10. Top Secret (TSR) - although this didn't come out until 1980, I seem to remember it being one of the first games (other than Dungeons & Dragons) that I played regularly. It was an early attempt at tackling a 'realistic' genre, but games always ended up a cross between a James Bond movie, a D&D dungeon crawl and an episode of the A-Team. In fact I recall one adventure where my top assassin (the one-eyed Matt Tallon) stumbled through some mystical portal into the world of Dungeons & Dragons!One of the frequent faults of early role-playing games was their use of multiple mechanics for different aspects of the rules. Top Secret had a really good gun combat system - with the first use of 'hit location' that I had encountered - but it's brawling system was some 'choose an attack/choose a defence/cross reference on a table' nonsense that jarred with the rest of the game and was utterly slow and useless in multiple combats.
I haven't seen a copy of this since the 80s, but still have fond memories of many adventures in the world of espionage. The game had a complete overhaul several years later and was revamped as Top Secret/SI with more logical mechanics and an adaptability to other genres (such as Pulp: their Agent 13 supplement being possibly the first Pulp roleplaying game), but it lacked the raw appeal of the original.
9. Bushido (Phoenix Games) - another classic from 1980. This was our bread and butter at school and we played the heck of it, with one particularly memorable campaign seeing my samurai character engineer a coup - via playing both sides of a civil war against each other and using ninjas to plant stolen sacred artifacts on key opponents - that saw him become shogun ... thus bringing the campaign to a satisfying, if grinding, halt!
Of course 1980 was also the year Shogun was screened on TV, all of us had read the massive book by James Clavell, learnt a few 'useful' Japanese phrases, and feudal Japan was the hot topic for 14-year-old boys.
I look back on my treasured copy of the rules now and they are just a mass of acronyms and numbers, but I guess we had a lot more time on our hands then and were more tolerant and willing to adapt. I think if we were to revive it today as a game, we'd need a very flexible gamesmaster who was willing to invest an awful lot of time into establishing a campaign background.
8. The Fantasy Trip (Metagaming) - 1980 was obviously a golden year for roleplaying games as it also the publication of The Fantasy Trip (TFT), a rules-lite system from Steve Jackson, that would eventually morph into the monstrosity that is GURPS. But back in the day, this little game completely turned round our thinking on fantasy role-playing games ... with the introduction of concepts like 'skills' and 'quirks' to personalise our characters.Steve, Pete, Nick and I played a lot of TFT at the time, with Steve as our 'totally out there' gamesmaster, winging it to his heart's content. Our party, which included my ranger Farthorne The Wanderer, was aided by a djinn (modelled on Robin William's character in Disney's Aladdin) with a penchant for anachronistic summonings (such as DJ decks and complete disco light systems).
Farthorne was one of my few genuinely 'heroic' characters in this Golden Age of roleplaying. As you will learn from future entries in this list, I might talk a good game, but my roleplaying skills barely rose above: "let's kill it and take the treasure".
We were always being told: "Don't go to the Land Of The Orcs." One day we went to The Land Of The Orcs. We were slaughtered within about five minutes of crossing the border. We should have listened!
Next time, we remember the James Bond RPG, d6 Star Wars from West End Games and the mother of them all: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons!
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