Non-Fantasy Tabletop Roleplaying Games

[Akarin]

Not that there's anything wrong with D&D/Pathfinder/etc, but they have such a large share of the market that they tend to always dominate conversation.

Anyone play other sorts of tabletop roleplaying games?

[Akarin]

Started this because I was talking to Ydrasse about Vampire the Masquerade.

Personally I'm really into Call of Cthulhu (and also Trail of Cthulhu, which is the same premise with slightly different rules.) I've played a lot of horror games. Dread (the one with the jenga tower) can be really fun. I've also always really wanted to play Unknown Armies.

I own several dozen roleplaying game books, most of them I'll probably never get a chance to play, and that's kind of sad, but they are still fun to read through.

[Akarin]

I really like mysteries as a

structure

for games. Like the core activity being "figure out what happened" as opposed to "survive" or "kill the monsters and relieve them of their possessions." Most horror games are actually mysteries, but mysteries can also work really well for science fiction or historical or even fantasy games.

A science fiction game I own that I've always wanted to try is

Ashen Stars

which is basically built around the concept that most

Star Trek

episodes are really mysteries, structurally.

[Akarin]

Spire and Heart are my most recent two plays. They are v fun and a nice move away from D&D etc.

The artwork on those, particularly

Spire

is absolutely gorgeous. And the setting seems really neat too.

What was the game you played of

Spire

like? Like was it a one-shot or a campaign? And what sort of things did the characters get up to, was it more political or more fighty or more mystery? Do you think the system worked well?

[Akarin]

Ten Candles is an annual play for us

I have this in pdf but never had a chance to play it. The physical prop thing for horror really works well though. Have you played Dread too, or just Ten Candles?

[Akarin]

are there any really good sci-fi/apoc tabletop rpgs out there?

The thing that instantly comes to mind is Apocalypse World (the original specific flavor of what Reck said.) It's basically Mad Max and movies like that.

But it's not as crunchy as I think you're looking for, it's very loosey goosey build the world by making stuff up as you play. It might appeal to you but it's a whole different style I think than Vampire.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is another Apocalypse World Engine game actually using a post-apocalyptic setting, but that one is more about running a civilization rebuilding rather than characters in a Mad Max kind of world.

If I were to pick an SF game for you I think it'd probably be Shadowrun, but I haven't read anything of the newest edition. But it's a very fleshed out world with lots of detail. Kind of a cyberpunk kitchen sink thing where there are also dragons and orcs and whatnot in your cyberpunk dystopia.

Other than Ashen Stars, the scifi game I most want to play is Eclipse Phase, but that's like a futuristic space post-humanism kind of thing.