Okay folks -
What are some of the non-American games that I should absolutely know about? Preferably, those either written in English or with English translations readily available.
Hit me.
I'm keeping an eye out for Tenra Bansho Zero, being developed/translated by our own Andy K. (And if I recall correctly, I have a $1 discount on that to cash in!)
Other than that I dunno. Over on the pundit's blog I heard about Capitán Alatriste, and as reviewed on RPG.net it sounds pretty cool. However it's probably not easy to acquire in the US, and it's in Spanish to boot.
:cool:--searching for info on it, I see that Viggo is starring in a film version that's in production, for release later this year. Maybe the RPG will make it over here after all.
There's JimBobOz's d4-d4, out of Australia, an excellent lite system.
-mice
Quote from: Elliot Wilen:cool:--searching for info on it, I see that Viggo is starring in a film version that's in production, for release later this year. Maybe the RPG will make it over here after all.
Alatriste is already out in Spain. It'll come out in the US on December 22. There's an English-language trailer on You Tube, IIRC.
So does Viggo speak Spanish or is he dubbed in Spain?
Capitan Alatriste is a spectacular Spanish game, based on GURPs (roughly).
There's also Aquelarre, one of the best medieval RPGs out there for emulation of the era, vastly superior to Cthulhu dark ages, and based roughly on the BRP system (the Call of Cthulhu/Runequest system).
RPGPundit
Quote from: mattormegOkay folks -
What are some of the non-American games that I should absolutely know about? Preferably, those either written in English or with English translations readily available.
Er, could you narrow that down a bit? The most popular non-American games in English are mostly, well, English. There's Conan along with the other Mongoose Publishing offerings, and the Warhammer stuff. Also, the new stuff from Contested Ground Studios (http://www.contestedground.co.uk/) like a|state and Cold City.
From Sweden, the biggest U.S. imports are Mutant Chronicles and Kult.
From France, the biggest imports are In Nomine, Nephilim, Agone, and Reve de Dragon.
From Germany, the biggest imports are Engel and Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye).
Others mentioned Capitan Alatriste from Spain.
Australia doesn't seem to have any standout imports, but they have Dominion Fantasy, d4-d4, Lace & Steel, Rus, and Nylon Angel (http://www.whitemicegames.com.au/cgi-bin/users/productList.pl?task=DETAIL&productID=14).
I remember a Mutant Chronicles boardgame from when I was a little shaver. How's the RPG?
Two that haven't been mention so far in this thread:
Qin, set in ancient China, from France
Anima Beyond Fantasy (http://www.animarpg.com/), an "anime-style" game, from Spain (English translation still to be released)
Quote from: fonkaygarryI remember a Mutant Chronicles boardgame from when I was a little shaver. How's the RPG?
The
Mutant Chronicles RPG sucks. It's incomprehensible. Got some nice artwork in it though. ;)
Quote from: Elliot WilenSo does Viggo speak Spanish or is he dubbed in Spain?
Viggo speaks Spanish. He lived in Argentina and Venezuela when young. He also drinks Mate! :D
Someone asked for me to narrow things down a bit. Fair enough.
Assume that I know about the big hitters, like Mongoose's products.
What are some of the lesser lights that I should be following?
Quote from: JongWKViggo speaks Spanish. He lived in Argentina and Venezuela when young. He also drinks Mate! :D
Yes, but its probably Argentine Mate.
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Quote from: RPGPunditYes, but its probably Argentine Mate.
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Fill me in, Pundit, what's mate?
Quote from: mattormegFill me in, Pundit, what's mate?
I've explained Mate in one of my early Blog entries (http://www.xanga.com/RPGpundit/280883508/item.html):
Quote from: RPGPundit's BlogI've just woken up after a measly three and a half hours of sleep. My players can certainly go the distance, even in a Thursday night Traveller D20 game. Before Uruguay, the last time I managed 3 nights of gaming a week was in high school.
But this place is different, a whole other vibe. There is a mentality here where any work should be done as little as possible, any play should be done to the furthest degree allowable by man and law.
The gamers here are the real deal; human beings, not walking freak factories, not rejects from the marginalia of society but fairly regular guys or gals (most of them) who somehow manage to dedicate huge hours to the game and yet still pursue other lives. But everyone in this country is like that, they somehow manage to get up at eight in the morning, work till eight p.m., then party till four a.m.
Personally, I blame the "yerba mate". I'm drinking it right now. One sip of this stuff and your eyes light up like christmas flares. And I'm drinking the ultra light stuff ("la selva, para hepaticos", for those who know such things), I dare not try to drink the real deal ("canarias"). Trying that is just begging for my heart to start pounding and my limbs to shake to the point where actually typing would become a sharp impossibility, as much due to the loss of motor functions as to psychological issues; my mind just wouldn't be in it, never minding that my body would not be able to handle it from the trembling.
Mate is the southern end of South America's answer to coca leaves. Made from herbs originally native to the jungles of paraguay, yerba mate has been drunk by the indians for untold centuries, and has wholeheartedly been adopted by spanish culture. In particular the Uruguayans. I mean, the Argentinians drink it, with a bit of sugar to cut the intense bitterness, during tea time; but that sort of thing is for wimps and failed investors, Uruguayans are made of sterner stuff than that. They parade down the street with great honking gourds (argentinians often make their gourds of metal, while Uruguayan gourds are always real gourds, twice the size of Argentina's, sometimes encased in the ballsack of a bull), filled to the brim with mate so there's just enough space to stick the metal "bombilla" straw, in one hand and a thermos filled with almost-boiling water in the other. They drink the damned stuff virtually 24 hours a day, steeping the leaves with boiling water then sucking the infusion through the metal straw.
Yes, they drink near-boiling water through a metal straw. Figure out the physics, people..
And they drink it straight. No sugar for them; to a Uruguayan, only the somehow incapacitated (old women, little children and Argentinians) drink it with sugar.
Yerba mate is filled with vitamins, minerals, and energy. Lots and lots of energy. When I was up in Canada I'd found some ignorant fools, new-age health-nuts with more hemp underwear than brains, pimping yerba mate as "the health drink for the new millenium"... only problem is that they were selling them in little one-gram teabags. The health freaks were right, but that level of commitment is totally inadequate. Any Uruguayan could tell them: for yerba mate to have any healthy benefits at all, it must be drunk in a huge gourd filled with about a 50 grams of yerba, with boiling water and a metal straw and a bull's ballsack if at all possible. Anything less is just a placebo. Drink one gourdful every three minutes for every waking hour of your day, and call me in the morning.
I have wholeheartedly adopted the custom of mate, which between work and roleplay is the only factor, in combination with an ungodly quantity of nicotine (I have as much pipe tobacco in my house as some small tobacconists do), that keeps me from the brink of total collapse.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPunditI've explained Mate in one of my early Blog entries (http://www.xanga.com/RPGpundit/280883508/item.html):
RPGPundit
Oh, OK. I knew this sounded familiar. I think that William S. Burroughs wrote some about Mate.
Lace & Steel. At least originally Australian.
Two by Frenchmen:
Wuthering Heights Roleplay (http://philippe.tromeur.free.fr/whrpg.htm) by Phillip Tromeur - I ran this at a con once and it was an absolute hoot. Overwrought period meoldrama is pretty much the polar opposite of the kind of games I normally run, but Mssr. Tromeur's design makes it a fun change of pace.
Mazes & Minotaurs (http://storygame.free.fr/MAZES.htm) by Olivier Legrand - This game is basically a re-imagining of original Dungeons & Dragons with two key differences: the setting is mythical Bronze Age Greece and the mechanics actually make sense.
One by a Finlander:
Powergame (http://www.uta.fi/~trmika/gameindex.html) by Mikko Kauppinen - Finally, one you all can actually download! Powergame is a supers game that takes the basic lighthanded approach of the old Marvel FASERIP game and ditches the big percentile chart in favor of small d6 dicepools. Nothing mechanically revolutionary here, just a solid design that gone through a lot of playtesting and rewriting. Years of chasing the mechanically perfect superhero simulator have left me jaded, but Powergame is one of the few supers games I still give a crap about these days.
Aquellare and Captain Alatriste have already been described.
Lex Arcana is a Roman Empire x-files game, the party is a special branch of the Imperial Guard that roam the Empire finding occult threats and dealing with them, interesting stuff.
There are tons of great French rpgs, though the settings and atmosphere tend to be better than the mechanics.
Quote from: RPGPunditCapitan Alatriste is a spectacular Spanish game, based on GURPs (roughly).
There's also Aquelarre, one of the best medieval RPGs out there for emulation of the era, vastly superior to Cthulhu dark ages, and based roughly on the BRP system (the Call of Cthulhu/Runequest system).
RPGPundit
I agree fully with the Pundit on Aquelarre. But stay away from Alatriste. Is a crock of shit. The author (the same as Aquelarre) tries to make a ripoff of GURPS without understanding GURPS. The duel ruels make baby Jesus cry. You are better playing Aquelarre with the extension
Villa y Corte if you're interested in playing in Spain in the XVII century.
What's Villa y Corte?
Houses and Courts?
Quote from: ImperatorI agree fully with the Pundit on Aquelarre. But stay away from Alatriste. Is a crock of shit. The author (the same as Aquelarre) tries to make a ripoff of GURPS without understanding GURPS. The duel ruels make baby Jesus cry. You are better playing Aquelarre with the extension Villa y Corte if you're interested in playing in Spain in the XVII century.
Dude, that's pretty strange; I found Alatriste to be great, the dueling rules to work very well, and ran a very successful campaign with it. You're probably the first person I ran into who didn't think that the rules for sword-duels were fantastic.
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I was looking at Aquellare last night, one thing I think I would want to change is that damage for weapons looks kind of low, a dagger thrust can't kill in one blow if I read correctly which I dislike. Any suggestions on how to best address that?
Oooh, neat fencing rules? Please elaborate ;)
Quote from: RPGPunditDude, that's pretty strange; I found Alatriste to be great, the dueling rules to work very well, and ran a very successful campaign with it. You're probably the first person I ran into who didn't think that the rules for sword-duels were fantastic.
RPGPundit
Well, I could say almost the same from your case :) I know of three groups of people who started running it, and changed the system to full - GURPS or Aquelarre because the system produced absurd outcomes. And I read the duel system and couldn't make neither heads nor tails from it. Actually, in the mailing list of the game the most frequent question is 'How the fuck do the duelling rules work?' followed by 'Man, the duelling system is über-broken because...'
It seems that a later book about fencing schools only made things worst, but I can't really say.
Balbinus,
Villa y Corte is the nickname of Madrid in that time, alluding to the King having his residence and court in what was an small and unimportant village at the time. The most accurate translation I can think of is 'Small Town & Court."
Said that,
Villa y Corte was an
Aquelarre book that provided rules for playing in the XVII century instead of the Middle Ages, and described the city of Madrid in full, adding a metric fuckton of adventure seeds, plus a jargon of the time to add color, and a lot of other goodnesses, all of that packed in a sleek book of about 120 pages. An excellent guide with a very good duelling system, which makes
Alatriste look even worse by comparison.
On the damage system: damage in Aquelarre is brutal. Bear in mind that the amount of damage is doubled if you hit in the head, and halved if you hit the limbs. But you just need to make half the initial Stamina in damage to cause a severe wound, which means that you need to do just 5 damage points to put your foe at heavy risk. Daggers made 2D3 + bonus damage, and any PC will have at least 1D4 bonus damage. Add to that the close combat rules (which give you a +50% to your Dagger skill, increasing enormously your chances of doing a crit), and you'll see that combat is a world of pain.
Actually, we came to the conclusion that the most dangerous character was my girlfriends
jongleur (bard), who was armed with 2 daggers and a 75% at that.
Quote from: ImperatorOn the damage system: damage in Aquelarre is brutal. Bear in mind that the amount of damage is doubled if you hit in the head, and halved if you hit the limbs. But you just need to make half the initial Stamina in damage to cause a severe wound, which means that you need to do just 5 damage points to put your foe at heavy risk. Daggers made 2D3 + bonus damage, and any PC will have at least 1D4 bonus damage. Add to that the close combat rules (which give you a +50% to your Dagger skill, increasing enormously your chances of doing a crit), and you'll see that combat is a world of pain.
Actually, we came to the conclusion that the most dangerous character was my girlfriends jongleur (bard), who was armed with 2 daggers and a 75% at that.
I'll take another look.
What changed in the later editions by the way?
Awesome magic system incidentally, very evocative.
Quote from: BalbinusI'll take another look.
What changed in the later editions by the way?
Awesome magic system incidentally, very evocative.
Not much. Mostly, later editions are just a rewriting and editing of the old ones including the new professions, spells, bestiary and such that apeared over several books. Almost nothing changed rules-wise, it just came in one book instead of being scattered through several guides.
The magic system of Aquelarre is the best part of it along with the great work of bringing the setting to life. IMO, it beats AM system in regard to authenticity any day of the weak.
Is there an English translation of Aquelarre (http://aquelarre.org)?
Not as far as I know. Actually, there was a review of it in Dragon magazine in an article of games that would never make it in the US market. Mainly because the game was too realistic and gritty, and because in some of the illos (in the original edition the artist tried to emulate medieval art) there is some nudity.