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Choices make tabletop RPGs compelling. Whether the ones made before the game begins about character and setting or the ones made in the moment to steer the narrative into a different direction. Sometimes those choices are affected by the randomness of a dice roll though there are plenty of...

I'm working on a review and can confirm the starter set has women and non-Christain knights in the character pool.

Role playing games are generally inspired by other media. For many players who fell in love with worlds of fantasy, these inspirations include everything from Lord of the Rings to Conan The Barbarian and dozens of fantasy novel series since. Japanese console role playing games like Final Fantasy...

I find realism to be overrated in games. I’m telling stories with my friends and usually the games that focus on realism get dragged down in rules that make telling those stories harder. Books that add more rules to a game I like generally don’t interest me. Survivalist’s Guide To Spelunking...

Everyone is a nerd for something. Even though the worlds of sports and role-playing games seem to never cross over, it takes just a little digging to see that people can be fans of both. Even the nerd bars here in Wisconsin have Green Bay Packers games on during the football season. Storybrewers...

In this age of RPG ascendance, there’s no shortage of ways for gamers to make their hobby feel bigger. We can buy custom game tables, fancy dice sheaths and dice made from all sorts of artisanal sources. Adorablins, from Letiman Games, goes in the opposite direction. Everything you need to play...

Monster of the Week has the countdown where the Keeper explictly lays out what would happen in the mystery if the hunters never showed up. Monsters are built with a specific weakness in mind and the tension is between the players taking advantage of that weakness and the countdown ticking along...

A superweirdo is a main character in a story that follows a lot of the beats of a superhero story like secret identities, Fortresses of Solitude, saving the world but is not the usual masked billionaire or last son of a dying planet. Think of stories like Hellboy, Umbrella Academy or Doom Patrol...

Regular review readers probably have a decent picture of my tastes in RPGs. I prefer story over mechanics, character over plot and fiction over simulation. I also talk a lot about how I didn’t start with D&D so products that traffic in nostalgia of simpler dungeon crawling times have no hold...

Many RPGs have iconic adventures that have introduced thousands of people to their world. Adventures like Keep On The Borderlands, The Haunting, Dreamchipper and others will get fans of a certain system to break out into a smile and start telling war stories. For Delta Green, it’s the John Scott...

I've bounced off of many of those OSR games. I think SD resonates with me because it captures the feel of those dangerous early dungeon crawls without feeling beholden to design choices made 40 years ago. I like that it has customization options in the rules. I like that ancestry plus class is a...