Dozens of role playing products come across my desk each year. Each of them represents hours of blood, sweat and tears. As the year draws to a close, I want to highlight some of the best ones I’ve seen this year.
Many gamers took steps in 2023 to look outside of Dungeons & Dragons for their tabletop gaming experiences. For anyone that hasn;t tried these titles I hope they get to do so in the new year. Links are included in each entry and I hope that if anyone who plays these games lets me know about their experiences on social media.
Dragonbane
It would be very easy for me to populate this list with Free League Publishing products and call it a day. This Swedish design house has been killing it with their games over the past few years and any one of their releases could have appeared in this article. Ultimately, I chose the one that excites me every time I see the box on my shelf.
Dragonbane offers a complete role-playing campaign experience in a box stuffed with adventures, dice, treasure cards, rules maps and more. The campaign is flexible while still being cohesive and compelling. It mixes elements of dark dungeons and light comedy in a very tasty package that’s perfect for anyone trying to break out of the D&D bubble or dip their toes into role playing for the first time.
Pirate Borg
Mork Borg took the industry by storm three years ago by combining a grisly rock album art graphic design style with a minimalist approach to rules inspired by old school games. Since then there have been expansions into other genres, times and places. Pirate Borg takes the grungy feel of the original gam and merges it with one of my favorite historical periods.
Life (and characters remain cheap) in Pirate Borg, but the world feels much more solidly built than many of its relations. It also has a simple yet fun of naval rules that can be enjoyed outside of the Dark Caribbean. But when players can play a crew of half-crabs, sorcerers and undead pirates, why not embrace the strangeness as well?
Shadowdark
Shadowdark looks like another throwback to the early days of dungeon crawling when players burned through characters like they were scratch off lottery tickets and every step in the dungeon could be their last. It reminds me of a tabletop version of those small indie video games that look like they were made 30 years ago but contain ideas modern gamers enjoy. The line art in the books hammers home that feeling to show that not every modern game needs full-color painted art to stand out on the shelf.
Instead of being beholden to earlier versions of D&D, Shadowdark takes the best elements from those games and assembles them in a way that captures the thrill of those classic crawls without papering over flaws with thick layers of nostalgia. The real time toch mechanic puts players on the clock to work together and reminds them that they are the intruders and should act accordingly. It’s become my first choice for down and dirty dungeon crawls that gets characters into danger withing a half hour of beginning play.
Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster
Pathfinder Second Edition took some bold steps to come out of the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons when it was released. It wanted to make sure that every choice in building a character mattered from the ones that happen in the beginning to the ones that happen during play. I love flipping through these books to just see option after option of character ideas from different feats, classes and even bits of gear.
The remastered books takes even more steps into the light. It makes the game more user friendly and cuts away legacy ideas like modifier scores and alignment to make Pathfinder stand on its own. These books feel like they give the reader room to breathe and I look forward to the upcoming remasters next year as well.
Pendragon Starter Set
Pendragon put the players in the roles of knights during the time of King Arthur and partaking in legendary adventure. It stands out because it forces players to reckon with the rise and fall of their knights through their passions, aging and dying. Rather than players always gaining power, the game introduces a dynastic element as long campaigns feature new generations of heroes influenced by past actions.
The Starter Set focuses on the early years of Arthur’s reign with the player knights present for the Boy King pulling the sword from the stone. It also embraces a more fleixible approach to Arthurian tales that emphasize mythology over history. There’s still plenty of detail for fans of the lore, but the game now encourages players to choose or ignore the parts of Arthurian myth they want to make the game fit the table.
Old Gods of Appalachia
No game this year has made me feel like we’re sitting around a campfire telling spooky stories like Old Gods of Appalachia. Much of that comes from the source material of the excellent podcast filled with a mix of folk horror, dark fantasy and a splash of downhome humor. The book does a great job in providing the tools to recreate that recipe for friends and family.
This book has been one of my favorite licensed RPGs in recent memory. The authors capture the flavor of the podcast well and make it easy to build characters that could easily show up in the main line podcast. Where else can you build A Neighborly Sage Who Fears No Haints instead of a Level 5 Wizard?
