More than a decade and a half ago, I have a recollection of a friend coming to school one day with a small book which was an early Magic the Gathering RPG. I recall that it was about being a planeswalker and some other minor details. I can't for the life of me remember anything more about it, or find it on ebay. Does anyone know anything about this game? My interest is simply for nostalgic reasons.
[RPG] What was this Magic the Gathering RPG I remember
product-identification
Related Solutions
That would be Unknown Armies, "A roleplaying game of transcendental horror and furious action." The "major and minor charges" gives it away. It was written by the famous RPG designers John Tynes (Delta Green, Puppletland, and a lot of Pagan Publishing for Call of Cthulhu) and Greg Stolze (Over the Edge, Godlike, Reign, A Dirty World) and is published by Atlas Games. It has two editions. The last reprinting was 2007 so I'm not sure if that counts as "in print" or not, probably not.
Any game with a supplement called "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" is a shoo-in with me. I have UA 1e, several of the supplements, and the 2e corebook.
The game is probably most famous, besides being an excellent mature RPG (not sophomoric at all like many other "mature" efforts out there) for its madness system. Tynes was of course a Call of Cthulhu veteran but they wanted something more nuanced - the CoC Sanity Point system is very hit point like - and so they came up with the idea of five mental stress categories (Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self) and the idea you can get failures in each track but failures can also cause you to become hardened to some degree in each track and become less liable to loss from, say, low Violence stresses if you are exposed to that a lot.
The occult system is also very cool, you get major, significant, or minor magick "charges" from items or activities unique to your school. You can get minor charges by cutting yourself for epideromancers or taking a drink for dipsomancers, for example - but to get a major charge it requires something quite unique, like reenacting a scene no one else ever has from the Naked Goddess' life or films for a pornomancer (yes, it's what you think it is).
The third most notable thing about the game is the cosmology; there are archetypes you can seek to become an avatar of - like the Flying Woman, The Masterless Man, the True King, or the Mystic Hermaphrodite. There's a large occult underground that is all trying to get more or less in touch with all this stuff. Dresden Files fans will find it all not that dissimilar.
UA is a very gritty game - mature, deadly, weird. It's one of the top ten games ever published IMO. Heck it even has a TVTropes entry.
It is now back in print, with a Kickstarted third edition.
You might be referring to the Fighting Fantasy series of game books, starting with the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which were later coalesced into a roleplaying system, also called Fighting Fantasy.
Googling for it now, I can see that the Fighting Fantasy Introductory Roleplaying Game was released in 1984, while an expanded Advanced Fighting Fantasy series was released between 1989-1994
Could this be the system you're looking for?
Best Answer
If your timing is right, and your terminology close, then what you might have seen is an Everway sourcebook. Everway was a card-based roleplaying game released by Wizards of the Coast concerning people known as spherewalkers who can journey from world to world. It could easily be mistaken for a Magic: the Gathering RPG.
To be clear, however: no official Magic RPG exists, or has existed. However, Dungeons & Dragons 5e has bridged the gap between MtG and D&D. Here's an official writeup of Zendikar as a D&D setting, straight from Wizards of the Coast. Here's one of Innistrad. But the biggest change has been the release of the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, which brings one of MtG's signature worlds into D&D5E.
Ryan S. Dancey has, on Reddit, posted what can be seen as a comprehensive supplement to this answer.
Other Wizards of the Coast employees chime in on his Facebook page.