I was recently reunited with Rick Swan's The Complete Guide of Role-Playing Games. I had a copy in high school, but lost it somewhere along the way. The book's premise is simple: it's a collection of Rick Swan's reviews of the rpgs that had been published by that point in time, by which I mean 1990. Each game covered gets an entry describing what it is about, its level of complexity, and how good it is overall.
Underneath that, though, is a fascinating snapshot of an era now long gone.
When I had a limited number of games available to me back then, based solely on what the local stores were willing to carry, the book was a revelation; it showed you just how expansive the rpg hobby was and had been since its inception. The book is full of games I would never have heard of otherwise. Who among us has ever played Swordtag? Or The Morrow Project? Or Sandman? I've met some Skyrealms of Jorune fans over the years, but Expendables? Never.
Returning to Swan's book now renders it a map of how batshit insane a lot of early rpg design really was. Check out KABAL's rules for determining your character's height:
Similar instances of madness: if you wanted to play a character of a gender opposite your own in DragonQuest, you had to roll for permission. The lowest end character type in the James Bond rpg has you spending 3000 points at character creation. Timeship apparently doesn't have rules for time travel.
If nothing else, The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games is a good reminder that your favorite game, yes, the one you think is the new revolutionary hotness, may also disappear beneath the shifting sands of time.
