Dogs in the Vineyard
Dogs in the Vineyard is a game of bad-ass holy cowboys travelling from town to town righting wrongs and shooting sinners in the face by D. Vincent "Lumpley" Baker. Ok, it's more complicated than that, but that's the heart of it, setting-wise.
Player-wise, it's a game of morality, whatever that means to you. But don't let me turn you off to it with these oversimplifications. DitV is a very cool game that's fun to play. Basically, you're out in the foothills and plains of an Old West that "never quite was". Essentiallly it's the American Old West with Mormon settlers and Native Americans and horses and six-shooters and soldiers and city-slickers living "back east" in their big, sinful cities, but not. It's like some kind of parallel alternate reality. The players take the roles of "troubleshooters" for The Faith, nicknamed "Dogs" (as in "God's Watchdogs"). They have ultimate authority while out patrolling the towns of the Faithful. Their job is to root out sin and evil in the towns for the town's own good. The people themselves aren't as important as saving the community as a whole from sin. Sometimes it's better for one to die than for many to suffer. Then again, more often than not, the people of these close-knit communities are your friends and relatives, brothers and cousins. Would you kill your own blood for the good of the community?
Yeah, ok, inquisitors have been done before. The setting is keen and all, but what really makes the game tick are the rules. They, along with the player's interest, make conflicts matter. It pushes you to ask how far you're willing to go, how important the stakes are you. If you're losing an argument, are you willing to punch the guy? If you're losing a fight, are you willing to pull a knife? A gun? Are you willing to shoot it? What if it's your friend? Your brother? Your mother? And next time you have to make a similar decision, declaring "this is sin" and "this is not sin", what if the situation is different? What if there are "extenuating circumstances"? What if the very doctrine you follow is what is causing the problem in the town in the first place? All of it's very intense, and the resolution mechanic for finding out who wins a conflict and what happens to them on the way is great! Your various stats and traits and belongings and relationship, which are all rated in dice, give you a pool which is rolled, and then you take turns saying or doing things to try to get your way in the conflict, and backing them up with a couple of the numbers from the dice you rolled. The other guy either turns the tables on you, negates or avoids what you did, or accepts what you said or did, and uses up some of the dice he rolled to back it up. Whoever runs out of dice first, or is unwilling to keep going for RP reasons, loses and the other guy gets what he wanted to happen.
After any conflict, if you had to accept any of the other guy's "attacks" you roll some dice and see how it changes your character (you get to pick from a list, but it needs to make sense with regard to the conflict that just happened.) It's possible you could win the conflict but die in the process, but only if it's important enough to you that you'd risk it.
The structuring of the game and the advice ("Escalate, Escalate, Escalate", "Drive Play Towards Conflict", etc) are really great for making the game play the way it's supposed to. It might be a little different from what many people are used to, but personally it's one of my favorite games.
The book is small (digest sized?), about 155 pages long and has a pretty cool illustration on the front of a pair of Dogs in their distinguishing quilted longcoats. The art inside is sparse and not great, but that may be appropriate to the genre, I don't know. The book isn't organized really well either, but there's a "rules index" at the back which mostly makes up for it.
If you want to try something different, if you want to play an RPG that has meaning and tells a story, but is still as cool as cowboys fighting demons and shooting people in the face, then I'd definitely pick this game up. You can even get it in PDF form if you're one a budget. (PDF: $14.00 Print: $22.00)