Designed to be played in only a few sessions, Alas Vegas is structured like an HBO miniseries, focusing on the strange surreal uncertainties that await each player. Afflicted with amnesia at the start of the game, they don’t know exactly who they are, where they are, or why they’re there. The players choose which skills they gain through narrative flashbacks, giving the characters shape both narratively and mechanically as the game continues.

Liminal Horror is a rules-light system for modern horror stories, taking inspiration from places like Silent Hill, Junji Ito, and Silent Legions. Horror, like any narrative genre, can be applied in different ways. GURPS and FATE can both handle horror adventures, as can D&D with its Ravenloft series, or Blades in the Dark with its ghosts and demons. Any system can tell a horror story, because any game can have horrific things happen in it.

Michtim is an RPG inspired by any number of tiny-furry adventurer stories, like Redwall, Mouseguard, and The Secret of NIMH. You play as the hamster-like Michtims, experiencing their society and the adventures these fuzzy little heroes get up to; including the sabotaging of human factories, swiping human technology, and protecting and healing the natural world. There is a youthful exuberance about the game; the book is written with a gentle delight that is reminiscent of old children’s cartoons, where your character’s abilities might stem from being a great tactician, cook, wizard, or cyborg.

Trigger Warning: poem referencing self-harm By the time he reached his room, Edmund wasn’t angry at all. He was an orphan, would always be an orphan, and was going to leave the mansion. Everything made sense again. He grabbed up his poetry notebook from his desk, chose meter and scheme, and began to write. If I had my drothers, I’d kill off by brothers, and drown all my sisters in the bath.

So far we’ve covered how RPGs guide or encourage certain player behaviors from a lot of different angles: Games have rules, stories have rules, worlds, characters, and improv all have rules. Are there any other ways in which RPGs have rules? Let’s go back to Of Grub and Grain for a moment. I mentioned cooking as a generally ignored aspect of RPGs, something we tend to just wave away. What happens if we base a whole RPG around this oft ignored activity?

To describe the world of the Troika! RPG is to do it an injustice. It is surreal and macabre, a mixture of Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam, full of hilarious horrors and unbearable fantasies, akin to a drug-fueled homage to Jim Henson, Planescape, and 70s adult cartoons. It is a bizarre pastiche of a thousand different fevered imaginings. The system itself is as unworldly as its world-building. Character classes are randomly chosen from a list, with each being little more than a short suggestive paragraph, a list of skills, equipment, and perhaps a single special ability.

You’ve probably heard of Call of Cthulhu if you’re involved in RPGs at all. Released in 1981 by Chaosium, the system is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Usually set in the early 1900s, the game centers around investigators, artists, professors, and other similar protagonists of H.P.’s stories, discovering and hopefully thwarting the machinations of cultists, Old Ones, and horrors from beyond. It’s famous for having a high body count; do not fall in love with your characters, they will die or go mad with remarkable speed.

It was still raining. Edmund had resolved himself to explore as many rooms in the Mansion as possible, and wasting even an hour for meals in familiar rooms felt inefficient; so when he acquired his lunch from Mrs. Kippling, he asked for a different dining room. She directed him to a medium sized dining room, designed to seat six diners at most. There, Edmund ate his thick chunky soup that was almost a stew and smelled of oats.

MΣTΔ is, natch, a very meta RPG. I have a bit of a problem discussing MΣTΔ as a game, because the interplay of meta content and non-meta content in the game makes it somewhat difficult to pin down exactly what is and is not meta about the game. Okay, deep breaths, let’s start at the beginning: what is “meta” anyway? Meta, as a prefix and an artistic concept, deals with an interaction between a discrete body of work — whether a painting, book, game, movie, or other medium — and the audience of said work.

Mythic Mortals is, quote: “an action-focused roleplaying game that lets you and your friends engage in over-the-top fights and epic battles. Inspired by The Avengers, 300, X-Men, Devil May Cry, and so many more; Mythic Mortals aims to bring that fun, explosive experience to the table top.” The mechanics of Mythic Mortals — a narrative-focused card-drawing strategic-combat system — are certainly worthy of discussion, but it’s the next line in the introduction that is most interesting to me: “You and your friends will play as yourselves, suddenly granted incredible powers.