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The Old World is a dark, medieval fantasy world, with elements blatantly stolen from all corners of the fantasy genre, and full of black, british humour. The charakter design and game system are original and fun to play. They are nice and simple to use, but not very realistic. Who cares? When you are playing Warhammer, you are doing it mainly for fun. And where else can you play rat-catchers, students (bonus skill alcohol consumption), or demagogues. While the table top system of Warhammer tends to be played by fourteen year olds and fat guys with body odor who have no real life, who revel in having the biggest, baddest orc general, the role playing game is not like that. You hope you never meet that orc general, and if you do, it probably will turn out that he is sucking his thumb when nobody watches.
Runequest is one of the games using the Chaosium system. The Runquest version is the most detailed one I know of, a bit too detailed for my taste (its an old pun that the exhaustion rules of Runequest are tiring). Still, the Chaosium system is by far the most elegant one I've ever seen, simple and yet very realistic. And the standard world for Runequest, Glorantha, is the most realistic fantasy role playing world I've ever seen. A lot has been copied from ancient civilisations. Glorantha is definitely the RPG for grown-ups, who have not the need to be cool, play super-heroes or change and rule the world they play in. Nearly everything your character is is defined by his place in society, and he also has duties to his tribe or village. People who just run around wielding swords like in more adolescent-oriented RPGs have no backup, are not trusted and end in the gutter. While many RPGs play in a world comparable to middle age technology, Glorantha is still mainly in the bronze age. One funny little detail, which Glorantha is best known for, is that you can play a duck. The one depicted by me here is Spark Valor, who by profession is a Humakti, a kind of paladin for the grim God of Death - a very unusual combination. Unfortunately, if you are not as lucky as I and get to know some people who know the designers, it is hard to find the material these days.
Das Schwarze Auge ("The Black Eye") was the first widely distributed german role playing game, and still is the most successful one. Back in 1982, when it was introduced, I stumbled upon a Box of "Das schwarze Auge" in a book store, which I mistook as some kit which helped programming adventures on a home computer. Still it wasn't a bad buy. The system has changed a lot since those days and I'm not familiar with it anymore. In the first edition, the rules were extremely simple: level-based, no skills, you made all tests against one of your base character attributes, and there were 11 spells overall for player character mages. Of course the evil necromancers in the adventures worked all kinds of crazy magics. It was a lot of fun.
The Midgard system is another german system - I think the oldest one - I never really liked. Mages are comparatively weak compared to fighters, rules are pretty complicated yet not realistic.
I played AD&D a lot. Probably I played only "Das Schwarze Auge" and Call of Cthulhu as much. AD&D had a totally illogical character creation system, skill system and combat system. Nothing was unified, everything patched together as happenstance. All of this changed, when Wizards of the Coast bought up TSR, the manufactorer od AD&D. They did an incredible job to clean up the rules while preserving the spirit of the game. In D&D, there are weirdnesses, like the spells that you forget once you utter them, ridiculous. But it really is fun to play. Especially on the lower character levels, say level 3-7, where you can play the character, rather than keeping book of his special abilities, spells and stats. On higher levels Magic becomes incredibly strong, dominating the whole game, and the players are so mighty that normal problems are not even a hassle anymore. You have to throw armies, dragons and demons at them. It's a heroic system after all. I think much of the charming quality of D&D comes frome the Monster Manuals and Rulebook, which are packed with atmosphere, ideas, little details and show this game has been tested and refined by thousands of players. You also get great background material, worlds to play in all thought out. I always liked the fairy-tale fantasy feeling of the core modules better. This is how medieval fantasy should look like. Valiant Knights, evil Dragons, mighty Wizards. The classic stuff.
Call of Cthulhu is my all-time favourite role playing game for experienced game masters and players alike. It has the best character design and play system, where you can concentrate on the person you play, not the rules. And, while the rules are ridiculously simple, they are more realistic than most of the other rules I've seen. Combat is pretty abstracted and deadly. Magic only defined by a host of example spells. How could there be rules for the supernatural, anyway? You usually play everyday people from the 1920's, who are confronted with the horrors of the Lovecraft-Mythos. They try to keep their mental sanity, while struggling against crazed cultists, stern policemen and things that should not be. Opposed to fantasy worlds, in CoC you spend a lot of time on research and investigation and avoid violence like the plague, because what you are up against tends to crush you like a foul egg if you confront it bluntly (and is immune to bullets, most of the time, too).
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