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 role-playing 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.

King is Dead is, quote: “A print-n’-play role-playing game about a family of giants, their feuds, and a prophesy that may spell doom. Will you follow your father’s wishes and swear fealty to Branwen, or revolt and fight against the tide of destiny and take what you think is rightfully yours, or perhaps you will find another way?” Mechanically, the game uses the AGORA system, which was designed for a game that (at time of writing) has yet to be released.

At first, Edmund was delighted to receive his first expectation as a Moulde. As he was still unfamiliar with the Moulde family, he assumed — quite incorrectly — that attending a family meeting would be an easy expectation to meet. By the time he had made his way up the hill again, he realized it was an opportunity as well: In An Ornithological Watcher’s Primer, Lady Strumbrugge had been very explicit that the only reliable way to learn about birds was to watch them.

Runaway Hirelings is a comedy RPG about the squishiest and most inconsequential characters in the whole of the RPG medium: the hireling. Hirelings served a very specific role in the early era of dungeon-delving RPGs. Players often found themselves lacking certain abilities: perhaps no one was playing a lockpicking thief, or they needed some method for carrying and extracting all the loot they scavenged from the dungeons. One of the original uses of Charisma in 1st Edition D&D was to limit how many hirelings you could command at once, and how likely they were to stick around.