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. ?
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?
Closing in on the finish now, and not a moment too soon. The games in these last couple years are going to be familiar with most everyone, I think. Another tied year! 2018 was, I think, the year I finally conceded that I just can’t keep up with everything coming out.
Feels-heavy dynastic melodrama in a super accessible GM-less package. Great to play with your non-gamer friends who are enjoying the mainstreaming of fantasy.
The King is Dead is a sexy, violent Game of Thrones-inspired GMless PbtA game. Each player gets a book filled with little mini-games that handle various types of scenes. You take turns arranging scenes between characters, while organically developing a map in the middle of the table comprised of locations, events, and characters mentioned in those little games. Oh and there’s a card game happening concurrently with the mini-games, where you’re trying to assemble the best possible hand before moving to “the coronation,” the last scene of the game.
Facilitating TKID at NewMexicon in 2019, with possibly the first set of prop cards available.
For subject matter that could be so fraught –a sexytimes-focused minigame, seduction baked into almost all the rest, lots of violence and the possibility of character death – I found TKID notable for the extensive safety and consent baked into every element. It is currently my favorite game by the Bakers.
Legacy (2nd Edition)
A PbtA game about building communities across generations.
Legacy 2nd Edition by Jay Iles was my other important game of 2018. I ran a nice campaign of this for my local group, and playing it was a great reminder of how different PbtA games can be. Legacy is a post-apocalyptic game based on Apocalypse World, which sounds like an ourobouros but the focus is very different. In Legacy, you play both specific characters and the family/house/faction to which that character belongs. The editorial focus is on community building, rather than personal stories. Playing at the house level is the big, abstract movement of history, while zooming in on the characters lets you work out the personal dramas of the folks tied up in that history. The weakened character monogamy and shifting scales is an acquired taste; my players prefer sticking to one character. But the form is strong and distinct, and has spun off several free-standing hacks.
Maybe my favorite part of Legacy is how very different your world and shared map ends up looking, depending on the mix of family playbooks you started with. If you chose Kaiju-hunters, well, welcome to giant monster land! If you chose the sneaky scientists hiding away in their secure bunker, you get lots of pre-ruin technology. You want mutant monsters? Play the mutant monster hunters.
I’ll be running a Slavic-flavored fantasy game version of Legacy, called Free From The Yoke, as a spotlight GM at New Mexicon in 2020 (rescheduled for September – I hope you’ll try to make it!).
Few games have garnered as much critical acclaim and fan hype as Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. The structure of the game is dead-simple, so simple in fact I’m having trouble reconciling how this was the first breakthrough game in this format. There’s a deck of provocative questions about your past with the Queen, and you spend the game drawing cards and answering those questions. That’s it. I called it a “feels filler” when I first played her hand-written draft of it at a house con. The published version includes a deck of gorgeous art of various “queens” to choose before you embark on your mission. Terrific game and enjoyable at any age or experience level. I expect many, many hacks to appear in the coming years.
I got to play Star-Crossed, Roberts’ other big-deal game, at the same house con as For the Queen. This one’s more conventionally structured, although it’s still GMless: two players act out two people who cannot be together for reasons you come up with before play. Then you pull blocks from a Jenga tower as you execute PbtA-style moves from your playbook. There are two playbooks and they’re slightly different from each other. I played half of an isolated pair of scientists on a distant planet romantically orbiting one another despite the mission’s prohibition against fraternization. I love that this model can be mapped to so many different settings. It’s also got a nice game-y layer, which is a fine alibi for friends to not feel weird about flirting with each other.
Goblinville is a sweet little fantasy mashup of several other games. I’ve run it a few times now, and it always produces a fun time. The characters are little goblins in a big world, going off on small-time adventures for small-time stakes while trying to build up their small-time village. I wrote way too much about Goblinville in 2019. It’s a tiny, very good game.
Forbidden Lands is Free League’s fantasy adventure game built on the Year Zero Engine. I played a bunch of it, and it was pretty fun, but I couldn’t help but feel let down by it. I was hoping for a more direct adaptation of Mutant: Year Zero, in particular in how MYZ delivers its campaign, but FL was more concerned with serving up an old-school-evocative experience. Which it does. Forbidden Lands is probably my favorite fantasy adventure game, but the setting is a mess and its official campaign was hard for me to deliver to the players. I’ll probably run it again in the future for my own fantasy setting.
I’m not super into OSR-style games (other than Sine Nomine’s Godbound and Stars Without Number), but I’ve had a couple chances to play convention one-shots using Old School Essentials. It’s just B/X D&D, but it’s reorganized and super cleanly presented. It’s the D&D I grew up with so I know it down to my prepubescent bones. A fine platform to run system-agnostic OSR-style adventures in.
The grand finale! Maybe not so grand, but I think you’ll agree the twenty-teens have been a heck of a strong year for small-press roleplaying.
Here’s a list of all the entries in the series. I’ll list all the games mentioned in the series at the end. Hope my lists provoked some good gaming memories of the previous decade. What were the most important games of the decade to you?
Have a fun and sane 2020, y’all, and thanks to everyone who backed my Patreon my first month: the first draft of this series was January’s backer-only post!
Because I live in the southwest, one state over from Magpie Games I’ve played a heck of a lot of Zombie World during its playtesting. It’s a card-based version of PbtA (which Magpie downplays in its marketing blurbs, since they’re trying to expand their audience) and it does precisely what it says on the tin: a group of survivors (built from three cards) deal with zombies and each other in some thematically appropriate setting: a mall, a hospital, whatever. Every time I’ve played I’ve gotten a very satisfying, genre-appropriate tale of (usually) awful people in the midst of an existential crisis. It’s great to see it live in the world!
I ran the campaign of Band of Blades this year. I wrote a lot about it. Despite taking up a notably big chunk of my gaming schedule (nine sessions, which is a lot for me), it wasn’t the most important game of my year. The game is Forged in the Dark, featuring fantasy soldiers beating a hasty retreat before the implacable zombie hordes of the Cinder King. There are some interesting remixes on the FitD model, particularly the shared enterprise of the Legion and the downtime phase you might normally expect. We ended up having fun with it but I learned a lot about why FitD games will never be my favorite.
We also played a good long run of Godboundin 2019. This is Sine Nomine’s OSR game of divine beings wielding the Words of Creation to reshape a world broken by magic and hubris. It’s sold as a love letter to White Wolf’s Exalted but I feel like the underlying themes of the game play out quite differently. It’s only OSR-adjacent in my mind, as well: most of the game’s mechanisms are tied up in how Words are wielded and how the characters build up their divine power over time. Read more about this game!
Sources: Wikipedia, Indie RPG Awards, DriveThruRPG, my poor bookshelves
All The Games
This is a complete list of every game highlighted in the series. Wondering where and how to learn more about small-press gaming? You could do worse than browse this list.
If you’re thinking about picking any of them up, please consider doing so through these links. I may make a few extra cents on affiliate sales, and every bit counts. Thank you!
You’ve probably noticed I went silent for a couple months. It wasn’t on purpose, but it was the culmination of stuff both within and outside my control. Been thinking a lot about the work I/we do here, goals and the overall environment of gaming talk.
Two big realizations have recently shifted my thinking about the point of…all this. Gaming. Talking about roleplaying. What we get out of any of it. This isn’t existential dread or anything, it’s actual genuinely interesting stuff! By no means am I quitting playing, good grief. But how and when I talk about it might be changing.
The Feed Monster
Finally (finally!) understanding the social media (but specifically Twitter) discourse engine was the biggest one. We get a good bit of traffic here at IGRC off Twitter, and for that I’m grateful. But also? The folks I follow and the general tone of roleplay talk has been fucking with my head. You know the thing where you see all your friends posting pix from vacations and you think to yourself, “hey, am I the only one not on vacation? Why is everyone else so much better off than me?” Your feed becomes, like, an aggregate being. That’s what happened to my roleplaying feed: given any realization or opinion or discovery I might want to talk about, someone else had gotten there first. And they state that realization or opinion or discovery in such a strident way that not only did I feel like the last person to get there, but I felt like shit for taking so long. I’m supposed to be good at this! How am I just now making these discoveries?
Good lord, the sheer condescension. Everywhere. All the time. No effort at all to meet folks where they are, no effort to even try and see a new angle, just viciously patronizing dismissal. Given a broad enough feed of thinkers and talkers, it quickly feels like there’s nothing new under the sun.
Obviously this is untrue. I have a voice and a set of experiences that’s unique, even if any given discovery or realization or opinion I may share wasn’t necessarily the first. The feed will always be there to remind me that I’m stupid, though. It’s demoralizing even if objectively bullshit.
I have to assume this happens because the algorithms that feed us this garbage are designed to do so. To amp up the competition, to put people at each other’s throats. To juice engagement even when it’s not really, you know, how actual humans engage with ideas. I love talking about ideas! I don’t love that someone feels slighted because they didn’t get credit for having the idea first. We’ve all got to be better about both giving credit, but also that ideas aren’t that precious.
The feed messed with my head, bad, over the past couple years. As we got more traffic, I’d also get such weird shit in comments both here and abroad. Listening to criticism is a two-edged sword, and I’ve just recently figured out that a lot of that criticism is someone else’s damage playing out.
With the changes happening at Twitter, and our follower count slowly deflating like a poorly made nitrile glove balloon, I think it’s time to turn away from the feeds for feedback and real feedback. I encourage everyone to either subscribe to the website to get notifications, or if you’re feeling generous, support the work at Patreon and get notified that way.
The Payoff(s)
The other major triggering event for me was a more exciting galaxy-brain moment. This is good stuff and I want to write more about it, but it veers steeply into my most hated gaming-discourse topic: theory. So I’m reframing my thoughts as observations, not prescriptive commandments.
I had a friend visit me a month or so ago. He had moved away several years ago but visits once a year now. Before he left, he had both been one of my closest gaming friends and an ongoing source of tension at our table. When he visited, we played games of course. Having him away from the table, no longer there every week, gave me a fresh perspective on just what was happening there…as well as with other middling-tense gaming relationships I’ve had over the years.
The galaxy-brain realization was this: we all have needs we try to meet with our gaming and those needs might not be compatible. While Big Model theory talks about creative agendas, my realization was that these agendas are actually strategies for achieving what we need. They aren’t, themselves, what we need. (This is the part where I fully expect condescending sighs from old Forge heads who will harrumph that agendas were always that. What fuckin’ ever.) So, like, aligning creative agendas at the table via narrow rulesets or table culture or overtly intentional play? That doesn’t address underlying human needs. That doesn’t get us to the payoff.
The twist here is that the payoffs are often in conflict with each other. And that is why we run into trouble. It’s not conflicting strategies, it’s conflicting goals.
Take, for example, my old gaming buddy and I. My goal is most often fraternity above all else. I’m a pleaser and I like to entertain. I am happiest when my players are happy. Of course our goals are a pie chart. Runner up goal is often novelty, like, what does this game do and what kind of interesting things come out of it? As much as I would like to really explore a weird setting or situation, I’m not really wired to make that a major goal for myself. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the goal of my friend is agency. As we played, it jumped out so very obviously that he was happiest when he was making things happen and the unhappiest when he couldn’t. Agency can be at odds with fraternity if your desire for agency means making someone at the table unhappy. And when my trying to angle and massage and nuance the social context of play doesn’t address the fact that this isn’t helping him make things happen.
I’m fiddling with a larger model of play goals. That’s the thing I’ll write about later. But over and over, I see tension where theoretically players’ strategies are aligned. And I will also see good flow despite different strategies being deployed at any moment of play. You don’t need procedural coherence when you’re all going for compatible goals. If the whole table wants to explore the GM’s weird prep, you can absolutely explore in different ways. If everyone’s just happy to be at the table with their friends, same thing. If a novel system also lets you get things done, right on, we’re both getting what we need.
This feels important, a synthesis of lots of play observations over the decades. Identifying the scope of goals is all well and good (and definitely an invitation for willful misinterpretation and gross jargon wars), but I’m most interested in spotting when goals come into conflict. When I want to explore and you want control. When I want novelty and you want comfort. And so on. Agendas — strategies — were just the beginning.
Babble over. Stay tuned for more.
Jahmal And I Do Another Podcast
Jay and I co-interviewed Jason Lutes, our friend who wrote about his sprawling West Marches campaign here a few months back, about his upcoming campaign. Jay’s also working on launching a West Marches style game but in a sci-fi vein. Looking forward to what he cooks up! The whole format feels high maintenance and tricky. Anyway, check out Jay’s Patreon to get the inside scoop on future Diceology podcasts as well.
Apologies for my iffy audio, that’s on me. Didn’t get my mic situation squared away right.
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.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
Closing in on the finish now, and not a moment too soon. The games in these last couple years are going to be familiar with most everyone, I think. Another tied year! 2018 was, I think, the year I finally conceded that I just can’t keep up with everything coming out.
If you’re just starting the series, the first entry is here. This series was made possible by my generous Patreon supporters. Thank you!
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
The King is Dead
Feels-heavy dynastic melodrama in a super accessible GM-less package. Great to play with your non-gamer friends who are enjoying the mainstreaming of fantasy.
PDFs are available at DriveThruRPG. The marvelous physical production, with neat little cards and other props, is available at Lumpley’s Itch page. Not necessary but strongly encouraged!
2018: The King is Dead
The King is Dead is a sexy, violent Game of Thrones-inspired GMless PbtA game. Each player gets a book filled with little mini-games that handle various types of scenes. You take turns arranging scenes between characters, while organically developing a map in the middle of the table comprised of locations, events, and characters mentioned in those little games. Oh and there’s a card game happening concurrently with the mini-games, where you’re trying to assemble the best possible hand before moving to “the coronation,” the last scene of the game.
Facilitating TKID at NewMexicon in 2019, with possibly the first set of prop cards available.
For subject matter that could be so fraught –a sexytimes-focused minigame, seduction baked into almost all the rest, lots of violence and the possibility of character death – I found TKID notable for the extensive safety and consent baked into every element. It is currently my favorite game by the Bakers.
Legacy (2nd Edition)
A PbtA game about building communities across generations.
PDFs are available at DriveThruRPG.
2018: Legacy, 2nd Edition
Legacy 2nd Edition by Jay Iles was my other important game of 2018. I ran a nice campaign of this for my local group, and playing it was a great reminder of how different PbtA games can be. Legacy is a post-apocalyptic game based on Apocalypse World, which sounds like an ourobouros but the focus is very different. In Legacy, you play both specific characters and the family/house/faction to which that character belongs. The editorial focus is on community building, rather than personal stories. Playing at the house level is the big, abstract movement of history, while zooming in on the characters lets you work out the personal dramas of the folks tied up in that history. The weakened character monogamy and shifting scales is an acquired taste; my players prefer sticking to one character. But the form is strong and distinct, and has spun off several free-standing hacks.
Maybe my favorite part of Legacy is how very different your world and shared map ends up looking, depending on the mix of family playbooks you started with. If you chose Kaiju-hunters, well, welcome to giant monster land! If you chose the sneaky scientists hiding away in their secure bunker, you get lots of pre-ruin technology. You want mutant monsters? Play the mutant monster hunters.
I’ll be running a Slavic-flavored fantasy game version of Legacy, called Free From The Yoke, as a spotlight GM at New Mexicon in 2020 (rescheduled for September – I hope you’ll try to make it!).
2018 Runners-up
For The Queen
Available through Evil Hat Productions.
Few games have garnered as much critical acclaim and fan hype as Alex Roberts’ For the Queen. The structure of the game is dead-simple, so simple in fact I’m having trouble reconciling how this was the first breakthrough game in this format. There’s a deck of provocative questions about your past with the Queen, and you spend the game drawing cards and answering those questions. That’s it. I called it a “feels filler” when I first played her hand-written draft of it at a house con. The published version includes a deck of gorgeous art of various “queens” to choose before you embark on your mission. Terrific game and enjoyable at any age or experience level. I expect many, many hacks to appear in the coming years.
Available through Evil Hat Productions.
Star-Crossed
Available through DriveThruRPG.
I got to play Star-Crossed, Roberts’ other big-deal game, at the same house con as For the Queen. This one’s more conventionally structured, although it’s still GMless: two players act out two people who cannot be together for reasons you come up with before play. Then you pull blocks from a Jenga tower as you execute PbtA-style moves from your playbook. There are two playbooks and they’re slightly different from each other. I played half of an isolated pair of scientists on a distant planet romantically orbiting one another despite the mission’s prohibition against fraternization. I love that this model can be mapped to so many different settings. It’s also got a nice game-y layer, which is a fine alibi for friends to not feel weird about flirting with each other.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Goblinville
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Goblinville is a sweet little fantasy mashup of several other games. I’ve run it a few times now, and it always produces a fun time. The characters are little goblins in a big world, going off on small-time adventures for small-time stakes while trying to build up their small-time village. I wrote way too much about Goblinville in 2019. It’s a tiny, very good game.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Forbidden Lands
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Forbidden Lands is Free League’s fantasy adventure game built on the Year Zero Engine. I played a bunch of it, and it was pretty fun, but I couldn’t help but feel let down by it. I was hoping for a more direct adaptation of Mutant: Year Zero, in particular in how MYZ delivers its campaign, but FL was more concerned with serving up an old-school-evocative experience. Which it does. Forbidden Lands is probably my favorite fantasy adventure game, but the setting is a mess and its official campaign was hard for me to deliver to the players. I’ll probably run it again in the future for my own fantasy setting.
Available through DriveThruRPG.
Old School Essentials
Available through DriveThruRPG. The physical boxed set is available through Exalted Funeral.
I’m not super into OSR-style games (other than Sine Nomine’s Godbound and Stars Without Number), but I’ve had a couple chances to play convention one-shots using Old School Essentials. It’s just B/X D&D, but it’s reorganized and super cleanly presented. It’s the D&D I grew up with so I know it down to my prepubescent bones. A fine platform to run system-agnostic OSR-style adventures in.
Available through DriveThruRPG. The physical boxed set is available through Exalted Funeral.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
The grand finale! Maybe not so grand, but I think you’ll agree the twenty-teens have been a heck of a strong year for small-press roleplaying.
Here’s a list of all the entries in the series. I’ll list all the games mentioned in the series at the end. Hope my lists provoked some good gaming memories of the previous decade. What were the most important games of the decade to you?
Have a fun and sane 2020, y’all, and thanks to everyone who backed my Patreon my first month: the first draft of this series was January’s backer-only post!
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Zombie World
Not my favorite genre, not my favorite PbtA, but gosh I’ve ended up playing an awful lot of it. Probably the most accessible PbtA game on the market!
Available at Roll20.
2019: Zombie World
Because I live in the southwest, one state over from Magpie Games I’ve played a heck of a lot of Zombie World during its playtesting. It’s a card-based version of PbtA (which Magpie downplays in its marketing blurbs, since they’re trying to expand their audience) and it does precisely what it says on the tin: a group of survivors (built from three cards) deal with zombies and each other in some thematically appropriate setting: a mall, a hospital, whatever. Every time I’ve played I’ve gotten a very satisfying, genre-appropriate tale of (usually) awful people in the midst of an existential crisis. It’s great to see it live in the world!
2019 Runners-up
Band of Blades
Available in PDF from DriveThruRPG, or hardback from Evil Hat Productions.
I ran the campaign of Band of Blades this year. I wrote a lot about it. Despite taking up a notably big chunk of my gaming schedule (nine sessions, which is a lot for me), it wasn’t the most important game of my year. The game is Forged in the Dark, featuring fantasy soldiers beating a hasty retreat before the implacable zombie hordes of the Cinder King. There are some interesting remixes on the FitD model, particularly the shared enterprise of the Legion and the downtime phase you might normally expect. We ended up having fun with it but I learned a lot about why FitD games will never be my favorite.
Godbound
Available in PDF and hardback from DrivethruRPG.
We also played a good long run of Godbound in 2019. This is Sine Nomine’s OSR game of divine beings wielding the Words of Creation to reshape a world broken by magic and hubris. It’s sold as a love letter to White Wolf’s Exalted but I feel like the underlying themes of the game play out quite differently. It’s only OSR-adjacent in my mind, as well: most of the game’s mechanisms are tied up in how Words are wielded and how the characters build up their divine power over time. Read more about this game!
Sources: Wikipedia, Indie RPG Awards, DriveThruRPG, my poor bookshelves
All The Games
This is a complete list of every game highlighted in the series. Wondering where and how to learn more about small-press gaming? You could do worse than browse this list.
If you’re thinking about picking any of them up, please consider doing so through these links. I may make a few extra cents on affiliate sales, and every bit counts. Thank you!
Alas for the Awful SeaApocalypse World, Second EditionBand of BladesBlades in the DarkThe Burning Wheel, Gold Edition RevisedCircle of HandsCity of MistCoriolisDog Eat DogDungeon WorldDuranceFall of MagicThe Final GirlFollowForbidden LandsFor the QueenFreemarketGoblinvilleGodboundInheritanceInvisible SunThe King is DeadLegacy, Second EditionOld School EssentialsMasks: A New GenerationMicroscopeMonsterhearts, Second EditionMontsegur 1244Mouse Guard, Second EditionMutant: Year ZeroNight WitchesThe One RingPrimetime Adventures, Third EditionThe Quiet YearSagas of the IcelandersSpace Wurm vs MoonicornStar CrossedStars Without Number, RevisedTechnoirTenra Bansho ZeroThreadbareTimewatchTorchbearerUrban ShadowsThe WatchWitch: the Road to LindisfarneWorld Wide WrestlingZombie World
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
<em>Related</em>
Hey folks.
You’ve probably noticed I went silent for a couple months. It wasn’t on purpose, but it was the culmination of stuff both within and outside my control. Been thinking a lot about the work I/we do here, goals and the overall environment of gaming talk.
Two big realizations have recently shifted my thinking about the point of…all this. Gaming. Talking about roleplaying. What we get out of any of it. This isn’t existential dread or anything, it’s actual genuinely interesting stuff! By no means am I quitting playing, good grief. But how and when I talk about it might be changing.
The Feed Monster
Finally (finally!) understanding the social media (but specifically Twitter) discourse engine was the biggest one. We get a good bit of traffic here at IGRC off Twitter, and for that I’m grateful. But also? The folks I follow and the general tone of roleplay talk has been fucking with my head. You know the thing where you see all your friends posting pix from vacations and you think to yourself, “hey, am I the only one not on vacation? Why is everyone else so much better off than me?” Your feed becomes, like, an aggregate being. That’s what happened to my roleplaying feed: given any realization or opinion or discovery I might want to talk about, someone else had gotten there first. And they state that realization or opinion or discovery in such a strident way that not only did I feel like the last person to get there, but I felt like shit for taking so long. I’m supposed to be good at this! How am I just now making these discoveries?
Good lord, the sheer condescension. Everywhere. All the time. No effort at all to meet folks where they are, no effort to even try and see a new angle, just viciously patronizing dismissal. Given a broad enough feed of thinkers and talkers, it quickly feels like there’s nothing new under the sun.
Obviously this is untrue. I have a voice and a set of experiences that’s unique, even if any given discovery or realization or opinion I may share wasn’t necessarily the first. The feed will always be there to remind me that I’m stupid, though. It’s demoralizing even if objectively bullshit.
I have to assume this happens because the algorithms that feed us this garbage are designed to do so. To amp up the competition, to put people at each other’s throats. To juice engagement even when it’s not really, you know, how actual humans engage with ideas. I love talking about ideas! I don’t love that someone feels slighted because they didn’t get credit for having the idea first. We’ve all got to be better about both giving credit, but also that ideas aren’t that precious.
The feed messed with my head, bad, over the past couple years. As we got more traffic, I’d also get such weird shit in comments both here and abroad. Listening to criticism is a two-edged sword, and I’ve just recently figured out that a lot of that criticism is someone else’s damage playing out.
With the changes happening at Twitter, and our follower count slowly deflating like a poorly made nitrile glove balloon, I think it’s time to turn away from the feeds for feedback and real feedback. I encourage everyone to either subscribe to the website to get notifications, or if you’re feeling generous, support the work at Patreon and get notified that way.
The Payoff(s)
The other major triggering event for me was a more exciting galaxy-brain moment. This is good stuff and I want to write more about it, but it veers steeply into my most hated gaming-discourse topic: theory. So I’m reframing my thoughts as observations, not prescriptive commandments.
I had a friend visit me a month or so ago. He had moved away several years ago but visits once a year now. Before he left, he had both been one of my closest gaming friends and an ongoing source of tension at our table. When he visited, we played games of course. Having him away from the table, no longer there every week, gave me a fresh perspective on just what was happening there…as well as with other middling-tense gaming relationships I’ve had over the years.
The galaxy-brain realization was this: we all have needs we try to meet with our gaming and those needs might not be compatible. While Big Model theory talks about creative agendas, my realization was that these agendas are actually strategies for achieving what we need. They aren’t, themselves, what we need. (This is the part where I fully expect condescending sighs from old Forge heads who will harrumph that agendas were always that. What fuckin’ ever.) So, like, aligning creative agendas at the table via narrow rulesets or table culture or overtly intentional play? That doesn’t address underlying human needs. That doesn’t get us to the payoff.
The twist here is that the payoffs are often in conflict with each other. And that is why we run into trouble. It’s not conflicting strategies, it’s conflicting goals.
Take, for example, my old gaming buddy and I. My goal is most often fraternity above all else. I’m a pleaser and I like to entertain. I am happiest when my players are happy. Of course our goals are a pie chart. Runner up goal is often novelty, like, what does this game do and what kind of interesting things come out of it? As much as I would like to really explore a weird setting or situation, I’m not really wired to make that a major goal for myself. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the goal of my friend is agency. As we played, it jumped out so very obviously that he was happiest when he was making things happen and the unhappiest when he couldn’t. Agency can be at odds with fraternity if your desire for agency means making someone at the table unhappy. And when my trying to angle and massage and nuance the social context of play doesn’t address the fact that this isn’t helping him make things happen.
I’m fiddling with a larger model of play goals. That’s the thing I’ll write about later. But over and over, I see tension where theoretically players’ strategies are aligned. And I will also see good flow despite different strategies being deployed at any moment of play. You don’t need procedural coherence when you’re all going for compatible goals. If the whole table wants to explore the GM’s weird prep, you can absolutely explore in different ways. If everyone’s just happy to be at the table with their friends, same thing. If a novel system also lets you get things done, right on, we’re both getting what we need.
This feels important, a synthesis of lots of play observations over the decades. Identifying the scope of goals is all well and good (and definitely an invitation for willful misinterpretation and gross jargon wars), but I’m most interested in spotting when goals come into conflict. When I want to explore and you want control. When I want novelty and you want comfort. And so on. Agendas — strategies — were just the beginning.
Babble over. Stay tuned for more.
Jahmal And I Do Another Podcast
Jay and I co-interviewed Jason Lutes, our friend who wrote about his sprawling West Marches campaign here a few months back, about his upcoming campaign. Jay’s also working on launching a West Marches style game but in a sci-fi vein. Looking forward to what he cooks up! The whole format feels high maintenance and tricky. Anyway, check out Jay’s Patreon to get the inside scoop on future Diceology podcasts as well.
Apologies for my iffy audio, that’s on me. Didn’t get my mic situation squared away right.
The link to the podcast wasn’t working with the embedded player but here’s the URL: https://overcast.fm/+SgBLSMnDc
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related