The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them.

Knave started as a modification of Cairne, as the writer wanted to add a few rules. And then someone copied Knave to create Vaults of Vaarn, and so on. Without the ability to copy these texts, the authors may never have made the books.

Wandering monsters make farming hard. But the wardens have a solution; they take all the useless people - the feckless drunks, incompetent thieves, and political upstarts - and send them out to guard the farmlands around the Edge of Civilization. Some monsters die, some cretins die. It’s a zero-scum game.

System

• Only roll once per action
• Separate Damage from Luck
• Create backstory during play

Format

• Each story is a railroad but players can switch routes at any time.
• Print and bind with floss.
• No house rules, ever.

This was one of the greatest adventure modules out there. I played it so many times that I once used it as a Mind Palace in university, because I can remember every single room.

White Plume Mountain

The original adventure took the adventurers around a ‘house of fun’ style dungeon, with a ham-fisted hook, and no kind of plot. They enter a room, and beat up baddies. Sometimes those baddies have a magical weapon. One room has a big zoo of monsters in glass boxes, and the PCs must fight through them. They can’t defeat the evil wizard who sits at the base, because the plot says so. The evil monsters with magical swords will fight one at a time.

RuneQuest’s Glorantha setting is 500 pages long, so it’s about half the length of Lord of the Rings.

In order to help with character creation, players can get a ‘Player pack’ pdf, which tells you that the book as written was too confusing for normal players to build a character.

The character creation begins with your grandma, determining her occupation, skills, and what that means for you, before we move onto the next grandparent, and so on. I’m not fucking kidding.

Trouble at Grogs is one of the best adventures I ever ran, and I’ve run it many times, in multiple systems.

It looks like any other adventure at first.

• The players find a roaring tavern owned by a half-ogre named ‘Grog’.
• Grog asks them to find out who’s been stealing things in town.
• Reading more, you (the GM) find out that Yuri (another tavern owner) has hired two half-ogres and two elves to start the trouble.
• The bad-guys (Yuri and his crew) have found underground tunnels, and use them to steal and make mischief.
• On day 2, Yuri’s two half-ogre cut-throats come to rough the players up.
• The town is brimming with various people and places, such as an ex-ranger sheriff, a banker, and a maid at Grogg’s who secretly works for Yuri.

The first time I read it, I was surprised to find it didn’t have an ending. I leafed back a page, and read more thoroughly as if I’d missed it. But no - there was no ending. I played it anyway.

I so often hear people giving the golden rule of RPG’s as ‘remember it’s a game, and to just have fun’. I can see that if nobody likes the game then it’s not a good game, but the ‘have fun’ advice, while common enough, doesn’t help anyone to do anything.

John Mill discussed the paradox of happiness. If you want to build a boat, you try to build a boat. If you want to go to the shop then the best thing to attempt to do is to go to the bloody shop. But if you want to have fun? Well, try it now. It really doesn’t work. So what can you do to ‘have fun’? Well, there’s sports, catching up with friends, learning new maths and a whole host of other things. Notice a common element - none of them have ‘fun’ as an objective. Sports may be fun, but don’t ‘play just for fun’. Play to win. You play to score points and stop the enemy scoring points. If you’re catching up with friends and you want to have fun, where exactly does that lead you? Probably nowhere. You might be better off seeing where the conversation takes you. If you’re learning maths, don’t go with what’s fun. Who knows what maths is fun before learning it? Better to work at examples quickly and look at why things work as they do. By the end of the night, you might find you’ve had fun whether you get all the right answers or not.