This is The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games (1990), by Rick Swan. It is sort of a buying guide for RPGs, with the bulk of the book devoted to fairly detailed reviews of over 150 RPG systems, evaluating them on the merits of their complexity and playability.

I like Swan’s approach. He doesn’t really care about the sort of in-the-weeds mechanical stuff that causes so many arguments among those deep in RPGs. He’s pretty welcoming and I generally agree with his assessments (he gives Pendragon his highest rating, so he’s obviously a man of culture and refinement). All that said, I refer to this a lot less than I do the similar Heroic Worlds (see tomorrow’s post) and I can’t entirely explain why. Maybe its because I don’t really like the Phil Foglio cover art. I dunno.

Still, an excellent primer on RPGs from their genesis to 1990 (and, of most of the books I’m talking about this week, the easiest to find at a reasonable price). I will never understand why publishers were putting out books like this, but thank goodness they did. They offer valuable insight into slices of time, the state of the industry and people’s attitudes towards games in the moment. We don’t really have an equivalent sort of book that I know of after 1992. You can dig this sort of thing up on dusty old blogs or in the back alleys of message boards, but that isn’t the same. This feels more permanent.