.dungeon is a pretty simplistic RPG in a lot of ways. With a MMORPG dungeon-crawling aesthetic, the game taps into virtual RPG simplicity. You assign dice to your stats and roll the dice any time you want to do something. Roll high enough, and you do. Roll lower, and you don’t. Pretty simple rules-light stuff.
But there is one specific difference: .dungeon’s ludo-narrative taps into the meta-narrative of the game. Put simply, the real world affects the game-world.
Noblesse Goblige is a competitive GMless RPG based in Verdibog, a cosmopolitan goblin city in a swamp. In it, you play as a scion of one of five major goblin clans, each of which has a claim to the title of Gob-Boss after the current Gob-Boss, Lady Stinkworth, died without naming a successor.
Each player plays a character from a different clan, each with the goal of manipulating their way to the top of the successor list, bringing power, prestige, and lots and lots of money to their clan.
Mission Accomplished is an RPG inspired by shows like Archer, The Venture Brothers, and Better Off Ted. It’s a game about being a team of super-spies who save the world on a weekly basis, usually in 30-45 minute increments. You drop into dangerous situations, mix things up, and then get out of there and back to HQ, a job-well-done.
But that’s only half of the game. The second half is the HR meeting, where the complaining, bickering, and blaming happens.
You Awaken In A Strange Place is an RPG.
Juuuust barely.
I mean, take a look at it; there’s barely anything there. The core tenet of the game is that everyone comes to the game unprepared. If you want to play this system, the first thing you have to do build the system itself. I mean, you have to call it a sandbox, don’t you? There’s nothing to railroad. The GM is given five minutes after building the characters to make notes before the game officially starts, like some perverse scholastic speech-and-debate competition.
Darkspace is an RPG, though I’m not sure the game would agree. As far as it’s concerned, it is, quote: “an immersive sci-fi experience. Five players take on the roles of the crew of the Triton, an ill-fated cargo ship alone in dark space. The captain, the doctor, the mercenary, the corpo, the synth — one of you is a murderer. Will you solve the mystery of the Triton before the ship’s life support fails?
Inspired by Annihilation and Roadside Panic, QZ is about the Quarantine Zone; a place where the laws of nature decided to take a holiday and turn the area into a surreal fever dream. The game itself is not a horror game, nor comedy, nor drama; but the QZ can be horrific, funny, and dramatic in turn.
In the instructions on how to use the rulebook, the book clearly states that the game was designed to be played as a sandbox.
Lady Blackbird is, in fact, Chapter one of Tales from the Wild Blue Yonder, three pre-built one-shot adventure modules where you play as pre-made characters, in medias res, with a carefully constructed scenario for you to play through in an attempt to fulfill your character’s goals.
It’s not as locked-down as that makes it sound. For all the pre-building these characters have gone through, there is a lot of flexibility in how the characters are played and how their backstories are revealed.
Uneasy Lies the Head is a GM-less RPG focused on telling the story of a tumultuous royal court as a disastrous portent threatens to destroy everything the court holds dear. Perhaps the throne has cracked, perhaps the revolution has finally reached the gates, perhaps the sun has exploded. Whatever the cause, the players — as members of the court — must enact their schemes to reshape the world to their liking.
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.
