RPG Medium

Into the Woods is an RPG wherein your only goal is survival. Akin to the stories of Robinson Caruso, Swiss Family Robinson, and Castaway; and taking inspiration from games like Aground or Don’t Starve; Into the Woods is focused on the challenges of keeping yourself alive in a hostile ever-changing environment.

An interesting idea in itself; the cliche RPG experience is one of “Humanity vs. Monstrosity,” where evil enacts its will on the innocent, and the heroic players step in to save them. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that RPGs would start to explore the other kinds of storytelling, such as “Humanity vs. Society,” or in this case, “Humanity vs. Nature.”

Based on Cairn and Into the Odd, Runecairn is draped in Norse and Viking mythology, and inspired heavily by Dark Souls and Bloodborne games. There are re-skinned estus flasks, immortality, near continuous combat, even rules about bonfires. For all else that it does, Runecairn wears its inspirations on its sleeve.

That the game is obviously inspired at least in part by video games is not uncommon. Table-top RPGs have always had major influence on video game RPGs; consider the deluge of D&D RPG video games like Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Menzoberanzan, and Balder’s Gate — and that’s just a fraction of one license. Fallout was inspired by GURPS. Vampire: The Masquerade has had multiple video game titles. Even non-licensed game series like Magic Candle, Ultima, Wizardry, and Might and Magic all owe more to tabletop RPGs than any of their video game kin.

Cobwebs is an RPG about, quote: “reluctant investigators uncovering terrifying conspiracies and getting far more than they bargained for. It combines elements of noir, horror, and science fiction to create a uniquely haunting mystery built collaboratively.”

Cobwebs centers around two specific characters: the Darling, and the Missing. The Darling is the “investigator,” the person who — in their search for the never-present Missing — gets pulled deeper and deeper into the truth of a conspiracy. Think Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, or Leo and Naadirah in Mute.

Escape from Dino Island is, quote: “a thrilling adventure game about intrepid heroes trapped on an island overrun with creatures from a lost age — dinosaurs! Players take on the role of everyday people who are brave and competent, but also in over their head. The game is designed to help you create the kind of stories that are full of action and suspense, but in which fighting is rarely a good option. Will you escape with your life? And what kind of person will you become in your quest to survive? There’s only one way to find out…”

I Got Hit By A Meteor & Was Reincarnated as the Hero of a Tabletop RPG is an RPG and I am not typing all that out again. I’ma call it Meteor.

Meteor is purportedly a redesign of D&D 5th edition rules, with the framework detailed in the title; the players are dead, having been crushed by a meteor, and the devil has offered to redeem the players’ souls if they beat him in a game of 5th edition D&D.

Endless Lands is a fantastical RPG about traveling across the titular lands. As laid out in the rule-book, the game begins with everyone sitting down to talk about what kind of game they want to play, and then building the world that allows them to do so. The campaign’s Great Threat is discussed and decided on, all before the characters are created. Character creation is not particularly difficult, and the rules are simple enough to learn quickly and master easily.

Lancer is, to quote the book: “a mix of gritty, mud-and-lasers military science fiction and mythic science fantasy, where conscript pilots mix ranks with flying aces, mercenary guns-for-hire brawl with secretive corpo-state agents, and relativistic paladins cross thermal lances with causality-breaking, unknowable beings…players adopt the roles of mechanized chassis pilots — mech pilots — comrades together in a galaxy of danger and hope.”

The system itself is quite rich. With a defensible claim to the most strategically balanced RPG currently available, Lancer is a system that requires careful consideration of forethought, resource management, teamwork, and luck. There are ranges, area-of-attacks, damage types, conditions, statuses, hit points, stress points, structure points, core powers, and more. By managing to make all the complex economies interact and play off each other in a dizzying array of complexity, Lancer manages to make each combat a puzzle.

I described FATE as a system earlier; but my description was a poor one, abbreviated to get to the point I wanted to make. The actual rules of FATE are more detailed and interesting than I perhaps first made them sound.

Characters in FATE Core have two fundamental things that influence their abilities: aspects, and skills. Skills are simple enough; they’re what your character is good at and have a numerical value from 0 to +5, usually. Aspects are simple sentences that apply to your character. “The best star-pilot in the galaxy” is an aspect, for example. Or perhaps “Never gonna take no guff from nobody.” They can be quotes, phrases, explanations, descriptions; anything the player and GM agree describes the character narratively, rather than numerically.

Richly Gothic in tone, Blades in the Dark sees you and your fellows playing scoundrels in a wrought-iron steampunk city, working together to score heists, claim fortunes, and establish yourselves in positions of power in the city. The world is well designed, providing a fertile ground for intrigues, cloaks-and-daggers, and unseen dangers. Character design is detailed, including character sheets for each individual as well as the gang as a whole. You pick your backstory, select your class, put points into your skills, and set out to make or take your fortune.

GURPS is technically not an RPG, but an RPG System. It’s a distinction without much of a difference; an RPG is at once distinct-from and inexorably-linked to the ruleset used to play it. It could be said that D&D is a system, while settings like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or Ravenloft are the actual RPGs.

At the same time you could call Greyhawk a game setting, and say that The Keep On The Borderlands module that you’re playing is the actual RPG. Or you could call The Keep On The Borderlands a pre-built adventure, and it’s not until you and your friends are sitting around a table rolling dice that there is an actual RPG, but that’s mostly a matter of taste.