When thinking about media influence in RPGs, the obvious first step to take is to look at games like For The Honor.

No, that’s not accurate. The most obvious step is to look at officially licensed RPGs based on IPs like Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings again, Doctor Who, Sailor Moon, Highlander, Steven Universe, and many more. Those are systems for creating stories in established canons — what we could uncharitably call the RPG equivalent of fanfiction.

Starlight Riders is a card-driven heist-focused space-western with a 50s cartoon aesthetic. According to the website, “You play as a bunch of outlaws, fighting against an oppressive system that took all you had. It’s your role to tip the scales back in favor of the forgotten.”

GM-less and designed for one-shots, Starlight Riders is great for low/no prep games. There are a lot of little interesting quirks with the system: players get a few cards instead of a distinct “character sheet,” and as a troupe RPG, any player can play any character at the table. Gameplay alternates between cards, dice, and role-play fairly smoothly along the game’s three-act-structure.

Though you might not think to look at it, Olaf Hits the Dragon With His Sword is an RPG, even if the entirety of the game is summed up by its title.

The mechanics are simple enough: you and your fellow player have six colors of dice, and you answer a few narrative questions about your character — Olaf or the Dragon, natch — and their motivations. Each different answer corresponds to a color of die, and you put said colored die in the central pool after giving your answer.

Edmund awoke the next morning feeling different than he ever had before.

Leftover rain dripped from the roof outside. The storm had continued all night, letting up only slightly after the mansion struck six in the morning. The sudden silence had jolted Edmund from his shallow sleep.

His sleep had to have been shallow; getting to sleep had been so difficult. He had settled into bed at the stroke of one in the morning. Even so late, no matter how still he lay, his heart beat so fast and thoughts sped through his brain at such a rate that he had lain awake for hours, assaulted by a thousand ideas all demanding his attention.

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.

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. There is no established skill-list, you might know anything from sword-fighting +1 to bathing +3 or grilling +2.