Who are the really interesting modern TTRPG designers?

[Reynard]

Rae Nedjadi (Apocalypse Keys, Once More into the Void, Our Haunt, upcoming Tomb Raider games) Creates emotionally immersive games that are still packed with action and tension. Apocalypse Keys in particular mirrors personal conflict with external conflicts that highlight our monstrous natures. Does a better job of being a Hellboy RPG than the actual Hellboy RPG.

Apocalypse Keys looks interesting.

Kevin Crawford (Worlds Without Number, Wolves of God, Godbound) Creates trad games with extremely effective instructions on how to use them and generate more content. Not only would all trad GMs benefit from the random generation and idea seeds he puts forward in his games and supplements, they would also really benefit from a much more manageable approach to preparing / world building.

Crawford is great. Stars Without Number is essentially a perfect RPG.

Chris McDowall (Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, The Doomed, Ask the Stars) My favorite OSR adjacent designer. His games boil the style of play outlined in Principia Apocrypha down to its barest essentials. Extremely thematically compelling settings wedded to a far less arcane (and actually simple) frame.

I did not realize Into the Odd was a OSR version of Gamma World. I will have to check it out.

Thanks.

 

[Distracted DM]

This is a great thread!

 

[Committed Hero]

I'll give a shout out to Kevin Kulp, most recently the co author of Swords of the Serpentine. He has a gift for writing rules-light versions of Gumshoe games.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'll give a shout out to Kevin Kulp, most recently the co author of Swords of the Serpentine. He has a gift for writing rules-light versions of Gumshoe games.

I kept meaning to look at Swords of the Serpentine, because I loved Pelgrane Press due to 13th Age, and iirc SotS was sword n sorcery using gumshoe?

 

[aramis erak]

Rae Nedjadi (Apocalypse Keys, Once More into the Void, Our Haunt, upcoming Tomb Raider games) Creates emotionally immersive games that are still packed with action and tension. Apocalypse Keys in particular mirrors personal conflict with external conflicts that highlight our monstrous natures. Does a better job of being a Hellboy RPG than the actual Hellboy RPG.

I've used OMITV. It's a very interesting game. It's a storygame with no simulationism. Well written. Worth a look.

The final still isn't done yet, but the last preview is fully playable and looks awesome.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I'd be interested in hearing about people's play experiences of some of these games. I'm honestly a bit jaded about the next big thing in RPGs, whatever it is, because I worry that a lot of it is just hype.

You are correct that hype is a problem, and 90% of everything is crap anyway (Sturgeon's Law), but I can tell you about some actual play experiences.

• Apocalypse World / Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) in general -- AW is the (IMO) earliest example of a 'story now' game that is actually coherent and fun as a game rather than as a thought experiment or intellectual example. I have never failed to have fun playing or MC-ing (GM-ing) a game of AW. Of course, you do need the players to buy into the 'story now' model... or to put it more bluntly, you probably need to re-educate your group in that mode of play.
• Other PbtA games that I can personally vouch for:
  • Monster of the Week -- A lot of people say this is a better intro to PbtA than AW which... sure, that's an opinion. It may be the genre (Buffy-esque + lots of interpersonal drama) is more generally appealing that post-apocalypse? The tone is also less in-your-face / punk / swearwords, so there's that. Anyway, had fun playing a team of monster hunters in loosely connected missions.
  • Urban Shadows -- I've only played this a couple of times as one-shots, and it was fun, though I'm not super into the genre. I will say the "play in your hometown so the players are familiar with that world" is genius in its simplicity.
  • The Sprawl -- cyberpunk. Another genre I'm not super into, but this game made me like it. It does suffer from baked-in "Mr. Johnson betrays the party" inherited from Shadowrun, which is terrible, but you can ignore that part.
  • Legacy: Life Among the Ruins -- This is a really interesting take on AW, where you control both a person-playbook and a family/clan-playbook and you're kinda perpetual across a long period, like the named leaders in a Civilization game. (Lincoln of the Americans, from 2000 BCE to 2000 CE!)
• aaand... I was gonna keep listing other games but I feel like I'm taking over the thread with wall-o-text, so moving on

Luke Crane and Thor Olavsruud... the bent minds behind Burning Wheel and Torchbearer.

I have tried many many times to wrap my head around the core resolution mechanics of Burning Wheel and the gameplay loop but it is too opaque and Gygaxian sloppily scattered (with key rules 50 pages away from each other) for me to spend that much effort learning the games. I would welcome a BW SRD that stripped out all the cruft and just explained the rules.

But John Harper (Agon, which I really like; BitD, which a lot of people really like) is still active.

Blades in the Dark is a fantastic blend of story-now AW play with old-school D&D simulationist super-detailed setting, plus some gear (although it's Heisenbergian), plus territory control... it's this weird fantastic blend of two seemingly competing legs of the GNS stool that somehow works really well.

Agon reads amazingly but I would never, ever be able to get my group to play it. (I've pushed them pretty far and I know them well.) pemerton has an actual play of it here: <https://www.enworld.org/threads/agon-2nd-ed-actual-play.690886/>

I'll give a shout out to Kevin Kulp, most recently the co author of Swords of the Serpentine. He has a gift for writing rules-light versions of Gumshoe games.

I like Kevin and have met him IRL (plus of course he's an admin here), but it strikes me that Gumshoe is exactly the wrong system for 4-color swords'n'sorcery play like Swords of the Serpentine wants to enable.

I feel the same way about Night's Black Agents (err... not by Kevin Kulp; it's Ken Hite): you want to play Jason Bourne vs. vampires, that sounds awesome... and then you pick Gumshoe as the system? WHY, MAN?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I feel the same way about Night's Black Agents (err... not by Kevin Kulp; it's Ken Hite): you want to play Jason Bourne vs. vampires, that sounds awesome... and then you pick Gumshoe as the system? WHY, MAN?

Probably because I don't think that's actually the play-style its aimed at. Its aimed at George Smiley versus vampires. The difference is pretty pronounced.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Probably because I don't think that's actually the play-style its aimed at. Its aimed at George Smiley versus vampires. The difference is pretty pronounced.

Then its advertising campaign is entirely wrong.

Night’s Black Agents puts you in the role of a deadly secret agent, taking down the forces of darkness.

Bring your favorite high-octane spy thrillers to the table with Night’s Black Agents from legendary designer Kenneth Hite (Trail of Cthulhu). Have friends who love console shooters? This is the tabletop RPG for them!

Night’s Black Agentsbrings the GUMSHOE engine to the spy thriller genre, combining the propulsive paranoia of movies like Ronin and The Bourne Identity with supernatural horror straight out of Bram Stoker. Investigation is crucial, but it never slows down the action, which explodes with expanded options for bone-crunching combat, high-tech tradecraft, and adrenaline-fueled chases.

Night’s Black Agents

pelgranepress.com

This is clearly describing Jason Bourne (namechecked!) and not George Smiley (no one would ever describe him as "deadly" nor "high-octane").

Also sorry, but Gumshoe does not do bone-crunching combat in a satisfying way, full stop.

===

Anyway, we digress. I am willing to give Swords of the Serpentine the benefit of the doubt until I play it or read a trusted actual play of it. And Kevin Kulp is a great guy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then its advertising campaign is entirely wrong.

From my reading of the game, it kind of is. Once you're encountering the actual vampires in NBA, you really don't want to be taking a Jason Bourne approach. It will not go well. Bourne can do what he does because he's better or equal to everyone he encounters. That's not going to happen with NBA style vampires. Against their agents it can work fine (and some of the deterministic elements baked into Gumshoe can prevent things going off the rails, because in the context the game is set, failure is fairly likely to be irrecoverable), but that's not the whole of the game.

 

[pemerton]

AW is the (IMO) earliest example of a 'story now' game that is actually coherent and fun as a game rather than as a thought experiment or intellectual example.

Controversial!

Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel (I have a lot of actual play experience of both); HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling (I've read both closely and they've heavily influenced my thinking and my GMing); are all competitors for that title.