I’m spending the next several weeks talking through my most important indie RPGs of the twenty-teens. Last week I posted about 2010. Onward!
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
The Burning Wheel, Gold Edition
The final and best edition of this ground-breaking fantasy game. The previous edition of Burning Wheel changed my roleplaying life, no joke.
I’ve been writing about BW for years but not recently. Here’s what I’ve tagged so far.
2011: Burning Wheel Gold
This is kind of a cheat but it’s my blog so I can do what I want. Burning Wheel, revised edition, came out five years earlier and continues to be the single most important RPG I have ever played. Every other game I have played and evaluated since then is colored by the life-changing experience of internalizing the lessons of BW. The Gold edition further refined and clarified the game into a jagged little perfect gem.
I’ve only run a small handful of Gold-edition games since it came out, but it continues to be one of the all-time greatest tabletop indies. If you get a chance to even just read this hefty tome – it’s extremely reasonably priced, I keep telling Luke he’s underpaying himself – it will change your thinking about conventional tabletop roleplaying. You’ve probably already seen the impact of Burning Wheel in whatever you’re playing right now.
2011 Runners-up
Microscope
Ben Robbins’ Microscope received a new release in 2017, but I was first exposed to it a few years prior. It’s GMless/GMful, depending on your biases, and might not even be a “game” that many roleplayers would recognize, but it broke a lot of important ground in this design space. Players work together to sketch out a civilization’s rise and fall, and use various tools to zoom in and fill in the blanks in between. Very clever, useful in lots of applications beyond just Microscope, you owe it to yourself to get educated about what it does.
Technoir
Technoir and I had a rough first encounter, but my regular con roomie and celebrity podcaster buddy MadJay Brown ran this for me at Dreamation 2018. It’s really sharp and it renewed my interest in decoding the game for myself. There are some terrific situation-creation tools in this game, way ahead of their time given the 2011 publication date.
Technoir and Microscope remind me of an era of design that felt less like a market-driven monoculture than 2020. There were hardly any Powered by the Apocalypse games out yet, Fate was out there since 2003 but would never dominate indie mind share, and Kickstarter wasn’t quite the monster it would become. Other big titles of 2011 (per the Indie RPG Awards) include Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Anima Prime, Bulldogs!, Chronicles of Skin, an early version of Dungeon World, and some titles I confess I’ve never read. Visit the Awards page for 2011 to see all the entries.
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The twenty-teens brought a torrent of new small-press, independently created roleplaying games to us. The Forge had come to an end, the diaspora sent seedlings far and wide, Google Plus and Twitter were rocket fuel for the chaotic dissemination of ideas and audiences, print on demand made the entire workflow faster. And then there was Kickstarter, stomping on the gas and never letting us catch our breath. Now Itch.io is poised to further aerosolize game publication.
What even are roleplaying games? Do we still play these
things or just deliver hot takes about them?
What a decade.
I’ve gone through my notes and bookshelves and thought long
and hard about the titles that were most important to The Indie Game Reading
Club over the past decade. Okay nerds, don’t @ me about when the decade
“really” starts and stops. I’m starting in 2010 and ending in 2019.
This is by no means a comprehensive list! That would be
impossible, truly. As I went looking for date confirmation and reminders, I
scoured the Indie RPG Awards page (http://www.indie-rpg-awards.com/),
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_role-playing_game),
DriveThruRPG (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/)
and of course my own collection. There is a marked uptick in raw output
starting around 2016, and by 2018 there’s just too much to track. I know I’m
forgetting stuff, which is why I’m relying on these games’ lasting impressions
on me.
Let’s do this thing. If you want to buy these games, please consider buying them through the links in this article (I get a few pennies per sale).
This was originally a (very!) long piece for my $10+/mo patrons on Patreon. I’ll be doing this as a series of small posts here on the blog, one per year every year until we’re through the teens! Please keep checking in. ?
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Apocalypse World, 2nd Edition
This is the title that put Powered by the Apocalypse on the map and prompted a huge outpouring of hacks, reskins and PbtA-inspired original works.
Explore everything I’ve tagged “Apocalypse World” here.
You can get the PDF at DriveThruRPG here.
2010: Apocalypse World Changes
Everything
This is the year Apocalypse World changed everyone’s life. This is the birth year of Powered by the Apocalypse, perhaps the first truly new method-of-play (or “genre” as Vincent Baker, AW’s co-author, calls it) since Fudge/Fate. I’m not sure another one has shown up since. This game was by no means “the most important” game to me in 2010 itself, though! I had picked it up prior to BurningCon 2010, noodled over how the heck to make moves and fictional triggers and, what the heck, the GM never rolls? The GM doesn’t use stats? It was incomprehensible to me for the next two years, while I fell back into the easy habits of Burning Wheel and Burning Empires and late-stage Forge titles. I remember meeting Vincent at an after-party and saying “yeah, nice game, money well spent!”
I had no idea what was coming.
Apocalypse World is the single most important title to my gaming of the whole decade. I’ve played at least 20 titles that emerged from PbtA, and there’s little sign of the platform slowing down. It’s flexible, it has invited a generation of hacking, it does something genuinely new, and it doesn’t take advanced math to work it out.
2010 Runners-up
Stars Without Number
Stars Without Number was my first exposure to Sine Nomine’s OSR-inspired methodology. It’s a space adventure game, very loosely constructed, with lots of trad-style GMing tools. I ran it for a few sessions and it didn’t really tick for my home players at the time. We were accustomed to storygame-style mechanisms driving play via economies or other incentive schemes. SWN is D&D in space, and I hadn’t really internalized what that meant. It wouldn’t be until I ran Godbound (in 2019!) before this clicked. I would love to swing back around to the game’s beautiful second edition.
Freemarket
Freemarket was a collaborative effort by Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, Inheritance) and Jared Sorensen (InSpectres, Lacuna, Parsley). I thought it was kind of a love letter to urban living, with post-scarcity cyberpunks out-creating each other in search of social media cred. It was hard for me to find the fun in the game but it was a beautifully produced box set, foretelling the uptick from indie-standard 5.5×8.5 perfect-bound books. Personally, I think Freemarket was just a decade ahead of its time. Love to see a new edition of this that took our actual social media dystopia into account.
Next Week: 2011
That’s it for 2010! What was your most important titles of the year?
See you next week for another year of important indie titles.
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Still working my way through the last decade of small press, indie, and storygaming. Last week I hit 2011. 2012 was a big one too.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Monsterhearts
Challenging, beautifully written, makes no attempts at being everyone’s favorite. An undeniably important game-as-statement.
Monsterhearts 2, the latest edition, is available through DriveThruRPG.
2012: Monsterhearts
One of the first PbtA games to come out after Apocalypse World, Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts has been enormously but indirectly important to my gaming. I’ve only played four or five sessions across the decade, but the impact the game has had on PbtA games that came after is readily apparent: moves that lean hard on evoking player-level feelings, specific queer content, a heavy emphasis on sexuality as core to the play experience (as compared to the transactional, transgressive vibe of Apocalypse World‘s sex moves).
I feel like Monsterhearts and Dungeon World (a 2012 runner-up) started the first two major side branches of PbtA design thinking. The Monsterhearts branch led us to trope-intensive games like Urban Shadows, and Dungeon World led us to adventure-oriented games like Monster of the Week and Uncharted Worlds.
2012 Runners-up
Dungeon World
Sage La Torra and Adam Koebel’s Dungeon World is hugely important in terms of the sheer volume of DW play I’ve been in since it came out. I don’t even especially crave the Dungeon World experience these days, but it’s comfortable and easy and I’m happy to drop in on it whenever it’s offered. And if it didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have Space Wurm vs Moonicorn in 2016!
Dog Eat Dog
I played Dog Eat Dog exactly once, and it made an impact. It was the first time real-world considerations didn’t feel bad-weird to me for the players to address. One of the game’s killer apps is that the richest player at the table plays the colonizer, and everyone else plays indigenous characters suffering and surviving under the colonists. It prompts interesting discussions about class and money. I’ve seen drafts and games – particularly attached to design contests like Game Chef that encourage avant-garde design – that ask the players to bring their personal emotional baggage to the table, and that strikes me as veering into unqualified-therapist territory. DED plays with fire but it’s about socioeconomics, culture, and appropriation. It’s also genuinely entertaining, with some very snappy economies incentivizing choices by both the indigenous characters and the colonizers. Excellent case study in how to decolonize roleplaying.
Durance
Durance, a sci-fi game from Jason Morningstar about prisoners and guards on an alien prison planet, was the first GMless/GMful game I really liked playing. I’ve run it at conventions on and off since it came out. The big skill I was forced to learn to play Durance was how to frame my own scene, which continues to be one of the toughest skills to master. It was also the first game where playing multiple characters was energizing and interesting to me: each player plays a prisoner at one social rung, and a guard at a different social rung. It barely has any “resolution” to speak of but it tells the players where to thematically nudge the scene’s outcome. If a strong facilitator is managing the table, the premise is good enough to carry you the rest of the way. Top marks.
Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne
I didn’t get to play Witch: tRtL until 2019, but damn what a good experience. I was not ready to play this GMless guilt trip (but fun!) when it came out in 2012. You play a group of men hauling an accused witch to Lindisfarne for her execution. The witch player gets different guidelines to play by than everyone else, but everyone is playing to answer questions about their characters while proceeding through several thematic scenes. The questions-and-traits tech is simple and shows up in many freeform/larp spaces, and there are some baldly manipulative elements of how Witch plays out, but I dug it. Hell of an impact, even after multiple plays.
The Final Girl
The Final Girl deserves a mention here because, dang, I keep seeing this slender game offered up at otherwise-not-very-indie cons as Peak Indie. The premise is simple and terrific: everyone plays a character in a slasher movie, with responsibility for playing the slasher moving around the table. PCs are intended to drop like flies. It’s a very amusing party game, you can play 10 people at a table, and it just does slashers right. It’s kind of tricky to get in print any more, and I hope designer Bret Gillan puts a new edition out someday, somehow, along with some obvious hacks.
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Another week, another year looking back at the 20-teens and what they brought to small press roleplaying. To recap the games I’ve focused on so far: 2010 was Apocalypse World, 2011 was Burning Wheel Gold, 2012 was Monsterhearts. All huge games. But 2013 brought one of my all-time favorites, which I continue to play today.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Sagas of the Icelanders
This is it, my favorite-favorite Powered by the Apocalypse game of all time. Serious, melodramatic, accessible.
The PDF is available at DriveThruRPG.
2013: Sagas of the Icelanders
Sagas of the Icelanders seems like it should be a weird little niche game. It’s early PbtA. It’s got some rough edges. It’s about Viking settlers making a life for themselves in a lawless, empty land. It continues to be my all time favorite PbtA game, even above Apocalypse World itself. I have written extensively over the years about SotI, but here’s my elevator pitch: it might be the best, most accessible subject matter for non-gamers to get introduced to roleplaying. Everyone understands family melodrama, and most everyone understands violent family melodrama. I introduced my wife and many others to ttrpgs via Sagas of the Icelanders.
The game’s killer app is a split list of common moves, one for men and one for women. It’s intensely binary, reflecting the values of the Vikings at the time, even while subverting that very binary via playbooks like the Goði (a judge/priest who can learn “women’s” moves like healing, magic and coercion) and the Shield Maiden (a woman dedicated to doing a man’s job and suffering at the hands of both the men and women who reject them).
Sagas also creates/demands the most amazing relationship maps. Here’s one from my 2E playtest I ran at OrcCon, February 2020.
It’s just so great. Games are quite intense and serious, the moves constantly push the women to be shrewish and manipulative and the men to be vicious and honor-bound, nobody ends up looking “good” but the drama is palpable. Designer Gregor Vuga is actively working on a second edition, which the game desperately needs. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned to route around the game’s quirks.
2013 Runners-up
Torchbearer
2013 was a very good year for games with staying power. Torchbearer is Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane’s love letter to old-school (but maybe not OSR!) Dungeons & Dragons, built on the skeleton of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard.
What if you went dungeon delving not because you’re a great hero, but because you’re a dead-ender? Why would anyone go into life-threatening environments with a slim chance of finding enough sellable garbage to pay for room and board for a bit? That’s the Torchbearer angle. As part of this narrative deconstruction of B/X D&D of yore, your characters have Natures based on their culture, with much of the game maintaining a delicate balance of not too low (your character is alienated) or too high (your character craves comfort and safety). You also have a Belief and a Goal, big explicit flags you set to pursue the game’s various economies. There are all kinds of interesting procedural nods back to B/X-style play, including a hyper-detailed grind of light, food and rest, and an admonition to the GM to just Say Yes to players who come up with great ideas on how to overcome their obstacles.
I’ve run a couple campaigns of it and played several sessions at cons. It is consistently frustrating and fun, with fun just barely nudging out the frustration. Quite a trick to combine both overcoming obstacles and addressing situations: those are different play and design goals, and few games put them both under the same roof. Terrific game, and my favorite dungeon-delver.
Tenra Bansho Zero
Tenra Bansho Zero is a huge title in Japan, and translator Andy Kitkowski moved heaven and earth to translate it and bring it to America. It’s a hell of a smart design that does lots of weird things well: tons of manga/anime tropes (mecha and ninjas and sorcerers, oh my) are thrown together into one Rifts-like setting, players constantly chase and churn little melodramatic story arcs, an inverted NPC reaction table (you roll to see how your character reacts to an NPC!) and other cool little design gestures throughout.
The Quiet Year
The Quiet Year, a post-apocalyptic map-drawing game by Avery Alder that is kind of ttrpg-adjacent, opened my eyes to the pleasures of, well, ttrpg-adjacent play. I’ve had more exposure to The Deep Forest, a fantasyland adaptation by Alder and Magpie Games‘ Mark Diaz Truman where the monsters are spending a quiet year preparing their realm for the return of adventurers (ew, yuck, ptui).
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