Never Played Day Nine: Larry Niven’s Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch

[james_davis_nicoll]

Day Nine of RPGs I've owned but never played: John Hewitt & Sherman Kahn's Larry Niven’s Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch. Published by Chaosium, using yet another version of their BRP ruleset, this SF RPG offered players with the chance to roleplay in Larry Niven's Known Space [1]. The game crammed a lot of information into the basic set, with even more in the Companion. Production values were very high, as was the price (Something like $130 in current dollars). Yes, that's a Ralph McQuarrie cover. LNRW: RABtGA was also doomed, because scarcely had the game come out before Niven made a lucrative media deal and yanked the rights back from Chaosium. LNRW: RABtGA is very much out of print.

This was one of the games I most avidly anticipated in the mid-1980s and of course I never got around to playing it.


Read my review here!


1: I'd say this was before Niven's colourful eccentricities were known but really, Lucifer's Hammer, with its cannibal armies and asides like "The only good thing about Hammerfall, women’s lib was dead milliseconds after Hammerstrike" gave a pretty good idea of where Niven's head was at.