RPG books with quality writing

[Evil Scientist]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Mekton Zeta has some real good insight into anime concepts and I find it nice to reread. BESM is also written fairly nicely, but its more a variety of abilities and approachable style. than specific stories.

Dream Pod Nine RPGs (Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles) are pretty good, as is Eden Studio's AFMBE. Blue Planet is another I like.

Paranoia has its own tone as well.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Games I enjoy reading...

Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard are right at the top of that list for me. Why? Because they're transparent. The author gets a bit of rant on about how the game works and why it's built the way it is. I love it! Burning Wheel in particular is really inspiring, creatively.

[koipond]

How We Came To Live Here.

Also, Burning Wheel annoyed me when I got to an ability in the Character Burner and they were like "Whoops! We're going to cover this in the monster burner! We're bad designers."

I shouted, "Hell yes you are" and threw them across the room. That's when I donated them to a local youth group and hoped someone would enjoy them.

[kylesgames]

13th Age had a lot of sideboard discourse on game design decisions that was interesting, though I didn't find it to be too incredibly above average in the general quality of its writing.

Dream Pod 9 and FASA/FanPro are probably my favorite companies for writing to read; CGL doesn't do as good a job with the fun-to-read bits though SR5 does a good job and Eclipse Phase was absolutely wonderful from a politics/tech/posthumanism study perspective; I get the feeling that it was more Posthuman than CGL there.

[koipond]

All Posthuman, though to be fair at the time there was a fair bit of overlap between though right now that's gone. Most of the people who worked on Eclipse Phase aren't doing anything with Catalyst now, or are lightly doing freelance work.

I liked Eclipse Phase, it felt like it was a lot to take in at the time though. I used to love SR books too, but they have been less entertaining as of late.

If you can get a copy of Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net that would be an incredible read. Well, at least it was like 8 years ago when I read it.

[Evil Scientist]

[Evil Scientist]

[Groffa]

I really like Numenera, haven't had the opportunity to play it yet, but the setting and writing is really inspiring.