Call of Cthulhu RPG: Malleus Monstrorum. With the subtitle, "Lore of Things Beyond," you know this book won't steer you wrong. This is actually a revised edition of the Call of Cthulhu RPG's Creature Companion. It collects all the statistics and background information on the many Lovecraftian horrors that have appeared in every published Call of Cthulhu book ever. From crazed cultists to tentacled things to elder gods your mortal mind can't even comprehend, Malleus Monstrorum has you covered.

Star Trek Roleplaying Game: Aliens. There are a lot of aliens out there, and some of them aren't even part of the Federation. In your explorations, you will likely encounter many of them. Therefore, it behooves you to know as much as possible about their abilities, habits and physiology. This sourcebook for the Star Trek RPG fills in all the details. Curious about Horta culture? Wondering how much to tip a Betazoid waiter? Most of these questions are answered here. This also makes a great companion piece to the Starfleet Operations Manual.

World of Darkness: Armory Reloaded. This is, essentially, a book of violence. Not only does it provide a list of efficient and brutal weapons to use in the battle against vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures (or on their behalf, if you swing that way), but it also amplifies the World of Darkness combat rules, making them…well, more violent. When I reviewed this book for Robot Viking a few months ago, I called out this paragraph from the intro, which perfectly exemplifies the approach taken throughout the book:

We want to emphasize here and throughout: combat is some scary business. Blood spattering in the mud, people screaming, the smell of cordite burning nostrils. Bombs blowing people to bits. A vampire's claws leaving a man with his guts hanging out and his wife standing ten feet away, crying so hard she breaks a rib.

Wow.

AD&D 2nd Edition: Van Richten's Guide to Vampires. They aren't here for you to fall in love with, they don't generally smell nice, and they sure as hell don't sparkle. In the many worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, vampires are universally evil. They're usually placed at the apex of the undead hierarchy (liches sometimes compete for the top spot), so you'll find them behind nefarious schemes as often as they're responsible for a rash of bloodless corpses. Van Richten has hunted and slain vampires of all kinds, so you'd do well to heed his advice. Don't bring garlic, bring an enchanted sword. Or, better yet, a Daylight spell.

Gamma World: Machines and Mutants. Gamma World has gone through so many editions and revisions it's hard to keep track. This is from one of the more recent incarnations of the post-nuclear apocalyptic setting. Imagine a world that's a little bit Logan's Run, a little bit Fallout, and that's pretty much Gamma World. This is perhaps the most bizarre manual on this list, as it documents all manner of weird robots and freakish mutants. No, I mean really freakish. Sentient, evil penguins. Genetically engineered fireproof bears. Exploding fish. My personal favorite is the Architect, a robot that's been continually building for decades, creating non-sensical road networks dotted with houses that will remain forever empty. Also, there are man-eating cars.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

This takes us onto the Physical and Mental Mutation tables, full of exotic adaptations to the new brave new world ("Quills/Spines", "Pyrokinesis" "Multiple Body Parts"), and the occasional dark side of genetic damage ("Hemophilia," say, or "Epilepsy").

When it arrived in stores in the early 1980s, Gamma World was announced like this:

The first world is lost in the mythical past, the second was destroyed by apocalyptic energies, and now a whole new world awaits you - GAMMA WORLD!

...or would we!? Because maybe we'd still be around, and everything would be messed up in a cool way. When I was playing Gamma World in junior high, it seemed vaguely plausible that in a few years we'd have tattoos, and cool rubble to climb around on. There would be tribes!

Gamma World's principal architects were Gary Jaquet and James M. Ward - the latter of whom must be touched by some visionary quality, since his name is on Metamorphosis Alpha and Deities and Demigods. It's patterned more after science fantasy than science fiction proper - the creators cite The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's marvelous Wizards, a post-apocalypse subgenre boiled down and codified into 56 pages of narratively generative charts'n'tables.

Players set out into an America remade as a country of mutants, rural communities, and the mystery-shrouded ruins of a prior civilization. Robot farms, nomadic tribes, ancient spaceports, mutated forests and radioactive desert dot the landscape as well as the Cryptic Alliances, crackpot factions contesting for the fragments of what used to be.

As a context for storytelling Gamma World gets full marks. Gamma World's crazy mix of high-tech and ruined-garden aesthetics is still my preferred vision of the post-Reaganite era. In Mad Max, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the post-nuclear world is a humorless burned-out husk, but Gamma World is lush and green, a hothouse full of unwholesome life - like dropping the bombs just kicks everything up a notch.

It combines that neo-tribal waste-land adventure with a Riddley Walker, Motel of the Mysteries vibe - familiar artifacts become strange to us, the present day world we walk around in becomes a strange and distant past, a lost technological climax instant for the human race. Poignant and thrilling at the same time.

But Gamma World never caught on in a big way. Some X-factor was missing - maybe it lacked D&D's potent fantasy urtexts. Or maybe it was in the game design? GW's character creation lacks the hard-wired archetypal structure of D&D's class system - sure, mutations are fun, but it doesn't bring the ready-made type-casting of fighter vs magic user vs thief.

And the reward schedule isn't there. You don't go up levels - in Gamma World your base stats go up, and you can find artifacts, and there's a thin chance of further mutation (here I consult the Radiation Matrix), but you don't find that steady treadmill of advancement that keeps D&D and WoW players grinding onward and opening up new areas in the game mechanics.

And of course the nail in the coffin is the post-Reagan New World Order itself, which let the air out of our collective investment in a grim post-nuclear endgame.

But Gamma World keeps being remade, even unto the Sixth Edition. Cormac McCarthy, along with Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and even Al Gore, show that the devastated future Earth still has a place in the contemporary imagination. I like to think McCarthy would appreciate the final pages of the 1981 manual, a 100-item treasure table full of poignant relics as "57. Jungle gym - fair condition, used," or "1859 Swiss Infantry Sabre - excellent condition, well polished blade." Gamma World is a future with a past that includes the world we see around us, which ought to mean as much as a bunch of halflings.

And, seriously, as futures go, would you rather the boring old Singularity, or Gamma World? Do you really want to float around in space chatting with Farsc4pe_Guy_21 or do you want to explore a secret bunker shattered by nuclear fire, to learn the truth of our elder civilization? Leporinoid art by David Trampier.

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• Gygax spent his formative years reading science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber as well as the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian via Robert E. Howard's books.
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• In 1953 Gygax first played Gettysburg by Avalon Hill, and later ended up ordering blank hexagonal mapping paper from the same company.
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• In 1966 he founded the International Federation of Wargamers with friends, and in 1967 he organized a 20 person gaming get-together in his basement that was later billed as Gen Con 0. Gen Con is now the world's largest hobby-gaming convention.
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• He founded the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, which was a military miniatures society. This guy sure loved his Associations, Federations, and groups.
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• In 1971, he and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game, which later featured a supplementary set of rules featuring magic spells and other fantasy elements.
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• After playing Gettysburg, he became obsessed with finding ways to generate random numbers rather than using traditional six-sided dice. He found a set of the five platonic solids in the back of a school supply catalog and ordered several sets, and later introduced them into gaming in D&D. In fact, owning your own dice and keeping them in a little velvet bag was a sign of geek coolness, back then.
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• In 1974 he formed Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye and released the first set of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and their first run of 1,000 hand-printed editions sold out in nine months, and were later passed around college and high school campuses across the nation.
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• In 1976, TSR introduced the game Metamorphosis Alpha, which later became Gamma World. The game was inspired by Brian Aldiss' novel Starship, and later crossed over into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world with the "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" module. Gygax said the module was meant to show what would happen if a ship like one in Metamorphosis Alpha crashed into a D&D world.
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• In 1982 TSR followed the scifi vein with Star Frontiers, which featured swashbuckling space adventure through the unexplored worlds of the Frontier. This was actually my first introduction to role-playing games, and I have to admit that I loved this game a lot more than D&D. In fact, I'm tempted to dig through trunks to see if I still have the rulebook.
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• Gygax left TSR in 1984 during changes to management, and began working on the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon show.
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• In 1987 Gygax developed Cyborg Commando, a science fiction roleplaying game "set in 2035 at a time when the earth is invaded by aliens called Xenoborgs intent on subduing humanity and taking control of the planet. Luckily humanity has developed a new kind of solider: the Cyborg Commando, a mechanical/electronical man-like structure that can be implanted with a willing human's brain." Unfortunately it was later criticized as "the worst role-playing game ever written."
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• In 1999 he introduced Lejendary Adventure, which was meant to be a return to less-complicated gameplay with an emphasis on fun, although it explored the familiar gaming territory already well-covered by D&D. One of the last projects he had been working on was an expansion module for Lejendary called "Lejendary AsteRogues", as sort of "fantastical science RPG." According to Gygax, "The Lejendary AsteRogues game is actually in the "Fantastical Science" area, not true SF. It is a sort of mix of steampunk and super science with a leavening of Napoleonic Era military material." Sounds pretty scifi to us.
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• He wrote two science fiction short stories, "Pay Tribute" and "The Battle Off Deadstar," which were published in the scifi anthology The Fleet and Breakthrough (The Fleet, Book 3).
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• He has a strain of bacteria named after him: "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393." We hope it's not flesh-eating.
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• In 2000 he appeared as himself on an episode ofFuturama along with Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Stephen Hawking. He rolls the dice to determine which greeting to give to Fry.