The Lady and Tiger

2023 has been a great year for me in terms of RPGs, and I’m hoping to carry that momentum into the new year! My Worlds Without Number game has been going well, and although games under the OSR umbrella tend to be my preference I do want to branch out and try other RPGs. There’s a lot you can learn from playing new games, whether that’s picking up engaging mechanics, better leaning how to quickly absorb and communicate rules or just getting a little out of your comfort zone and broadening your skills as a GM.

Luckily, I know a wealth of folks who are willing to play one shots and short form campaigns of just about anything, so all I need to do is narrow down what games I want to run – that way I can learn the basics reasonably well and ensure that we all have at least a passable time. In the interests of this, I’m going to share the games I’m looking forward to playing, why I want to play them and what I hope to learn from the experience!

Mothership

As a big fan of movies like Alien and Ghost in the Shell, the general vibes of Mothership already really interested me. I don’t generally play horror RPGs with most of my experience being in D&D and games like it that tend to lean towards heroic fantasy. Like I mentioned earlier, a big motivator for a game to end up on this list is how different it feels from the games I generally play, and Mothership looks to be a very different kind of experience.

After recently watching Starship Troopers (for the first time!) I’m also interested in running one of the 1e adventures, Another Bug Hunt. It feels like it wears it’s influences on its sleeve and feels like a tense but fun introduction to the system that can flow pretty naturally into other adventures. My dream goal with this game is to eventually run the Gradient Descent megadungeon since it feels very much in the same vein as some of the sci-fi media I enjoy, but I don’t want to start by biting off more than I can chew.

Like some of the other games on this list, Mothership is a d100-based game and I’d like to see how that plays – an (admittedly small) issue I’ve had recently is being clear about probabilities of failure when a player’s roll is being modified by a number of factors. This is less of an issue with a d20 since everything is in 5% steps, but for a d6 or Numenera skill system (where the required roll is x3 the difficulty) trying to be clear on what the player’s chances are can be a little messy.

Pendragon

Pendragon is a game I’ve heard about for years but only recently took the time to look into. It’s a game about playing as knights in the Arthurian Court (among other settings) and the rules reinforce this with characters having Virtues and Vices that determine what actions they can perform. The idea of rules enforcing in-character behavior sounds interesting, and I’m interested in games that integrate roleplaying into the rules rather than treating them as an additional thing the players do while rolling for skill checks or attacks.

A specific adventure that gets recommended a lot is the Great Pendragon Campaign, a generational campaign that follows the lineage of the PCs from the days of King Uther (King Arthur’s father), to the age of the Round Table and quest for the holy grail all the way to the tragic fall of King Arthur. It’s intense and quite long so it isn’t something I expect to play soon (unless someone else is running it!) but it is on my radar. Much like the rest of the games on this list, I intend to start with one of the smaller quick-start adventures in order to try to get a good feel for what the system is about before committing to anything long term.

Burning Wheel

Burning Wheel is another game that’s long been on my radar and I actually have a physical copy of both it and the spinoff game, Mouse Guard. Like I mentioned above, I find the idea of applying rules and structure to the way players play their characters outside of combat quite interesting and if it wasn’t for its complexity I’d have tried it much earlier. Still, from what I’ve read a lot of the complexity lies in the character creation process which can be handled by spending some time reading the book and working individually with players and in the addon systems like Duel of Wits which are valuable but not intended to be used constantly.

Call of Cthulhu

Years ago a friend of mine ran a Call of Cthulhu one shot and I found it pretty interesting. Granted, we were students and spent the night joking about the horror over pizza but the general concept did interest me and as I’ve gotten older I appreciate the idea of more serious games. I haven’t read a lot of H.P Lovecraft’s work (although I did recently receive an illustrated copy of At the Mountains of Madness that I’m excited to read) but I do like a lot of stories that have been inspired by it and I want to take the chance to play the game and see what’s been compelling folks to swear by the system for decades. I’m also hoping to pick up some tips on how to pace mystery and horror story beats that I can better adapt to other games, considering that OSR dungeon crawling is only a step removed from horror anyway.

Numenera

This one is cheating a little, because I’m already running one of the old intro adventures for Numenara. But considering I plan on running it again and that we’re only a few hours into the material I figured it was allowed to make to list. My introduction to Numenara was actually the CRPG, Torment: Tides of Numenara. Although I did end up preferring the original Planescape Torment, I found the game engaging and it got me to take a look at the system that inspired it.

I’m only one session in right now so I have little to say, but the idea of GM Intrusions providing a way to reimburse players for the GM adding narrative and mechanical complications to the story as well as the focus on the Weird through Cyphers, single-use items that defy easy explanation and provide characters with varied ways of solving their problems, sounds interesting to me so far.

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure if I’ll get through all of these games in the coming year but I do hope to play many of them, and I want to focus on maintaining a healthy schedule so that I don’t overdo it. It’s easy to get your hopes up and chase that next big thing, whether in RPGs or in life, and it’s important to slow down and appreciate where you’re currently at and what you’ve currently achieved. I hope the new year brings many good tidings for all of us, and that we all have a great year full of memorable tabletop moments!