| 10 |
| Amber Diceless Role-Playing | 10 | This innovative approach to competition among players, transparent GM advice, and diceless roleplaying was the start of many innovations and approaches that are still being used today. One of the all-time greats. |
| Dark Metropolis | 10 | This plus the Night City book equals brilliant gaming forever. |
| De Profundis: Letters From the Abyss | 10 | Completely changes the whole view of how you look at what you're doing as a roleplayer. |
| Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook | 10 | Revitalized my interest in a somewhat flagging property that was still nevertheless so strong that it had never fallen off the top of the heap. Complicated but clear. Dense but well-organized. Terrifically fun. |
| Feng Shui | 10 | It didn't get there first, but it knocked the other high-flying super-octane fists-guns-and-cars games off the top of the pile and has held it ever since. Changed everything that came after. |
| Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting | 10 | The gold standard for d20 setting supplements. Unbelievably good, especially given how tiresome some of the later Forgotten Realms supplements had gotten in the late days of AD&D. Completely turned the setting around. |
| Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters | 10 | The best supplement made for one of the best games ever. |
| Night City | 10 | An absolute classic, one of the very best location books ever made. Just looking at this cover makes me want to run the game again. |
| Polyhedral Dice | 10 | Everyone loves funny shaped dice. |
| Prime Time Adventures | 10 | This game will change everything for your gaming, forever. I mean it. |
| Sidewinder: Recoiled | 10 | Hey, how come nothing was done with Westerns between Boot Hill and today except for Deadlands, which was its own thing? Sidewinder fills a need, both editions are solid, they're clear, fast, full of good advice, well-playtested and a ton of fun. And overlooked. |
| Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game | 10 | My first 10 goes to this game. And it's not nostalgia. It's really that good. |
| Toon | 10 | This game is a major problem for all game theorists. That alone makes it worthy of inclusion on anyone's Best Ever list. On top of that, it is a wonderful, fast, hilarious game. |
| Vampire: The Masquerade | 10 | There is no question that this franchise is one of the greatest franchises in gaming. A compelling setup, increasingly good mechanics as the Editions went on, and lots of freedom to work made White Wolf's fortune and launched a legend. This is one of the true greats - and every edition was a diamond for its time. Everyone who touched this game can be truly proud of the great work they did. |
| |
| 9 |
| The 1960s | 9 | A great campaign design guide. Well-made, flexible and thorough. |
| Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures | 9 | Compelling source material, and innovative approaches to tried and true AD&D mechanics make this by far the most robust, interesting and exciting of all the various AD&D settings. |
| Antagonists | 9 | The strongest outing in the new World of Darkness line. |
| Blood Brothers | 9 | The jokes even hold up well today. |
| The Book of Iron Might | 9 | The combat maneuvers and stunt sections alone are worth the price of admission. Once again Mearls delivers the goods. |
| Changeling: The Lost | 9 | A very different game from the original World of Darkness Changeling - perhaps the most severe of the re-imaginings. It seems unfair that it should knock it out of the park just as squarely. But it does. Life isn't fair. |
| Crashpoint | 9 | Utterly beyond crazy. The organlegging campaign model is one of the sickest things ever to see print. Lovely. |
| Cyberpunk | 9 | This rating is for second edition: it was one of the best science fiction games ever made. It was well-organized, easy to follow, and easy to run. |
| d20 Modern Roleplaying Game | 9 | Extremely good generic modern system, very extensible and flexible. |
| Dark Kingdom of Jade | 9 | This one was what Kindred of the East aspired to be but didn't quite get there. |
| Death Star Technical Companion | 9 | One of the best supplements for the game, useful even in non-Death Star situations. |
| Deep Space | 9 | Almost a more interesting setting than the original game! "A new life awaits you on the off world colonies!" |
| Delta Green: Countdown | 9 | Deserves the accolades - this is even better than the main DG book. |
| Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Monster Manual | 9 | Aces. |
| Escape from Innsmouth | 9 | An utterly fucking crazy book, innovative for its time, and highly effective. |
| Fatal Experiments | 9 | Tatterdemalion alone is worth the price of admission. |
| Gamma World Player's Handbook | 9 | A brilliant book for making a postapocalyptic game. What more do people want? Oh yeah, they want something to stroke their nostalgia. Fuck your nostalgia. I want a good game now, not in 1984. |
| Grimm | 9 | The best d20 minigame ever made. |
| Grimm's Cybertales | 9 | Unbelievably good. Better than what R. Tal. was doing with Cyberpunk at the time. |
| GURPS Alternate Earths | 9 | Now this is how location catalogs should be done. This is not just for a worldjumping game - this can be for native alternate history campaigns, too...and we finally get to see Gernsback! It makes me put my hand on my heart. |
| GURPS Alternate Earths 2 | 9 | It's just not fair to the rest of us to follow up a book that's brilliant with another. Doesn't SJG know the rules? |
| GURPS Funny New Guys: Technomancer in Vietnam | 9 | Christ on a crutch, this is what PDF publishing should have been all these years except we were too stupid to notice. |
| GURPS Illuminati | 9 | I bought this before I knew how to play GURPS. I've used it in every game I've ever run. I don't know what else to say. It's brilliant. |
| GURPS Screampunk | 9 | The first of the slim-line GURPS supplements that were attempted in the early 2000s - a terrific way to expand the "sidebars" that GURPS has always been famous for. |
| GURPS Weird War II | 9 | The best of the excellent WWII line. Fighting Nazi saucermen over the Hollow Earth. Now that's what I'm talkin' about! |
| GURPS WWII: Frozen Hell | 9 | Good grief, there's a book about Finland in WWII for GURPS. Just the sheer awesomeness of the topic, not to mention the great organization and the unbelievably solid campaign advice makes this book terrific. |
| GURPS WWII: Return to Honor | 9 | Most WWII supplements for other lines focus on Americans and Nazis, as if nothing happened in France after 1940. This book not only remedies this rather stupid trend, but goes beyond the borders of France itself to look at French holdings in other parts of the world, as well as develop several different campaign ideas. |
| Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers | 9 | One of the best fantasy city supplements ever made. |
| Home of the Brave | 9 | Guns, rednecks and high technology, welcome to America! |
| In a Wicked Age | 9 | An outstanding game (especially for the price) with the best use of random situation generation since they invented wandering monster tables. |
| Lords of Darkness | 9 | One of the best fantasy villains' sourcebooks ever made. If you ever doubted that your armor-wearing superheroes were needed in the Forgotten Realms, this will put that doubt to bed. |
| Mage: The Ascension | 9 | One of the strongest games in White Wolf's stable. Interestingly, each edition of the game was very different, although they used similar terminology and similar systems. Fortunately all three editions are highly flexible and intriguing. |
| Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade | 9 | The strongest contribution to Mage, one of the strongest lines of White Wolf. It's coherent, clear, detailed, flexible and thought-provoking. |
| Marvel Super Heroes | 9 | One of the greatest Basic Sets ever made. |
| Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set | 9 | Added significantly to the Basic Set without losing any of the charm or effectiveness. |
| The Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game | 9 | This flexible, interesting system is highly underrated. |
| Mutants & Masterminds | 9 | Raised the bar on D20 supers work. Great job on both editions. |
| Over the Edge | 9 | It's the setting that makes this book sing. The system, ultra-rules-light, does nothing but get out of the way. Outstanding well-developed and self-contained. |
| Planescape Campaign Setting | 9 | One of the very best AD&D settings in all of existence. |
| Ravenloft | 9 | One of the best D&D3 settings, the best Ravenloft in ages. Actually makes it playable long-term and with a focus on campaigns and native characters that previous Ravenlofty things lacked, to their detriment. |
| Sorcerer Revised Edition | 9 | Almost better than the main game itself! |
| Spycraft | 9 | One of the finest d20 adaptations to reach market. The chase system blows all competitors, including WOTC, out of the water. Unbelievably fun. |
| Star Wars Core Rulebook | 9 | I'm upgrading my rating because I got the SAGA edition and the improvements continue. As I said before, it's virtually impossible for WOTC to do as well as WEG did with this property because WEG did things so well for so long. But they have done the near-impossible with this line and can be very proud of what is one of the strongest d20 lines in existence. |
| Star Wars Sourcebook | 9 | Fun plus fun equals fun. It's simple math. |
| Sub Attica | 9 | I don't care that this book is essentially worthless for your average Cyberpunk campaign. Throw your average Cyberpunk campaign out the window and use this book. |
| Suppressed Transmission | 9 | I had no idea what this was when I picked it up in the gamestore, since I'm not a Pyramid subscriber. Twenty minutes later, the clerk said "you know you're going to have to buy that" and I said "do I EVER!" |
| Suppressed Transmission 2 | 9 | Well, I thought, there's no way it could possibly be as good as the first one.
It's hard to be wrong so often. |
| System Reference Document | 9 | Not quite as good as D&D, but as building blocks, it's not just outstanding - it changed all of gaming, forever. |
| Trinity | 9 | Highly underrated, very neat science fiction setting and system. |
| True20 Adventure Roleplaying | 9 | The best of the d20 variants and one of the best things to come out of the d20 boom. |
| Weekend Warriors | 9 | I have run this for many groups in many contexts and everyone loves it. Game over, man. Game over. |
| Werewolf: The Forsaken | 9 | The only White Wolf outing so far to distinctly and firmly improve on the original. (That's not a slam on the new games, the bar is just set very high.) |
| When Gravity Fails | 9 | This is what novel adaptations should be - expansive, specific, unafraid to modify the base game...if Cyberpunk had kept down this road, who knows where we'd be today? |
| The World of Darkness | 9 | A slimmed-down system, attention to genre, and even more flexible mechanics than ever made this everything White Wolf fans could have hoped for, and more. |
| |
| 8 |
| 7th Sea Game Master's Guide | 8 | One of the best and meatiest GM's guides of the Player/GM's Guide era of game creation. |
| 7th Sea Players' Guide | 8 | An outstanding game, with a usable setting and a decent system. |
| Adventure! | 8 | Both the d20 version and the Trinityverse version of this outstanding game are well worth having. The Trinityverse version is considerably better, but that doesn't make the d20 version bad - in fact, the chase rules, imported from Spycraft, make the d20 version superior in that area. |
| Angel Roleplaying Game | 8 | The addition of organization rules and fleshed-out demon-building to the already good Buffy ruleset makes this an extremely good game even or perhaps especially if, like me, you really couldn't have cared less about the show. JDCorley's Law: Bad source material means good gaming. Proven right again. |
| Ascension | 8 | The multiple possible endings each give the basics for a very interesting short campaign. Highly recommended - the best of any "metaplot" supplement. |
| The Asylum & Other Tales | 8 | One of the better "collections" that was put out early on. |
| At Your Door | 8 | A truly excellent campaign. |
| Autumn Nightmares | 8 | A pretty decent book with lots of antagonist stuff. The examples are a bit subpar, but they don't really mar the basic concepts. |
| Axis Mundi: The Book of Spirits | 8 | One of the better Werewolf supplements, well-organized and useful. |
| Bastion of Broken Souls | 8 | Nails high-level play for D&D right on target. |
| Beyond Countless Doorways | 8 | A worthy successor to Planescape. |
| Blood Sea: The Crimson Abyss | 8 | Gains a point for going over-the-top. |
| Bloodlust | 8 | This book had no right to be as good as it was. Science fiction vampires. It should have been awful. |
| The Book of Roguish Luck | 8 | Long overdue! |
| Brave New World | 8 | Highly underrated. Fast, simple system. Not a generic supers system. Addresses the "wah wah they hate us" supers subgenre in a detailed way other games haven't. Who cares about metaplots anyway? |
| Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game | 8 | A solid book with an innovative approach to game balance - necessary when the source material has such a casual approach to the normal "power levels" that gamers are more concerned with. |
| Changeling: The Dreaming | 8 | White Wolf just can't write a bad corebook. The First Edition had a psychotic but innovative magic system, the Second abandoned this (perhaps wisely, but disappointly to me) for a more balanced system. The main thing the book suffered from was from how to create campaigns and groups. A highly underrated game in any edition. |
| Chromebook | 8 | Although later entries in the line would go in exactly the wrong direction (away from consumer goods and towards guns and more guns), this initial outing in the line was top-notch. |
| Chromebook 3 | 8 | I am boosting this one because of the fashion section. Everyone wants to know what you're wearing in the dark future of the 80s, right? |
| City of the Spider Queen | 8 | Totally fucking crazy. And by that I mean it's really awesome. |
| Coruscant and the Core Worlds | 8 | Been waiting on this one since the days of d6 Star Wars. Maybe I'm biased because I wanted it so long. |
| Creature Collection | 8 | Some wonky CR calculations are basically the only thing wrong with this. |
| Creature Collection II: Dark Menagerie | 8 | Even better and creepier than the first. |
| Crescent City | 8 | An excellent city supplement for an oft-overlooked supers subgenre. |
| Cthulhu by Gaslight | 8 | Now we're talking. |
| Cthulhu Now | 8 | Excellent addition to the line. |
| CyberGeneration | 8 | Underrated, slimmed down CP2020 system, nifty supers stuff, and goony teenaged fun. What's not to like? |
| Dark Ages: Vampire | 8 | A solid addition to the vampire line, and an interesting glimpse of a world before the Masquerade became a stone-cold lock. |
| Dark Ages: Werewolf | 8 | The best of the supplemental lines to DA: Vampire...again, an interesting view of what the Garou were concerned with back then... |
| Dark Designs | 8 | It definitely gets the juices flowing for Victorian-era campaigns. |
| Delta Green | 8 | The reason everyone loves this is because it (with the much harder-to-find Golden Dawn supplement before it) is an actual campaign design guide for Call of Cthulhu, which was inexcusably omitted for fifteen fucking years. |
| The Divine & the Defeated | 8 | One of the better 'divine' sourcebooks for any setting out there, which is good given the centrality of the Titanic/Divine conflict to the setting. |
| Dogs in the Vineyard | 8 | An excellent and highly flexible game. |
| Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide | 8 | World-building, adventure design, and all sorts of cool stuff is put into this book. Unlike past DMGs which I have not been impressed with, this one gets the gold star from me. |
| Eberron Campaign Setting | 8 | An exceptionally good setting book for the excitement and enthusiasm it brings. Each individual piece of content has been seen before but it's presented in a strong way that really enhances the enthusiasm of players and GMs for the setting. |
| Fool's Luck: The Way of the Commoner | 8 | Long, long overdue, this book should have been the first supplement published. Instead we got endless page after page of stuff about nobles. This is one of the stronger contributions to the line as far as practical use in campaigns. |
| Forgotten Futures | 8 | I give this rather ordinary game a bonus because the love shows through on every page and the source material is unbelievably great. |
| Ghostwalk | 8 | Very interesting addition to any D&D3 setting. Not very game-balanced but that's not really what it's after. |
| The Golden Dawn | 8 | A very neat Call of Cthulhu campaign supplement. |
| Green's Guide to Ghosts | 8 | One of the more "serious" ghost-hunting supplements out there. Well done. |
| Guide to the Hulk & The Avengers | 8 | A decent addition to the line. |
| Guide to the X-Men | 8 | A decent addition to the game line. Some more mechanical support for team-oriented stuff could have been done. |
| GURPS Age of Napoleon | 8 | I am a little biased because of the source material, but this was long, long overdue. The only thing I wished was that there was more. |
| GURPS Arabian Nights | 8 | Why doesn't this have a remake?
You know, one that's like 900 pages long and has more of the same? |
| GURPS Atomic Horror | 8 | Solid, detailed approach to a rather psychotic bunch of source materials. |
| GURPS Bio-Tech | 8 | Hard to imagine a better generic biotech supplement. Even beat out the games where biotech was supposedly the cool thing about the setting. |
| GURPS Bunnies & Burrows | 8 | Hilarious and compelling. |
| GURPS Cabal | 8 | A little too complex, but brilliantly arranged and with a modern magical setting different from anything else out there - and with a campaign already designed, to boot. |
| GURPS Compendium I: Character Creation | 8 | Became absolutely necessary to use GURPS 3rd. with my group. |
| GURPS CthulhuPunk | 8 | Why does this work so well? SJG must have some kind of magic power over my brain. |
| GURPS Cyberpunk | 8 | If the Secret Service don't want you to have it... |
| GURPS Cyberworld | 8 | A solid cyberpunk setting usuable with nearly any sufficiently robust system. |
| GURPS Illuminati University | 8 | Hilarious and useful for college-style games. Might not be as funny if you are still in college. |
| GURPS Russia | 8 | If you can find it, never let it go. |
| GURPS Steampunk | 8 | The best thing done for steampunk, ever. The wide variety of possible campaigns is thoroughly explored. |
| GURPS Technomancer | 8 | A highly flexible and detailed setting. |
| GURPS WWII | 8 | This excellent book is the best of the self-contained GURPS games and is the standard against which all other WWII RPGs must be measured. |
| H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham | 8 | One of those supplements that's so amazing when you read it and then at the end you go "why in the world did they think this was what an Arkham supplement should be?" Still. Incredibly immersive. |
| House of Harpies | 8 | Solid game. Lots of stabbing. |
| Hunter: Storyteller's Handbook | 8 | Almost better than the game itself, this set the standard for White Wolf's later GM guides. |
| Hunter: The Reckoning | 8 | Again White Wolf shows they can't write a bad corebook. A lot of people complained about the art, but that just shows how misguided they are for actually paying attention to gaming art. They missed a hell of a good, creepy, interesting game. |
| Initiates of the Art | 8 | A very good campaign guide to a new "sort" of Mage. |
| The Invisible College | 8 | The Illuminati meet James Bond, what's not to like? |
| The Knights of the Rose and Cross | 8 | Definitely a solid addition to the line. We needed some heroes after all the backstabbery we had seen before. |
| Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City | 8 | Crazy - but you'll play it again. |
| Lands of Dr. Doom Campaign Set | 8 | Unbelievably crazy. |
| The Legacy of Zorro | 8 | Why in the world did this not get a full release? Zorro is like the best game idea ever! I am biased about this one. |
| Mage: The Awakening | 8 | It lost a lot of the flexibility of the previous Mage games and didn't seem to gain much for it. Gee, I guess it's only really solid and totally fun rather than utterly brilliant! That's what you get for setting the bar so high... |
| The Masquerade | 8 | A decent system married to a wildly popular property made this the big dog of non-boffer LARPing in America for years. Solid work that took off like a rocket. People are still trying to figure it out. |
| Menzoberranzan | 8 | A classic, and for good reason. |
| The Montaigne Revolution | 8 | Now this is what a campaign book should be. Kill them with guillotines! |
| Monte Cook Presents The Year's Best D20 | 8 | A great idea for a book! Too bad it didn't take off. I would have loved to see this continue. |
| Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed | 8 | This (first edition) is a very good - and most importantly, very complete - reimagining of D&D. |
| MX1: Nightmares of Futures Past | 8 | Although the module itself was rather uninspired, I'm giving this one a boost because of the tie-in with the events in the comics, which was never done before or since with even remotely the level of detail or effectiveness. The comic book company that figures this out again will have a license to take my money forever. |
| Necropolis: Atlanta | 8 | The Spectre examples for the NPCs showed how NPCs should be handled in all World of Darkness games, forever. |
| Omlevex | 8 | A new and different approach to supers gaming - the creation of the "fictional company", writers and artists. The Silver Age stuff is pitch-perfect. |
| Platt's Starport Guide | 8 | Funny, interesting, cool settings. |
| Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net | 8 | Probably should have been thought up and incorporated into the main game. Significantly improves CP2020 hacking. |
| Ravenloft Gazetteer Volume I | 8 | Who doesn't love Barovia? |
| Ravenloft Gazetteer Volume II | 8 | Everyone loves Falkovnia. |
| Ravenloft Gazetteer Volume III | 8 | Dementlieu is best because it's French. |
| Rebellion Era Sourcebook | 8 | Does in one book what West End Games took two - and a pile of worthless technobabble - to do. |
| The Reed Richards Guide to Everything | 8 | Hilarious AND useful. What a superhero supplement should be. |
| Reunion | 8 | One of the best AD&D supplements ever done. |
| Scared Stiffs | 8 | Who ya gonna call? |
| Six-Guns & Sorcery | 8 | Outstanding goofiness adaptable to any over-the-top Victorian setting. |
| Solo of Fortune | 8 | I give it a boost for the magazine format. That's hilarious. |
| Solo of Fortune 2 | 8 | A boost for the magazine format. Hilarious. |
| The Sorcerers Crusade Companion | 8 | The best of the Sorcerer's Crusade supplements. |
| Spirit of the Century | 8 | A fairly straightforward application of an interesting system, the main lightbulb that this game turned on for me was the intertwined character creation session instructions. This was something I'd been looking for for a long time. |
| Stargate SG-1 Roleplaying Game | 8 | Unfortunately very expensive and glossy, this solid, exciting game attracted little attention. |
| The Thousand Hells | 8 | I'm giving this supplement a boost just because the subject matter was so thoroughly wacko. |
| Tooniversal Tour Guide | 8 | You can't really improve on perfection, but this is a decent try. |
| Transhuman Space | 8 | It's not as brilliant as everyone thinks, and not as hard to use as everyone thinks either. As with all GURPS books since time began, you're clearly meant to carve off the pieces you like and use them in your own way. That said, it's meaty and delicious. |
| Urban Arcana Campaign Setting | 8 | Very good "modern fantasy with guns" setting. A lot of fun to read, the organizations alone have enough adventure hooks for a lifetime. |
| Victorian Age Vampire | 8 | Only about 10 years overdue, this book is a solid introduction and could have justifiably been a standalone game. |
| Vimary Sourcebook | 8 | Probably the strongest of the Tribe 8 line. Suffers from what the whole line suffered from - the in-character fiction is worthless and ubiquitous. |
| Virtual | 8 | The second best d20 mini-game ever made. |
| The Walking Dead | 8 | Best of the "Creature books" for Hunter. |
| Werewolf: The Apocalypse | 8 | Solid, interesting work. A new take on the Werewolf mythos in any edition. |
| World of Darkness: Mummy Second Edition | 8 | A total re-imagining, and completely self-contained. As always, White Wolf can't write a bad corebook. |
| World of Darkness: Sorcerer | 8 | One of the few mortal-oriented books from the WoD that didn't concern itself with hunting supernatural creatures. As such, very neat and fills an important niche. |
| Wraith: The Oblivion | 8 | As always, White Wolf delivers the goods. |
| |
| 7 |
| Guide to the Camarilla | 7 | A bit overblown and "too much" to use, this book could have benefitted from editorial focus on specifically using specific pieces in specific campaigns. That said, it's got plenty of good ideas. |
| Action! System Core Role-playing Game Rules | 7 | A solid, simple presentation of a clear, easy system. |
| Anger of Angels | 7 | A decent addition, could be the start of some In Nomine-ish material, but never went anywhere. |
| Avalon | 7 | A solid supplement. |
| The Banewarrens | 7 | Not as generic as it appears at first glance. Still, the setup is epic and the play is aaaaawesome. |
| Beyond the Barriers: The Book of Worlds | 7 | A decent addition, better than the usual World of Darkness travelogue book. |
| Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM) | 7 | A decent semi-generic system is probably what was needed for such a huge set of diverse source material, but it still seemed a little dry compared to the liveliness of the breadth of anime. |
| The Bitter Road | 7 | This was a solid contribution to the Mage line with something that was rare for White Wolf in the day: actual campaign design advice that was practical and specific. |
| Blood Bayou | 7 | A solid addition to the Scarred Lands line. Helps if you listen to bands whose singers are mad at their dads. |
| Blood Brothers 2 | 7 | The jokes are still good! |
| Blue Planet | 7 | The system seems solid, but it's the setting that makes this game sing. One of the very few attempts at hard science fiction in games, with setting detail being the main method of exploring the fiction. |
| Blue Rose | 7 | A good True20 implementation and an interesting setting. As with previous attempts at romantic fantasy, it's something of a failure there. Still waiting, folks... |
| The Book of Eldritch Might | 7 | I'm unfairly penalizing this good book because it spawned a ton of imitators who were not as good. |
| Bride of Portable Hole | 7 | I laffo-ed. |
| C.J. Carella's Witchcraft | 7 | A decent, grittier-magic version of Unisystem than existed in Buffy, a lot more formulaic, even for its time. That said, the formula is a good formula and is fun for a reason. Well worth a look. |
| Call of Cthulhu | 7 | Nostalgia colors much of the love for this game. Call of Cthulhu does, at best, a mediocre job of producing stories like Lovecraft's. Still, the sanity mechanic is both brilliant and truly innovative for its time - hell, even today it holds up well even if the rest of the system is clunky and outdated. A decent game. |
| Call of Cthulhu d20 | 7 | Has different strengths and weaknesses from the BRP version - but what elevates this version above everything Chaosium ever did with the BRP version is the unbelievably awesome campaign design, GM advice, and player suggestion sections. |
| Capes | 7 | The mechanics are a little too complicated for the enjoyment I get out of manipulating them. However, click-and-lock character generation for any setting such as supers in which archetypes are important is brilliant. This is where the "splat" proliferation of the 90s was heading before we got too annoyed with it to let it get there. |
| Castille | 7 | I almost wanted a whole different supplement on the church. Still, this gets the job done. |
| Changeling: The Lost Free Rules and Adventure | 7 | Does what it does very well. |
| Chicago By Night | 7 | The second edition dramatically improved on the first, which was like nothing we'd ever seen at the time. White Wolf's citybooks - and plenty of other modern occult setting books - sprang from this source. |
| Chromebook 4 | 7 | Not as bad as 2, not as good as 1. |
| Church of the Prophets | 7 | Pretty okay. |
| Corax | 7 | All the Changing Breeds were insane. They needed to do more of them. |
| Crescent Empire | 7 | Long overdue. This should have been one of the first books in the line. |
| Cthulhu Companion | 7 | Excellent material with good supplementary advice. |
| d20 Future | 7 | WOTC points the way on d20 science fiction supplements, taking the lead in a way they didn't in other areas. Both the SRD and the book are solid contributions. However, I was disappointed that the spaceship maneuvering system didn't incorporate innovations developed in other companies' open content that did chases and dogfights better. |
| Dark Force Rising Sourcebook | 7 | A good adaptation, does not reach too far, though. |
| The Dark Side Sourcebook | 7 | A good sourcebook. It has not been updated for the Revised edition and so will require a lot of balance tweaks. However, the information and discussion is top notch. |
| Deadlands | 7 | The crazy system has a lot of burps and bumps in it, but that's a bit of the charm for this crazy setting. Rated one lower for Inevitable Confederate Apologia. |
| Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand | 7 | "What? What? I liked it!" |
| Dragonstar Guide to the Galaxy | 7 | Very goofy - and good. |
| Dragonstar Starfarer's Handbook | 7 | Hilarious - which makes up for some weaknesses. |
| Exalted | 7 | A very nice skill-based magic system makes Exalted one of White Wolf's great innovations. That said, the setting is not that compelling. |
| Exalted: The Abyssals | 7 | Cheer up, emo Exalted boi! |
| Fang, Beak, and Claw | 7 | Neat druid-oriented adventure. |
| Forsaken Rites | 7 | The occult stuff was always weaker than the conspiracy stuff in this game - this supplement did a good job of fixing this. |
| Fragments of Fear: The Second Cthulhu Companion | 7 | Good supplementary material, nothing great or awful. |
| Guide to the Traditions | 7 | Long overdue, full of great information, marred only by the in-character sections. |
| GURPS Castle Falkenstein | 7 | What it lost in charm it made up for in playability. Character generation now takes far too long though. |
| GURPS Castle Falkenstein: The Ottoman Empire | 7 | Although it made me pine for an actual Castle Falkenstein supplement covering this area of the world, GURPS, as always, delivers the goods. |
| GURPS IST Kingston | 7 | Highly goofy - the attitude alone raises this supplement up. |
| GURPS Modern Firepower | 7 | Does what it claims to very adequately. |
| GURPS WWII: All The King's Men | 7 | Solid book with good info and a great bibliography. |
| Home Front | 7 | The only reason this isn't rated higher is because it's somewhat difficult to tailor to different groups of PCs. |
| In Nomine | 7 | A very solid book with a great deal of flexibility. Takes "splats" about as far as it is possible to go with them. The GURPS version loses some of the charm in favor of a good deal of organization. The main problem with the original book is this same organization. Trying to get through character creation quickly is a nightmare of flipping forward and back. |
| James Bond 007 | 7 | One of the good dead ones. If only it had survived to the Brosnan era when the franchise started making the crazy bank. |
| Kindred of the East | 7 | Gets high marks for weirdness and interesting ideas, low marks for anything remotely resembling the source legends. |
| Kingdoms of Kalamar Campaign Setting Sourcebook | 7 | Does what it does without muss, fuss, or fireworks. Actually sort of relaxing for that, I'll give it a bonus point for it. |
| Kithbook: Nockers | 7 | The only kithbook to rise above the pack, mainly through the addition of chimerical crafting rules that actually added to the game and made some interesting situation ideas erupt. Naturally these were never followed up on in any future supplements. |
| Lashings of Ginger Beer | 7 | A solid game - a lot funnier if you know the source material. |
| Laws of the Wild | 7 | Solid adaptation of MET for Werewolf. Not quite as compelling as Vampire but the pack structure makes for a good LARP experience with small groups. |
| Libellus Sanguinis 2: Keepers of the Word | 7 | The multi-clanbook structure again proves more valuable as a campaign design tool. |
| MA2: Avengers Coast-to-Coast | 7 | Pretty okay. Not much help other than stats. |
| Magic of Faer�n | 7 | Pretty good addition to the 3.0 magic system. All of the magic add-ons from various companies suffer from the 'gotta carry a stack of books to play a spellcaster' syndrome. Some attention to portability/use (easy-to-xerox, a well-organized PDF) would have made it a lot better. |
| Mansions of Madness | 7 | Tons of location-based fun. |
| MH-3: Murderworld! | 7 | Everyone loves Murderworld, right? Right? |
| MX2: The X-Potential | 7 | All of the Futures Past modules were great not just for their content but because they effectively incorporated the comic events of the time. |
| Oriental Adventures | 7 | If the campaign design information had been about 3/4 of this book it would be a 9. |
| Player's Guide to Low Clans | 7 | Assembling several splatbooks into one was a very good design decision, making the work overall stronger. |
| Portable Hole Full of Beer | 7 | I laffo-ed. |
| Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil | 7 | Basically the same adventure again. Fortunately it's a fun one. |
| Scion: Hero | 7 | A solid action-oriented corebook. Notable for not having setting details, unusual for White Wolf! |
| Silver Age Sentinels | 7 | The many different editions of this game make it hard to work out how to rate it. However, they also have different strengths and weaknesses that make them very different products. d20 has not-as-good organization. The Limited Edition has a number of character creation options that are too overwhelming. The stingy gamer edition is...well, okay. That one is basically perfect. More companies should do them. |
| Silver Marches | 7 | Sort of unnecessary after the terrific main book, although it keeps up the high standard of adventure ideas on every page. |
| Star Trek Role Playing Game | 7 | A solid guide to original series Trekkian roleplaying. The scenario design section is awesome - I wish it had been ten times as long! |
| The Sunless Citadel | 7 | Solid first outing. |
| There Is No Spoon | 7 | Could have been made more flexible (I disagree with the author that the only stuff that matters happens in the Matrix, for example), but it's really neat. |
| Traveller: The New Era | 7 | The lifepath system elevates this rather ordinary entry into the Traveller line. |
| Unknown Armies | 7 | Fairly good, an innovative system and a bizarre and interesting setting...it could benefit strongly from better and more specific campaign design guidelines. |
| Witches and Pagans | 7 | I'm glad we got this in PDF. Some more attention to what's fictionalized and what's "real" would have helped. |
| Wraith: The Great War | 7 | Really good but I'm not sure this needed to be a full corebook. |
| |
| 6 |
| Abomination Codex | 6 | A solid addition to an interesting line. |
| The Artisans Handbook | 6 | A good addition to the line, but it's almost gilding the lily. |
| The Autumn People | 6 | A decent although somewhat misplaced entry in the Year of the Hunter. Not as much meat as the other books - and it's a little bit if a weird outlier in the rest of the Changeling books, with very little solid advice on how to incorporate Autumn People in useful and/or dramatic ways. At the end of the book I had not much idea on how to use it. That said, it had a scattershot of good ideas. |
| Castle Falkenstein | 6 | The fictional tone of the book is annoying, and the system, although inspired, is clunky, but it's the setting, and the character design suggestions and "exercises" that make Falkenstein work. |
| Castles and Covenants | 6 | Kinda neat, I guess. A little uninspired after the line's brilliant start. |
| Creature Collection III: Savage Bestiary | 6 | Not as good as the first two but still a good addition to the line. |
| Dark Alliance: Vancouver | 6 | Better for its setup than for its execution, this citybook could have benefitted from a more extensive section on crossover play. Everyone was doing it anyway, and in this setting the first baby steps were taken towards making it a good idea. |
| Denizens of Darkness | 6 | A solid addition to the line, although perhaps not strictly necessary. |
| Die Kreuzritter | 6 | Pretty okay. |
| Discworld Roleplaying Game First Edition | 6 | Could have benefitted a lot more from analyses of comedy, satire, parody, puns, and all the various other bits of being Pratchettian rather than just being a setting guide. |
| Dragonstar Imperial Supply | 6 | Pretty decent, mostly unnecessary. |
| Echoes of the Past: The Slarecian Legacy | 6 | Properly crazy and creepy but what do I do with it? |
| Eisen | 6 | Needed a little more oomf to bring it up to the level of the other nationbooks. |
| The Factol's Manifesto | 6 | Probably unnecessary but didn't hurt anything. |
| Freak Legion: A Player's Guide to Fomori | 6 | Gross. |
| Full Metal Fantasy Volume 2: Iron Kingdoms World Guide | 6 | Sparks of brilliance can't rise above the overall averageness of the work. |
| The Fungi from Yuggoth | 6 | The outstanding initial few scenarios degenerates into farce by the end. |
| Galaxy Guide 2: Yavin and Bespin | 6 | Pretty solid supplements...not sure what the books are supposed to be for. Local campaigns? Quick stopovers? Doesn't seem to quite fit either one. |
| Gamma World: Out of the Vaults | 6 | A decent technology supplement but not up to the high standards of the initial book. |
| Graveyard of Alderaan | 6 | Pretty okay. Could have gone a lot farther in the Force direction than it did. |
| Green and Pleasant Land | 6 | A nicely done supplement, though nothing too special. |
| Guide to the Technocracy | 6 | An interesting collaboration - like the Guide to the Traditions, long overdue. The worst part is the in-character sections. |
| GURPS Black Ops | 6 | Good at talking about high-powered GURPS...the campaign itself is kind of blah. |
| GURPS Cliffhangers | 6 | Both versions were quite good. However, there was insufficient attention to customizing the system in both editions. |
| GURPS Discworld Also | 6 | Not as good as the main book but still pretty okay. Again, not how I would approach Prachettian material. |
| GURPS Martial Arts | 6 | I am still not convinced that the method of changing the system that's introduced in this supplement is the best way to handle things. Still, it works, so what am I complaining about? |
| GURPS Steam-Tech | 6 | Solid, but probably unnecessary. |
| GURPS Swashbucklers | 6 | GURPS is not very swashbuckling-friendly and this book, excellent advice aside, doesn't go far enough. |
| The Hierarchy | 6 | A little drab after the big buildup of the line. |
| Hunter: Player's Guide | 6 | A decent addition to the line, but not up to the high standards of White Wolf's other players' guides of this era. |
| Kingdom of Willows | 6 | The NPCs are less than compelling, the courtly intrigue is not that intriguing. However, that's all that's bad about this book. A solid addition to the line. |
| Kithbook: Sluagh | 6 | Everybody loves the sluagh right away, so this was a tough one to rate. A lot of good ideas, but a little scattershot. |
| MA1: Children of the Atom | 6 | Pretty solid addition to the line. Not much help for X-ish campaign design though. |
| Manual of the Planes | 6 | Decent planewalking guide, a little below WOTC's standard, though. |
| Masque of the Red Death | 6 | An interesting take on D20 classes makes this definitely worth a look. |
| Mutants Down Under | 6 | A lot better when combined with underage drinking. |
| Mysterious Places | 6 | Although it's certainly of high quality, this supplement somewhat returns to the bad old days of the White Wolf travelogue that was hard to incorporate into campaigns. |
| Narrative Combat | 6 | Some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure that it adds too much to normal D20 combat. I'd like to see a revised version that "amped up" the story elements even further. |
| Necropolis | 6 | He's back! With all the unfair death traps, incomprehensible locations and impossible-to-complete quests my 8th grade game had to offer! |
| The Nocturnum Master Collection | 6 | For all the work that went into it you'd think they'd avoid some of the problems of CoC campaigns past: chokepoints where a single roll can stop a game dead, impossible scenarios, and so on. Still, it's definitely an engaging series, no matter what system. |
| Pacific Rim Sourcebook | 6 | Semi-okay. Completely lacked any discussion of the Japan-o-terror which fuelled a good deal of cyberpunk sf thinking, or how to use the Pacific Rim in various ways to create various effects. |
| Shadows of Yog-Sothoth | 6 | Pretty okay campaign. Suffers from the "how could we possibly be expected to try that" syndrome, as well as the deadly "I missed a roll, well, looks like the game's stopped" disease. Pandemic in those early days... |
| Toon Ace Catalog | 6 | Gilds the lily. |
| Tribe 8 | 6 | The height of the "game fiction as sourcebook" craze of the 90s led to this. A system that was hard to figure out and a setting that was presented in such strange fits and chunks that trying to decide what to do was more or less impossible. That said, those fits and chunks were marvelous. And I mean really really really good. |
| Werewolf: The Wild West | 6 | White Wolf's crappiest oWoD corebook ever. That means it's pretty good! |
| The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game | 6 | A more than adequate sourcebook, although the d20 adaptation suffers from a few flaws, it was done very early in the d20 process and I don't think there was a lot of understanding of which bits of the engine can or should be messed with. |
| Wire-Fu: A Wushu Game of High-Flying, Hong Kong Action! | 6 | A very good overview and idea-provoking supplement. |
| Xcrawl | 6 | The humor and high concept make this a good game. It misses greatness by not having enough meat with the seasoning. |
| |
| 5 |
| A Guide to Marvel Earth | 5 | Could have been much better than it was - did not deliver completely on showing what life in the Marvel universe was like. |
| A World of Darkness | 5 | Pretty uninspired collections of mini-settings. White Wolf has never known how to do these right, although there's clearly some interesting seeds in there. |
| Aberrant | 5 | Every rule and setting element will either make you say "yes, brilliant!" or "this is stupid" in about even proportions. White Wolf's weakest corebook ever. |
| Cainite Heresy | 5 | An odd book. I really don't know what to make of it or what to do with it. I felt like I was reading one of the old-school Sabbat books without the humor. |
| Champions of Darkness | 5 | An okay supplement but lacks the campaign advice that made White Wolf's Ravenloft outings rise above the rest. |
| Chaositech | 5 | Chaos magiiiic! *plays power chord on guitar shaped like lightning bolt* |
| Chromebook 2 | 5 | Perhaps the weakest of the Chromebook line. |
| City of Angels | 5 | We wanted an LA supplement for the oWoD for 12 years and this is what we get after all this time? Hmf. |
| Deities and Demigods | 5 | The stats of the gods are pretty much a waste of space. The rest of the book barely drags it up to average. This needed someone to ask: What is the point of this book? and focus it. |
| Edge of Infinity: The Scarred Planes | 5 | Very good, but undermines the isolatedness of the setting a bit. |
| Epic Level Handbook | 5 | How did such a great idea come out so bland and uneven? |
| Freeholds & Hidden Glens | 5 | Pretty okay supplement with some interesting ideas, but as with most White Wolf location guides, you'll never use most of it and there's not much room for adaptation. |
| Games of Divinity | 5 | Kind of uninspired for what should have been a psychotically great supplement idea. |
| Ghost Towns | 5 | Could there have been good oWoD crossover between Werewolves and Wraiths? Yes. But this isn't it. Pretty astonishingly average given the quality of authors. |
| GURPS Compendium II: Combat and Campaigns | 5 | Pretty okay compilation. |
| GURPS Space Atlas | 5 | Interesting but the space could have been better used by fleshing out the planetary creation system to include actual adventure hook generation. |
| GURPS Update | 5 | Gets the job done. |
| H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands | 5 | The brilliant source material deserves better. |
| Heroes of Light | 5 | An okay collection but the lack of campaign design advice makes it rather blah. |
| Isle of the Mighty | 5 | The glaring factual errors make this book rather sketchy...but on the other hand, this game is all about how great factual errors are. Do you buy it?
Nah, me neither.
Still, there's some good material to plunder here. I'll be nice. |
| Kithbook: Eshu | 5 | Far too tied to national origin, the eshu kithbook, like most of the kithbooks, didn't add much to the understanding of the kith. Some of what was added was dreadful. |
| Laws of Ascension | 5 | The setup for Mage doesn't translate as well as the setup for Vampire, so this book doesn't ring bells as well. |
| Laws of Elysium | 5 | Pretty okay, but really not needed as the normal MET rules scale up easily and well. |
| Laws of the Hunt | 5 | Pretty decent but really not that necessary. |
| Liber Castellorum | 5 | An uncharacteristically meh book from the normally excellent In Nomine line. |
| Night's Edge | 5 | Thought-provoking but clearly needed a few more drafts and editing passes. |
| River o' Blood | 5 | It took a lot of work to make a non-compelling book about the Mississippi River in the 19th century. |
| Skraag: City of Orcs | 5 | No real surprises, but no major missteps either. |
| Sla Industries | 5 | Was it supposed to be funny, scary, splatter, or something else? I don't know, but there's enough psycho ideas in here to keep you interested... |
| Subsidiaries: A Guide to Pentex | 5 | Every evil corporation movie ever. |
| Technocracy: Iteration X | 5 | This is an average of the first edition score (3) and the Revised edition score (7). Sorry Revised editioners! You did the impossible - made these doofuses interesting after they were boring for three whole editions of a game. Too bad for you I can only give one rating. |
| Theatrix | 5 | This is a hard rating to give. There are so many innovative and brilliant things in the game that will improve your play forever. (The flowcharts, people. The flowcharts.) But the actual system itself...doesn't really sing the music the game's giving it. |
| Theatrix Ironwood | 5 | This book works its ass off and still manages to only get a bronze medal. |
| The Wasted West | 5 | This average book epitomizes the Deadlands post-apoc spinoff line. When you get done you wonder why they bothered making it as good as they managed to. |
| Way of the Ninja | 5 | How did this end up being average? Shouldn't it have been brilliant or sucky? In either edition? Step up to the plate next time and take a chance or two! |
| Wushu Open | 5 | A decent pacing system for collaborative storytelling, but that's all it is. |
| X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d' Amberville) | 5 | I rate it an 8 if you play at 4:20. SMOEK EVERYDAY |
| |
| 4 |
| AM2: For Faerie, Queen and Country | 4 | How could you make this setting be boring?
I don't know, but they did. |
| Clanbook: Lasombra | 4 | Pretty weak in both versions. |
| Engel | 4 | A compelling setting, but the d20 implementation was very lacking. (The Arkana system was not much better.) |
| GURPS Horror | 4 | Of only modest use whether you're using it to supplement GURPS or another horror game. |
| Hunter: Storyteller's Companion | 4 | White Wolf's "with the screen" supplements have never been that great, this maintains the mediocrity. |
| Laws of Judgment | 4 | Not much help on either setting it up on your own or incorporating it into an ongoing LARP. |
| Masks of Nyarlathotep | 4 | The Tomb of Horrors of Call of Cthulhu. If you could get through this blender with less than two dozen character deaths, your GM was cheating, or you were. This is totally at odds with the freewheeling, pulpish tone of the scenarios that make up the campaign, but there it was. |
| Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion | 4 | A few decent additions to M&M - unfortunately you can fit everything worthwhile from this book onto about two pages. |
| Villain's Kit | 4 | Not up to the high standards of the rest of the line. |
| |
| 3 |
| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons CD-ROM Core Rules | 3 | Pretty worthless even for the low standards of the time. |
| AM1: Amazing Engine System Guide | 3 | A pretty worthless attempt at multi-genre. |
| Authentic Thaumaturgy | 3 | I can't believe this slipped through SJG's normally impeccable editorial fingers. |
| Holy War | 3 | In-character game material should be taken out and shot. It was the disease that infected the whole Hunter line. This could have been a great supplement. Instead... |
| Hunter: Survival Guide | 3 | Combines the worst of WW travelogues with the worst of WW in-character game material. |
| Maximum Metal | 3 | Everything that is bad about Cyberpunk 2020, distilled into one book. |
| Monkeywrench! Pentex | 3 | Stupid. |
| The Quick & The Dead | 3 | The weakest of the Year of the Hunters line and the only one that I don't think is worth the money. |
| Rage Across Appalachia | 3 | How could they get such a crazy idea so thoroughly wrong? It's a tragedy I tell ya. |
| The Succubus Club | 3 | They hadn't figured out why Chicago By Night was a good idea and this was a bad idea. Maybe some still haven't. |
| Tales From The Floating Vagabond | 3 | I thought this was funny when I was in the 9th grade. I looked at it again later and wondered what I had been thinking. |
| |
| 2 |
| Aliens Adventure Game | 2 | Nuke it from orbit. |
| The Book of Nod | 2 | Some guy's vampire fanfic. The mere fact that White Wolf publishes it doesn't elevate it above that. |
| The Book of Props | 2 | More or less useless, even to novice LARPers. At least the ones with brains in their head. We waited for it eagerly and discovered nothing we couldn't have learned with a few free classes at our local craft store. |
| Buttery Wholesomeness | 2 | A comedy supplement that isn't at all funny. Next. |
| HoL: Human Occupied Landfill | 2 | A humorous game that's not funny. |
| Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads | 2 | Made my GMing worse for a very, very, very long time. |
| |
| 1 |
| Blood Treachery | 1 | To paraphrase that one line from the X-Files, I don't know what's worse, the mage-vampire interactions, or the fact that a good chunk of it is in screenplay format. (Well, play format. But you get the point.) |
| The Chaos Factor | 1 | As bad as you've heard. |
| Gypsies | 1 | Run, don't walk. |
| Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed | 1 | Ha ha ha, except you're A) not funny, and B) not in 1991 anymore. |
| |
| Unsorted |
| Nobilis | 0 | I contributed in a modest way to this book, so I am not rating it. I will say in a comment, though, that I found it to be incredibly versatile and interesting, a new take on high-powered gaming that hadn't been seen since Amber Diceless, another classic. |
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