RPGaDay 2017 #5 Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

This is a tough one, because I find most covers illustrative rather than evocative. "Look that that character doing their thing. Your character can do that thing, too." Licensed games often less so, because they're trying to remind you of the show and therefore just have the characters from the show on the cover.

World of Darkness core books generally avoid anything simply representational. The most striking example of this would be the old Werewolf: The Apocalypse book with its claw marks slashed across the cover. The new World of Darkness core rulebook was another good one, with the image of an empty street with a shadowy, incomplete figure in the center.

Though I think I have to give the award to Golden Sky Stories. The cover depicts 3 children with animal ears enjoying a sunset on a hillside. Most of the image is given over to the warm red sky than transitions to yellow just below the middle of the cover, where we see the children. The overall mood of the piece is warm and relaxing, which is much what the game inside the book promises.

RPGaDay #2 What is an RPG you would like to see published?

I would love to see a solid space/techno-fantasy game, where magic and technology are both well-integrated into the system and the setting.

For a long time it felt like magic and technology were the oil and water of RPGs. Even when they were allowed to interact, the interaction was often antagonistic. The more advanced your tech, the less effective magic is against it, and vice versa.

I think Mage: the Ascension and GURPS Technomancer are the best games in terms of modern magic. The setting for Mage does have antagonism between magic and science, but it's a conflict that is as much about people and ideas as it is about natural forces. Whichever version of reality you believe in is the one that is true for you, so getting more people to believe in magic makes magic more effective.

Also the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts were able to do magical things with technology. The Sons of Ether believed in ether science, which had been "disproven" by the Technocracy, the big bad of the setting. So even though they believed that what they were doing was science, it was technically magic. The Virtual Adepts were so "bleeding edge" that they pushed technology to do magical things. You know, like all the stuff hat movies and TV tell us that computers can do, even though people who know how computers work know that they can't.

GURPS Technomancer posited modern world where magic was a known and public force, replacing atomic energy as the driving force of the latter half of the 20th century. It did some pretty solid world building, looking at how modern people would use and view magic.

But something like either of them taken to the stars is what I would really like to see. Magic and technology working together to explore space. I've got some ideas that I may or may not develop, and the upcoming Starfinder RPG looks like it might scratch my itch, but we'll see.

RPGaDay #28 Scariest Game You've Played

I've already told my Ravenloft story, and that's as scary as I get. I've never played a deliberate horror game. I don't own Call of Cthulhu, though I do have a good selection of World of Darkness material. Never played it though.

I tried to run a NWOD mortals game, but it didn't go too well. There was a supernatural element to the game, but it never achieved anything like horror.