Wait, wait!
Not finished yet, I guess…
Call it an errata, if you wish, but the truth is there are simply too many games and too many complex aspects of RPGs to ever really be “finished.” Even in the process of writing this, games have come out that are far better examples of, say, experiments with Game Balance or explorations of real-time than the examples I used.
And that’s nothing compared to the subjects I haven’t even broached.
When I first started this…I guess you could call it a project, I did it for weird reasons. I had been struggling with my other writing projects, hitting brick wall after brick wall, forcing my fingers to type out trite and uninteresting sentences that advanced boring stories with empty souls, to the point where sitting down to write was becoming an act of self-harm. My brain began its spiraling semi-regularly, and it began to adversely affect my relationships with my friends, family, and myself.
I wanted to end this project with a discussion of this game, because for all the myriad of games I have mentioned in this journey of ours, Wanderhome differs in perhaps some of the most significant and profound ways from all the others.
Based on the Belonging Outside Belonging system (also called “No dice, no masters”) from the Dream Askew and Dream Apart games, Wanderhome is, quote: “a pastoral fantasy roleplaying game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change.
In Nowhere Kingdom, the players take the role of a council of advisors and gentry charged with suggesting policies and proposals to the ruling Demons of the Kingdom. Thankfully, these demons are not evil; just mildly cruel, mostly bored, and they only get to rule the Kingdom for a year — their price for overthrowing the previous tyrant.
As the game progresses, random problems land on the council-table and the council-members must all come up with proposals to solve them.
Noumenon is an RPG…and frankly, that’s almost all I’m prepared to say categorically about it.
Noumenon is a system designed to facilitate an exploration of a surreal dream. Characters wake up as the insect-like Sarcophagi trapped within the Silhouette Rouge, and they barely have time to look around before they are approached by a well-dressed three-eyed elephant-headed being who guides them to a sweeping staircase with only thirty-three steps that reaches all the way up and out of a hundred-story-high cavern.
Do Not Read This Journal is a horror journaling RPG, but I hesitate to call it a Solo experience. Certainly, the process of journaling in the game is akin to other Solo RPGs, along with its cards and oracles. The significant difference is, once you have finished your journaling — your “turn,” as it were — you tuck the rules into the first page of the journal and pass it on to someone else.
Hero Quest is the best game ever made.
The best thing about Hero Quest is the gold. Every quest grants your characters gold that can be used to acquire cracking equipment that improves your character’s chances at surviving their next quest.
Okay, but is Hero Quest really an RPG? Perhaps, perhaps not. If it is, it certainly leans heavily into the strategy-board game side of RPGs, similar to the RPG-like Gloomhaven or Betrayal at House on the Hill.
I feel like the name Demon Crawl — Gothic does a good job of explaining the tone and style of the game, so I will instead focus on its inspirations. As a table-top strategy RPG, it was inspired in part by action games like Diablo and Doom.
If those sound like strange inspirations for an RPG, I understand the instinct. As I’ve explained before, being inspired by computer games is not exactly uncommon among RPGs, but the kind of inspiration that Demon Crawl has taken from Diablo and Doom is not exclusively their tone or setting.
Paradox Perfect is, quote: “the improv comedy sci-fi TTRPG of absolute absurdity and chronological chaos! Generate a bizarre Utopian future, roleplay even stranger time-travelers to defend it, and embark on an adventure through history to save the timeline from alteration - before your past, present, and future change along with it!” Paradox Perfect uses the standard die rolling mechanics of a Forged in the Dark game; rolling d6s and calling 1-3 a miss, 4-5 a hit with a complication, and 6 a straight success.
Revels in the Heavenly Hall is, quote: “a game of violence without dice, powered by autonomy and collaboration in a one-shot framework that lets you sketch out a battlemap, arrange fighters on it one by one and then smash them into one another with reckless abandon. Its aim is to simulate tactics — not only good tactics, but awful ones too; ones that you would be ashamed to have thought of in a setting where the stakes are high and the story hinged on you being good at much of anything.
