• He/Him

Hi its me Flux! I mostly talk here about Tabletop RPG's, Actual plays that I like, and other media I enjoy (Like video games!)


My favorite TTRPG's, at the moment include:
-Mothership
-Armor Astir Advent
-HEART: The City Beneath
-Songs for the Dusk
-Tendencies: Spirit and Glamour
-Beam Saber
-Songbirds 3e
-His Majesty The Worm


I've been having a hankering to run something Fantasy lately. And while I could pull out one of my favourite OSR darlings like Songbirds or Mausritter, there's a couple games that I've heard about that I've been wanting to crack open to see if they sing to me. This list includes...

  • Shadowdark
  • Burning Wheel
  • His Majesty the Worm
  • Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard
  • Dragonbane
  • Runequest
  • Torchbearer
  • ICON

If you've played any of these, what has your experience been like? And do you have a favourite adventurey/dungeon crawley/fantasy-ey game not listed here? I'd love to see it!


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in reply to @TheFlux's post:

Flying Circus. Planes and sorcery instead of swords and sorcery. Well, there are swords too. Not exactly dungeon crawl but the cycle of play condenses a lot of the same things into its structure.

XCrawl is my favorite dungeon crawl setting vibe. I actually don't terribly like the specific neo-Rome that the book sets up but that's not important, the XCrawl League is. Dungeon crawling as a cross between extreme sports and pro wrestling style "sports entertainment."

GURPS Thaumatology is worth looking at for the detailed game-stat version of hermeticism style magic influences. Having a system of symbolism like this makes magic feel more mystical, less like a pure game abstraction.

I had a real bad experience with ICON for reasons i could elaborate on.

but the tldr is: It's not done and there's too much goofy shit and trap builds. like the existence of trap builds at all, and a vital piece of advice completely missing from the game proper.

And enemies are hideously tanky.

My fantasy game of choice currently is Worlds Without Number. It offers an absurdly excellent GM section in the form of location tags, which are massive spark tables for environs which include default NPCs, treasures, enemies, locales.

It's character creation is the halfway point between OSR minimalism and 4e tacticslord shit. You can spec into being able to tell the GM "no, that magic bullshit doesn't affect me" to a level 1 whirlwind attack.

Every melee attack has a stat for guaranteed damage so if you're a fighter, barring getting slowed or stunned, your turn is never wasted.

And extensive systems to dump silver into so you can give players real-ass treasure.