Betrayal at House on the Hill is an RPG.
No, it isn’t.
I mean, it is, kinda, but it very much isn’t. Betrayal is a lovely little game where you create your own 80s horror flick, complete with traitor, campy villain, and spooky house. If you go looking to buy Betrayal you’ll find it on the shelf next to all the other board games, not an RPG to be seen.
Mörk Borg is grimdark, apocalyptic, and born from a mix of doom-metal album cover and fever dream. It is rust, rags, and rotten meat. It is rules-light, and tone-rich.
First, let’s talk about violence. Combat in Mörk Borg is simple enough. It borrows heavily from the d20 systems you’re familiar with; roll a d20, add your bonuses, and if you roll over the difficulty rating, you succeed.
The difficulty rating is 12.
World Ending Game is an RPG about what it says on the tin. It is, quote: “a falling-action game. Many existing game systems excel at climactic final battles or big-stakes adventures, but don’t allow you to sit in the aftermath, thinking about all that has come before and imagining what could come after. World Ending Game is a tool to let you do just this.”
The game is mostly comprised of minigames, called Endings.
Set in space, Mothership takes its cues from the horror sci-fi genre; everything from Aliens to Event Horizon. Players familiar with Call of Cthulhu will likely be comfortable with the game’s sanity and panic mechanics, while the addition of classes and a tiered skill tree round out the flexibility of character creation. Space is dangerous, death comes easy, and if your character is lucky enough, they might make it to second level.
So you may have noticed — I certainly have — that I’ve generally use Fantasy and Horror games for examples in this treatise. Of course there are more genres and styles than those two, but it does bring up a fascinating dichotomy in the hobby.
Let’s look at the RPG Sins. Heavily based on the Storyteller System used in White Wolf games like Exalted or Werewolf, Sins casts your persona as an undead being recently wrenched back to some form of self-awareness.
Cairn is, according to its website, quote: “an adventure game about exploring a dark & mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. Character generation is quick and random, classless, and relies on fictional advancement rather than through XP or level mechanics.”
Aesthetically, Cairn is a fantasy D&D-like, with swords and spells and goblins galore. Mechanically, it’s an interesting mix of new and old-school rules. Random rolling of character stats is from the early era, when new characters’ long-term survival was neither expected nor reliable.
Rules-light and focused on ordinary people, the center of Endure as a survival RPG is, quote: “Its Endurance economy. Endurance helps characters succeed and keeps them going, but is always depleting. If you are out of Endurance, you have to rely solely on your cunning and luck of the roll — and often it is not enough to survive. You need time and resources to recover Endurance, so the game ebbs and flows between tense action and quiet downtime.
Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying is tongue-in-cheek to be sure. Designed as a storytelling game with no prep and only a few dice, the game is a gentle jab at an aspect of RPGs that has gone by the wayside in recent years; the inventory.
Now, that’s not entirely true. Almost every RPG acknowledges that characters can carry things, keeping them in their pockets or backpacks. Many don’t bother keeping careful track, however, opting for the adventure-game route of hammerspace or bottomless pockets.
Burnout Reaper is a dark and bloody cyberpunk game about the murderous gig economy: rich people need organs, and thanks to the omnipotent forces of supply and demand, your job is to acquire them from people who haven’t finished using them yet. A Grand Guignol style bloodbath relishing in the horrors of late-stage capitalism, Burnout Reaper is a brilliant, if blunt, exploration of Economy.
Each gig you take rewards you with Cyber Crypto, or CC.
Sacrifice is a universal RPG system, though only technically. In practice, Sacrifice is a deconstruction of the entire RPG medium and dramatic storytelling.
There is, in fact, only one simple set of rules: your character can do anything that the narrative has established your character can do. When they want to do something that the narrative hasn’t established they can do, then they roll 2d6. If they roll a 12, then they succeed.
