Role Playing Games

Role-playing games are a delightful way for a group of friends to invent stories together. These are the ones I’ve been playing regularly in the past ten years or so.

Ars Magica

The Amurgsval web site was originally created around our long-running Ars Magica campaign.

The Ars Magica Mailing List is available in two flavors, instant and digest. To subscribe to the instant list, send the command 'subscribe ars-magica' to majordomo@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU. To subscribe to the digest, send the command 'subscribe ars-magica-digest' to majordomo@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU. CSUA is also home to the main FTP site.

Ars Magica is pretty popular across the globe, given that there are Web pages all over the planet. Take a look at Project Redcap, Mythic Perspectives, and Atlas Games.

Shadowrun

Our gaming group started the Twilight Brigade Shadowrun campaign after we ran out of ideas for the Amurgsval game— and after years of evading the modern paradigm, we got into the thick of it with cyberpunk! Shadowrun is put out by FASA Games, but you're likely to get better information at Shadowland or the Shadowrun Archive, and there are some Shadowrun-related mailing lists at Deep Resonance.

Feng Shui

Feng Shui is a delightful role-playing game centered around the world of Hong Kong action films. The system’s simplicity appealed to me a great deal— it makes it easy to get the game mechanics out of the way so I can get to the stories I want to tell, and encourages the players to help fill in the details of the world. (Of course there’s a chandelier to swing from in the bar...) Our Feng Shui section of the site has a lot of conversion to other systems such as AD&D-esque high fantasy and Star Wars.

Champions

The best superhero role-playing game I’ve found. The character creation system is very flexible and powerful, but is best wielded by someone who knows the system and is comfortable with algebra. Hero Games, the creators of Champions, has a very nice program called HeroMaker to help with the details. Players only need to keep track of their own characters (often with the help of friends who understand how to use the system well but without playing really dirty tricks), but gamemasters have their work cut out for them: creating all the non-player characters is a lot of work, and it takes a fine touch to avoid having the superpowered combats take hours to resolve half a minute of superheroic battle.