Which RPG has the best backstory or the most interesting history? might have

Edit:
Some people might have different definitions for backstory, history, a hook or maybe even a metaplot event. I don't mind what you call it. I am  just curious what you think. Of course we can always what is called what. That's interesting as well. Personally I am really fond of short backstory that sets things in motion at once. I really dig savage worlds setting lately with backstory events like the Serpent Fall, the Hellfrost and the Curse of the Seahags. Must be a phase. I also really like bigger amount of history as Fading Suns has. But I must admit most history in that setting isn't really relevant to the game.

For me, that's Earthdawn/Shadowrun.

I like the ebb and flow of magic remaking our world in fantastic ways.  It just makes a lot of sense to me on a personal level.  It's hard to explain...

When it came out, I thought Rifts was pretty cool. Main book, Vampire Kingdoms, Sourcebook 1, Wormwood, Phase World, and Atlantis were all very interesting.

Later, I thought Broken Gears (tiny sci-fi RPG) was pretty sweet.

Someone made a gigantic unofficial conversion of all the Macross anime series (except Frontier), manga, and films to Mekton, and that was/is fan-fucking-tastic.

Shadowrun and Warhammer 40K have amazing back stories.

Shadowrun.  The fantasy, cyberpunk, futuristic setting just works.  Myth-magic-technology-fantasy type races.  The whole native american reawakening thing is great.  D&D meets Neuromancer.  So much design space to be able to take it nearly anywhere you want to go.

Played so much of it 12+ years ago.  Wish I could pull it off now, but I think a) technology has changed so much since it came out that I'm not well versed enough in what's possible; b) I'm too old to use street names that don't sound too cheesy.

OVER THE EDGE is my all-time favorite backstory game.  I still like reading the book nowadays even though I doubt I could run it for my current group.

Old-school Shadowrun. Doesn't always make sense, but is UBER COOL. Newer-school Shadowrun (i.e. the post-2060 timeline) is much more bland to my taste, though.

I see a lot of Shadowrun here. That's a tricky one. A lot of history in Shadowrun is also being called Metaplot by some people. I consider it backstory, but I had a discussion about it once on another forum and people there called it Metaplot.

Is that because the Metaplot of one edition of Shadowrun becomes the backstory of the next edition?

In regards to setting back story,

My favorite is probably Tribe 8. It just grabbed me and reeled me in.

There are quite a few I like, but if I had to pick one, it is Tribe 8.

Was thinking about this, this morning.

Warp World.

Basically it is a post apocalyptic game. After a nuclear exchange killed tons of people their simultaneous death anguish ripped warps in the world. These warps allowed old Gods to rise and for elves, dwarves and creature of legend to reappear on earth. The Old Gods didn't want the world to kill it self again so they suppress technology. So it stays at a musket and low steam power era. Attempts to go higher draw the Gods attention and they blanket the area reducing the technology. So you may empty and uzi before the area is dropped back to bronze age technology. It is 300 years after the big event, Magic works again but was based off technology so you had spells that duplicated radio signals and such. And you could use it o hide some technology.


I liked the mix of technology and magic. The explanations on why everything was how it was and how technology was controlled. Tricks you could do to enhance technology or suppress it.

Never got to play but loved the idea. System was typical 80's over complicated rule set. Magic was brain numbing to try to run it seemed. Pretty realistic damage system. One did not want to get shot. And they even had magic bullets

Lots of post-apocalyptic love in this thread and I'm no exception.

Traveller. I'm a latecomer to the whole OTU mess, but I find the pre-TNE backstory pretty cool. I'm particularly fond of the idea of humanity's first contact with aliens being... shit, more humans? ANd the Vilani being all like "yeah, we get that a lot." I'm not terribly familiar with how the TNE metaplot was handled by GDW but I feel it could be made to work with the right group, especially if it happened as a catastrophic event in the middle of an established campaign.

Rifts. My original Favorite Setting. Really, the way Kevin Siembieda dovetailed the post-apocalyptic resurgence of the supernatural into the Beyond The Supernatural metaphysics is briliant. The bad guys, the Coalition in particular, are a tad more cartoonish than I'm 100% comfortable with, but that's really part of the charm. To me it's the power creep and, to a much lesser degree, the necessity to ham-handedly advance a "metaplot" (classic Palladium, jumping into industry bandwagons with a 10 year delay). I still love the old books though. If only Kevin had an editor to steer him away from writing giant arms and armor catalogues, and towards packing these books with world information.

Old World of Darkness. Fuck me if we weren't all over the metaplot back in the day, spending a goodly amount of gaming time (before a session, after a session, or during the obligatory pizza break) argüing the finer points of rivalries (a.k.a. "who would win in a fight") and the fate of obscure NPCs, with the fervor of an unwashed, cosplaying Trekkie hopped up on Mountain Dew and Cheetos in the first night at a Star Trek convention. It sure as hell wasn't haute literature but it was good pop culture, and we gobbled it up like the eager fanboys we were.

Castle Falkenstein. All right, I admit it. I liked the Tom Olam storyline. Not nearly as much as the other entries, but I thought it was a nice touch, as were the card mechanics. But I'm weird like that. And much as I love Germany and feel Bismarck was a badass, the Unseelie/Prussian alliance makes a horrifying modicum of sense when you think about it.

Delta Green. Really a setting-within-a-setting, they did a good job of transposing the X-Files vibe to one several possible Cthulhu Mythos worlds. Great set-up for a mission-based campaign.

The Day After Ragnarok. "Pulp Rifts" is the absolute best definition for this setting, ever. Nazi occultism breaks the world, smashes Europe, drowns America under a tsunami of mutagenic poison, and an ailing British Empire shares the weird new world with an aggressive, Stalinist USSR (and their mysterious frost giant allies) and a Showa Japan who Imperial ambitions remain undeterred. Add pulp supernatural and weird science horrific elements, with a side of historical and pulp characters butting heads all over the Serpent-tainted world, and go apeshit. It's Hellboy meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Loki take the hindmost. They've just released a sourcebook about dungeon crawling inside the corpse of the Midgard Serpent and if that's not awesome the world no longer has any meaning to me.

Here's another one.

Empire of the Petal Throne. Should be hors concours really. Kid grows up in the 1930s reading pulp fantasy and starts building his own world; grows up, becomes an anthropologist, travels the world and fleshes it out with newfound knowledge; becomes a gamer and uses it in wargames and eventually publishes it as one of the first original RPG settings.

d6 Star Wars RPG had the best backstory. Which was ruined by the time the rest of the versions of the game had come out.

Traveller, Day after Ragnarok, old WoD, Delta Green, we really have the same taste, The Butcher.

Empire of the Petal Throne - grabbed my imagination by the throat at a tender age.

2300 AD - Best aliens, hands down. Least obnoxious FTL handwavium. Decent future history.

Transhuman Space - Best near-future, non-FTL sci-fi setting. Never played a lick, but read every source book front-to-back and back-to-front.

Shadowrun  - honorable mention for great backstory, but doesn't quite make the cut because no instance of actual play every lived up to the promise.

Ok, maybe I should redefine this topic a little. What's the influence backstory has on your games? Which games have backstory that influence actual play a lot? In what way does it influence the game? Or does it have great backstory which never seems to come up?