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. It’s always 12. Enemies never roll, similar to Knave, and you either roll over 12 to hit, or over 12 to dodge. The difficulty is constant no matter which monsters you’re fighting against.

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. They allow the players to narrate and resolve the overarching story. It gives the players time to say goodbye, rather than deal with the abrupt smash-cut ending that most campaigns provide. World Ending Game is the denouement session to everything that came before it.

Edmund cast the lantern around the tomb, casting shadows over the rough stone. Plinkerton didn’t create this room; it was far too old. The long steps and secret door weren’t likely the original entrance either; people would notice if the crypt of the first Moulde was suddenly covered by a clock statue. There had to be another way out…the original way out.

Edmund was beginning to realize the problem with trying to be three things at once; a person, a Moulde, and an Edmund. It required him to translate the confusing thoughts and actions of others three times before he could understand the situation with precision.

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. Protecting humanity from an otherworldly horde known as the Brood, your character must maintain a balance between their humanity and their monstrousness, or else fall to ruin. It’s body horror and blood, hive-minds and howling from beyond the black. It’s 28 Days Later: the Masquerade.

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. On the other hand, its combat system is rather new, starting from the assumption that all attacks hit and the only randomness comes from a weapon’s damage dice.

The Mansion struck ten in the evening, the deep boom rolling over Haggard Hill. The storm clouds continued their bubbling creep over the city, turning the warm velvety darkness of nighttime into the empty gray darkness of foreboding doom. Black rain fell fast and hard against the windows of Moulde Hall.

Edmund raised his crank lantern higher against the gloom. He had found it in a storage-room filled with gardening supplies; a clever tool that somehow turned the rotation of a crank on its side into a dim reddish light. Edmund had prevented himself from taking it apart then and there only by promising himself the opportunity later, when he had the time.

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. Your inventory is not supposed to be “realistic,” its supposed to be full of single-use assets that get you past the next obstacle so you can continue the game.