Anyone have favorite books from Guardians of Order?

I liked their corebooks.  I feel their sourcebooks were mostly poor, though.  I never liked their fan guides.

GoO self destructed amidst much drama, but when I look back at their output I see constant improvement and attempts to address issues fans brought up.  Of course, as I think back, there were other problems.

I also see a company that was very erratic.  They were all over the map.  There were three editions of BESM in what, five years?  Then there was a d20 adaptation of BESM.  Then there was Silver Age Sentinels in both Tri Stat and d20 flavors.  How about Tekumel and Game of Thrones in there too?  I think they planned to do an Amber game (Pundit might remember).  Silver Age Sentinels had a ton of supplements pooped out along with the game, even though the impression I've always had is the game belly flopped on launch.  Then there was Slayers, Dominion Tank Police, and all those Fan Guides.  All of this was compacted into a very short period of time.  They had all these different games which never had any focus beyond a couple of months.  They had this huge catalog to rival major publisher release schedules even though they were a small outfit.  

There were also the Stingy Gamer Editions of a few games.  BESMd20 and Silver Age Sentinels d20 had explicitly labeled versions under this banner.  The Tri-Stat system wasn't explicitly labeled a Stingy Gamer Edition game, but it had an inexpensive core rules only release separate from SAS which was effectively the same type of thing.  I remember thinking these were a really cool idea at the time.  They were RPG books for under $10 with all the text content, just no art.  Looking back, they were an iffy idea which I don't think made a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things.  

There was the Magnum Opus imprint.  I don't remember how it was supposed to work.  This is also the area where most creators got screwed by the GoO implosion.  I only have two Magnum Opus games.  The first is Dreaming Cities, which is just the basic Tri Stat rules with some (IMO) bland urban fantasy settings without sufficient mechanical examples to be useful.  The second is Everstone: Blood Legacy, which uses the anime d20 ruleset as a base to construct what I think is a really cool Rifts inspired setting.  It's sad that Everstone died in the smouldering ruins of GoO, because I think it had some potential.

I loved Silver Age Sentinels and I've greatly enjoyed Tri-Stat.

I would be happy to see Tri-Stat reborn, but perhaps under new ownership.

I can't help but think of Mark being a cautionary tale about biting off too much in the game industry. He started with a lot of enthusiasm, and when I was in the business, I had the good fortune to have some arrangements with him that were great for both of us. But, I also had the good fortune to not be owed any money by him during GOO's crash. I always feel that it's a shame how things went bad.

All that being said, I liked BESM, and ran some fun game sessions using it, and even a short campaign in Uresia. Of course, the most memorable gaming was probably a couple of silly sessions of the Sailor Moon game - and, you know, anything you look back on 20 years later with a big smile was time well spent.

I thought the Guardians of Order were Green Lantern's bosses.

Ran some fun games of Slayers with BESM and loved the system. I also used Dominion Tank Police and Tenchi Muyo.

Uresia - Grave of Heaven was one of the best d20 settings ever created. I have a lot of love for that one.

To this day I think the Tenchi RPG & Sourcebook sets the standard for any RPG adaptation of an IP source.

BESM 2nd Edition was my go-to system around the turn of the century. Still think its a great system, great presentation.

I miss Guardians of Order. I recall there was some story behind their demise, but it was years ago that I read up on it.

Quote from: TristramEvans;825423BESM 2nd Edition was my go-to system around the turn of the century. Still think its a great system, great presentation.

Something I remember about BESM2:

I bought the original color edition.  It's a pretty book, but one thing that really irritated me was all the space wasted on the charts which showed simple and intuitive progressions.  Highly Skilled is a perfect example of this.  It's a simple 10 skill points per rank, but there's also this chart which does nothing more than show what the Rank times 10 is.  There were quite a few charts like that in the book.  I felt that was a waste of space which could have been used for content or reducing page count.

Of course, since I was a bigger wanker then than I am now, I bitched about this on TBP.  I recall Mark saw this and commented on it.  I don't think anyone else bitched about the charts over there other than me.

I also moaned about the color and paper stock and the extra unnecessary premium I felt it added to the book.  Because I bitched and moaned about that type of thing back then.  

Then, a few months later, GoO was printing a new version of BESM2e, the Revised version.  It excised all those simple mathematical charts and was in b&w.  I don't know if it was because of my comments, but what I took away from it is that GoO felt it was important to address concerns like mine.  

BESM3e was bittersweet.  The introduction basically says that BESM started as the game Mark wanted, and BESM3 was the game the fans wanted.  GoO delivered what the fans asked for, and went out of business at least partially because of that.

I take away a very dark statement about the RPG biz because of that.

I remembered hearing at they would do something with Roger Zelazny's Amber, or the Amber Diceless system - one or the other or both, but it never came to anything. I'd love to hear the rest of that story.

//Panjumanju

Quote from: jeff37923;825422Uresia - Grave of Heaven was one of the best d20 settings ever created. I have a lot of love for that one.

It's fantastic, I agree.  I have two copies of the BESM version of Uresia.

S. John Ross produced a systemless version available as pdf or print via Lulu: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/uresia.htm.

I had a good time with Guardians of Order - somehow I got on their lists as a playtester, which meant that a) I got sent offers to playtest books (And I'm listed as a Playtester in a bunch of them) and b) they sent me one of everything they printed. (Which was a savings on my part, let me tell you.)  They eventually had to cut out sending me free stuff, but that was fine - I more than got my money's worth out of them.  I even got to write a module for SAS, which was a lot of fun.

I've had fun in the past playing BESM and Sailor Moon at cons. (I ran some games for the kids section of the gaming conventions, a long ways back.  It was fun.)

Quote from: jcfiala;825595S. John Ross produced a systemless version available as pdf or print via Lulu: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/uresia.htm.

I did not know this. Thank you! I now must go and spend my money.

Quote from: jcfiala;825595S. John Ross produced a systemless version available as pdf or print via Lulu: http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/uresia.htm.

He was really enthusiastic about that one.  I remember as he was writing it he would pop into the RPGnet channel on IRC and talk about his cool new project.

Favorites of BESM.

Cute and Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters  and Big Ears, Small Mouse.

SAS was pretty good for a supers RPG (not nearly as good as ICONS, of course); but the biggest lament for GoO is that they crashed before putting out Amber 2e.  Of course, if they had managed that, there might never have been a Lords of Olympus...