Make sure the system you use matches the kind of players you have, for an optimal experience
Admin Note: This is part of the ongoing series called “D&D isn’t the only TTRPG if you don’t want fantasy play another goddamn game!”
I already reblogged this once but this is important:
Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D
There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure
So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do
And this is not to say that you shouldn’t play D&D: D&D is hella fun. But there’s a lot of genres and styles that D&D does a piss-poor job of doing, and because of that it’s so good we’ve got other games
*cracks knuckles*
All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.
Courtly Romance and Chivalry
There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.
Blue Rose – based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.
Pendragon – naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.
Historical Fantasy
This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.
Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs
Chivalry & Sorcery – one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach.
It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.
World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) – while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.
Ars Magica – this exists along very similar lines to the dark age material above, based around mages and magic-users in a ‘Mythic Europe’ setting. It also has a really cool open-ended magic system, and one of my personal favourites.
Awwww shit heck yes I might want to add to this list but this is a really good starting point
I’m just gonna… supplement this with a few discoveries from my Kickstarter habit:
Monsters and Other Childish Things: good for all your “a child and their ____” needs. Runs on the One Roll Engine (ORE), which appears in a wide variety of other games as well.
Ironclaw: a grittier, low magic, Renaissance fantasy game… for furries. Higher attributes roll larger dice, from d4 up to d12.
Better Angels: a game about supervillains being intentionally bad at villainy. You play a villain and the demon empowering another player’s villain.
Cartoon Action Hour: what it says on the tin. He-man, Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats… heck, you could do DynoGUARD if you want to.
Ryuutama: part Oregon Trail, part Miyazaki movie, with a dash of old school Final Fantasy thrown in. The GM has their own character sheet and ability progression!
Wield: play as sentient magic items picking up and discarding users over the centuries.
Farflung: literally the embodiment of that post about wanting to play a game where the different flavours of quarks are the names of your stats. Zany sci-fi hijinks in the style of Futurama, Red Dwarf, or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Wait, that’s where the names of the stats in Farflung come from? I always thought Top and Bottom as stats had… other implications
Skoraeus Gateway, a long-forgotten entrance that leads deep underground to a city once inhabited and built by stone giants, so named for the deity they worshiped. Skoraeus Stonebones’ hands can still be seen gripping out from the earth below on either side of the entrance.
If y’all think Etney is buff you should meet her big sister
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This is Pyra, she’s a paladin and a member of the city guard in Kreiturg, a city back on Etney’s home continent. As that’s on the other side of the world right now it’s unlikely she’ll make an appearance in the campaign but I love her anyway, she is very strong and she loves her baby sister very much 💖
Izzie’s tumblr archive 