Nice new avatars; both Tuco and Colonel Mortimer are my heroes. :cool:

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;548684Can a master movie director, who created their own film genre years ago, make a movie comeback by returning to their old genre of filmmaking?

Off the top of my head, Fritz Lang with The Tiger of Eschnapur/Indian Tomb and The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse; his last German films are returns to his first projects with his ex-wife Thea von Harbou - adventure serials and conspiracy thrillers. The first attempt lives up to the first Indian Tomb (which was so successful it had been remade three times, with Lang's one as the last) and may be the best Indiana Jones movie ever made; the second is good in its own right, but doesn't approach the grandiose 1922 Dr. Mabuse: The Great Gambler. Of course, it's not easy to top something like that.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;548684So I wondered if this question can be asked about RPGs?  Has there been a master RPG designer, one who invented a whole genre for RPGs years ago, that recently went back to their roots and created a brand new RPG that was successful?

Here, though, I am drawing a blank. Certainly not EGG, Siembieda or Marc Miller. It also doesn't help that many have moved on to other genres - Sandy Petersen continues to kick ass, but in computer games. That's hard to compare.

Quote from: thedungeondelverJim Ward has always put out product but nothing as big as what he did for TSR (Star Frontiers, for example).

I know this will not help my old-school creds, but Jim Ward has always been, and will always been a hack.

Quote from: Melan;548764It also doesn't help that many have moved on to other genres - Sandy Petersen continues to kick ass, but in computer games. That's hard to compare.

I was thinking of a number that went this same route.  

A successful role-play game today is a tricky thing to define.  I'm usually like, 'It wasn't a total failure, success!' So, something like Dead Reign seems comparatively successful by today's standards.

Of course Gygax's Dangerous Journeys (tgfka Dangerous Dimensions), Cyborg Commando, and Lejendary Adventures come to mind.

Mark Rein*Hagen tried to catch lightning twice with both reinventing SF gaming and trying his hand at an open license (years before the OGL): Exile.
But his fellow White Wolfers were against it (especially the license) so Exile was shelved. (Some setting elements were reused in Rein*Hagens collectible action figure game, Z-G.)
I doubt that Exile would have been a hit. The thing was even more pretentious than Vampire...

Quote from: Black Vulmea;548760Adam Baldwin.

Thank you.  Posting at night, etc.

Quote from: Melan;548764I know this will not help my old-school creds, but Jim Ward has always been, and will always been a hack.

I didn't say he wasn't a hack.

The OP's question is a good one, but just to nit-pick, James Cameron didn't even slightly invent anything.

Alien is based in most part on "Voyage of the Space Beagle" by Canadian science fiction author A. E. Van Vogt, in 1950. It was a very influential book in the science fiction community. The author even sued the film company and they settled out of court. The book was well known at the time. Gene Roddenberry even sited it as an influence for Star Trek.

And to bring this back to roleplaying, both the Dungeons & Dragons 'Displacer Beast' and the 'Xill' come from "Voyage of the Space Beagle". Even still, the book wasn't that special - it was part of a literary tradition at the time, to which James Cameron's film was just an extension, not a revelation.

I would foot that in cultural media, roleplaying games included, there are very few earth-shattering shifts. Most work is derivative, some more obviously than others. Some might say Savage Worlds is just Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition with all of 2nd edition taken out, rather than the RPG darling people say it is. I'm sure there's a host of other examples.

So I don't take it as a surprise that no RPG giant has successfully repeated themselves with amazing new content, because there was very few large steps, period.

//Panjumanju

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;548789Mark Rein*Hagen tried to catch lightning twice with both reinventing SF gaming and trying his hand at an open license (years before the OGL): Exile.
But his fellow White Wolfers were against it (especially the license) so Exile was shelved. (Some setting elements were reused in Rein*Hagens collectible action figure game, Z-G.)
I doubt that Exile would have been a hit. The thing was even more pretentious than Vampire...

I have the playtest doc somewhere in the depths of my HD.

It's actually got some good ideas, and I considered using it as a Starblazers Adventures setting before seeing Mindjammer (and later burning out on FATE 3.0).

The core idea is that humanity evolves into this stereotypical perfect, flawless but boring and stagnant utopia (shades of Iain M. Banks' Culture), and PCs are free-thinkers and malcontents who were exiled to the wild frontiers of space, interacting with other malcontents from prophets to pirates, alien civilizations, and stuff.

I did gloss over the system stuff, but there's a game in the setting material.

What is Mark Rein@Hagen doing nowadays anyway? He was all over the place in the 90s, then he just seemed to drop off the face of the Earth all of a sudden.

He was living in Eastern Europe, I think he was making way more money writing travel books then games.  Dunno if he's still there.

Quote from: Melan;548978What is Mark Rein@Hagen doing nowadays anyway? He was all over the place in the 90s, then he just seemed to drop off the face of the Earth all of a sudden.

Being Laughed@At for a Ridiculous@Name?

Quote from: Melan;548978What is Mark Rein@Hagen doing nowadays anyway? He was all over the place in the 90s, then he just seemed to drop off the face of the Earth all of a sudden.

Last I heard he was working on some sort of propaganda capacity for the Georgian government when the South Ossetia fiasco hit (what was it, 2002? 2005?). He even had the official Georgian government "Russia is lying! Come hear our side of the story!" website up for some time. I shit you not.

Quote from: The Butcher;548922I have the playtest doc somewhere in the depths of my HD.

Those files are still available for instance here.

Exile should have gotten developed. I'm not sure how amazing it would have been, but there were some interesting ideas in there: Ulsters, a second skin that allows people to live in space. I had visions of people interacting in open space with these things.

Quote from: The Butcher;548996Last I heard he was working on some sort of propaganda capacity for the Georgian government when the South Ossetia fiasco hit (what was it, 2002? 2005?). He even had the official Georgian government "Russia is lying! Come hear our side of the story!" website up for some time. I shit you not.

"Currently Mark lives Tbilisi, Georgia with his wife and child, and works as an international consultant for the government there. Due to the current conflict in Georgia, Mark has set up "SOS Georgia," a site dedicated to presenting true information about the invasion from those caught in the middle."

Quote from: thedungeondelver;548988Being Laughed@At for a Ridiculous@Name?

"When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the country he now lives in, Georgia, uses the • as a comma, thereby making it meaning-laden. Mark no longer uses the dot in his name, replacing it with a more pedestrian hyphen. "

Source for both quotes.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;549080Exile should have gotten developed. I'm not sure how amazing it would have been, but there were some interesting ideas in there: Ulsters, a second skin that allows people to live in space. I had visions of people interacting in open space with these things.

I liked the concept of the Icarus Drive, which allows interstellar hyperspace travel for ships that dive into the heart of a star... and which must be operated by human pilots because no AI would be mad enough to do something like that.