black books of the original game (right), thanks to the funky artwork of David Deitrick.

Unfortunately, past that blond-haired Skywalker lookalike was a game that generated characters who were – gasp – ‘middle aged’, and talked about ‘terms of service’ in a way that my confused 11-year old self barely understood, let alone got excited by. I tried the best I could though, and when seminal space simulator Elite arrived on my BBC Model-B, suddenly Traveller made a lot more sense. With Traveller’s influence on Elite fairly obvious, I began to see the possibilities in the game; but by then I was far more interested in adding Military Lasers to my Cobra Mk. III than I was in figuring out Traveller’s rules.

As the years have passed though, I’ve grown a lot more appreciative of Traveller as a standards-setting game. Many of its conventions were entirely alien to the 11-year old me, but the older I get, the more I realise it was a game ahead of its time. Design, setting and system all came together to perfectly simulate the original Traveller universe of the Third Imperium, which over the years has become immensely detailed, even spawning multiple continuities as Traveller has ‘done a RuneQuest‘ and passed through various different publisher’s hands.

As a result, these days it’s kind of hard to know where to start with Traveller, so I thank the lord that someone else answered that question before me. If you’d like to know where to get started, read Jeff Rients’ excellent post on the matter which gives you a variety of options. Alternatively if you think you know what you want, you’ll probably find it at TravellerRPG.com, or at Marc Miller’s Far Future Enterprises site.

Speaking personally, I don’t see myself going back to Traveller any time soon, but as they say, you never forget your first time. Which is pretty much applicable to game number four, too.

4) Champions

While it wasn’t the first superhero roleplaying game – opinions vary, but I’m going with Superhero 2044 for that – Champions was certainly my first superhero roleplaying game, and as such left an indelible mark on me; sort of like Superman poking you in the eye.

While Champions’ first edition came out in 1981, my first exposure was to the 1982 ‘blue box’ second edition. It’s brilliantly ‘low-tech’ by comparison to later editions, with the whole thing looking like it had been typeset and pasted-up by hand.

Nevertheless those amazing character creation rules were intact; no game before it had been so detailed, so liberating or, quite frankly, so bloody complex. It took me a few years to understand just how ‘Power Pools’ worked , and even longer to know what ‘foci’ were (if only they could have mentioned Green Lantern, I’d have understood instantly!).

Not one to be dissuaded however – and not knowing Marvel Super Heroes was just a couple of years away – I persevered with Champions, and many a memorable super-slugfest happened around our gaming table. Sure, our characters were probably all very simple ‘Bricks’ or ‘Energy Blasters’ – but we had fun, especially with the blank character templates which allowed even people like me, with very limited drawing skills, to create pretty cool looking costumes.

Since then, I’ve bought two more editions of Champions, and quite a few of the supplements. Although I would never call myself a Champions die-hard, or even a massive fan of the Hero System which sprang from it, I think I kept buying their books mostly for their excellent GM advice and brilliant evoking of possible campaigns. That would probably explain why I’ve owned Justice, Inc, Danger International, Fantasy Hero and Star Hero, and probably actually played only a few sessions of each.

Boiling it down further, I think one name kept me buying Hero Games material: Aaron Allston, one of the authors of Justice, Inc., a slew of A/D&D supplements, that D&D Rules Cyclopedia above (I knew I bought it for a reason), Ghostbusters International, Champions 5th Edition, and many, many other roleplaying adventures and supplements… plus one more book I’ll get back to in a minute. Allen Varney, a fairly big name in roleplaying himself, called Allston “the best in the business at writing campaign material” and I think he’s right.

Perhaps best known these days for his fiction (particularly Star Wars novels), I first read Allston’s gaming work in the Champions II supplement (which I still own!). From then onwards I pretty much wanted to own anything with his name on it. When I read somewhere that Hero Games were planning a line of supplements to detail individual author’s campaigns, and that Allston was going to write the first one, I couldn’t wait.

The resulting book was Strike Force (1988), which is hands-down the best superhero roleplaying supplement I’ve ever read.

Chock full of brilliant advice on everything from between-sessions roleplaying to hidden storylines, and with a detailed campaign setting that I would have killed to play in, it was inspirational unlike anything I’d read before in roleplaying. In fact, it hasn’t been topped yet, for me.

I’ve no idea how easy it’d be to find a copy of Strike Force today, but I’m pretty sure it’d be worth it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if some of the best advice ended up in the latest edition of Champions, considering Allston’s name is on it.

Luckily you for, the Hero System hasn’t changed a whole lot over the years, and remains readily available; if anything it’s gotten better. It’s also gotten a whole lot bigger, which means that the current Hero System 5th Edition is close to 600 pages in length – apparently thick enough to stop a bullet.

That’s just a bit too rules-heavy for my own tastes, but ultimately I learned a lot about how to run a good game from reading Hero Games material, and for that, I’d say their games are worth experiencing, even if it’s just for campaign advice.

5) Top Secret/S.I.

Without jumping back in time and interrogating my 15-year old self, I think it’s safe to guess that I probably picked up Top Secret/S.I in about 1988 because I really wanted to play a modern-day espionage type game – but I didn’t want to try and run it using Danger International.

I may have also been influenced by one, fleeting encounter with TSR’s original Top Secret, first published in 1981, which had such an evocative box (itself reminiscent of 1970s spy novels) that I remembered it seven or so years later.

Unlike the original Top Secret however, which was fairly rules-heavy, Top Secret/S.I (which stood for Special Intelligence, as I recall) streamlined the system greatly, allowing fast-paced combat and cinematic gameplay – just the way I like it. My favourite system was for hand-to-hand combat, which ruled on whether you’d hit, where you’d hit, and how much damage you did with a single percentile dice roll. (How? It’s magic!)

Top Secret/S.I, like Marvel Super Heroes, holds a special place in my heart because of several memorable campaigns. The first was a mish-mash of the game’s official setting (a quasi-Bond global struggle between the good guys, Orion, and the evil bad guys of WEB) and whatever else I felt like throwing in. We had a whole host of memorable moments including my personal favourite – getting the characters to jump out of a plane, with what turned out to be bundles of laundry in their parachute packs.

Beyond that though, the inherent flexibility of the system – and a few excellent supplements – allowed me to run a ‘future cops’ campaign (sort of like Robocop – without Robocop) and a ‘near future superhumans’ series of games, utilising the F.R.E.E.Lancers supplement by Jeff ‘Marvel Super Heroes’ Grubb. There was even a pulp supplement based on the Agent 13 novel series by TSR, but just like Justice, Inc. I never got around to running that seriously.

Undeniably one of the best things to come out of TSR in the 1980s, Top Secret/S.I was innovative, well produced and had some of the best rule systems I’d seen to that point. In some ways it may have been something of a precursor to the D20 Modern system, although as I recall, the Buck Rogers XXVC system was much closer in mechanics to D&D.

Sadly, Top Secret/S.I is out of print these days, and not even available as a PDF, which is a shame as there are some excellent rules and very enjoyable settings to be had. I’ve seen a few – ahem – fan-disseminated copies out there though, so if you look hard enough, you’ll probably turn something up. As for myself, I’m holding on to my boxed set and supplements; too many good memories.

Up next…

Because over 2,600 words about old roleplaying games just isn’t enough, I’ll talk about:

• Another superhero RPG (or two)
• The original horror game
• A game about horrors, that’s not horrific
• My all-time sci-fi favourite
• And a bit of time travel…

Well I’ve got to maintain a bit of suspense, right?