RPG Medium

Okay, let me first take a step back and say this unequivocally: I don’t think Errant Challenger is a bad game. This is a rhetorical device, yeah? Just go with it for a second.

Errant Challenger, by Fauix, is still in its Beta at time of writing. It’s a fairly straightforward system, easily graspable by most anyone familiar with RPGs.

It’s a bad RPG.

I mean, look at it! It’s not so much a rule-book as it is a word document exported to PDF. The cover is poorly structured AI mush. There’s no real setting, just a chunk of fantasy pablum. The system itself doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done twenty time over in different systems.

Against the Apocalypse, designed by Oleander Garden, is a game about war, last stands, isolation, and death. It is a game where the players are soldiers in a war against the Demiurge, who sends their hollowmen every Sunday in an attempt to kill the players. They have little in the way of supplies or hope, and the game will end the way all wars must, in death.

The game is, in a single (compound) word, Anti-narrative.

Divided into two parts — the fighting and the downtime — the game encourages the players to unfold their character’s lives in the manner things would happen, not should or could. The book asks players to be honest with both themselves and their imagined world: the goal is not to tell a story, but to simulate life.

Errant, published by Kill Jester, is a, quote: “rules light, procedure heavy, classic fantasy role-playing game in the vein of the first few editions of that role-playing game and its many imitators and descendants.”

Another one?

Not to complain, but the RPG medium is rife with OSR D&D-likes. Rife, I say. What is there to be gained with breaking down yet another one, when we could be talking about interesting games like Rosewood Abbey, LORDSWORN, Pine Shallows, Lumen Ryder Core, Edelweiss, The Long Shift, or All the While?

What is to be gained, I think, is purely an excuse to talk about that first line in the description: Rules-light, Procedure-heavy.

Iron Halberd, by Level2janitor, is a medium weight OSR Fantasy RPG. Recognizing the variety of definitions in the world, the game clarifies OSR to mean that the game is deadly, the story is player-driven, resource management is important, and the system itself is compatible with most other OSR resources.

Anyone familiar with OSR systems will be quickly familiar with most of Iron Halberd’s offerings. Stats are randomly generated, the world is deadly, and the focus of the story is on the player’s actions, rather than the GM’s Mary-Sue villains. Inspired by Dungeon Crawl Classics, Knave, and 13th Age; the system has rules for warbands, strongholds, crafting, hirelings, and long-travel.

But what does “medium weight” mean?

Endeavour, by Armiger Games, is a playset for the Paragon RPG system, which was made famous by AGON, the epic myth TTRPG. Inspired by the hopeful and optimistic Science Fiction genre — specifically the original Star Trek — Endeavour sees your characters traveling throughout the galaxy, discovering new species, alien cultures, and strange artifacts in your quest to learn more about the universe.

AGON, on the other hand, is about retelling epic adventures in the style of the Odyssey. Your characters travel from island to island on their journey home, subject to the whims and wills of the Gods.

Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger, by Graham Gentz, is an artifact of its time.

It’s hard to explain what Henry Kissinger is to people who don’t know. It’s very easy to explain who Kissinger was, but what “Kissinger” is…

Memes of Death playing a claw machine, Steven Colbert dancing in his office, and a prevailing sense of an omnipresent cruelty existing in the world; its easy to see why The Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger was made. Henry Kissinger was, in many ways, a complicated person.

It would be easy to mistake Night of the Hogmen for a module, easily adaptable to any system or setting you’d like. It’s meant to be played in a single evening, encompassing a single event: a panicked run from a crashed carriage to a church, chased all the while by a swarming sea of ravenous hogmen.

But it’s not a module: it has its own small ruleset and premade characters. It’s Forged in the Dark, and while it is a part of a larger setting, it has no concrete connection to anything beyond its single run. It’s a One-shot RPG, similar to Lady Blackburn or Honey Heist.

Diceless Universal, by Michael Raston, is a very simple Universal Deterministic RPG. Only four pages long, the rules of the system are barely worth calling rules. Being deterministic, the rule section mostly details how the GM describes the world, and the players react. It is shared storytelling at its most basic; little more than a collaborative argument.

But I talked about that kind of play earlier. What I’d like to discuss now is the very last page, where the system details its progession mechanic: what it takes for characters to level up.

Darkest Days is a dark fantasy RPG designed by Bell Moon Games. A bit souls-like, the game sees its players as former legendary heroes returned to life by ancient ritual, in a desperate attempt to save the world from demons and monsters. It has an interesting “pip” system for skills, which gives you bonuses from both your stats and your equipment.

One of the more interesting parts of the Darkest Days ruleset is how it handles skill checks. In most modern RPGs, when a player wishes to undertake a task, they are given some measure of difficulty. Most systems call this a “difficulty rating” or a “target number.” You have to roll “better” than this number to succeed at your task.

Okay, but where does this number come from?

Sellswords, by Pagentry Games, is, quote: a tabletop roleplaying game about the sorrows of war and those who sow them. It’s medieval in its trappings, though magic and monsters are not in the expected setting. Instead, the world is plagued with war, banditry, and politics. It’s a world filled with the worst excesses of power-hungry warlords draped in religious finery and exotic furs.

The PCs play as mercenaries, masters of brutality and flexible morality, who will do anything and serve anyone for the right price. Perhaps they will do horrific things for the right reasons, or be righteous for the wrong reasons, but only one thing is true: they serve only themselves, their coin, and Lady Fortune.

Sellswords is a diceless game, and rather than concoct an elaborate method of juggling points to pay for results, like Noblis or the Four Points System, Sellswords has a far more elegant system for deciding what happens: GM fiat.