Off the Shelf: Hero System 6E / Champions

When the original Marvel Superheroes went out of print, Champions saved superhero gaming for us. This was in the early 1990s, when Marvel and Star Wars were still small brands, and TSR lost the rights to Marvel. We were left with a pile of Marvel gazetteers, a DC game we liked but never really played, and superheroes were changing to the Image Comics and Wildstorm style.

Marvel was dead.

Even trading cards couldn't save it.

And we were left with a few superhero games without a system. Sure, we could still run Marvel Super Heroes (MSH), but the game ran its course, and like Star Frontiers, the d100 system limited high-level play. And along came Champions.

In our home game, the Champions heroes and villains stepped all over the Marvel Universe of the 1980s. Our universes collided, and the Champions' bad guys were so much better than Marvel's. Mechanon, Dr. Destroyer, and Eurostar savaged the Avengers and X-Men simply because they were better-designed characters, not Marvel's soft, one-trick power ponies.

Champions is a professional-level superhero system designed to do anything. Unlike GURPS, which is more skill-focused, Champions focuses purely on powers and abilities, with skills as a minor part of the game. Champion is professional home audio, hi-fi gear, expensive speakers, heavy-gauge speaker wire, great amps, a powerful subwoofer, a professional mixer and receiver, and a record player with a diamond-tipped needle.

Champions felt like pro home theater gear compared to the cheap Sears hi-fi record player in a fiberboard stand with a black plastic lid and two cassette decks on top of a cheap Marvel Super Heroes AM/FM radio.

And what did we do with this system?

We converted our D&D Mystara campaign to it. Oh yes, this was good stuff; we were playing 5E in 1993. We had superpowered fantasy heroes long before many of you were born. Magic spells were multi-powers; elemental spells could summon ice creatures, and the speed chart was your bonus actions if you could afford them. The spells were good, and you could design them down to the hex pattern of the AOE. You could put magic spells in items and give them charges. Someone designed a magic mind-control helmet and made the goblins in the first cave in Keep on the Borderlands fight the other factions until they died. You still can't do this in 5E, yet we got up to all sorts of incredibly fun, silly stuff back in the 1990s.

Did the book care where the powers came from? No. If you were a mage, you had these limitations; if you were a cleric, you had those. You got more points for spells and powers. If you were a fighter, you had ability scores in the 30s and 40s, and you were a muscle-bound freak with tons of hits and skin so thick that crossbow bolts bounced off of it.

So I recently compared this system to 5E, and it is still the better game. It's dense at the start, but the complexity stays linear and flat as you go up power levels. In 5E, it just gets worse: turns drag on because nobody knows what to do, and battles become one-sided blowouts. All that indecision for a predetermined outcome.

And there are far fewer books than a 5E library.

And they do 1000 times more.

I can design any power fantasy in any genre with these books. And I am not paying game designers to do it for me and trickle out the next cool thing in a book that costs 50-80 dollars. All I need to do is learn the system, and I never need to blow money on 5E books that slow-drip options and force us to buy the book twice for the VTT version.

Champions and Hero System: you make your own balance. If you don't know the system, your character dies until you figure it out and get the next power you need to defend against whatever killed you last time. Low-powered, humans-only games are like GURPS with a very limited skill list. No superpowers; there's little reason to play, but the system is solid and still works well. As a universal resolution system, it runs fast, and it is skill-light.

And Champions characters were much better than Marvel characters. These were characters built for that high-end audio setup, far better tuned and crafted than heroes who let the spandex do their marketing. And, to be honest, you didn't care if a Champions character died; they weren't anyone, but another hero could replace them and pick up the torch. The game was dangerous because the characters were a bit generic and relied on comic-book tropes.

You could run an X-Men game where the characters regularly died and were never resurrected or retconned back to life because marketing complains and the artists don't know how to draw anyone else. We don't need the Krakoa recycling-waste-management island to bring everyone back so new writers can ruin them all.

Your characters died, and you created new ones.

Yes, you could retcon with a "comic book trope" and bring popular characters back to life, but you never had to, and you didn't need to. The fallen heroes got a marble statue in the city park, and people remembered them for their sacrifices. That was a part of the fun of playing a superhero RPG; few get that these days. We are forced to play with the official characters, and they never change. Nobody dies. Nothing changes. You play with the official sock puppets, and you are allowed to be happy within IP allowances.

Champions' heroes could fall from grace, and they could fall hard. Anything could happen. Go ahead and make that choice; the next writer won't save you or reset anything. You may end up the villain. You will probably go out in a blaze of glory like James Cagney in White Heat. However you choose to fall from grace, there are no guardrails here, and there are no retcons. The danger is real, and one wrong power blast could vaporize a crowd of innocent bystanders.

Just one small mistake can start a downfall, and it takes a lot to walk the true path of a hero. You fall, and you fall hard. After the crowd destroys your statue, the city will tear it down in disgrace. That can't happen to a Marvel or DC character. They are "profitable IP" and can never change, and when they are sold to the next company, here we go again.

And you don't know how good a superhero game can be.

Hero System went from the garage today to my coffee table, and now it's heading to an upstairs shelf.

Off the Shelf: Adventures Dark & Deep

I still love this alternate 1E game; it is huge, expanded, full of great stuff, and all still 100% 1E compatible. Adventures Dark & Deep is the ultimate "Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy" version of 1E, and even the monster book alone is the definitive 1E bestiary, expanded, full of fun monsters, and worth the hardcover price.

As a standalone game, few have matched its scope and depth. This is the ultimate "modern" version of 1E, and it does compare nicely to OSE Advanced Fantasy. As your "core game," you cannot go wrong here, and this is easily decades of fun. The game also has expansion books, such as the Cthulhu Mythos, and they work well as either Dark & Deep expansions or 1E expansions.

So why play a "lesser" game like OSRIC 3? For the same reason you might prefer Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. Some do not want all the expansion content and just want to focus on the core, basic, original game. Expansions can muddy and confuse the game, creating too many race and class options for people to sift through.

You add bard and drow options, and people flock to them. Sometimes I want players to consider only the core, original, solid options, which is what the original adventures are balanced for, and I don't want a party full of special ancestries and hybrid classes. This isn't ruling them out forever, but the choice of game says what the game will be and where the focus will be.

Someone who has played a paladin or ranger will likely choose a new expansion class. Everyone wants to play a bard. Everyone wants to play an expanded ancestry.

Sometimes a more focused game delivers a better experience. The moment you open the floodgates of 1001 ancestry and class options (and subclass options), everybody can be anything, and those classic choices disappear. I am a star centaur dark reaver warlock hexblade antipaladin! Right. No.

This is why we need generic, be-anything, do-anything superhero games. If you want to be that, go play a superhero game and have anything you want. The death of the superhero gaming genre killed fantasy gaming, and the floodgates opened, letting fantasy become a superhero game with pre-canned builds companies can sell you for quarterly profits.

OSRIC 3 is a choice. Dark & Deep is an expansion, and it is also a choice. Both are entirely compatible and deserve to live on the same shelf. For me? Less is more, and I play OSRIC, just like many play OSE Classic Fantasy.

I'll migrate to Dark & Deep if I ever get tired of the original game's options. I will probably have fun here. This is just as "correct" a choice as OSRIC, and in some cases, the better one. But as I rebuild my gaming life, I want to start simple. For me, right now, simple is OSRIC.

Off the Shelf: Legend

The original Legend game by Miongoose Publishing is still in print and worth keeping. This OGL game made all its test content open under the OGL and restates the RQ2 ruleset many loved.

Yes, I get that Mythras has replaced this under a better license. But this is original source data, like an original Unix distribution, much like the first Cepheus SRD, and it forms a pillar of our hobby. And yes, Mythras is a great game (albeit with a tiny font), but Legend is a small-book game that captures my imagination more than the massive hardcovers do.

The only thing that comes close is OpenQuest, another great fork of the original RQ-style rules. Cepheus, OpenQuest, and all the other fan efforts will keep these systems playable and open long after the rights pass to someone else, and things get locked away behind website portals, subscription services, and closed gardens. These will be the last games we can truly own and share.

When companies buy up the last available IP and move to smaller IPs, it will all be locked away, and you will be forced to pay for it through a subscription model. This is already happening in Hollywood, as the franchise series we loved are being merged and bought with the goal of making us rent our happiness and memories.

Even the defunct OGL is a path out of this corporate hellhole we all face.

If you are playing a closed-garden game, you are on the side of the media-powerhouse merger and rental model. They'll sell D&D like this for billions; prices will rise, legal threats will go out, and customers will be shoved into a portal for a monthly fee. Sorry. This is the road we are all looking at ahead of us. And once D&D is sold, other recognizable IPs and similar ones will be sold. Properties will be snatched up. There will come a time when Wall Street comes in and buys everything up like private homes, turning it all into rental properties. Some markets are so hot you probably can't find private homes anymore. 

We haven't gotten there yet in gaming, though in AAA gaming you can see the warning signs. You don't own your games. Physical media is being dropped. There will be no second-hand market anymore. They can wipe your games if you stop playing for a while or say the wrong thing online.

Again, we are a few years out from this, but you can see the warning signs in D&D with digital-only DLC and releases. Once the website shuts down, all that digital content goes poof. Gone forever. Like it never existed, and they can sell it to you again in the next edition.

The line is drawn now, at least for me.

And if you support closed-source games, you're honestly contributing to this mess and what is coming. All the closed-license games get sold. I start talking about them less and less. They're all dead ends, with no future, and really not worth my time. All of them will end up on AI and walled gardens. All of them will be state-enforced rental schemes.

I still have the open community editions of these games. I can still play them in 10 years. I can still create derivative works and self-publish.

In 10 years?

I doubt most people will even have what we have today.

Off the Shelf: OSRIC 3

I love Adventures Dark & Deep, but it is a massive game. The low-level starting guide helps a lot, but I'd still play it after I'd exhausted 1E. And there is a lot to play in 1E. Dark & Deep feels like a massive modded game, and while I absolutely love those, sometimes a clean, basic ruleset appeals to me more than a "more stuff" game.

I want something clean, tight, with limited options, easy for new players, and expandable.

And I want a game that works.

OSRIC 3 will never let us down, nor will it ever be torn up and changed. Version 2 was very close, and version 3 is the closest yet to perfection. The first edition was one of those perfect games, and the downfall started when they messed with the formula, started commercializing the game, and sanitized it in reaction to the Satanic Panic. The second edition is really only as good as it is because of the first edition, but it was always a step down from its peak.

OSRIC is like OSE Classic for AD&D.

Sometimes, BX or 1E is all I want or need. A simple alchemical base. A clean, constrained, blank canvas from which I can create a million ideas. I don't want the extra stuff, and I can add most of it myself. Sure, this game doesn't have bards, but the book above has a great bard, and people have been hacking homebrew classes into 1E for nearly 50 years. Besides, the bard has been a bit of a trash fire for the last three editions of D&D, and I don't mind a game that lets me step away from them for a while and bring back the one I really like. This is true of many other expansion classes, too.

BX works well with 1E, and most of it is fully compatible.

1E is the only game that ever delivered balanced high-level play. Forget 2E; the expansions and splat-books blew it up. 1E is the only version of D&D that you could play to maximum level, and it still worked. BX only goes to 14. 1E goes all the way. It will never be broken since, like the original OSE, it is a reference work.

And high-level play is still very deadly. Resurrection is never guaranteed. Death has a price. All characters will die in this game, either after a short, adventurous life or after settling down and having heirs. Any other game that keeps your character alive forever is lying to you.

And OSRIC is community-supported. This is its biggest strength. Sure, I can buy POD copies of the original books and keep them safe, but those will not be on sale or available forever. OSRIC will endure long after the company and IP are sold off and merged into another trillion-dollar entertainment monopoly. I love the original game, but I love the community more. This is why I support OSRIC. It is open-licensed. They can never take this away from us. It will never change. It uses the fixed numbers and math the hobby's creator approved.

It's a beginner's game for 1E. That has never been done, and not even the original 1E game is easy for beginners. I can teach someone this pretty easily. I can do this with the Dark & Deep basic book, too, but OSRIC feels like OSE Classic Fantasy to me. I can teach anyone 1E.

But why 1E over BX?

For the same reasons Gary made AD&D: to standardize the rules. To have consistent convention play.  To reduce arguments and eliminate rule inconsistency. To have a balanced high-level game, something we've lost in 50 years of D&D and never had since.

Sure, BX is the beginner game and always was, but for people who come together and play seriously, 1E was the version of the game best designed for official and convention play. 2E fell into the story-gaming and power-gaming trap, lost its edge, changed the math, and it bankrupted the company. BX does not create a solid, long-term, convention-ready ruleset that eliminates ambiguity and house ruling. You don't have to make much up to play 1E, and everyone can agree on the rules and rulings. Ultimately, this speeds play and standardizes the experience for everyone.

Gary knew 1E was the best version of the game for long-term play, and in more than 50 years, that is still true.

While my 1E books are the original source, OSRIC is the community edition of the classic, and far easier to hand a new player and for the community to support.

Off the Shelf: My 2d6 Games

All of these are Cepheus-based, and each is the perfect amount of game to play with an AI. I see these slowly killing the last of my 5E collection, and that is a strange thing to say. I can be against AI art and still play these with an AI chatbot; it isn't taking anyone's job, and it is using the compute power they are giving away for free in a creative way.

Again, we are not making art.

We are just using the models as a text-adventure, and playing them by a real-world game's rules.

There is a difference.

Just make sure data sharing is turned off; I do care about privacy. Plus, read the terms of service. You gotta be careful. Never assume anything on these systems is truly private. It isn't. Or use a private, ethically sourced local model, which is where this is all going in 3-5 years. Make an informed choice.

But asking an AI to sort through a full 5E version and parse bonus actions, free actions, and those pages-long subclass designs wastes tokens and compute power. This will burn more power and resources from our planet, so the less tokens you use, the more you can help the planet, if you care about it that way. 5E is an incredibly inefficient, bloated, and overwritten to an almost laughable degree. Simple games that an AI can grasp and master are the future, plus the AI can make up all the things a simple game doesn't do.

All I need is a simple 2d6 resolution system that can be communicated easily to a model. An AI can do 8+ on 2d6, and I am betting an AI can figure out BX far easier and cheaper than it can 5E, so there is still an option there. BX is probably next, once I standardize on a system. It has to be lightweight, not a few hundred pages, and I want something simple that doesn't throw too many special cases at me.

But solo play with oracles? Without a computer, it works, but this does everything much more easily. Because we are using rules, wish-fulfillment is constrained. That can happen with solo play; you can cheat yourself far too easily or make rulings that make everything go your way. With an AI on the other side of the table controlling enemies, each one will be a challenge, and they will try to outthink me, pursue their own objectives, or stonewall me against a course of action. They will call in allies for help. They will set up roadblocks. An AI running the opposition makes them deadly and smart, and I do not need artificial challenge from "expanded monster rules" to make a foe deadly.

I have had AI opponents throw more challenge at me in text-based games than I ever had in years of trying to solo 5E. I sat there, perplexed, stunned at how carefully a foe had boxed me in and cut off avenues of approach, taking the high ground in a situation with a realistic thought process, and I was the one standing on the outside, feeling hopeless, like a frontal assault was the exact dumbest thing to do. And it was. The AI would even admit to boxing me out. I had to change tactics to something it didn't expect. I had to judge enemy injuries without an "easy rest" system like some video game, and tell the AI that the wounded needed to get off post to seek care and rest. Then, time could be used against them, and waiting until a shift change or a better time to strike at night became an option.

I have found oracles for solo-play tend to confirm your own biases and double down on your own thinking; if a situation is only going to be a frontal assault, then that is how you are going to use the oracle. You will either use the state machine and generations in the oracle to make the frontal assault easier or harder, and any 5E system will tell you, "the fight should be balanced," and you are meant to win anyway. By "balanced," it means "even the dumbest choice is a winning strategy."

An AI will make stupid mistakes and needs correction. You will need to speak to it "DM to DM" every once in a while and tell it that the last ruling or paragraph has completely lost the plot and all the marbles. You will argue a ruling or logical plot construction, just like you do with a real DM. You will correct it and make it roll back the last paragraph, because what it just said was so stupid it defies logic and reality. That is happening less and less to me, to the point where I am starting to see a local AI system as superior to oracle-based play.

An AI will create an infinite, procedural, realistic, and NPC-filled world for you in the blink of an eye. Anywhere you go, something or somebody is there. In the wilderness, there will be no one. You can "tweak the matrix" and suggest things to drop in, so it isn't without your input. Just like a DM, if you search for travelers along a road, you may find a few. You won't know where they are or what they are up to, but the AI may throw you a bone. Or it may not. Or you may eye-roll and tell the AI that, in a rarely traveled borderland region, no circus troupe would be wandering around. That call will be pulled back, and you will get something sensible. Those moments happen, and you need to be able to call BS on your DM. Just like in real life.

An AI DM on a local model running in text-adventure mode is close to what we think an "AI DM" will be, but don't be fooled. What is coming will be much more than this - transformative, with image generation, 3d map generation, 3d models pulled from the ether, and a system unrecognizable from any high-end VTT or even 3D MMO. This stuff will kill the VTT and MMO markets in one fell swoop as the new generation of models takes over and creates experiences that seem like magic.

And it is not you who will matter; the "normie" market will swoop in and decide if this is ethical or moral for you. To be honest, me sitting here playing in text-adventure mode like I was typing on a Unix teletype terminal feels honest to me, conserving power and tokens, sticking to simple games and text only, and trying to understand the experience before the market attaches to a hybrid 3D AI fantasy experience like a million lampreys and the choice is made for the industry, and the ethical thinkers are silenced.

The normie market will always throw a few billion dollars at something flashy and wasteful, which is how we got into the situation we are in with 5E. The lowest common denominator has the most money; ethics and conservation be damned.

What I do over here will be orders of magnitude less wasteful, keeping ethics and ownership of the games and IP concerns as hard constraints. I keep AI art out of the discussion. I try to be forward-looking while keeping my soul. I tweak my models and experiences to be as efficient as possible. I minimize token use, especially for repeated procedures. I will use power-efficient systems and chips. I use the AI and ask it, "Was that wasteful? Is there a better way to do this?" I will minimize RAM usage and expensive lookups.

The planet matters.

IP matters.

Ethics matter.

And I will walk away from games so stupidly complicated that they burn tokens every turn trying to figure out the game's action economy and power usage layers for each and every combatant. All I need is a simple ability score, skill, and combat system with one action per turn. Stunting, special attacks, and special uses of powers are up to me and my AI DM to figure out, exactly how we used to handle this in the days before overwritten rules.

BX clearly beats 5E here, and an AI DM turns the system into a more expressive and flexible system than the overthought 5E morass we are burdened with these days. If Wizards ever fails in the AI market, the blame will squarely land on an overcomplicated 5E ruleset that blows up when billions of tokens are burned trying to figure it out for the player base. They own the better game for AI, and hubris will force them to dismiss it and fail in their online strategy yet again. Don't get me started on how expensive all these tokens will be, and how they never needed to spend all that money delivering an inferior product for the job. This is their mistake to make, and their money to waste.

BX is the better game.

And my 2d6 systems are the king of simple, straightforward, token-efficient gaming.

I'll be over here on my Unix terminal having fun.

Off the Shelf: Traveller

I planned to put this in boxes and sell it until I learned I could solo-play it with AI.

That one thing changed everything for me. I could explore a universe, save my exploration to files so I could return to it, land anywhere on any planet, and have it read the UWP to generate an infinite world. The game is simple enough that any AI can make out a UPP and skills. The rest is up to me.

At least I am not using AI for art, I guess, but as my referee? Sure, let's go. Any planet, any subsector, and any place - infinite NPCs, adventures, and locations? I get it- no "AI DMs in D&D," but for something I pay for, for personal use? Sure, why not. Otherwise, these books are out the door. It is too big a game and a universe for me to explore, or even create content in my head for.

Yes, it does feel like giving up.

But I have never seen this universe this way, nor used my books in this way. Every one of them can be used. I did not waste the money collecting. Honestly, this is the first time this has happened to me with a 'collectors' game, seeing AI transform it into something playable. I limit the books, use it only to referee, and feed in information on characters and locations. It does the rest: it tracks the campaign, generates the missions and NPCs, creates locations, and I play.

As the models get better, VTTs may die off in favor of AI. I can only imagine an AI running a massively multiplayer universe using a pen-and-paper game and mutlliple DMs running in parallel, 24-7. The AI can handle maps and positioning. The AI will let you know if other players are nearby and what is going on with them. You will get notifications to connect your PCs and groups. The AI will create the character and storyboard art, or even live 3D models.

The VTT will be dead in the next few years.

The MMO will follow shortly after.

The concept of what a roleplaying game is will change in the next few years.

Yes, AI sucks.

But seeing this makes it feel inevitable.

Off the Shelf: Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition

Cepheus Deluxe Expanded Edition (CDEE) is still one of the best generic 2d6 games out there. If you were smart, you bought the black-and-white version while the giant striped sidebars were still there; at least they didn't hurt your eyes as much as the full-color version. The B&W version is a solid performer, and it gives you all the tools you need for science-fiction adventures in the "little black book" genre of gaming, and even better charts, tables, and tools for filling out a universe.

But great news! In August 2026, a new, sidebar-free, better-layout, updated, larger-font PDF is up on DriveThruRPG! I am waiting for the POD book and then diving in.

While the similar Cepheus Universal is more of a science-fiction genre-creation toolkit, CDEE does the core Traveller-style game loop even better than most versions of Traveller, and it does not come with an Imperium, so we are back to the hobby's roots. Where every Imperium and subsector was DIY, and we created our own 2d6 universes. Frankly, this is how I remember Traveller, having started with the original LBBs.

Games can get too big, and I am slowly moving back to one-book, no VTT, simple character sheet, DIY gaming. The era of 5E feels like it is ending, and the great "library games" of the 2010s and 2020s are starting to look more and more like dinosaurs than experiences. Yes, I have boxes of Traveller books, but this one is on my coffee table right now. This is the one I can hold in my head and play.

These days, I only have a handful of library games I want and need. Palladium and GURPS are two of them. BX or 1E will be there for my D&D, along with a nice Dungeon Crawl Classics collection (which I suspect will win my fantasy gaming top spot). If a game competes with a better one, I sell it.

CDEE, either the older B&W version or the 2026 revision, is an amazing game that holds its own. What I love about it is all the tables that help you fill out a universe, encounters, and tradeport encounters. This is the best "space trading" game between two covers, by far, and the exploration game is done very well, too. The 2d6 resolution system, with talents added to it, makes this one of the better 2d6 games, and it gives you plenty of customization and character tweaking.

Iam glad I fished this out of the garage crates today, and I am looking forward to playing it again.

Off the Shelf: White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game

As of this writing, this book costs five bucks on Amazon. Compare that to boutique OSR games that cost ten times as much. And crowdfunding campaigns where the top supporter levels are often 100 times that. Don't get me started on supporting a 5E habit, which can quickly run into the thousands of dollars.

And, arguably, you get more in this game than you do in most others.

Sure, this book is printed on cheap paperback newsprint, but who cares? My T&T 5.5E book is printed the same way, and I love it. For the price of three D&D hardcovers, I could buy three dozen of these books and hand them out to play with people in libraries, SCA events, and anywhere I go. Couple that with dice bought in bulk, and getting someone into the hobby would cost me eight dollars. Keep the dice; I just gave you a lifetime of fun and adventure.

It's one thing to play in someone's game; it is another to walk away with the complete rulebook and dice to play it. D&D is not that game anymore. Outside of free PDFs, most of the OSR isn't this accessible anymore, either.

Basic Fantasy on Amazon costs twice as much, but is a more premium product. I would like to see a low-cost option there, too. Of course, Basic Fantasy needs to be mentioned in the conversation since it is the standard-bearer in open gaming. Both are compatible, so you could easily play adventures for one with the other. I love White Box FMAG for its ultra-cheap, paperback smell, newsprint paper, no-frills, digest-sized feel. Basic Fantasy is still a full-sized book; this is digest-sized and ultra-portable.

This is so cheap it is in its own category of gaming.

But it isn't cheap in design or quality; it is a great, well-thought-out game with a solid design. More OSR games need no-frills editions. Why are we locking the hobby into expensive POD publishing options, where a copy of most OSR games runs from $25 to $100? Yes, full-color hardcovers are expensive, and the PDFs are often free, but we need to push prices down and get the games into more hands.

Newsprint, no-frills, digest editions are the way to go, subversive and easy to pass around.

In an era of pricey, expensive, get-rich crowdfunding, it is nice to see a game that puts its players first. Like Basic Fantasy, this one is worthy and cheap enough to give away for free as a gift to someone priced out of D&D, or someone whose parents can't pay the hobby's entry fee.

Off the Shelf: Cypher System

I bounced off this game at least six times. For the past year, I lost faith in it, feeling that the newly revised edition wasn't for me. I had the books in my garage and took down the blog I'd started for it. But this is me, and the same thing happened to Dungeon Crawl Classics, a game I love and adore.

But Cypher System is one of those one-book "desert island games" people bring up all the time, and they are right to choose it. I had some of my best solo adventures with this system. I lost faith for a while and needed some distance to get perspective.

This is what happens when I feel a game is near-perfect, and it gets changed. While I agree the new edition is the best for new players, it loses touch with the original design, where you came into the system picking a "player type" for your character - combat, social, environment, or powers. This was very close to the old d20 Modern "strong hero" or "smart hero" class system, but instead of ability scores, the "classes" (called types) felt more like player types than character types.

If you loved combat, picking a combat-type character meant you'd have fun and get all the powers and abilities that would make your table time a success.

The new game flips this on its head: you create a generic character before you pick a type, and I feel something was lost. I don't want a traditional game where I sort through a skill list and pray those skills fit my play style. Just give me the social character archetype and let me talk to the NPCs, and I can do the rest.

The new wounding system, I felt, was unneeded and meant to appease those who expect hit points and tracked wounds, or could not tell the difference between getting stabbed and spending the same 2 points to avoid the blow. To me, the difference was clear; even though the rules did not, I could make a call, and my table agreed. If you drop to zero in all pools without taking a wound or light damage, you are not dead but dropping from exhaustion. Take most or all of those losses in wounds? You are dead.

The player can choose to avoid those wounds with pool expenditures. There is a difference.

Also, GM Intrusions can be triggered off wounds taken, and they should. Playing a Jaws game? That's blood in the water. No wounds? No reason to pull that card as a GM. It is a narrative system; wounds work differently here, and are one-level abstracted.

I know the old game was dense, and even I bounced off it a half-dozen times, but once I figured it out, the rest was easy.

But I loved my old books.

And my old books came out.

The new version? I will give it a chance, but I have a full library of three Cypher System games, and I intend to keep them on the table. The old game still works great, and it is still one of my desert-island games. The new and old games are more side-grade games, in any case; all the books are still compatible, and even the sister games work the same way.

Still a great game.

Off the Shelf: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a specific job. It hands you a tight B/X kit — characters, gear, magic, combat, the usual action rules — and then it gets out of the way. The adventures do the rest. They supply the rooms you should not have entered, the things that do not belong in a Monster Manual, and the treasures that might save you or end you. The adventures do the rest. There is no bestiary. Those belong to the adventure writer’s twisted imagination, and they stay there on purpose. If the players could study the opposition in advance, this would be a different game.

I keep that game on one shelf. Rules & Magic sits at the end. Everything else is a night or a place: Carcosa, the Virginia Disastrum books, A Red & Pleasant Land, Frostbitten & Mutilated, Broodmother Skyfortress, the anthologies, Blood in the Chocolate, World of the Lost, Earth Incubation Crisis. The Swords & Wizardry box on the same board is just storage. OSRIC is only there if something needs a number before it eats someone. The shelf's identity is the modules.

It is a stack of horror films that happen to use dice.

The 18+ contract is not a sticker on the wrap. This is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. You know what you sat down for. Taking the character sheet is pressing play on Terrifier, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, or Event Horizon. The film does not stop to ask if you are comfortable. Neither does this kit. If the game pre-defines the envelope of the horror, it sands down the thing you came for. It tempers the worst thing the module is willing to put in the room. If that is too much, get up and walk away. That is allowed. The game is not designed to run a comfort layer on top of the night. That runs counter to the horror this shelf is for.

What I love about this game is the default stage. Not generic medieval. Seventeenth-century Europe. The dawn of the colonization push: Pilgrim ships, trade empires stuffing holds and calling it God’s work. For a horror game with Puritan bones — all sinners shall be punished — that is ripe territory. The people writing ledgers and raising forts in the New World are the campers. The woods, the coast, the thing in the chapel, and the cargo that should not have been opened are the movie. The point is to inflict that on the expedition. You do not need orcs in a hole. You need a world that still believes in damnation and has just enough maps to walk into it. That is why the Virginia books on the shelf matter more than another dungeon pamphlet. 1633 is not flavor text. It is the year the contract is set.

How does a night run? The players sit there with character sheets and no frame of reference. No known bestiary. No magic-item list to drool over. No “fair encounter” math to hide behind. The referee puts a strange, unsettling situation on the table — a chapel that smells wrong, a hold that should not be that cold, a town that will not look at you — and the players react. There are no feat lists, subclass powers, death saves, or short rests to save you. What you see is what is there. Very little stands between you and a horrific fate except what you do, or what you fail to do.

The kit is small on purpose, and it does the job a B/X kit is supposed to do: it defines the niches and then protects them. The Fighter is the only one who gets better at hitting things. The Specialist is the skill kit. Magic is a loaded gun that might be pointed at the room. Nobody at the table is a toolbox of feats. You are your role, and the situation does not care.

As a referee, you have to love horror and be willing to let the night go where it goes. This is not a game for fudging dice so player narratives survive. Think Night of the Living Dead. They may fall one by one. They may all go in one ugly TPK. You can run the old tricks: peel one of them off, let the woods lie to them, make every sound a question. Like The Thing, they may stop trusting the person across the table because something in the room might already be wearing that face. You are Stephen King or John Carpenter. Part of the fun is the ride — the characters, and the terrible fates that may happen to them.

The still-unpublished Referee’s Guide puts a warning in front of all of this, and it is worth hearing in plain language. Enjoying a vicious movie is not the same as acting one out with other people in the room. LotFP art is flavor. It is there to tell you this is not the other fantasy game. It is not a shot list you are required to stage.

Know who sat down. Talk outside the game. Find the line before the night starts. The job is not to shock, scare, or scandalize the actual human across from you. If you truly offend them, they will not come back, and you will have earned that. Respect for the person comes before the idea you had for the scene. That is not a comfort layer bolted onto Friday the 13th. That is how you get a table that will press play at all.

The game has a reputation it really doesn't deserve, and the above could be considered one of the first "safety tools" printed in an OSR game. The game is an interactive horror movie. A lot of people cannot handle that. The people who can love this game like nothing else. But, as the game reminds you, talk to each other about it.

Depending on my mood, the first spine off the board is A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, Volume I. I love history, and I love horror, and this is the peanut-butter-and-chocolate moment. The punishment is not a speech. It is the colony. They have arrived in a land they do not understand, with ledgers, sermons, and a fence that will not help them. There is the settlement they think they are building. Something else is out there, too.

The fun is watching the characters take roles in that new place and then turning the screws the way Blair Witch turns them. A problem. A mystery. Someone who does not come back. Sounds in the woods that the colony's charter does not cover. Do not dump the truth on page one. Let the settlement invent explanations.

The beat I cannot resist: one or more of them are Magic-Users, locked in the stocks for witchcraft, while the colony manager has to stand in the mud and plead for their help. The sky is wrong. The woods are wrong. Everyone else is sure it is Satan. Nobody in charge understands it, and the only people who might are the ones they already chained up. That is the night. That is why this book comes off the shelf first.

Carcosa, Broodmother, the anthologies — those are not a punchline. They are the other situation. Virginia casts the player characters as colonists. The rest of the shelf casts them as stereotypical adventurers: swords, packs, a map, the old hunger for the next room. Same original sin. They opened the door. They unlocked the box. They walked into a place that was not theirs and expected the universe to grade on a curve. It does not. A pulp frame like Carcosa can still terrify an adventurer as badly as 1633 terrifies a colonist. The clothes change. The bill does not.

That is also when the OSRIC book on the end of the shelf earns its keep. In a night where “adventurer” is the default costume, you can let the table think they recognize the furniture. That looks like an owlbear. That looks like a +1 shield. No, it is not. The familiar stat line is bait. The module’s thing is what is actually in the room. OSRIC hands you the lie. LotFP is the punch that follows.

When I want the movie I actually described, I start in Virginia. The shelf stays because nothing else I own does this mix: 1633, Puritan panic, pulp nights that still punish the expedition, and a kit that will not let the Monster Manual save you.

Off the Shelf: FATE

I still love this game, mostly because of the dice. This is also still a better pick-up-and-play narrative package that is far easier to get into than many of today's overly complicated narrative swamp games that end up coming off like 5E with pools and special dice tacked on. I could have to sort through 400-500 pages of a full-sized game with multiple volumes and a few hundred pages of who-cares character options, or play an easy-to-teach single-book narrative powerhouse game like FATE.

I know Accelerated is out there, but I like Core better, even with the streamlining and improvements of the latter. I feel too much was taken out of Accelerated, and I prefer the classic, expansive, full-featured game toolkit over the Lite framework version. I can do more with Core; it slots into any setting quickly, and it gets the job done. Yes, it is an older game, but that doesn't make it any less powerful or flexible.

Accelerated stripped too much out, and I appreciate Core's "game building" toolkit approach. This works, and I don't need the changes in the smaller book. Sure, Accelerated is a tiny book and very easy to hand out to new players, but the OG Core book is my jam and the one I started with. Plus, I like Core's traditional Skills approach over Accelerated's generic (and too easy to cheese) Approaches system.

In Accelerated, I can pick a high "Flashy" and "Flashy" the entire adventure by overusing the Approach. In Core, I am using traditional skills (the book's list or my own list), and "what can be done with what" is far better defined and clearer. New players will "lean on Flashy" in Accelerated far too much, but they will understand the uses for Core's Stealth and Lore skills easily. Defined choices with clear uses are easier for me, and the players I play with, than catch-all approaches.

Core is the book for me.

Accelerated is too simple and vague, to the point of being the harder game to play.

One thing my brother and I did with this game was binge a TV show and play through the episodes with FATE. We didn't need the fully realized, hour-plus character designs of GURPS, the pool-based power frameworks of Cypher, or any other generic system. FATE described any television show character quickly and cleanly, and you could start playing in five minutes.

Best of all, you could turn any "episode situation" into an aspect for the game, such as "Sienfield gets an important package for another apartment," and run with it. Kramer could have a "winning lottery ticket he is always losing," and that plays into the episode, too. The game is a collection of dice rolls, creating aspects, invoking them, managing your fate points, and laughing your way through a situation. We laughed for hours playing this, and it got sillier and sillier as the night went on. This does everything from Seinfeld, Scooby-Doo, Baywatch, Looney Tunes, CHIPs, A-Team, or any other episodic situation  TV show quickly and cleanly, with minimal fuss.

FATE has a wide dramatic range, too, from slapstick silly to gritty and serious. It can get deadly and grim, like The Walking Dead. It can do romantic comedies better than any system I've seen, and it isn't even a "romance game" filled with that typical heartsy AI art you see in many 5E crowdfunding books these days. You could run "Anchorman: The Roleplaying Game" with this system more easily than with any generic system, and the rules work and create chaos on their own. You could even do something as silly as "KISS: The RPG" and simulate your favorite 80s rock band through medieval adventures, doing things no other game could easily manage.

FATE does superheroes, too. Video games. Lara Croft. Ratchet and Clank. Sonic. Mario. Link. Double Dragon or Streets of Rage. TMNT or Thundercats. Transformers or GI JOE. All with minimal fuss and effort. And if you know the characters or have a guide, anything converts easily, and you don't need a huge character guide to convert a character into the system.

Even classic movies are easily played with FATE. The Maltese Falcon. American Graffiti. Star Wars. Jaws. ET. Indiana Jones. The Thing. Star Trek. Blade Runner. Books, too. Dune. LotR. John Carter. Conan. For some of these films and novels, FATE does a better job, faster, and easier than the "official RPG" for the game. For movies and books without a game, FATE does them very well.

While the collector in me would love a "Jaws 5E" game with a few hundred pages of authentic 1970s New England oil-painting art, what am I doing here? Why am I wasting my money? Just to have something I will likely never play? Why do I need a hundred pages of subclass options for sheriffs, marine biologists, and fishermen again? Honestly? I would rather have the New England art book and no dated and little-tested 5E rules that will likely never be used at a table.

Oh, and martial classes in Jaws 5E still suck; play a caster.

In FATE, you write down aspects, which combine character concept, trouble, and history. You pick skills. You pick a few signature stunts. If you know your characters, like a GI JOE character, then this stuff is trivially easy. It is less of a character sheet and more of a description and collection of signature style moves and phrases. Snake Eyes? Silent but Deadly. There we go, no need for an expensive VTT character creation tool or looking up the feat in a 600-page rulebook, or waiting for the inevitable hundred-dollar minimum crowdfunding expansion to get the character you want.

You just have it.

A one-book game.

Four dice.

GURPS forces you to design the power or know the skill and advantage lists. Cypher forces you to search the archetypes. In 5E, you need to read a few hundred pages of subclasses to see if the designers gave you something you can use, or wait like a good consumer for the next book. In FATE? You just say it and write it down. I'm done with this designer hubris junk! I can do better, and FATE gives me the tools if I have an imagination to use them.

Sometimes I am in the mood for that level of depth. If I am digging in and savoring a simulation-heavy, survive-this-system, it is going to be GURPS. But for a one-book toolkit game? Something pick-up-and-play with cool dice?

FATE still has it.

Off the Shelf: Rifts

It was one of those moments when I feared I had lost them all.

A water leak in an adjacent room meant I could not get to my Rifts books, and I feared the worst. So they sat on a shelf while the carpets dried. I was worried about warped paper and ruined books.

All of them were fine. Not one warped page. Not one water-damaged cover. What are these things, indestructible? I have seen people's play copies of Rifts, yellowed pages, all the corners bent, a cover with more creases and bends than California fault lines, and yet still loved and used the day they were bought 30 or more years ago.

When Rifts comes around, people will still be playing Rifts with these same books.

So back in my room, on my premier game shelves, I put the copies right next to my SDC games. I do not care about the MDC thing; that is how we describe standing in front of a cruise missile in this world these days, or staring down the barrel of a tank. We have MDC weapons in this world; get used to it. Bombs, anti-ship missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, thousand-pound bombs, 30mm anti-tank cannons, and the other big things that go boom are circa 2026 MDC firepower. Even shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets dropped from drones with shaped charges count.

Does Rifts sit as a display game, or do I play it? I get the feeling that this time, I play. It slaps around the D&D multiverse by a good mile, making those worlds look soft and silly. These are true planar terrors, walking tanks that could crush you flat with a cough, or your skin falls off due to their bad breath. Rifts has always been over the top in all the best ways a game could be. The Rifts multiverse is the endgame of all games, including all games, superior to them all, more overpowered than them all, and giving back by making anything magic that stumbles into an MDC creature with MDC power. Even superheroes.

You get MDC! And you get MDC! Here's a six-shooter; even you get MDC!

Powergaming? Books full of OP items? Unbalanced OCCs that could crush some normal human OCC fool who stumbles through a rift from the 1880s? The whole "do we start a bar fight with MDC weapons?" problem. It is all here. Use what you want. Play a small, one- or two-book campaign. Do a one-shot, but it's likely MDC and will end the campaign with a successful hit. Import your favorite characters and kit them out with power armor. Drop your favorite superhero team in and make this world their new home. Everything has a place here. It's all good.

Back in the early 1990s, compared with the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms, Vampire: The Masquerade, BattleTech, Cyberpunk, Dark Sun, a dead Greyhawk, Megatraveller, Twilight:2000, and the other settings of the day, Rifts was better than them all, with maybe Cyberpunk's Night City coming close to the cool factor. D&D and TSR were dying.

People were tired of all the settings we put on pedestals today. I remember the time the "first OSR" died and took TSR with it. Even in fantasy games, we had Palladium, GURPS, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, MERP, and a few others that "did D&D better." AD&D 2nd Edition got heavily sanitized, politically correct, safe for every audience, and nobody cared. The game blew up with splat books. The Vampire subculture started, and continues to this day, with the people angry at VTM 6th. They realize people base their lives around these Kindreds and identities, right? Don't mess with people's goth identities; they are sacred, just like My Chemical Romance is a religious experience.

The hardest part of playing and enjoying Rifts is letting go of other people's negative opinions. In that sense, it is just like GURPS. These games don't deserve the repeated nonsense that people endlessly adopt as false lived experience.

We had an AD&D 2nd Edition game going back in the 1990s, and it was fun, but Rifts was always the one we waited to play. Nothing compared to blowing everything up and laughing about it. You both got to live in utter fear and wield weapons that could level city blocks. The game was pure power fantasy. Did you feel weak with the last character? Ask your referee about playing something overpowered next time for a massive revenge kick. Play an MDC Dragon or Godling if you want. The Coalition will hunt you, but since when did they ever NOT deserve it?

Rifts was awesome and full of character. Any god could drop in, hop off their MDC motorcycle with the nova cannon and missile racks, and offer a mission. If you remember Image Comics and Wildstorm, yeah, that was Rifts. I use my MDC cyber-claws to tear the front of the building off. Roll an attack, give me damage; all right, the building has no front wall, bricks are all over the street, and the bad guys inside are surprised.

Today's games are far too careful and afraid of their own shadows.

Today's players are lost, believing they don't deserve to have it all. A carefully balanced game is good enough for me.

Why aren't you living life?

Why aren't you experiencing something awesome? Another balanced 5E book won't fix your boredom with the game. You will just be complaining about broken this or broken that. Sure, the majority of Rifts is broken, but it still works fine that way.

Why are you so afraid?

If you fear giving characters power, you will run from this game screaming. If you embrace the anime-inspired overpowered attacks and weapons that can slice a hillside in half, you will be right at home here. If all you know in life is carefully balanced D&D 5.5E, I feel sorry for you. That's not true power. Even at level 20, where you are single-turn nova-blasting encounters, that is nothing compared to this. You are still relatively weak on the cosmic scale of things, and your carefully planned alpha attack will bounce off a tank, and your character sheet and identity-gaming avatar will be literal red mist.

And no, this isn't the end-of-edition D&D 5.5E overpowered characters, which are only meant to break the game so everyone begs for D&D 6E to come along and save us from the end-of-edition OP subclass options. They have done this to every edition of D&D they printed; they blow out the edition in a fire sale of OP releases, people "have fun for a little while" but "eventually grow tired of all the powergaming," and then "please release 6E and fix this!" Planned obsolescence means breaking your own game and riding off the YouTube hype to sell the last few books before you replace them all.

We broke the old game; please buy the fixed one.

Is Rifts broken? Mostly. Do I care? No. Is it being so all over the place part of the fun? Sure, why not? I am a roleplayer; I could make a ham sandwich work as a rule system. I can have fun with anything. Part of the challenge is making it all work together. The characters are so cool I don't even care. And the game wasn't intentionally broken to get you to buy the next one. It is a big box of stuff you pick and choose from; most of it works together, some pieces are wildly overpowered, and you learn how to become a better Rifts GM by playing, and not by copying YouTube streaming shows.

Rifts is a game I keep walking away from but can never truly leave.

Rifts will still be here. Just like my books, the game is a survivor.

Just like you deserve to be, too.

Off the Shelf: Ultramodern 5

I don't know why I like this version of 5E, I just do.

It is quirky, strange, cool, different, and it mechanically breaks down the 5E design into a series of interconnected modules. This is a vertical slice of 5E; instead of doing the traditional class-and-subclass thing, they tear the game's internals apart while keeping it at the same level of power and balance as the original. As a result, you get this interesting mix-and-match system where many of the subclass choices exist outside of the class, and it is a really ingenious design that reduced the typical 5E bloat we see from expansive listings of subclass powers (most of which we never use). I would love to see a fantasy version of this game, since the character building is on a step above most 5E implementations, with cross-class archetypes being used instead of subclasses.

Modern weapon damage is also kept under control, with class abilities providing the damage boosts rather than overpowered modern weapons. It seems counterintuitive, but the entire 5E design hinges upon class abilities being the force multiplier, so it makes sense. Less skilled people will not be able to use modern firepower to its full effect, and what matters is the warrior, not the weapon. If you want a modern gun simulation, play GURPS.

Many 5E science fiction designs tend to fail to land for me, being oddly specific, one-note, or just feel like "D&D in space." This has more of a Shadowrun meets Moebius vibe going, and it can sort of be generic "Heavy Metal" science fiction anywhere you put it. It has a default setting, but really, you can throw this at any homebrew "futurepunk" setting mixed with fantastic races and have it work. It works with realistic races and with fantasy races in a science fiction setting. If you wanted to use this with a "Starfinder" type setup where the game's initial promise was "fantasy races in space," this would do that just fine.

This delivers "D&D in space" while maintaining its own unique, gritty, dirty, and broken future aesthetic, whereas many other games are too "Mass Effect"- clean and sterile. That "plastic future" aesthetic is the bane of many games and TV shows, covering up a great moment of societal change with plastic wall panels and slick-looking Hollywood laser rifles in bright white molded plastic shells. That "plas-fi" future is the state selling you hard on giving up basic human rights for the honor of living in a future where everything is covered up in a slick plastic shell and veneer of social order.

Dirty science fiction leaves room for individuality and personal freedom, and even early Star Wars knew this. The future is dirty and mostly broken down, but you can find honest people among the mass of criminals and downtrodden. The white plastic stormtroopers are state symbols of fascist control. Massive defense projects promising world domination are inherently evil. If you never knew New York or LA in the 1970s, right after the Vietnam War, you don't know science fiction.

In this light, Mass Effect-style science fiction that is overly militaristic and clean comes off as some defense contractor hype video for a multi-billion-dollar weapons program for corporate welfare. Modern Star Trek almost always falls into "plas-fi," and it does not know what it wants to be. Like many IPs, including modern Star Wars, it has no place in today's world since it speaks to no one.

There is no message or pain; the false future sold to us by the architects of the Vietnam War, the promise that military force would solve everything, was a lie that got millions killed. Is that message resonating today, or has the machine taken over the messaging? Modern Hollywood is the machine; it can no longer make science fiction or compelling dramas that speak to the human spirit. Hollywood is a generation waiting to die, destroying the world on its way out the door. You can't speak to the future through an aging group of bitter creators dragging you into their graves.

This is why YouTubers' movies are decimating Hollywood, and there will be a science-fiction answer, likely soon. When you fail to speak to people, they will find ways to speak to each other on their own, and your IPs and properties will be excluded from the conversation. This is also why Marvel, DC, and Star Wars are failing. The original sin that created them is fading from memory.

I hate to speak like that, in such dark and broad-brush terms, but you need to understand the underpinnings of Star Wars, and most of the science fiction IPs came from a world that promised us floating cities, flying cars, and daily rockets to Mars in the 1950s, which ended up in the Vietnam War of the 1970s and the failure of the Dream State. That is a 20-year promise of tomorrow, well within a lifetime, sold hard, and it crashed and burned.

Reality set in.

And Hollywood is echoing those same promises of the rockets to Mars and flying cars, and the pen-and-paper industry writes games to echo that failure. Fantasy in this context isn't escapism; it is morphine meant to dull the massive pain of living in today's world. This is where D&D 5.5E is right now, removing any sense of hardship, pain, or triggering content to purify the numbing hit of painting its players as false gods. D&D 5.5E and the world it presents is a painkiller, safe, and corporate-friendly, and it won't upset Wall Street.

The cyclops are fortune tellers. The lizardfolk are eco-defenders. Orcs are character options. Any mention of people enslaving or slaughtering others is wiped clean. Any semblance of playing in a harsh and bitter, Conan-like world is gone. Death and failure are near impossible. D&D as a fantasy game feels dead and numb.

Modern D&D is a fantasy painkiller without a prescription. It is acetamino-fantasy.

Ultramodern 5E is still very much a "dirty" game, science fiction that smells like burnt oil, lived in, unclean, and broken. It manages to restructure and rebuild 5E into a unique, subclass-specific free framework that delivers on the 5E build process. A lot of 5E compatible games either deliver the traditional "dozen page long" heavy class designs full of subclass options. Here is a paladin, and here are 32 pages of paladin subclasses bloating the game to infinity and beyond, most of which you will never use.

D&D 5.5E is a distraction by design.

Ultramodern was designed in an age of system hacking 5E, and of trying new approaches to that monolithic framework, trying to tear it down and make it a better system for science fiction, diverse occupations, and character types. The dream of hacking and remixing 5E died around 2020 when the streamers took over, and the system has been design-stagnant until Shadowdark rolled around.

There is no starship combat; instead, a mecha system gives the heavy-metal vehicle a combat hit. It is a lot like the original Star Frontiers in this regard; it is just a "ground pounding" science fiction game that focuses on personal action, and you could conceivably use "any science fiction naval wargame" as your ship combat system. Frankly, this is a better option, as many science fiction RPGs fail horribly at delivering ship combat. The only exception to that is Stars Without Number, which does a good job of delivering the ship combat goods while keeping the system light and approachable.

The game also has its own magic system, combining all sources into one, and delivering a "spell point" style system that works well for universes that mix magic and "space magic." It avoids the tropes of the D&D 5E spell list and delivers a good selection of powers that build on the system's strengths while remaining simple and usable.

If you ever wanted a 5E spell, put it in a one-shot artifact or scroll, and be done with it.

Ultramodern 5E is a different design ethos from a different time, when 5E was still much more of a "currently hacked" system, constantly remixed with homebrew. In late-stage 5E, 5.5E set in rigor mortis, cementing many of the design expectations, with massive subclass collections and monolithic class designs. 90% of the subclass options in 5E you will never use. Ultramodern opens them all up to you while keeping the base-class designs focused and simple.

For a science fiction 5E game, that works for me, reducing complexity and the number of pages read while opening up the character design system to a box of Legos I can assemble any way I want. This is the version of 5E where I could take a random "fantasy race guide" and throw them all into a science fiction setting, delivering on the promise of "magic and tech" that many games failed to deliver in the past. From Dragonstar to Starfinder, a lot of games have tried, but very few have endured, Starfinder being one, and on the 5E side, Ultramodern 5E feels like the answer to that system.

Perhaps that is why I still like this game; it approaches the massive problem of 5E's class complexity in a novel way, and remixes the rules into a framework that handles the dirty, post-fantasy-world sci-fi that I like.

Off the Shelf: Genesys

If you play the Edge Studio Star Wars game, you typically play Genesys. Star Wars is the entry point for this game and provides setting-neutral support for its unique dicing system. For Star Wars, you play Star Wars. For everything else, you play Genesys. This system transplants the cinematic system used in the Star Wars game to other genres, allowing you to use it for anything you can imagine.

These two are sister games, same rules, different dice, and less Star Wars.

This is "Movie: The RPG," the game. Any Hollywood movie from 1920 to about 2019 can be recreated with this system, and it works better than many of today's narrative and storytelling games since the dice leave "what happens" up to you, instead of "telling you what happens" through the rules. I put an end dat of about 2010 on this simulation system since Hollywood has changed so much in the 2020-2026 era that filmmaking is practically unrecognizable and alien compared to earlier times, due to streaming and the collapse of the theater model.

Genesys feels like a forgotten system at this point, with Cypher System feeling like it replaced it (and Cypher System fading), and these days, Daggerheart is the RPG darling of the narrative crowd. This was always in the same sort of narrative simulation systems, such as Cypher System, FATE, Savage Worlds, and other generic systems.

I bounced off Cypher System many times before I finally learned it. It is a good system, but a part of me preferred Genesys, since the dice in Genesys are more solo-friendly than Cypher's GM-driven narrative model, which is honestly better with other people. Daggerheart, I have, but never got into, partially because I have Nimble, which does everything I need for superheroic fantasy.

What I like about Genesys is that you are playing with oracle dice, there is no narrative control system, and you do not need to drop out of character to reference narrative rules and determine outcomes. There are no "hope and fear mechanics." I am not dropping out of character to accept a GM Intrusion (or trigger a Player Intrusion), tripping bennies, nor am I dropping out of character to create a situational aspect.

There is a pair of "story pools" for the GM and players, with each player getting one point and the GM getting one point. When a point is used by either side, it flips to the other. These are mainly used to upgrade dice (positive for players, negative for enemies), to activate talents, or to affect luck and slightly change the narrative (we find a crashed cache of survival gear).

The dice roll tells me "what happens in the world," and I can stay in character to make it happen, or suffer the consequences. It is simple, straightforward, and keeps the action in the "mind space" of the game and in-character" situation.

This is a classic, fun, and elegant system that relies on special dice, and it is the best "special dice" system out there. The pool mechanics are limited, and enforce a currency that flips between the players and the GM.

Weaknesses? Some people get tired of constantly interpreting the special dice symbols. The game does have a fatigue to it if you are constantly rolling the dice for every little thing, and having to look at charts, cancel symbols, and interpret the remaining pool with every single roll. I recommend that dice rolls in this game be used for the macro-level actions: one roll to sneak across the town, avoid guards, and stay out of trouble. Do not roll for every city block, and every action without consequence!

In many cases, just do not roll; let the character's skills and abilities grant automatic success, and only roll when it means something, when there are consequences for failure, or when the path forward is uncertain and potentially dangerous.

Landing your starship at a starport in normal circumstances? No roll needed; that is a routine action and should be covered by your normal training and ability as a pilot. If there were a situation that made it difficult, such as enemy fire or severe weather, roll. But - only if you need to! If the bad weather can't force anything to meaningfully change, then why roll?

"Just to see" is not really a good enough reason.

If there are others being chased by stormtroopers, and you need to stick the landing on the first attempt, or else that group will be stuck down there, playing a desperate defensive last stand, then, yes, roll. If the bad weather just means a sloppy landing, or landing in a far-off, clear spot where no roll is needed, then don't roll. Why? Does it matter?

Before you roll, think of the dice as the director of the scene "on the set" wanting to film "the best movie possible." Does the scene have conflict? Is there an uncertain outcome? Does failure have consequences? Is the scene interesting enough to even film?

If the scene is a nothingburger, assume success and move on to the next scene that the audience does want to see. Why waste film on filler? Why waste a die roll on the same?

Being frugal on your shot selection makes for a great movie.

Being selective in rolling the narrative dice will avoid burnout.

Part of why I fell out with Genesys was GURPS, and GURPS is its own amazing thing that can do anything, too. GURPS tends to enforce a gritty reality on everything it touches, which is amazing to see superimposed over Star Wars or any other "false reality" game (including D&D). However, gritty realism does not always work across genres, and it can dramatically change things.

If I am playing "D&D with GURPS," I can get those moments where a goblin is hit in the leg by an arrow, hobbling around, and bleeding to death. That is a dark, gritty, and hardcore level of reality that is cool to experience in a hyper-realistic system, and it gives a wonderful feeling to "see D&D through realistic glasses."

If I want to play a movie game, GURPS can do that with a few tweaks, but there are times I want to play a narrative, curated experience where the rules have a lot to help me. The dicing system in Genesys is fun and produces unexpected outcomes. This is good stuff, and things that GURPS does not give me without adding oracle dice or other tools.

The system is more weighty than Savage Worlds, FATE, or even Cypher. The dicing is simple, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, special rules, and sections of the rules to master. Once you get the hang of it, everything runs smoothly, and you can mostly play with just a GM screen reference and be fine. There are fewer "toys" (cards, bennies, tokens) than Savage Worlds, and no XP and per-character pool economy like in Cypher.

Cypher is still a lot easier to convert into, requiring only one challenge number and a few special abilities for monsters (or any challenge). This requires source data and conversion, so it is par for the course for games like GURPS or Savage Worlds.

The real advantage here is that the dice are all oracle dice, and you are not taken out of character to figure out what happens next in the narrative. The flip-flop story pool between the players and GM is an acceptable extra pool to track, and accounts for momentum shifts and narrative control flips.

The characters are also top-notch, with the talent trees being an excellent part of the design, solving the character depth issue in a single page of the character sheet. The characters here are far more fun to build than Cypher or Savage Worlds, with only GURPS beating them in design flexibility.

Dated? Compared to the game-of-the-week that comes out on Kickstarter? Yes, a touch. Clunky? Not really, the narrative dice are the reason to play. VTT support? I haven't seen too much, so that is a minus, but I play solo, so not for me.

The community content on DriveThruRPG is excellent.

If you are playing Star Wars and want to stay in the Star Wars groove while playing in other settings, Genesys will work perfectly. The same types of dice are used here; the mechanics are identical, and there is not much more to learn to play.

This is still a solid generic system; it still holds up, and the solo-play factor is high due to the assistance from the oracle-like dice. A strong recommendation.