Day 4 is a tricky thing to do because it is so wide open.

Most Surprising Game

Mark

Surprise!  What is a surprising game?  How is it surprising?  Oh, the humanity – why so brief question?  Surprisingly bad?  Or good?  How and why does it surprise me?  Well, I think I need to just get over the dramatics and answer the damn question.  So let me try to make this  a surprising answer!

I am going to go with an old game that I bought, new, for $4 in the grand old days of 1987 from a bookstore as I mistook it for a Fighting Fantasy styled game due to its cover.  That game was (and is) called Maelstrom.  I have owned a few copies of it over the years and I found it to be an all round surprising game for its time.  Firstly it surprised me in not being a Fighting Fantasy novel (published with a similar style cover by same company) but it does have a solo adventure in it!  Secondly, it was the first RPG that I had ever come across that had a free form magic system in it that resulted in exhausting the mage if they stuffed up.  Thirdly it was the first historical RPG I owned based on the late middle ages to renaissance.  The final surprise was how long we played the game for.  It had a good deal of longevity in it with a simple system and just a clever background.

Now the last surprise was actually not my final surprise.  The true final surprise is I found out last year that the game has Kickstartered it’s second edition.  I was blissfully unaware until one day when I went searching for a Maelstrom group on Google+ and found one!  An active, but small group, with fond memories of the game and they were all abuzz about the new version of the game.  So that (and the fact that I found supplements on DriveThruRPG) were the last surprises for the game.

It leaves me all nostalgic.  Better go and see if I can make up a herbalist and entice some people into a game…