Six RPGs with Alan Bahr

Alan Bahr is an award-winning and best-selling roleplaying game designer, known for his company Gallant Knight Games, as well as his work at Osprey Games, Steamforged Games and many other companies.

With the Kickstarter of Siege Perilous now live, today he tells us about Six RPG games that have influenced him.

          

1 & 2. King Arthur Pendragon / Prince Valiant—Perhaps combining these is cheating a bit, but separating them would feel wrong. Both by Greg Stafford (my polestar in game design), these games both showcase Greg's talent for finding the soul of a genre or mythos and bringing it right to the forefront of a game. I often refer to Greg as "the game designer's designer," for his breadth of talent (as showcased in both these games the strongest) is one that you will appreciate the further you go into game design theory and thought. They have long cast a shadow over Arthurian tabletop gaming.

3. Keltia—A very personal love, Keltia is a French RPG translated to English (and now sadly out of print). Keltia deals with the Arthurian mythos through a more mythstorical lens, rather than one derived from fantastical mythology. The evocative art sells the idea of this setting being dark, with bright lights shining through as the world changes and you are at the forefront of it.

4. Dungeons & Dragons (3.0/3.5)—The game that got me into roleplaying. The pictures, ideas, and hooks throughout that first Player's Handbook fired my young imagination and kept me charging forward. I still go back to my collection of 3.x books and thumb through them, my appreciation growing deeper as the years go on. A perfectly imperfect game, in all the best ways.

5. Aaron Allston's Strike Force—Perhaps the greatest hidden and underappreciated treasure inside gaming, Aaron Allston's Strike Force is revolutionary in putting to paper common (but misunderstood or miscommunicated) game-running practices and campaign structure ideas. While it is deeply tied to superheroic roleplaying, the lessons in the book apply widely across games and campaigns and helped make me a better designer and facilitator.

6. The Quiet Year—Avery Alder's card-mapping game is hugely influential in how I changed my opinion on the physical act of presence in tabletop roleplaying. The careful card-tography (an ill-advised portmanteau of card-based cartography I just invented) creates a uniquely physical act of exploration and storytelling that subtly supports the game through physical interaction and action.

And tell us about your own game:

Siege Perilous is my own entry into my body of game design canon, a game I've been carefully crafting for a long time.

Siege Perilous is a solo and troupe (group) roleplaying game about Arthurian knights questing across England. You will travel through the life of your knight, encountering characters, enemies and NPCs. You will undertake quests, both for your own advancement and that of those you serve alongside and for.

Siege Perilous is about getting older and moving past old scars that still pull at you. It's about loss, discovery, pursuing perfection and failing. It is about romance, battle, conflict, duty, loyalty, love, faith, and death.

Thank you, Alan!

Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.