This one’s a tough one. I realized, looking at the wall of gaming books across from me that a lot of the stuff I run is licensed material now. It wasn’t always the case. The only real licensed game I ran was James Bond: 007 by Victory Games, and while I had bought a few like the execrable Indiana Jones RPG that was really an unfinished set of rules, I remember playing Ghostbusters once and it was fun, and the DC Heroes game from the 1980s, but that was it. It wasn’t until the 1990s that licensed games started to really multiply.

Let’s see: there was West End Games’ easy and rules lite Star Wars — which is still better than the ones that came after. It was the king of the dice pool games — nothing like needing a wheelbarrow for your big climactic battle with a stardestroyer. There was the Last Unicorn then Decipher Star Trek systems, the weird Babylon 5 game that I ran for about two years straight. In the aughties, however, there were a bunch of these — Firefly or Serenity, depending on the flavor of Cortex you liked; Supernatural, Dresden Files, Battlestar Galactica — and that was just Margaret Weiss Games. Doctor Who, Avatar, and now Alien and Blade Runner. The goes on…

My favorite license? Hands down, Blade Runner. I love police procedurals. I love moral and ethical dilemmas. I love cyberpunkish settings. It’s got all that, in a setting I love, with solid, rules lite mechanics, great artwork, and a solid creative team on it.

But my favorite licensed RPG..? I think that’s a tie, really. For the longest time, it would have been — without contest — James Bond: 007. The mechanics were elegant and innovative for the time, it was perfect for the ’80s and my fascination with spy movies, action movies, Bond, cars, guns, you have it. We played the hell out of it and I’m on my third boxed set and main book. I modified the rules for a cyberpunk campaign and a Stargate campaign, and the system worked without much tweaking. A few different games split my attention about the middle of the aughties and JB:007 got less and less table time…then we just never got back to it.

One of the reasons is the other licensed RPG that ties with JB:007 — Battlestar Galactica. I loved the reimagined show, as most vets I know did. It was produced by a guy, Ronald D. Moore, that had been naval ROTC and did a rotation on the frigate WS Sims. He actually knew what military life was like — something pretty rare since the WWII and Vietnam vets in Hollywood aged out. It presented “realistic” version of the Galactica universe — not one where your civilization gets wiped out and next week your at the casino planet hanging out, but where the impact and consequences are dire. There’s moral and ethical dilemmas — something my daughter has noted I seem to like in my movies. Best of all the lightweight, simple rules of the early Cortex system — but improved from the Serenity rules set — lent to roleplaying over roll-playing. I wound up running the best campaign I’ve ever done in that game and setting — one that lasted five years and was so damned satisfying when it ended that I still look back on it six years later and wish we were still playing it.