The Escapist - The Young Person's Adventure League

The Adventurer's Atlas is your guide to the best role-playing adventure games for young people, a sort of road map to other worlds where you are free to explore as another character, a tour guide of places to go and people to be (which would have been an even better title for this section if someone hadn't already beaten me to it).

Be aware that there is a lot of information here. Please don't be daunted by the number of entries on this list. The purpose is to give you several options from which to choose, not to overwhelm you with choices.

Each roleplaying game in the Atlas is detailed with a series of criteria, followed by a few paragraphs that supply any extra information you may need to know. Explanations of the criteria are listed below.

~ Publisher: The name of the company (or companies) that publish the game. This is good to know if you're trying to order a game from a game or book store that has never heard of it before.

~ Cover Price: What you can expect to pay for the game brand new, or in the case of out of print games, a general figure of what it may cost in an online auction. Prices listed for PDFs are for downloadable digital copies that you can view and print from your computer. Sometimes, these listings will include a PoD price directly after them - this stands for "Print on Demand," a service where the PDF document is printed, assembled into a book, and shipped to you directly. Many books that are out of print can be found for sale in PDF format. You may occasionally see a "PDF & print" price listed - this is a package deal that some publishers offer where a PDF is sent to you to read and enjoy right away, while waiting for your print edition to arrive in the mail.

~ Availability: Explains whether the book is still in print or not - which tells you whether you'll be able to find it new in a store, as a PDF download, or have to hunt for it in some secluded forbidden bookstore in the slums of Calcutta.

~ Summary: A general idea of the kinds of adventures this game contains.

~ Complexity: This is a rating of how complex the rules of the game are, using three different categories: Easy, Medium, and Complex. Easy RPGs are usually very rules-lite, have less detailed characters, and involve little or no die rolling. Medium RPGs have more involved rules, have characters with several stats and/or skills, and rely on more dice rolling (and may even use more than one type of die. Complex games have many rules, very detailed characters with lots of stats, skills, and other abilities, and require a lot of die rolling (possibly with modifiers), using many different types of dice.

~ Dice used: An explanation of the dice you will need to play the game. If all of the "d4s" and "d12s" make no sense to you at all, you may be well served by a trip to the F.A.Q. page.

~ Supplements: Explains the availability of supplemental material for the game - additional books and online material that expand the rules, setting, or both. Remember - you don't usually need extra books to play a roleplaying game; they add interest, and can fill sections of a game that you would like to see fleshed out, but you can function without them.

~ The Good: Positives about the game - what makes it fun, what players will like most about it, and what features of the game might even teach them something, if they're not careful.

~ The Bad: Negatives about the game - usually price, or complexity of the rules, that sort of thing. Weigh this against the good to judge what value the game will have to you.

~ Advisory: Elements of the game that parents, guardians, and/or teachers may want to know about. None of the games listed here contain graphic violence or realistic occult practices, but those that might contain cinematic/cartoon violence or fantasy magic are pointed out here, so that parents and others can make informed decisions.

In these entries, you will see the edition of certain games mentioned frequently. In most cases, when a role-playing game has a new edition printed, the rules are updated - and sometimes there can be drastic changes to them. Because of this, supplements for one edition may not be compatible with editions that came before or after it. It is almost always possible to convert the material to the different rule system once you have a working knowledge of the rules, however.