RPG Medium

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.

Cast Away, written by by Joe O’Brien & Reilly Qyote, is a survival RPG. Your characters are survivors of a disastrous event, anything from a shipwreck to a zombie apocalypse, and must manage their health, fatigue, food, and shelter in a hostile aftermath.

The system is quite good at what it sets out to do. This is a game of struggle and strife, fighting to survive, and every mistake you make or failure you suffer results in more trouble for you down the line. Failures beget failures, and death for your character is permanent. This game is so good, in fact, that it brings up a significant question about RPGs in general:

This is a difficult game. You’re not expected to survive; not without some serious luck. You’re going to fail, fail hard, and you’re not even allowed to roll up a new character. This game is hard, and if you fail you’re done.

Does that sound like fun to you?

A two-fer, eh? Okay, let’s go!

The Great Ork Gods is an RPG made by Jack Aidley. It’s a one-shot comedic game, designed to be played and forgotten about in an evening. At its most basic; the players play brutish nasty hate-filled Orks, as well as the Orkish gods who hate the Orks as much as the Orks hate them.

One Wrestling Ring to Rule them All (stylized as 1WR) is a Wrestling RPG by Dice Kaptial. The players play as wrestlers who must fight and compete for the entertainment of the onlooking audience. A bingo-card of nine “goals” increase the audience’s score as they are met, including things like one of the wrestlers doing a heel-turn, or performing a specific move during a specific round.