An Arcane Followup

So, a while back I did an article looking back at Arcane‘s Top 50 RPGs list from back in 1996, as polled among their (primarily UK-based) readership. At the time, I said that no truly comparable list had been produced since, but I’ve recently become aware of Tabletop Gaming magazine’s June 2018 piece on the Top 150 games. This includes board games and card games, but RPGs are healthily represented there – in fact, the top game on the list is an RPG. It’s also a UK magazine which feels in some respect like a present-day update of Arcane with a wider remit and some somewhat deeper insights, and the list was also based on a reader vote.

So, I thought it would be interesting to extract just the RPGs from that list to get a “Top RPGs” sub-list, and compare it to the Arcane list. Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it – the readership may well not be that similar – but it’s interesting to think about, right?

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

Fun? Sure, Oui!

After we’re done with my current 4-session dose of Ars Magica, my Monday evening group is going to be doing some Feng Shui, so to get ready I acquired and had a read of the core rulebook. This is the 1st edition book, since it’s the version we’ll be playing, but apparently the new 2nd edition is very similar with a few points of distinction.

Feng Shui bills itself as being the Hong Kong action movie RPG, and on that front it knocks things out of the park – indeed, it’d be pretty decent for most other action movie genres at that. There is a default setting in which feng shui sites all over the world are the key to a Big Trouble In Little China-esque battle for occult supremacy that takes place over a swathe of time periods, ranging from ancient history to a cyberpunk future, but it’s completely viable to ignore this if you want to. The best thing about the default setting is that Robin Laws packs into the core book all the stuff you need to support play in any of the time settings presented, which cover more or less all the potential settings you might want to run an action movie RPG in. Running Feng Shui in a homebrewed setting or a specific movie’s world will in many cases be as simple as deciding what bits of the book you want to leave off the table, rather than having to cook up a bunch of new stuff.

(In the new edition, the bio-cyberpunk future is relaced with a Fallout-esque postapocalyptic setting, presumably because cyberpunk isn’t as popular these days, but I consider this a mistake; if you want a postapocalyptic setting, all you need to do is take the equipment list for the time period you reckon the apocalypse happened and then wreck everything, boom, done.)