Another difficult one. There are so many fantastic settings but they all boil down to what the group make of them. They're also so different I'm finding it very hard to compare.
Shadowrun and (old) World of Darkness are wonderful, versatile settings, both of which are likely to get me running to your gaming table. If you haven't tried them, I highly recommend both. Shadowrun is cyberpunk with added fantasy motifs, whilst World of Darkness has an intricate network of supernatural beings, each group with its own agenda and its own political intrigues. I think these are my favourite settings - I think the other settings I've played and loved (Deadlands, Pathfinder, Final Fantasy, Aberrant, Exalted) have been made so great by the GM & players.
So you know what, my favourite setting is the one with the most collaberative, most imaginative group turning it into something truly special. But Shadowrun and World of Darkness are good places to start.
I spent a good long time running Shadowrun in its first and second edition. I moved on because I think the games need to look at the right stories, about what it is to be human in those transitional times and most of it fails to do so.
ReplyDeleteThe later editions really fail in that area.
That definitely makes sense - the best non-fantasy cyberpunk stories are the ones about people. We've got an anthology (this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13595000-cyberpunk) and the story I think is best is "Down and Out in the Year 2000" which shows a very dismal side to cyberpunk, but the protagonist's story still ends with a degree of optimism ('bleak positivity' is the term floating to mind from when I studied drama), and it comes from the human focus of the story.
Delete