Arthur Von Gusse sat quietly, sipping his tea.

It was some dreadful Asian blend — nowhere near as pleasant or aromatic as a solid Brittianian tea; what was the country coming too? The King was becoming far too multicultural, Arthur mused. When Queen Virginia was alive, the Empire always had the best, whether it was English or not. Of course, the best often was English, and if it wasn’t… well, a short war would soon see that it was. Now, all King Wilhelm seemed to care about was making friends, and by extension making everything as foreign as possible. The Passenger’s Crossing was one of the few places left in the whole of Cliffside that hadn’t completely succumbed to the advancing hordes.

Goblins? is an RPG. In it, you play as a goblin.

It is not unique.

In recent years the prevalence of Goblin-focused RPGs has exploded. There’s Goblins in Shadow, Noblesse Goblige, Gobs of Gobs, Hannukah Goblins, The Goblin Warrens, Goblin Country, You are 100 Goblins, Now Go Save the World, Goblins and Grimoires, I’ll be Taking That, All the Kings Goblins, Journey through Goblinland, Those Little Bastards, We Gank at Midnight, Goblin Market, Disgusting Little Freaks, Stacks of Goblins, GOB, Goblin Karting, and Three Goblins in a Trenchcoat; and that’s certainly not all of them.

I Have Gone This Far is a Solo Journaling RPG played with a deck of cards, a falling-block tower, and a means of recording your story. It uses the Wretched and Alone SRD, a system for creating bleak journaling games with established win and loss states. In I Have Gone This Far, You play the part of a charlatan and con-artist who has beguiled the locals into believing that you know something of demons. You’ve sold them charms, spells, and means of protecting themselves from an imagined threat…until suddenly your charge becomes possessed.

Mausritter is a rules-light fantasy sword-and-whiskers game inspired by any number of similar stories, including Mouse Guard, Brambly Hedge, The Rescuers, etc. It combines a lot of rules and ideas from many games I’ve mentioned here, including the character creation method from Into the Odd, inventory management from Knave, layouts from Mothership, and other concepts from places like Goblin Punch, Moonhop, and Last Grasp Grimoire.

Stats are the simple three of Strength, Dexterity, and Will. HP and Gold are found by rolling 1d6 each. Inventory items are cut-out squares that you fit onto a small grid that is your backpack. Magic is used by wielding runes which can be used three times before being recharged by performing a unique task. The game is more about exploring than finding a single villain to thwart, and is a wonderful example of OSR gaming.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that once a pirate has spent enough time at sea, the Horizon looks different everywhere on earth.

This is not how a sailor begins their career. When they first step onto the swaying ship, young and fresh-faced, they are first overwhelmed by the majesty of it all: a distant expanse of unending blue, swallowing up the past, future, and anything else that the sailor brings with them.

Highwinds is a space opera RPG, with elements of fantasy thrown in for good measure. The game encourages you to “Take the role of resourceful heroes on the edge of space and fight pirates, save people from killer robots, and explore ancient vaults locked in astral space.”

Focused on combat, the game only has four stats for its characters: Accuracy, Dodge, Initiative, and Toughness. You pick your skills, your talents, your equipment, and off you go to swash your buckle across the stars.

Powered by FATE Accelerated, Iron Edda Accelerated is a Norse-mythology inspired Mecha-RPG about warriors fighting alongside the bones of dead giants and metal monsters. Ragnarok has come to the land, and the evil dwarves are sending their mechanical constructs to destroy everything you hold dear. How will you survive the coming cataclysm?

You have a lot of choices: perhaps the most overt answer is “by binding my soul to the bones of an ancient giant and go Kaiju it up,” but that’s only one option. You could also be a Skald, a Seer, a Farmer, a Merchant, a Shieldbearer, or more; and all of these destinies result in a very different kind of game.

Session Zero is a card-based solo character creation game. It is, in short, a quick and easy journaling game to build a creative backstory. You draw at least five playing cards from a shuffled deck, and based on the prompts you write out significant moments in your character’s history before the beginning of the game.

It’s called Session Zero, because that’s what a session zero is. As a gaming term, session zero is, natch, what comes before the first session. It is, in essence, the prologue to the game.

So ends the first story in the Edmund Moulde quadrilogy. With some time to spare before my treatise on the medium of RPGs is finished, I will spend the next few Saturdays uploading some short stories set in what I ended up calling The Cliffside Universe

After all, Brackenburg is only one of the major cities in the Britannian Empire, and a steadily decaying one, at that. There is room for stories across the globe as the world slowly changes from steam-punk to diesel-punk, and no one city is better suited to display the variety and complexity of that transition than Cliffside, hub of trade, adventure, and diverse stew of humanity.

Opening each Edmund book with an excerpt or quote from a fabricated biography of Edmund Moulde was the plan for a long time…but when I first decided to post the book on a (now defunct) blog, I needed something to separate each chapter. So, I decided to write more of Edmund’s Poems.

What resulted was a mix of parodies and absurdities. At first, I attributed each quote to a different scholar and book, but soon the rivalry between Sirs Kohlm and Krink took shape, and eventually they became the only scholars I cited.