My Top Ten TTRPGs

Happy 2026. Dusting off the old blog and dropping one that a lot of Dungeon Tubers are doing. In spite of being a Caucasian Male TTRPG player over the age of 50, I have yet to set up a Dungeon Tube of my own, so I'm dropping it here. For my dozen or so I hope you are all doing well. I can't believe I had over a hundred views on the last Astroprisma one. I haven't played it in a while now, but it remains a fun game that I enjoyed and it makes the list.

10. Deadlands (Pinnacle Entertainment Group): This one is weird west setting and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I didn't play it enough for it to go any further up the chain. I remember a few characters I ran--"Stone Cold" Ken Masters who was me doing a piss-poor Steve Austin getting blown away by a rifleman is very memorable and there was a gambler I played at a convention one time when I lived out in the UAE--for me the best mechanic was using the poker cards. I never tried the D20 or Savage Worlds version, so I can't speak to those but the original was fun.

09. Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf): For a time there in the 90's, this was the go to. My group played in a lot of the old World of Darkness and the various supplements. Dice pool system, but it felt like an easy one compared to some of the things I've encountered today. I still have the first edition of the core rule book and may revisit it someday. 08. Heroes Unlimited (Palladium): It's a super hero game with the Palladium engine. I also had plenty of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the various supplements. I remember reading the books like crazy and playing a few games in high school and as a recent graduate, but not enough to place it any higher on the list. Nowadays when I want rules light and just can't keep up with what characters can do even in 5th edition, I just don't think Palladium books can make the cut. 07.Marvel Super Heroes (TSR): You know and love FASERIP. This is the main supers game we played at a time in my life when Marvel was doing now wrong. I recently re-acquired them and hope to play again soon. My Mandela Effect affected brain doesn't remember if I started with this or with some half-hearted attempt at D&D, but as I remember it today, this is what started me on the journey. 06. Ryuutama:Natural Fantasy RPG (Kotodama Heavy Industries): For quite some time this was the number one RPG in Japan. It was billed as "Miyazaki meets The Oregon Trail" and that pretty much covers it. Two unique elements to this game: 1. Travel is the focus 2. The GM has his own character--a dragon called a Ryuujin. It grows along along with the players and tries to help them succeed. It's very rules light and a lot of fun. (I put two newer games on my list which may prove to be usurpers as time goes on. I used to proselytize for Ryuutama all the time. It's a really light-hearted fun game worth a shot. I'm sure it would be a great one to solo) 05.Cyberpunk 2020 (R. Talsorian Games) I don't want to separate things by edition too much, but RED--the current edition--could be up here in about the same spot. RED is a little easier to learn as I understand, but I really haven't played or run it, so 2020 it is. A lot of fun to be had here and I have both played and run online. The setting is what makes this game for me. Everyone should watch Edgerunners if they haven't. 04.Astroprisma (Crescent Chimera) another new one which is kind of a sister game to Shadow Dark in my mind. It has a similar creation backstory and creator--another young woman who jumped on the shoulders of giants and surpassed them streamlining some of the tedium of games that came before. It was a successful Kickstarter...it just didn't quite break the bank like Shadow Dark did. This is Sci-Fi space exploration geared for solo play with later expansion for groups to play together. Build a ship, explore a sector and get into trouble with various factions in the dystopian future. 03. The Roleplaying Game of the Planet of the Apes (Magnetic Press/West End): I love the ruleset, the supplements and the setting. This is a new one and I haven't been able to run one for the group. This is a variant of the D6 West End games like Star Wars. It looks so good and I'm working on my campaign/one shot planning now. The little solo part in the book was more like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but a more complex Solo expansion is on the way. 02. Shadow Dark (Arcane Library): I've run this a few times. I haven't quite gotten a continuous campaign out of it, but it's fun to read, has interesting art, and is supported by a growing community. Everyone in the Dungeon Tube audience has to know about it unless they've been living under a rock. 01. D&D 5E (WOTC 2014): Unpopular opinion in these circles, but for better or for worse, I've played it more than anything else. The mechanics are solid and easy enough for anyone to play who has an interest. I prefer Shadow Dark. I honestly had more fun with 4E and I grew up with 2E and played in a cool OSRIC campaign just before Wuhan Flu, but at the end of the day, I've played more 5E with more people in person and online than I've ever played in any of the other games over the previous 40-ish years of playing. It comes down to who is running the game and who you're playing with as far as the cringy/woke bits are concerned and the 2024 update is a bridge too far, but this version has been the most popular for a reason.

Take care...hopefully, I won't make it a complete ghost town in here in 2026..Also, Happy Year of the Horse...CNY is on the way you know!

RPG a Day 2023: The 10th Anniversary Edition--Day 1 First RPG Played This Year

 It's that bittersweet time of year again. My blog will wake from hibernation for this month as I participate in RPG a Day. Going to try to keep my answers short and sweet this year. The bitter part? My vacation will be over before the challenge is...

FIRST RPG Played this year:

In spite of all the controversy going on with the OGL and WotC at the time, my ongoing Roll 20 D&D5E game was the first game I played this year. Things have changed a lot around here since that time. The biggest of the changes is that China lifted all the Covid restrictions. The Wuhan flu feels like a distant memory now. Most of my gaming remains online, but we finally have live tables running as well. Let's hope we never go through a time like that again.  

I have been running my game since November '21. It was supposed to be an adaptation of Palace of the Silver Princess, but I've taken the party all over the place by running modules that I never got to run before to flesh out the cities and towns in Haven that had only sparse descriptions as originally written. Unfortunately, I unwittingly turned my campaign into one of those inter-planar/multiverse things. Ugh! hate those and it's like I'm running one and I'm playing in one at the live table as well. To make things worse, I crossed a bridge too far back in Halloween of '22.I allowed the party to explore a carnival using a KS supplement that I backed called Heckna!. They have been stuck there ever since. I will not tell a lie, the campaign is looking like old Elvis now, and I'm pushing the party hard down that railroad back to Haven. You can take your pick as to what the setting is feeling like to me now: A) Casablanca B) Hotel California C) Roach Motel.

Still, we press on. Luckily, getting there is half the fun right...right?

TTRPG: The Woke List

I don't blog a whole heck of a lot once #RPGaDAY is over for the year, but it seems that another TTRPG controversy has been brewing over the last few days. There is a list out--no link provided. You can find it easy enough and those that know already know anyway--that breaks down some of the big name TTRPG companies down by how woke they are. Long post less long, TTRPG creator John Wick is angry because he didn't make the list. I responded on a YouTube discussion with the following...I liked it so much that I saved it below:

The first 7th Sea 2nd edition KS project--back in 2016 so only around five years ago--was great. It was the top backed project on KS for a long time, and I was among those backers. 

The follow-up has been a disappointing disaster to say the least. The KS for 7th Sea Khitai funded and the product was due for delivery way back in August 2018. That's pre-WuHan Flu by a couple of years. He got fat on all that sweet, sweet KS money and fell way behind. He is currently partnered with Chaosium to sell the existing products and for help in completing the outstanding ones, and--to his credit--he never "skipped town" and still updates us and shows the PDFs as the project slowly makes its way to completion. However, by this point any real interest I had in playing has fallen by the wayside. 

The list itself was not meant as an enemies list. It was used to make consumers--mostly conservatives--aware of what these companies and games represent. Most gamers want the game to be apolitical the WOKE SJW types see the hobby as a means of pushing their agenda, and many of us don't want anything to do with it. It's not a bad thing to support the companies that stand for what you believe in, and there's no reason to spend your money on a company or product line that hates you or pushes "morals" that you portend to disagree with. That said, I will be buying 'Witchlight'. I want it and it doesn't matter to me if Wizards of the Woke is the publisher or not. On the other hand, I will not be buying D&D "prom night" or similarly themed "snowflake/safe place" products and it wouldn't matter who published it--it just happens to be Wizards. At the end of the day everyone should vote for what they're interested in with their wallets, play with the people they like to play with and play the way they like to play--just as it's always been. 

One last thing, politically speaking, I don't care if the company is good, bad or indifferent. If they can't deliver their product in a timely manner, they will not get financial support from me--and thus is the fate of John Wick.

RPGaDAY2021--Day 31: THANK

 #RPGaDAY2021 Day 31 it's all over but the Thanking.

I thank everyone behind the scenes at RPG a DAY and any and everyone who responded to the prompts and gave me something to think about or discuss.

My gaming experience was overall weak during the 2020-2021 season--that's a school year to you and me--but I'm hoping to get involved with more for the 2021-2022 season. I'm thankful for VTTs. I'm thankful for creative TTRPG enthusiasts that create the KS projects I'm interested in and thankful for others like myself that take the risk to back them.

I'm thankful that I have a wife that puts up with the hobby...not all gamers get that. I'm thankful that I have a daughter who is getting closer and closer to the age when I can play some TTRPGs with her. She's mastered UNO more of less already.

Finally, as much as I like responding, I'm thankful I get to go back to blogging sporadically for the next 12 months.

RPGaDAY2021:Day 30--Mention

As this year's venture comes to an end is there anything else I want to mention? Honestly, not much. I'll just fill-in my play experience since the last RPGaDAY ended

I ran an online one-shot last Halloween with the Heckna! play test rules. It was a very quick scenario wherein my two players managed to make it from the midway of the carnival to a haunted hotel before they had to go. It's one of the risks of playing with a younger teen because they have to go too bed when the parents tell them. It was fun, but I wanted more.

I played in a 5E campaign Spring 2021. It was a fun murder mystery type game with werewolves. I liked being able to be a player for a change. It was a pretty decent group for a Roll 20 pick-up game, but again players are flaky.

Upcoming? I'm planning a go with D&D Hardcore converting the classic 'Palace of the Silver Princess' and I'm hoping to accentuate all the non-PC/controversial parts that my PG-13 play style can muster. I'm also scheduled as a player in an upcoming Ryuutama game, but the group really seems to be dragging their feet on that one.

I'm planning to buy Viking Death Squad which I plugged in yesterday's prompt and The Wild Beyond the Witchlight box-set from WoTC. I really want to support the Wonderfilled Games project, GiantLands, #keepgamingfantasy but I'm waiting until it's gone to print. I hope I don't miss out, but if I do, I'm sure I'll gripe about it next year.

#RPGaDAY2021:Day 28--DELVE

 #RPGaDAY2021 for day 28 I rolled a '4' and got 'Delve'.

From a quick Google search I get this:

"What does it mean to delve deeper?

to examine something carefully in order to discover more information about someone or something:

It's not always a good idea to delve too deeply into someone's past".

Depending on one's level of sensitivity that might be good advice. Sometimes one can look back on a person's life--particularly someone we admire--and find statements they may have said or beliefs they held that would be problematic--so called--in today's society. Even more tricky is when the person is no longer with us to defend themselves or clarify their statements. Of course my hope would be--in the case of most TTRPG pioneers--that they would double-down on the "offense" and tell the snowflakes to grow a pair, but I digress.

Notwithstanding the fact that I am far more offended by what is deemed, "acceptable, normal behavior" today, than what was common in the fairly recent past, it wouldn't take too much digging to find something published or said that one doesn't agree with. That doesn't mean you need to CANCEL the past or clutch your pearls and add disclaimers to the front of everything.

We're focused on TTRPGs here, but clearly this happens with all sorts of media. I'm not sure when people became so sensitive and started "straining on the gnats while swallowing the camels" to paraphrase another book from the past that people get offended by, but it certainly wasn't that way back in the 80's and 90's.

All that rambling and preambling to say that for those who are daring enough to delve deep into the dark past of Dungeons and Dragon, you should checkout 'Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History'. No doubt it has probably been sanitized for our consumption, but there is a lot of great artwork showing how D&D evolved from past to present--including some "spicy" advertising campaigns that will probably have snowflakes demanding the book come with a warning label. I'll give one myself.

WARNING: Product was produced in 2018 and the level of WOKENESS among the professionally offended grows exponentially with each passing year. BEWARE!

Side Note: If you never watched 'Song of the South' you should rectify that at your earliest convienence. While everything is subjective to the viewer's own tastes, I find it to be a sweet and gentle movie with a lot of classic animation and humor that only the flakiest snowflakes would find offensive in the least.

RPGaDay2020--Day 27--Fraction

#RPGaDAY2021 Day 27. I rolled another '1' and got 'fraction'. I'm not going into any depth at all for my responses during these final days.

I will say that I hate all forms of math including fractions and that way back when I took the S.A.T.s it was proof. I had a natural '20' in English but a '1' for the maths.

The other things that pops into my head about 'fractions' is that in spite of all the TTRPGs I own, I only play something different than D&D 5E a small fraction of the time, and in spite of what my wife may think, I only back a small fraction of the group funded projects that I wish I could support.

RPGaDAY2021:Day 12--Think

 For #RPGaDAY2021 and day 12 I rolled a '1' and thus the topic is 'think'.

If everything is more or less going well for you, you have the luxury of spending free-time thinking about subjects like the state of TTRPGs.

It should be well documented for those reading my entries, that I'm not happy with the WOKE direction the mainstream wing of gaming is headed. I fight in the culture wars on the social media battlefield waving the flag of traditional conservative gamers who want gaming to remain fantasy and keep identity politics or politics of any kind for that matter out of it--but I can only do that because I'm in a position to do so. If I were thinking about where my next meal was going to come from or whether or not there was a roof over my head, the fact that soyboys have D&D prom gender fluid edition heading toward the market wouldn't even be on my radar. The question becomes then, should it be on my radar now? It's not as though I'm forced to buy the thing and there are more than enough legacy products and OSR clones of such to keep one busy for a lifetime. I think that's something I should really think about.

RPG a Day 2021: Day 5--Community

 Day 5 of #RPGaDAY2021 and I roll another '4' for 'Community'.

This is another one that lends itself to controversy as I don't like where a lot of the current TTRPG community is going. To keep it positive, I do remember a time when gaming really did feel like a community or even a refuge from the world, but alas it doesn't feel like the hobby we have today...at least not in the 'macro' as the kids say. These issues are well documented, so no need to go into great detail. Luckily, in the 'micro' there are still a lot of positive things happening. I'm all for the OSR, the indy publishers and Kickstarter creators who are trying their best to #keepgamingfantasy even if they're often using the same engine that fuels "the world's most popular role-playing game'. At times these groups almost feel like a community unto themselves a remnant that is holding the line and that I'm happy to be a part of.

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