If there’s one thing that science fiction and fantasy can teach us, it’s that calamity is only as far away as the author’s need to provide readers with their next thrill. Real life is much the same. While each of us hopes to remain safe and undisturbed in our homes, it is still a good idea to have on hand a go-bag filled with the necessities you would need if circumstances forced you to suddenly evacuate.
Necessities include the obvious (clothes, meds, food, water, and such) but one can make a case for entertainment as well. After all, you might find yourself waiting in spartan conditions for some time. Having a distraction on hand might well make a stressful situation less stressful. Which raises the obvious question: which tabletop roleplaying game should be in my emergency go bag?
Tabletop roleplaying games have an admirable ratio of potential entertainment hours to weight. One can spin out years of adventure from a single, well-designed set of rules. Or, given a sufficiently inspired gamemaster, from a poorly-designed set of rules.1 In regular life, any set of rules you enjoy will do. However, I argue that there are criteria for go bag-worthy TTRPGs that will dramatically narrow down the candidates.
First, the game should be available to you—which for a lot of people just now considering this issue, boils down to “the game should be in print.” You cannot pack away a game you cannot acquire.
The first criterion is the least restrictive criterion, as so many games are in print just now. The range of TTRPGs available for purchase, both reprints of ancient classic games and new games, is simply astonishing to anyone old enough to remember when buying RPGs required a trek to the nearest million-person city.
Second, the rules should be on paper, not in some electronic format. In part this is because PDFs are the spawn of Satan, but (more importantly) it’s because you cannot be certain that you will have access to electricity wherever you find refuge. Physical rulebooks require only a source of light and eyes to read them with (or fingertips for those of you reading Braile).
The second criterion will eliminate a lot of games. Focusing on electronic-only games makes sense for publishers. They don’t have to worry about rising paper costs, they can offer immediate gratification via online sales, and customers can store on their phones and tablets RPG libraries that if on paper would require hundreds of meters of shelves to store.
Third, the rules should be comprehensive, rather than requiring ancillary materials for full functionality. Among other things, this has implications concerning dice: fewer are better.
The third criterion will, alas, eliminate many favorites. Seventh edition Call of Cthulhu has two core books, the Keeper and the Investigator books. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, requires groups to have three books, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Guide, and the Monster Manual.
Fourth, the game should be light. You may be carrying that go bag for some time.
The fourth criterion is also restrictive. The Dragonbane box set comes with everything you need, but it’s heavy. Swords of the Serpentine is likely comprehensive (and the mechanics demand only a single six-sided die!) but the hardcover rulebook is a massive tome. The seventh edition Call of Cthulhu slipcase is weighty enough that one can use it to bludgeon Deep Ones into submission. There are single-tome editions of Champions but the mechanics require fistfuls of six-sided dice.
Fifth, there is no fifth criterion. I am as surprised as you are. Breaking Tor.com tradition!
While the above criteria eliminate legions of TTRPGs, many games satisfy all four needs. When I scan my TTRPG library I note a few obvious candidates. Here are my top five picks.2
Icons Superpowered Roleplaying by Steve Kenson. The game is compact, the rules are comprehensive, and gameplay requires only two six-sided dice.
Monsterhearts 2 by Avery Alder is one of the many games that use the Powered by the Apocalypse game engine. Gamers play high school students whose already stressful academic careers are complicated by the fact that each and every one of them is a monster of one sort or another.
Mörk Borg by Pelle Nilsson, Johan Nohr, and Patrick Stuart is an experiment in bleak nihilism verging on black humor. Trapped in a doomed fantasy world, player characters are certain to enjoy eventful lives…if not necessarily for long.
M-Space by Clarence Redd belongs to the Basic Roleplaying genus of games, by way of the Design Mechanism’s Mythras. This science fiction tabletop roleplaying game offers some ingenious game mechanics3 that are delivered in a compact, perfect bound rulebook. In fact, loving SF as I do, this impressive game would be my top choice, were it not for my final choice…
Traveller, Little White Book Edition by Marc Miller is a venerable science fiction roleplaying game. Requiring only two dice to play, Traveller is the product of an era when assumptions about what kind of role players might want were very different than today. Consequently, the facsimile edition contains everything needed to create one’s own setting, from worlds to the people in them…all in a single 6×9, 160-page perfect bound rulebook.
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The tabletop roleplaying world being as diverse as it is, I am absolutely certain there are choices just as worthy as those above, overlooked simply because I have not yet encountered them. Feel free to make the case for your favorites in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]Reviewer waves at all the fans of FGU’s “Space Opera” still struggling with its stream-of-consciousness ruleset.
[2]There’s an unspoken fifth criterion: I have to have actually gotten around to reading the rules. Sorry, “Save the Day”! Sorry, “Our Traveling Home”! Sorry, “Court of Blades”! Sorry, “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”! All of you deserve better than a footnote.
[3]Although the focus here is on physical rules, I must note that the PDF rulebook is unusually well laid out to enhance PDF readability.
I guess White Wolf’s Changeling fails on the number of dice test. Though a pouch of D10s isn’t that hard to manage.
Yeah, quantity of dice needed was an issue with the WW games with which I am familiar.
The fifth criterion, though difficult to plan for, should probably be that the theme of the game not relate too strongly to the nature of the catastrophe. If the stars are right and R’lyeh has risen, Call of Cthulhu isn’t going to be popular. A limited nuclear exchange of some sort will dampen the desire to play Twilight 2000. I’m sure there are games out there that line up with more mundane disasters like fire and flood. Really, any game dealing with the end of all things (as many seem to do these days) isn’t going to go over well. Mörk Borg may not go over all that well.
If you’re just off to an emergency shelter or to stay with friends or family who live outside the disaster area, then not many dice makes sense. Indeed, a diceless system might make sense, though I never cared for any that I’ve come across. On the other hand, if you’re on you own for survival, particularly hefty D20s can do double duty as slingshot ammo, and D4s are excellent caltrops.
Yeesh. What did PDFs do to you? :O
Bob Herzog might disagree with that sentiment. :P
PDFs eat up ludicrous amounts of memory.
PDFs aren’t documents, they’re pictures of documents.
(Admittedly, it is nice to have my two and a half shelves of Traveller in iCloud where they’re almost always at my fingertips.)
—
As for reading the room, in February 2020 I dropped by the toys & games shop I used to frequent and where the proprietor always had time to chat, and mentioned that I expected sales of Pandemic were either way down or way up…
I’ve been sent PDFs that were literally images of pages at a fixed size, so not only did they consume absurd amounts of memory, they also circumvented one of the strengths of ebooks, being able to adjust font size. I can only assume the people responsible [removed on advice of lawyer].
@8: Heh, the scanner app I use (it’s surprising how useful it is to have your late mother’s divorce papers on your tablet (no really, this was important once)) creates PDFs that are “scanned image backed by OCR” – and the OCR seems to do a decent job even on my “hours outdoors on a New Mexico winter night futzing with telescope bits” handwriting.
I did consider Amber Diceless on account of the diceless but not only is it larger than digest sized, the game seems to be designed to make people turn on each other… hardly ideal during a crisis. About the only game that would be worse is Diplomacy, a game I have seen break up an engagement.
Similarly, Illuminati has an optional cheaters’ variant, in which almost all forms of cheating are completely legal. The rule recommends playing it “only with very good friends or people you will never meet again”.
@10 and @9 This is why for the past few years I’ve been invested in co-operative games. Fewer (though not zero) opportunities for lasting grudges.
Which is a bit of a change for me, since the first co-op game I ever saw was the ’90s LoTR game, which I just didn’t get at the time. Now I have Pandemic and all its variants, which was unfortunate in 2020, but at least we had a the concept down and could look up other co-operative games.
I would have mentioned Bunnies and Burrows, but it seems to be out of print again (last known edition 2019).
Of what’s in print, the first thing that comes to mind is Coyote & Crow, which requires only one (480 page, $70 hardback) rulebook.
And, for many people, glasses. Consider Burgess Meredith’s character in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last” and include multiple pairs in your go bag.
Back in the days when your cell phone, if you had one, looked like a brick, Coast Guard enlisted personnel aboard ships homeported in my town used to play a lot of AD&D during rack time. The older editions leave more room for “theater of the mind,” so they just needed books, dice, pencils with decent erasers, and character sheets, plus some notebook-sized graph and lined paper–all easy to store.
I think you’ve missed a few good candidates! Big props for choosing Monsterhearts though! The first edition ripped my heart out in the best way.
Fate Condensed or Fate Accelerated by Evil Hat is definitely worth checking out for a light narratively-focused game that can be adapted to any genre with a relatively low page count
Wanderhome by Possum Creek Games. A light fanciful and heartwarming low-stakes game that requires a handful of coins and no dice.
Fate of the Flying Temple – a particular implementation of Fate where the characters are kids with powers in an Avatar The Last Airbender-like fantasy setting trying to do good and solve problems non-violently. It was the seed for one of my long running campaigns.
Kobolds Ate My Baby meets all the criteria listed. And your character is nigh-guaranteed to be short-lived.
I’m weird but I keep a couple of hard copies of Risus and the companion on the shelf.
Now for published stuff, Mini 6 is available in hard copy from DriveThruRpg.
And there are the various Tiny D6 products (Frontiers for space, Dungeons for Fantasy, Supers for, well, super heroes, and many others).
I had been thinking that you had missed the most obvious option, that Steffan O’Sullivan had solved this problem with SHERPA.
But looking it up… it has been out of print for twenty years.
Big Eyes, Small Mouth is available in .pdf format, and it’s one of the more overarching games I’ve played. It’s based on anime, which means a wide range of storylines as well as worldbuilding, and the source material is no Palladium Rifts, AD&D any version, or GURPS. I’m old. LOL.
Paranoia white box is my back-up choice.
Steve Jackson Games 1977 “Melee” and “Wizards” derived TFT.
Mausritter seems like a contender. D6s only. Simple rules. The only downside might be the inventory – you actually put pieces on the character sheet to represent how much space they take. But that could be fudged
It’s also free if you don’t mind printing it yourself and has tons of community content
Honored to have Icons on the list!
You can pick up your own print copy of Icons to have “just in case” over at DriveThruRPG (and get a free PDF along with it as a backup, in case you do have a working electronic device and a willingness to work with devilspawn).
‘PDFs are the spawn of Satan,’
…said no-one having to take books to a gaming convention, ever.
Also, you missed out on the ultimate ‘rainy day’ TTRPG: D6 Star Wars, from West End Games. Published from 1987 up until Phantom Menace, D6 star Wars meets all if the criteria you set out, and more. Fast, simple, flexible rules; I have literally taught people how to play this game within 5 minutes. No specialty dice; just some d6s needed. No learning time for understanding the setting lore. It’s widely available from used games & book sellers, as well as in a 30th Anniversary format put out back in 2017 by Fantasy Flight Games. You only need the single Core Rulebook, although the secondary Sourcebook does help expand the game.
And even if the author disdains the PDF format, fans of the system have been keeping it alive and well with the current REUP (Revised, Expanded, UPdated) edition.
Either of these two would be mine. Broken Compass or Outgunned both from Two Little Mice (although they no longer own Broken Compass sadly).
Outgunned probably wins out. But they are rules light but still with some meat and you’d only need about 10 d6s, and I could run and hack so many different types of campaigns/games with just that system.
And the core rulebook is like journal sized so very easy to chuck in a bag.
I think you miss the mark by saying D&D REQUIRE the core bookset to run. You don’t NEED the DMG PHB or the monster manual in order to successfully run a DND campaign. At most you need a handful of dice: D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and a D20. Plus a piece of paper and something to write with. You can make up everything and anything you want, including monsters/enemies. I feel that because of this, D&D is the most viable TTRPG game because of how easy it is to get started with nothing.
@26 And in a pinch you can dispense with the dice. Early players (when TSR couldn’t keep up with polyhedral dice demands) received cardboard tokens to cut out and draw from a paper cup instead. The tradition continues in prisons, where dice are often forbidden as gambling implements.
Though prisoners also have a number of creative methods of making dice from available materials, some of which might also come in handy for postapocalyptic gamers.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/padk7z/how-inmates-play-tabletop-rpgs-in-prisons-where-dice-are-contraband
Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley.
The rules originally appeared as a pamphlet-sized document, one page front-and-back of text folded.
This was arguably excessive, as the rules could probably be fit on an index card.
You will need dice, or a die. Optimally, you’d have three dice, and it’s helpful if the third can be distinguished from the other two, but resourceful players might well manage with one. You probably also want to have little scraps of paper and a pencil, so that you can write down your character’s name, occupation, and current sanity. And I guess if you’re writing things, that suggests a light source might be helpful (but that was implicit in the entire discussion, wasn’t it?).
Anyway, I don’t think it gets more apocalypse-friendly than that. Unless, as somebody upthread suggested, Cthulhu was your apocalypse, in which case Yog-Sothothery in your roleplaying might be in poor taste.
Runequest 2nd edition works well – it does need polyhedral dice, but is a single book.
Starships & Spacemen is also a single book and exemplifies TOS Star Trek.
GURPS works if you just use the base book. It only requires six sided dice and not many of them
Many early RPGs had only 1 rulebook and expected the gamemaster to do everything related to the world and adventures.
TY nylter1 for the Paranoia! I’m old so I know the basic D&D came with everything you needed in a box lighter than some of the mammoth tomes some games boast. Also, do any small town residents remember when getting the Wargames West catalog like getting the Penny’s or Sear’s Christmas catalog?
@30: I am so old that I remember that the basic D&D game came in a box not containing everything you needed — it had three pamphlets that, with someone to guide you, would let you play the game if you had the dice, but it did not include the dice.
@31: And when they did start including dice they weren’t very good (not T$R’s fault, the industry wasn’t there yet). Friend of mine had a d20 from the day that looked like a chewed wad of gum when I saw it in the late Eighties.
@32: Yep, I remember the cheapass dice that were available Back In The Day. Some of them quickly ceased to be “fair” as corners rounded off unevenly…