GLARP 
Geek Lifetime Achievement in Role-Playing
History of the Award
The Geek Lifetime Achievement in Role-Playing (GLARP) award began in 2010 with 13 nominees vying for one of three spots in the initial group of entries. The results were determined with a simple poll asking voters to pick a first, second, and third choice from among the games offered.
The poll was open for the month of October 2010 and at the end, 112 role-playing enthusiasts (rpggeeks) had selected three games to enter this hall of fame. The remaining ten games will join new candidates for the First Annual GLARPs in October 2011.
2010 Inductees
Like Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu (1st Edition) has some roots in an older game, in this case RuneQuest (1st & 2nd Editions) which provides the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) which is the core of the mechanics. Call of Cthulhu (1st Edition) was published in 1981. There have been a total of six editions of Call of Cthulu and the source material and changes in mechanics from versions 2 through 6 are so similar that RPG Geek considers them the same system.
Mechanically, the various editions are fairly similar. Characters are occult investigators (not always deliberately) who will confront the horrors of a supernatural world. Unlike many games, players are confronted by two ways their character can leave the game. They can die in a traditional manner by being killed by the horrors they encounter, or they can become insane by being exposed to those horrors or gaining knowledge of magic. In most games, the characters eventually become rich and powerful, but in Call of Cthulhu that future is promised to no one and many characters either die a grisly death or wind up in a mental institution.
Call of Cthulhu uses a skill-based system based on percentile dice. Characters have skills and abilities which they provide their percentage chance of success at various actions. As they are successful in adventuring they are able to improve their skills. There are no classes and no levels.
Call of Cthulhu is the first successful game to be based on investigating mysteries. Unlike prior games, which typically involved characters having encounters as they moved from one area to the next, Call of Cthulhu presented clues which gradually led players from one part of the mystery to the next. It was a fundamental change in the design of adventures.
Call of Cthulhu has provided many source and settings books allowing players to be occult investigators in any era from the Roman Empire to the future. The core setting is in the 1920's but other popular eras include the 1890s (Cthulhu by Gaslight) and modern times (Cthulhu Now). The six editions were published in 1981 (1st), 1983 (2nd), 1986 (3rd), 1989 (4th), 1992 (5th), and 2005 (6th).
Dungeons and Dragons is the oldest of the three games inducted in 2010, with roots in the 1971 game Chainmail. The release of Dungeons & Dragons (Original Edition) in 1974 started the path of what is still the most commercially successful role-playing game in history. It has spawned multiple editions, two feature films, a Saturday morning cartoon, and a raft of best-selling novels. It has also inspired numerous imitators, the basics of many online role-playing games, and more than three decades of play.
Every member of the D&D family shares some basic characteristics. The characters have six ability scores (usually) and those scores define basic aptitudes for various activities. Each character is a member of a class and/or race which helps to define its abilities. As characters progress, they earn experience points which in turn lead to new "levels". Each level grants new powers and abilities. These basic mechanics haven't changed much from the first release in 1974.
Beginning in 1977, there were actually two divergent paths for the game. Basic Dungeons & Dragons was the simpler set of rules and was released typically in boxed sets with everything needed for characters in a range of levels. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Edition) was considered more complex and was actually released over the course of 1977-1979. Several versions of Dungeons and Dragons were released over the ensuing years with new versions in 1981, 1983 and the fifth and final version in 1991. Meanwhile Advanced Dungeons and Dragons did not have a second edition until 1989. The next edition was Dungeons & Dragons (3rd Edition) which was released in 2000 and marked the return to a single game under the Dungeons & Dragons brand. Three years later, Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 Edition) joined the family.
2008 saw the release of Dungeons & Dragons (4th Edition). This latest version marked a major departure from the previous releases and sought to integrate lessons learned from the world of online gaming. The game retained its class and level structure, but the classes and powers were changed greatly with an eye towards making every character useful in combat all the time. The new version also emphasized the use of miniatures more strongly than any of the previous editions. In 2010, D&D Essentials was released creating a new entry point for the 4th edition of the game.
2011 Inductees
Traveller was, according to the creator Marc W. Miller, an attempt to do Dungeons and Dragons in space. There are many hallmarks of that in the rules, not the least of which is a lack of a detailed setting in the core books. Traveller has had many editions, most of which used the same basic rules of the 1977 edition. That edition, now called "Classic Traveller" by some, is still in print today.
Traveller uses a lifepath system for character generation. Players generate a character by choosing a profession (initially limited to Army, Navy, Marine, Scout, Science, and Other) and then rolling for the results of their previous career. Once a character has been generated he will have a number of skills and possibly some equipment. Characters can die during character generation. Within the context of the game, task resolution is typically 2d6 + Skill to beat a target of 8 or higher. Later versions changed the rules on resolution to accommodated various levels of difficulty.
Traveller is very different from other games of the time because there is no provision for characters to gain levels or make other improvements to their skills. Once the character is generated there are no changes in his his skills or abilities. Traveller can also be described as the progenitor of the "splat" book. Although the initial rules were very similar for all lifepaths, there were soon advanced rules for generating characters from various lifepaths. The first of these was Mercenary which covered Army and Marine characters; it was released in 1978. Books for other professions soon followed.
White Wolf Games Studio was formed from a combination of the Wieck brothers' White Wolf Magazine and Mark Rein•Hagen's Lion Rampart RPG publisher (known for Ars Magica). Their first new RPG was Vampire: The Masquerade released in 1991. This combined the dice pool system of Shadowrun (due to the inclusion of designer Tom Dowd) with a dark modern-day gothic-punk setting (the World of Darkness) in which vampires manipulate mortal civilisation behind the scenes. Character classes were implemented as vampire clans, each with a different feel, and the range of supernatural powers gave the game a superheroic slant.
The RPG was phenomenally successful and revitalised the RPG industry in the 1990s. On the back of its success, further linked lines were added to the World of Darkness. Each year a new full RPG was developed: Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming; each of these played very differently and could be used independently, or mixed together crossing over genres. Additional lines introduced historical settings for the European dark ages, the American wild west, the European renaissance, the First World War, and Victorian age Europe. Further expansions to the range of RPGs included Kindred of the East, Hunter: The Reckoning, Mummy: The Resurrection, Demon: The Fallen, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, and Orpheus (Orpheus was particularly notable for being designed as a fixed number of books). Various live action RPGs were created too, opening up the LARP scene to a new type of game that (being set in the modern day) had less stringent costume requirements than the traditional fantasy games. Card games, board games, merchandising, and even a mainstream television series were produced.
With the remarkable success of its core games, White Wolf grew rapidly producing hundreds of rulebooks and supplements. Ultimately not all lines were big sellers, and the publisher found they'd spread themselves too thin. Additionally the setting's metaplot had grown vast with the many interconnected games, and had evolved in complex ways over time. So when the company had a change in management, the World of Darkness was brought to an end in a global Armageddon (playable as a range of scenarios) bringing various in-game prophecies to fruition. White Wolf then rebooted with a cleaner, more streamlined New World of Darkness, inspired by but completely separate from the Classic WoD.
The tale does not end there. In 2011 White Wolf announced the publication of a 20th Anniversary edition of Vampire. The fanbase responded so enthusiastically that further new releases are now planned and the Classic World of Darkness is again enjoying new publications. The back catalogue of titles is also available in both PDF and print-on-demand formats from Steve Wieck's DrivethruRPG. The Classic World of Darkness contains role-playing opportunities to meet the tastes of nearly every gamer. That diversity has earned it a large fanbase that has never stopped playing its games and now continues to support its ongoing publication.
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