The Game Not Played...

Dust off that RPG that's been sitting on the shelf, bereft of attention.

We've all got 'em. That game you bought that looked cool, or was a licensed franchise you like on TV or whatever, or that you used to play and just don't anymore, or everyone just wants to play D&D... The orphan taking up room on your shelf that you're not going to play, but keep because -- just maybe -- one day it'll happen.

I've got a bunch of these. Oft times, I buy them to steal ideas, or the art’s pretty to look at, or I liked other products with the same mechanics — either way, there's a host of these things sitting waiting to entertain my gaming group (or not...they might suck.)

Some are new and we just haven't gotten to it. The obvious one here is The One Ring — the new Free League version. I bought it because the wife is a massive Tolkein nut, but we just haven't gotten to it. There's the perennial outcast -- Jovian Chronicles, a rich and interesting anime-inspired hard sci-fi setting with truly awful mechanics. I constantly want to run the setting, but in 1990s style, there’s a massive meta-story built in that I think needs dumped. It’s also a hugely fleshed out world that makes it, paradoxically, hard to find an entry point for me as a GM. Similarly, I was really pumped for Altered Carbon. I liked the show (haven't read the books) and the initial art, etc. looked promising. It's a hot mess -- mostly due to it's use of symbols for everything that makes the rule book all but unreadable. There's Capers -- a superheroes meets Prohibition America. Look interesting; haven't gotten to it yet. Another old one -- Aces & Eights, a Western RPG that has some weird mechanics to it. There's a host of interesting material that I've stolen for other Victorian-period games, but the game itself looks peculiar. But again -- fantastic background material that is a treasure trove for setting. I never got a chance to run Firefly, and honestly, I bought it to have material for the original MWP Serenity game; I do not like the Fate-ified version of Cortex that has been their go-to since the Leverage game came out, and if I ran a Firefly/Serenity campaign, I suspect I would use either the Battlestar Galactica version of Cortex, or port it over to something else.

Then there's the endless settings for D&D: Odyssey of the Dragonlords is a cool Greek myth-inspired setting with a full campaign and gorgeous artwork. Haven’t run it, though I think the rules for centaurs and other mythic creatures is better realized than in the official Mythic Odyssey of Theros. Age of Antiquity -- a Rome-based campaign — that, had it published on time, would have been useful when I was running a Roman Empire-based D&D game. As it stands, it’s gorgeous and well-developed as a setting, but it hasn’t been played. There's Forbidden Lands, another Free League game. I bought it to possibly play a more realistic and brutal version of D&D. Brancalonia, an Italian “spaghetti fantasy” setting, looks fun and would probably fit the humor of the Nerd Night™ group. I’ve stolen the idea of sub-standard gear from the setting, where your weapon, or other gear, is likely to fail over time.

Probably the saddest orphans on the bookshelves are the ones that saw heavy use in the past, but have been left behind for newer games. When I look at my shelves, I see the massive collection of Space: 1889 stuff, coupled with the Castle Falkenstein books that I used to augment the former setting. From about 1990 to the aughties, Victorian sci-fi was a regular in the play rotation. So was my all-time favorite game: James Bond: 007 — a very innovative game at its time that is still useful, if a bit long in the tooth in some of the mechanical design. This game got played steadily from the mid-80s to about 2010, when we went on a pulp and Battlestar Galactica kick. The current core book and GM pack is the third of fourth I’ve owned.

So, what unplayed or orphaned games do you have on your shelf?