1970’s cool with time and dimensional travel.
Luther Arkright by Mythras is a handy resource and interesting premise based on a comic book. Basically a flawed 70’s Bond type character tasked with keeping the timeline clear of meddling, it is an open book world building platform, a bit like Dr Who with drug addiction, guns and free love.
The 1990’s of the X-Files, pre smart phones, Nazis living in exile and Grey skinned aliens with big eyes to now..
The original Delta Green created quite a stir.
CoC 6e had an independent homage product Delta Green, that gave us a re-skinned X-Files game, based on all the popular paranoia’s of this period. Alien abduction, immortal Nazi’s hiding in darkest South America, government conspiracies and the traditional horrors mingling with regular folk.
From it came the independent Delta Green product line covering the 2000’s to now and from that a re-printing of the original pre-2000’s version Conspiracy as an alternative back story. DG stands out as one of the few games currently available as a first and only edition and has remained solid since. 6e at it’s heart, it developed some good mechanical evolutions and has it’s own feel.
1980-90’s Kids on bikes adventure like Stranger Things, Tales from the Loop, E.T etc.
Nothing I have covers this specifically, but between Trouble Shooters, BRP, Pulp Cthulhu, Mythras Imperative and M-Space, it would be easy enough to get something going with The Loop, Electric State and other books for inspiration (literally take any one picture from these and something starts). The Comae Engine and Trey are also ideal.
A lighter hearted take on Cthulhu now.
The “triangle” book is the Delta Green original book updated as “The Conspiracy”,
The Laundry Files, based on the Charles Stross books is a very British take on fighting Cthulhu, keeping your bus stubs for expenses and warm pints included. Still very dark as Cthulhu needs to be, it has a unique feel only possible through English understatement and dry humour. Where else would budget cuts to IT services threaten the viability of fending off world destruction or an agent go back into the jaws of horror to retrieve his laptop (or have to pay for it)?
Bond, The Professionals and co or a more militant theme like Strike Back.
For a more up to date, but still light take on Bond style games, DWD lite has Spec Ops, a D00 lite game. It is also compatible with other D00 games, so supernatural elements could be added or you could just use Cthulhu now or Delta Green with no or little horror.
A Dresden Files style fantasy-modern world full of nightmares living right under our noses.
Clearly based on the popular Dresden Files books with Harry and co holding back the tide, After The Vampire Wars covers the same turf effectively with the Mythras system. This also ties in with other Mythras works like Destined and M-Space.
More British horror, but lighter this time.
The Rivers of London books are light horror or at least supernatural based. Less dark and desperate that Cthulhu, the team at BRP made this a special love project and even developed new sub-systems for it, that many wish were added to the new BRP core book.
Supernatural and the newer Evil or Surrealestate series.
Doing a Supernatural style game is as easy as doing Cthulhu now, probably with pulp rules, with or without Cthulhu attached.
If you want something a little darker as some episodes could be, or to go more into the darker Evil series style, Sigil and Shadow by Osprey is a reworking of a D00 lite Special Ops and Bare Bones Fantasy mash-up. It is very real and quite dark, but has less overt monster fighting than most games of it’s type concentrating more on the psychological effects of impending doom.
Also of note, but I have not played it is Unknown Armies. This is dark stuff, so more on the “Evil” series end than Supernatural.
Street level super hero like Batman, Daredevil, The Watchmen or Spiderman.
Something old but still valid is Super World (available as a pdf), good enough to help launch George R R Martin’s career (google it, quite a story), or something newer in Mythras Destined or you could simply use the BRP core book at a pinch with bits of Magic World, Super World and other Chaosium classics included.
High or cosmic level supers are out of the realm of most D100 games, but can be done (with less math than Champions and the like). For me that is irrelevant as I only like street level anyway where D100 games excel.
Mesh these with M-Space for a Guardians of the Galaxy style game.
Near future or alternate future/now, like Electric State, .
Mythras Imperative and M-Space handle this very well. BRP could also, with a lighter feel maybe, but the harder feel of M-Space would sit best, dropping in select bits from supporting books.
Zombie or all the other apocalypse scenarios.
Seasons of the Dead for Mythras is custom made gritty, dark and flexible, and “disaster” agnostic. Like all Mythras based systems it is also a handy resource (a DCeased style game with Destined?).
Apocathulhu available on DTRPG is also an option, giving us the world after our CoC characters fail to stop the worst outcome from happening.
The Dark Tower or Shadow of the Torturer Books and even Fallout.
I have always wanted to do a far future lost Earth game, drawing on all of the elements of future science, post nuclear mutations and alien weirdness these books and games inspire. An old monograph from BRP Future Earth is actually an uncredited clone of the Torturer books and this is also one of the sweet spots for a generic system like BRP to thrive in.
You can literally pluck an idea, monster, character from any system and drop it in, tweak it to suit and go.
Play style is already in the hard and unforgiving space, “exotic” abilities ect. covered by even the core BRP book’s spells, super powers, psionics and mutations and almost any genre book can contribute.
Apocthulhu series are a “life after the collapse of humanity” series, which could be a good start as could Luther Arkright in a failed dimension!
An outlier here is Dark Astral, a laughably thin tome compared to the monster Zweihander it is supporting, but very cool.
A bad futre, the near future or a far distant one.
Space Opera like Star Wars, Buck Rogers etc.
Frontire Space from DWD is a traditional sci-fi game, complete with alien races, lasers etc. It is open ended, flexible, quite complete and light enough to avoid getting too bogged down in tech or morale conundrums. With some resources, it is capable of handling more sci-fi genre.
M-Space can also handle this with some clear Star Wars hints, but FS is pulpier and lighter.
Hard sci-fi, alternative future, weird science.
M-Space from Clarence Redd is a loose Traveller clone in Mythras Imperative clothing, with a very live system and constant support. It has support books with a more Star Trek, Blade Runner or true science feel and works with or without traditional conceits.
I could see anything from a John Carter, Fallen Skies, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Alien or even a Gravity style game.
I cannot have these books at hand without being drawn into “what if” games like the Leviathan or the Ancillary series. Just browsing the 1980’s style sci-Scandi art evokes ideas.
Alien, Predator and Starship Troopers otherwise known as “Bug Hunt” sci-fi, although “bugs hunt us” is probably closer.
Mothership is the…..mothership I guess of this style of desperate, hopeless “space is big, dark and bad things live there” games and a paragon of succinct and cool design, but New Horizons (pdf) also deserves mention for it’s 1000 odd pages of more traditional Cthulhu-ish futuristic goodness (badness?).
M-Space can do this style perfectly well also, so I have bought the very basic Mothership Player’s Survival Guide pdf, which is basically free, to access the system and the feel and will drop the best ideas (stress mechanic) into an M-Space game. I will probably end up with the Deluxe set (since ordered). Apparently the scenario books and community are amazing.
Other stuff of note.
The Comae Engine deserves it’s own spot as a pick up and play generic system, especially if used with Trey, the accompanying solo option.
How about solo games?
Zweihander has a solo module, D100 Dungeon is a solo game engine and Trey allows for solo play with most systems. Because D100 games tend towards the gritty and can be frighteningly swingy, “write your own adventure diary” style games work well.
A system idea I have been pondering is “blind” play, where characters are not fielded with actual numerical stats, just a character sheet of a description, their weaknesses and strengths outlined and the result of their prioritising of their growth path (they apply the d10’s, the GM rolls them in secret and tells them how they went in vague terms.
This works well in D100 games because the range is deep and squishy enough to disguise the actual value for a while and the systems can come down to bean counting, this defuses that. Also, the 2d10 with flips idea can be used by the GM to hide the difficulty and therefore the roll likelihood.
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D100 games cannot capture the feel of every other RPG styles and mechanics out there, but I hope you get a feel for the flexibility and consistency of the mechanics and their many uses. The big thing for me is in a triditional sense (or non-traditional if you choose), they just get out of the way and let the game be what it needs.
If wanted, D100 can accomodate with room to absorb most ideas, if not the scaffolding holds firm without.
I am not ne for TTRPG mechanics that control play or force a style within that play. The mechanics are only ever the enabler of a communication based game. A good example of this is Mothership, a game that allows for player driven story telling with enough mechanical structure to “get stuff done” and add rewards and penalties, but little more.
From an older gamer’s perspective, tricks to force immersion into game play are not wanted or needed, indeed I find them restrictive and limiting.
You only need processes to determine if your goals and your (characters) efforts to reach them are rewarded or what any setbacks cost you. In other words, I do not feel the need for the game to rail road me or hold my hand, just enable my imagination.