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blakebouchard · 4 months

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7 Fantasy RPGs to fill the D&D-shaped Hole in your Life

So. It finally happened. Either Hasbro, or Wizards of the Coast, or someone else associated with Dungeons & Dragons finally did something so fucked-up that you've decided to swear it off entirely.

The problem is that for decades, there has been one obvious answer to the question of "What game with Dwarves, Longswords and Wizards in it should we play" and that was D&D, every time. Even their strongest rival in the past couple of decades was just an older version of D&D with a spit shine.

Now you find yourself adrift in a sea of possibility, with no signposts. There are names you've heard, but you have no idea which ones you'd actually be interested in, because you had always just assumed you'd be playing D&D until the heat death of the universe.

So let's take a look at a few games that want to fill that D&D-shaped hole in your gaming life, and examine what they're offering.

Disclaimer: I'm not covering the entire breadth and depth of the TTRPG industry here. I'm specifically going to be covering Fantasy RPGs that should appeal to D&D fans here. So if I didn't cover your favourite indie RPG, sorry. But there has to be a "First step" outside of the D&D bubble, and each of these games should fulfill that need.

The Other "Kitchen Sink" Game: Pathfinder

If you can't bring yourself to keep playing the corporate game, but you still want something that offers as close to that gameplay experience as you can possibly get, your best bet at the time of this writing is probably Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

I say this as someone who very much did not vibe with the original Pathfinder, or its "D&D in space" sister product Starfinder. But at this point, I'd absolutely tell a newcomer to jump into Pathfinder 2E before I recommended they buy any WotC product.

To their credit, the 2nd Edition of Pathfinder does much more to, uh, find its own path by diverging from 3.5 edition and implementing new systems that take it into uncharted territory. The "Two Actions Per Turn" paradigm is often cited by its proponents as being a meaningful improvement over the 5E way of doing things.

The "TTJRPG": Fabula Ultima

One of the biggest success stories of the early 20's was Fabula Ultima from NEED Games in Italy. It came seemingly out of nowhere to win the ENnie Gold Award for Best Game of 2023. Since then it's become notoriously difficult to find in print, though it's still freely available as a PDF.

Fabula Ultima is a "TTJRPG," modelled after Japanese fantasy video games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, Breath of Fire, etc. While it's firmly planted in the Fantasy genre, its gameplay will also very recognizable to fans of those types of games.

The major benefit of this conceit is that you can probably already picture how combat in FabUlt works in your mind: Two rows of characters take turns jumping and slashing at each other, or casting magical spells to harm, heal, or apply status conditions. There's no concept of "Spacing," but the game still manages to be mechanically intricate with lots of varied class abilities and status effects to apply.

D&D refugees looking for a game where you simply pick a class and fight some monsters, but aren't too particular about how they do that, will find a lot to love here. FabUlt leans much more heavily on storytelling mechanics than D&D does, so players who've been looking for something a bit more "Theater of the Mind" should be well taken care of here.

Final Fantasy Lancer: ICON

Like Fabula Ultima, ICON is a TTRPG that takes heavy inspiration from JRPGs, specifically tactical games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. It's from Massif Press, who also authored the surprise indie Mech combat hit Lancer.

And like Lancer, ICON is a game with two very distinct rulesets: Outside of combat, a "Fiction-first" narrative system inspired heavily by Blades in the Dark; In combat, a grid-based tactical skirmish game reminiscent of D&D 4th Edition. All backed by the gorgeous art of its author Tom Parkinson-Morgan, who also writes and illustrates the comic Kill Six Billion Demons.

ICON separates its "narrative" class system from its combat class system, giving each character two distinct character sheets that come into play at different times. Because those two systems don't have to cross over very much, each can be as intricate or as rules-light as it needs to be to promote the type of gameplay most appropriate for the situation.

The Old-School Gateway Drug: Shadowdark

If you ever took a few steps outside of the walled garden that is D&D in the past few years, you will likely have read or heard of the OSR, or "Old-School Revival/Renaissance." Proponents of the OSR are players who yearn for an older style of Dungeon Crawling Survival Horror game that hearkens back to the early days of D&D, before the players became akin to superheroes.

Shadowdark aims to be a game that bridges the gap to that style of gameplay, without being totally unfamiliar to players who only ever learned 5th Edition mechanics. It's "Old-School gaming, modernized."

Aside from simply being a modern take on a D20 fantasy game, it freshens up gameplay using a mechanic called the "Torch Timer." It turns light into a resource that dwindles in real time. This serves to elevate the tension of the game as every minute that passes is one less minute of light on your torch. And when the torches run out, well... You can probably guess what happens next.

5th Edition with the Serial Numbers Filed Off: Tales of the Valiant

Tell me if you've heard this one before: Wizards of the Coast introduces sweeping changes to its "Open" license model, leading existing 3rd-party content creators to create their own version of an older ruleset to protect the viability of their backlog. It happened in the past, but what are the chances that happens a second time? Ha!

Well... It did happen again. This time, playing the role of the "Paizo" in this scenario is Kobold Press, who loudly declared that they were "Raising the Black Flag" in response. In order to ensure that there would always be a "Core Fantasy" ruleset that would remain compatible with their content, they announced Tales of the Valiant, which would essentially duplicate the 5th Edition ruleset with a bit of a spit shine, in much the same way that Pathfinder did for 3.5 Edition.

Tales of the Valiant will be the game for the D&D player who just wanted a rules refresh of 5th Edition, but also doesn't want to keep throwing money at the corporate hegemony. It should end up being "The 5E you can feel good about supporting," and that matters right now.

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Matt Colville's Big Bet: The MCDM RPG

Kobold Press was not the only publisher of third-party D&D content to have a strong reaction to the OGL fiasco. Unlike Tales of the Valiant however, Matt Colville's response was to announce a fully new Fantasy RPG system, with no expectation of backwards compatibility with any edition of D&D.

MCDM's sights are firmly set on the "Post-Kitchen-Sink" future, and to that end their game is explicitly not trying to be the one game for every possible playstyle. It's Tactical, meaning you'll need a grid to play it on, and it's Heroic, meaning characters should feel powerful, and not like they're constantly one critical hit or failed trap-sensing check away from being decapitated.

This approach might seem like a massive risk considering how insanely powerful 5th Edition became at its peak. But a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign backed by over 30,000 people shows that there is at least an appetite for something new, and that there is a like-minded community of players ready and waiting to join you.

The Critical Role Game: Daggerheart

If the Kobold Press announcement was a shot across the bow, and the MCDM crowdfunder was a bomb dropped, then Daggerheart is a full-blown asteroid, streaking straight towards Wizards of the Coast HQ.

Daggerheart is an original Fantasy RPG from Darrington Press, the publishing arm of the Critical Role media company. That by itself should mean something considering how important CR is to the D&D brand, but there's more to talk about here. Though it superficially resembles D&D in a lot of ways, it has some extremely important differences. Namely, its use of "Powered by the Apocalypse" mechanics such as "Fail Forward" dice rolling and "No Initiative" combat.

While "PbtA" has become somewhat of a loaded term in the D&D community, Critical Role has an opportunity to overcome that stigma with the sheer force of their platform. I've made this case already in the past, but if they were to use their power to do for themselves what they did for 5th Edition, it would be the most significant threat to the Hasbro Hegemony to emerge since Pathfinder. Let alone taking just a slice, Daggerheart has the long-term potential to take the whole damn pie.

And more!

The games I've listed here are all theoretically capable of replacing the Corpo game as your "go-to" long-term game. Not all of them are fully playable as of this writing, but they all represent one possible future for the "Sword and Sorcery" RPG genre.

There are of course a whole plethora of other games out there beyond the limited scope of "Medieval Fantasy" that are just as valid and just as viable, if you're feeling a bit more adventurous.

If you're looking for something explicitly tactical like a miniature skirmish game, but still in the RPG genre, and you're willing to expand your choice of genre beyond Euro-centric Medieval Fantasy even further beyond ICON, you might be interested in Gubat Banwa or the aforementioned Lancer.

If you want a game that promotes a slightly more streamlined, less mechanically-intricate approach to combat while still giving you tons of monsters to kick the shit out of, you might want to check out the "Illuminated by LUMEN" family of games inspired by the games LIGHT and NOVA from Gila RPGs. It might even inspire you to write your own RPG!

If you're more interested in the Old-School Renaissance, you might want to check out Forbidden Lands, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Old-School Essentials, or MÖRK BORG.

If you like the idea of "Old-School Roleplaying" but are also willing to step outside of the fantasy genre into Sci-fi territory, you might be interested in Stars Without Number, its Cyberpunk sister product Cities Without Number, or Mothership.

Finally, if you just want a game that focuses on telling the best story rather than mindlessly killing monsters and acquiring loot, you might want to check out Blades in the Dark, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Girl by Moonlight, Coyote and Crow, and many more Fiction-First games in the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark genres.

But most importantly: Just play more games! Don't just buy them, play them! The point of this whole exercise is to replace the monopoly with a plurality, for the sake of the health of the tabletop gaming industry.

Because the next time Hasbro lays off a bunch of WotC employees, there should be a much stronger, more diverse industry for them to land in feet-first. We should all want for the people who build the games we love to feel safe in their career choice. Not just for the sake of the ones who are already there, but for future prospective designers and artists who want to make their mark.

It should be viable to be a tabletop game designer outside of just making more D&D stuff forever, because as we've seen, it's not safe to assume that we can all just keep doing the same thing we've been doing and not get bit on the ass by it.

If we want that future, we have to take it into our own hands and build it ourselves. But if there's one group of people that knows about building something very big from very little, it's TTRPG players.

#ttrpg #icon rpg #icon ttrpg #mcdm #pathfinder #fabula ultima #kobold press #tales of the valiant #daggerheart

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rpgsandbox · 3 months

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The 10 Most Anticipated TTRPGs For 2024!

EN World's annual vote on the most anticipated titles of the coming year, and yes, some games have appeared on this list in previous years.

10 Tales of the Valiant (Kobold Press)

1st appearance Kobold Press joins the 'alternate 5E' club with this rewritten, non-OGL version of the game! A million dollar Kickstarter last year, and a new one for the GM's book going on right now, Kobold Press announced this as 'Project Black Flag' during the OGL crisis of 2023, but being unable to trademark that name opted for Tales of the Valiant instead. The system, however, is still called the Black Flag Roleplaying System.

9. Mothership 1E (Tuesday Night Games)

3rd appearance On this list three years running, the boxed Mothership 1E game should be coming out this year! This is sci-fi horror at its best -- you can play scientists, teamsters, androids, and marines using the d100 'Panic Engine'. Yep, it's Alien(s), pretty much.

8. Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Program (Exalted Funeral)

2nd Appearance Exalted Funeral made quite a splash when they announced this game last year, which went on to make neary $2M on Kickstarter. And how could they not? It's Monty Python fergoodnessake! A rules-lite gaming system, spam, a minigame with catapults, spam, coconut dice rollers, spam, and an irrepressible Python-eque sense of humour. Did I mention the spam? It was at #10 on this list last year, but it's claimed to #8 this year.

7. Daggerheart (Darrington Press)

1st appearance From the Critical Role folks, Daggerheart is a new fantasy TTRPG with its own original system coming out this year with "A fresh take on fantasy RPGs, designed for long-term campaign play and rich character progression."

6. Cohors Cthulhu (Modiphius)

1st appearance It's Ancient Rome. It's Cthulhu. It uses Modiphius' in-house 2d20 System. You can be a gladiator, a centurion, or a Germanic hero. Did I mention Cthulhu?

5. Dolmenwood (Necrotic Gnome)

1st appearance The British Isles, a ton of folklore, and a giant Kickstarter--Dolmenwood is a dark, whimsical fantasy TTRPG drawing from fairy tales and lets you "journey through tangled woods and mossy bowers, forage for magical mushrooms and herbs, discover rune-carved standing stones and hidden fairy roads, venture into fungal grottoes and forsaken ruins, battle oozing monstrosities, haggle with goblin merchants, and drink tea with fairies."

4. Pendragon 6E (Chaosium)

4th appearance Last year's winner was on this list waaaaay back in 425 AD, and it's still here! Well, maybe not that far back, but it's shown up in 2021 at #4, 2022 at #3, 2023 at #1, and now 2024 at #4! What can we say? People are clearly anticipating it... still.

3. 13th Age 2nd Edition (Pelgrane Press)

2nd appearance 13th Age is over a decade old now, and was our most anticipated game way back in 2013. Now the new edition is coming! It's compatible with the original, but revised and with a ton more... stuff! 13th Age 2E was #3 in last year's list!

2. The Electric State Roleplaying Game (Free League)

1st appearance Free League is always on these lists, and for good reason. This gorgeous looking game is described as "A road trip on the verge of reality in visual artist and author Simon Stålenhag's vision of an apocalyptic alternate 1990s".

1. Shadow of the Weird Wizard (Schwalb Entertainment)

3rd appearance First announced by Rob Schwalb a couple of years ago, this is a more family-friendly version of his acclaimed RPG, Shadow of the Demon Lord. SHADOW OF THE WEIRD WIZARD is a fantasy roleplaying game in which you and your friends assume the roles of characters who explore the borderlands and make them safe for the refugees escaping the doom that has befallen the old country. Unsafe are these lands: the Weird Wizard released monsters to roam the countryside, cruel faeries haunt the shadows, undead drag themselves free from their tombs, and old, ancient evils stir once more. If the displaced people would rebuild their lives, they need heroes to protect them. Finally at the top of the list after being #7 in 2022, and #6 in 2023!

#RPG #Tales of the Valiant #Mothership #Monty Python #Daggerheart #Cohors Cthulhu #Dolmenwood #Pendragon #13th Age #The Electric State #Shadow of the Weird Wizard

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golddragontales · 9 months

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My first module is out now, set up as pay-what-you-want! Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it goes! I look forward to hearing some fun stories of DnD shenanigans. Planning to release a Pathfinder compatibility module soon. Up Next: Seven Deadly Sins!

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haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted · 11 months

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Tales of the Valiant Cover Art by Hugh Pindur (Pindurski)

#Tales of the Valiant #RPG #Covers #Cover Art #Black Flag Roleplaying #Fantasy #Art #Kobold Press #Hugh Pindur #Pindurski

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jkcorellia · 8 months

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I...understand that Kobold Press's Tales of the Valiant is intended to be a DnD 5e clone at heart (to a far greater extent than Pathfinder 1e or 2e, and unlike something like Daggerheart, which is just a competitor), but...man. It's a little sad to me just how much a clone seems to be so far. Obviously there's still plenty more playtest to do, but so far the selling point seems to be primarily "not Wizards of the Coast" - which, to be fair to them, is a good selling point, but it's looking like I'd much rather play PF2E, the Cypher system, Daggerheart, SW5E (which, honestly, is the kind of clone-but-different I'd have wanted from TotV), or any number of other fantasy-combat-and-roleplay simulators over TotV if I'm going to move away from DnD.

#dnd #pathfinder #tales of the valiant #daggerheart #sw5e #ttrpg #I guess I'm glad such a clone is happening #for those who want almost precisely the 5e experience without the baggage #but wikidot is baggage free babey

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tjtrewin · 7 months

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I invented a new pangram for my debut blackletter font: Undaunted 😆

#kobold press #ORC #WotC #OpenDnD #ToV #Project black flag #tales of the valiant #worldbuilding #fantasy font #blackletter #blackletter font #pangram #d20 #ttrpg community #ttrpg #ttrpg design

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whiterosebrian · 9 months

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Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you a second batch of photographs from this year's GenCon featuring the plush Pengee. Do you like this? I hope to take plenty more throughout the first day of the convention.

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pocgamer · 4 months

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Bailing on the OGL: 3 Companies, 3 Directions

When Wizards pulled their OGL nonsense back in January and February, several major companies made announcements about their plans to forge ahead on their own. Now it’s nearly a year later, and we’re seeing the results. Three companies, three directions, let’s dive in. Continue reading Untitled

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#5th Edition #D&D #MCDM RPG #OGL #Pathfinder #Tales of the Valiant #ttrpg

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exceptionalpotato · 2 days

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Art for a D&D character I've been playing! He's just a little guy with too much magic and not enough sense. Anybody's guess whether his grand adventure in the wilderness will end with him humbled and returning to an academy in the city. His name's Bluepurry Meowffin.

Art commissioned from @thebardbug (littlemothbard on IG)

#d&d #art #Tales of the Valiant #Kohold Press #the more I look at his little face the more I love him

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rpgbot · 7 months

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Cleric Changes: Critiquing OneDnD and Tales of the Valiant Variances - RPGBOT.Podcast S3E78

On this RPGBOT.Podcast, we do a side-by-side comparison between the updated versions of the 5e cleric being presented by OneDnD (WotC) and by Tales of the Valiant (Kobold Press).

#ttrpg #podcast #dnd #one dnd #tales of the valiant

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thegaminggang · 9 months

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#Tales of the Valiant #Kobold Press

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bahamaat · 9 months

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Back from the vacation

Weather cooperated, the rest was amazing, tons of photos for family, souvenir shopping, advanced winter holiday shopping for a few folks. Amazing.

Sadly, none of the posts I prepped went out - because in the rush to pack and prepare, I didn't upload them to the other blog but I'll get to them.

Really interested to see how the playtests are coming - I see and caught a bit of what Pathfinder 2e remastered has in store, got to read the Tales of the Valiant alpha pack on the trip there. Spent some time, but not a lot, poking at 5e to see how it is shaping up. Looking forward to seeing the MCDM rpg unfold - I share a lot of Matt's opinions on stuff, but like always, the differences are in implementation and degree - I do like that he's choosing to go a slightly different route than Paizo and Kobold Press, or Darrington Press to be honest. His initial vlog about it reads a lot of like something between a Powered by the Apocalypse game mixed with 13th Age and the tactical combat encounter design of D&D 4e.

While I was away I did some more brainstorming at night in the hotel room - mostly for the current Nerath campaign, but I did get another page or so of rough notes about whatever I'm going to do to tweak the ToV baseline rules for my own game.

#nerath #blog update #ttrpg design #fantasy worldbuilding #how I spent my vacation #tales of the valiant #pathfinder 2e remastered #pathfinder #matt colville #mcdm

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rpgsandbox · 11 months

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kickstarter

Tales of the Valiant RPG: Launching Black Flag Roleplaying

The heart of 5th Edition: core rules for high fantasy games, including a Monster Vault and a Player's Guide to power your campaign!

Be Bold.

Be Brave.

The new Tales of the Valiant RPG keeps the 5th Edition community independent and tabletop moving forward—use it to tell your own tales of 5E high adventure!

Tales of the Valiant (ToV) keeps all the best of 5E D&D and adds a Kobold Press spin to the well-loved game. It combines the Creative Commons foundation of 5th Edition with new elements to create a powerful Kobold-style 5E with teeth.

New 5E Options. Of course, ToV includes the fighter, wizard, and rogue, and dwarves and elves. Much more than that, it provides a wealth of new options and expanded gameplay. Explore the new Mechanist class and try out the kobold, outsider, and beastkin character lineages. Tales of the Valiant provides hundreds of new options for talents, spells, and monsters.

Early Access to Private Playtests. Backers get two exclusive playtest packets containing new classes and new creatures not available to the public until later.

Create Your Own World and Share Your Adventures. Tales of the Valiant is built on the Creative Commons and Open Roleplaying Content licenses, so the core rules are available for everyone to expand on as part of the 5E global community. Keep your investment in 5th Edition going strong!

Retain Compatibility with 5E Tradition. While ToV brings new options, its roots are familiar. Play any 5E adventure with creatures and spells from Tales of the Valiant—and keep the best of both worlds at your table!

For even more insight into Kobold Press's plans, visit the Tales of the Valiant website and check out the the 64-page Tales of the Valiant Preview PDF to see lineages and heritages, 4 classes, 8 subclasses, the spellcasting rules, and 8 monster previews.

The Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide includes everything needed to create legendary heroes and run the game, and the Monster Vault includes every dungeon-crawling and fire-belching creature of high fantasy. Tales of the Valiant strengthens those mechanics and enriches their story potential, to make your next campaign your best campaign!

The Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide features 13 base classes and all the lineages and heritages of classic fantasy. These include the bard, cleric, druid, fighter, mechanist, monk, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, wizard, and warlock, as well as humans, dwarves, elves, kobolds, halflings, beastkin, and more.

And that's not NEARLY all! The Monster Vault includes hundreds of monsters of core fantasy, from familiar orcs and red dragons to all-new foes like star crows, husk demons, and mechadrons original to Tales of the Valiant.

Many more details to come on both Monster Vault and Player's Guide in updates and on the Kobold Press blog, Discord, and YouTube.

While the heart of Tales of the Valiant comes from the 5E Creative Commons, we're also adding much-needed new tweaks for both characters and monsters. These new monsters and new character options entered public playtest in February, and Kickstarter backers will get access to 2 additional sets of playtest material (3 if we unlock a stretch goal).

Game design and especially character design is a time-consuming process of putting forward rough material and refining it in the crucible of playtest. Kickstarter backers will have the inside track and inside view of this process as we push toward a 2024 release—and the game is playable starting right now. Download a ToV Preview (PDF) to get a taste, and back the Kickstarter to gain access to the full Alpha Release plus the private playtest packets coming in late June and July.

More information on the public playtest and KS-exclusive playtests available on TalesoftheValiant.co

Kickstarter campaign ends: Sat, June 24 2023 12:00 AM BST

Website: [Kobold Press] [twitter] [youtube] [discord] [mailing list] [support]

#RPG #kickstarter #Tales of the Valiant #Project Black Flag #Kobold Press

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