If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that it’s ENNIES’ season. What an incredible set of nominations and winners! Some bloggers use this time to give out their own awards, so why not me? Enter the Gesties: the most prestigious award in the RPG space.
I’ve come back to the hobby in early 2023 after a long, long hiatus. This post will be about my favorite games from these last two-plus years, regardless of their release date. I’ve considered every game I’ve bought and read, GM-ed or played in that period. Without further ado, let us talk awesome games!
Most Played Game
I will start with the easiest award category: the numerical one. I’d like to recognize the two games I’ve played the most of in the last two years, and tell you why.
1. Fate
I stumbled upon Fate by accident. When I came back to the hobby, I wanted to run a Weird West scenario for my new group of friends. I vaguely remembered running FUDGE in the 90ies and started asking around, looking for it. People were like: “Oh, you mean Fate, right? Nobody’s playing FUDGE anymore.” Turns out a lot can happen in 20 years, and a small hack of FUDGE became a major game while its daddy lay somewhere on a heap, forgotten. So I tried Fate, and I fell in love.
Fate’s core mechanic of Aspects does so much heavy lifting when telling a story. It creates a natural way of introducing complications. It lets you mechanize any character concept with no changes to the rules. It makes it incredibly easy to make the environment a living part of the game. In that first Weird West game, one PC was a gravedigger who was unknowingly also a werewolf. We wrote it down as an Aspect of his, and it just worked. Amazing.
Over the two years that followed, I’ve GM-ed a lot of Fate. I don’t want this to become a Fate post so I’ll simply name the Fate books with the largest impact on me. There is a lot of Fate books: from settings to toolkits to complete RPGs.
Fate Condensed – people really don’t need the big Fate Core book anymore. This little booklet has everything you need to start playing. And it’s dirt cheap, too.
Dresden Files Accelerated - some Fate concepts I only really understood after running this game. It’s expertly written. It also has some interesting mechanics like ritual magic and Mantles (which are really character playbooks/classes made to work with Fate).
Fate Space Toolkit – an astonishingly complete set of rules for running all sorts of sci-fi campaigns, from hard sci-fi to complete gonzo. I find it useful even when running other systems.
Venture City – it includes a complete and versatile subsystem for superpowers. Building superheroes with it is incredibly fun, and they are reasonably well-balanced.
If Fate is so great, then why am I even playing other stuff? For one, I’m flaky, ok? I need a regular dose of new and exciting in my life. For another, though, Fate’s versatility comes at a cost. If you are not careful, the game can easily devolve into repetitive stacking of advantages until you can release them all in a big finale. If the group is careful to focus on the narrative part of that process, it can give you amazing, crazy stories. If the group is more min-max oriented, though, it devolves into a trite and dry husk of itself. And it usually falls on the GM to be on a constant watch against that.
2. Cities Without Number
When I came back to the hobby, and started lurking on Reddit and other places to see what people talked about, Kevin Crawford’s Without Number series of games kept coming up. The GM tools were the best in the industry, people said. I bought into the hype – literally. A Polish online RPG retailer talked to Kevin and imported all the offset-print versions of his games available at the time. I bought them all. It was a good investment. The GM support in his book truly is stellar. But so far, I have only managed to actually run his cyberpunk game: Cities Without Number.
We played weekly for about a year, and there’s a lot to love about this game. The sandbox-building tools are excellent, and they let me create an exciting future version of the city I live in. The mission-based game loop worked admirably well. Or should I say, the money-based game loop. The quickest way to make your PC more powerful was through cyberware. To buy, install and maintain said cyberware, you needed money. To get money, you went on missions. You got hurt on missions, and it cost you money to get patched up. You also faced enemies too powerful for you, which made you want even more money for even more cyber. Wash, rinse, repeat. It had my players engaged at all times. They were heartbroken when I called an end to the campaign.
It was a formational game for me in that it was my first exposure to the OSR, sandbox-driven school of thought. I was instantly hooked. It’s another reason why I don’t play too much Fate anymore: I’ve slowly but surely veered more and more towards the OSR (or rather, the NSR, post-OSR or whatever you want to call it). And it’s all Kevin’s fault.
The reason why I ultimately cut the campaign short was that generating interesting NPCs/enemies with all the cyber felt a bit too time consuming, and it burned me out. The game has a lot of moving pieces, and cyber affects all of them. I don’t like having this much math in my game prep, I guess. It’s still an excellent game, though, and if you’re not afraid of a little crunch, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Most Wholesome Author
Bet you didn’t see that category coming, huh? You see, when I get obsessed excited about a new RPG, my instinct is to talk to people about it. The beauty of the internet era is that I don’t have to bore my family to tears to scratch that itch anymore. I can go to Reddit or Discord (or Substack) and connect with likeminded people who actually care. So that’s what I do whenever I discover a new game I like. The way the community of a given game behaves, whether the author is still in the picture and what they are like – all that has a sizable impact on my long-term enjoyment of a game.
To celebrate that fact, I would like to call out two RPG authors who are particularly nice people and invest a lot of their time into the communities around their games.
Kevin Kulp
Kevin is the author of a couple RPGs, most of them using the Gumshoe system. He hangs out at Pelgrane’s Discord server talking mostly about his latest baby: Swords of the Serpentine. I will discuss the game itself later. For now, I would like to give some appreciation to Kevin.
He is clearly passionate about his game, and his enthusiasm is contagious. He pops by to share stories from his home game, talks about house rules he’s been testing, responds to questions, and shows endless patience to the fans.
Besides the fact that he is a treasure to talk to, I would like to give him kudos for commitment. He once shared he’d been running Swords of the Serpentine for about five years before its release. The game is thoroughly playtested, and it shows. It’s full of designer commentary, explaining rationales for various mechanical decisions, but also giving you ready-made house rules for when you want to play in a different tone than the preset. And he keeps playing the game, experimenting with the ruleset and setting, and keeps releasing materials supporting the game. This mix of genuine kindness and enthusiastic commitment is admirable.
David Blandy
David Blandy is the author of Eco Mofos, which my readers know as one of my favorite RPGs. What you would not have known yet is that David is also one of my favorite people.
He created a small but vibrant community on Discord, and – without exaggeration – it’s quickly become my favorite place on the internet. David shows warmth and support to everyone on the server, and he managed to attract similar-minded people and create a culture of empathy, encouragement, and creativity. In no small part, you’ve got him to thank for reading my blog: the small gestures of support from him and the community helped me regain momentum and start writing regularly1.
David is also present on Substack, writing the excellent David B.'s Newsletter.
Best GM Accessory
I am not much of a prop guy. I find it hard to juggle things as a GM. I don’t do music, I don’t do minis, and I try to offload as much onto the players as I can. I am envious of GMs who can create this whole theatrical experience on top of the actual game but it is what it is. What I do love, however, are things designed to make my life easier as a GM. I would like to call out some favorites.
The Game Master’s Apprentice
The Game Master’s Apprentice is my most-used GM tool by far. I have the physical deck which is a total pain to import to Europe as DTRPG only prints cards in the USA. I wish they put a bit more effort into supporting their customers on the other side of the pond. But oh well. I was able to get my hands on the deck but I also scripted it onto my phone so I could draw cards digitally. Yes… I’ve been using it so often I could not risk not having it around.
GMA is an absolute life saver when you have to improvise during the session, letting you generate inspirations in the moment. Need an NPC name? Draw a card. Need to know what’s in that drawer? Draw a card. Need motivation for your villain? Draw a card. Need to generate details of an unplanned location? You guessed it… draw a card.
And this is not all! GMA is a great tool for solo play, as well, and it works incredibly well as an adventure generator. A true Swiss-army knife of a card deck.
Hexcrawl Toolbox
The Hexcrawl Toolbox by Games Omnivorous is a unique proposition in the RPG world. A box full of beautifully drawn, evocative hexes for all typical fantasy terrain you can put together for an impromptu hexcrawl. It is not cheap and, truth be told, I have probably not used it enough to objectively justify the investment. But subjectively? It’s my favorite item on my RPG bookshelf.
There is something magical about creating a landscape with it. It feels like a box of geographical Legos. Playing around with it is fun even without any end goal in mind.
It has also given me some amazing memories of spending time with my daughters. They absolutely adore this thing and can spend hours building imaginary lands with it, and then telling stories about them.
Finally, you also get the hexes in digital form, and you can upload them to your hex editor of choice for a beautiful long-term hexcrawl campaign.
If you can afford it, buy it2.
Best For Solo Play
I love solo play, and I have a true toolkit of books, card decks, and games that I like to use. When I tell you that the two positions below are the best, they really are the best. I guess I should say that I only rarely play bespoke solo experiences: journaling games and such. I usually prefer complete RPG rulesets adapted to playing on your own, without a GM.
Best Solo System: One Page Solo Engine
One Page Solo Engine blew my mind when I first found it. It is a complete system for roleplaying without a GM that somehow fits onto a single two-sided sheet of paper. On top of that, it is completely free, and there is also a free app for it. It gives you a whole ecosystem that you can put on top of your favorite ruleset and play with no preparation whatsoever, generating content on the fly.
I guarantee that it is beginner friendly because incidentally, it was the first solo system I came across, and it took a single read-through to figure it out. It really is quite simple and logical.
I have since read a lot of other solo engines, some of them truly remarkable, but I find myself coming back to OPSE, and also recommending it to others who would like to start playing solo. It is that good.
Best Solo-Friendly RPG: ECO MOFOS!!
Eco Mofos is a post-apocalyptic RPG from the OSR school of play but with a hopeful, hippy bent. I’ve mentioned that I am a big fan of its author. I am a big fan of the game, as well. It is not a solo-first RPG. It works beautifully with a group. I am giving it a solo-friendly award because it has given me my most fulfilling solo RPG experience thus far.
Eco Mofos has a built-in solo mode, and it is excellent. I believe it was written (or co-authored?) by Chaoclypse who is an expert in solo systems, and it shows. That said, the part that really made the playthrough sing for me was the core exploration procedure. It is not part of the solo section. It’s meant first and foremost to ease GM prep and even enable prep-less play. The way it works is it lets you generate a pointcrawl from building blocks of six points each, stocked with paths and content types (danger, treasure, etc.) On top of that, it gives you plentiful tables to roll specific adversaries, locations, etc., depending on terrain type. But that is not all.
Eco Mofos is stocked to the brink with random tables. In a brilliant move, the whole inventory section is done as one giant random table. You know there is loot in this ruin but don’t know what it is? Just roll for it. This logic permeates the book. Almost anything can be rolled for: spells, foraging ingredients, concoction types, you name it. This approach makes it a breeze in solo play which is by definition done mostly on the fly.
The game has lots of other little elements which add to the effortless solo experience. Characters gain Burdens in stressful situations providing actionable roleplaying prompts. (Your character has gotten Arrogant through this experience. Wanna stop feeling that way? Undertake a stupidly dangerous task.) There is a Luck stat, giving you a natural way to ask questions of the world (“I am running from Bandits. Can I see any cave or ruin I could hide in?” – roll your Luck and we’ll see.)
I wish all games were written like this. Every step of the way, you feel that the game is there to make your life easier. It’s firmly in the fifth generation of RPGs. And what makes the GM’s life easy, also makes the solo gamer’s life easy.
Best Genre Emulation
Swords of the Serpentine
Swords of the Serpentine (SotS) won a bunch of ENNIES in 2023. I jumped on the hype train and bought it. And boy, am I glad I did.
The game is supposed to emulate the sword and sorcery genre (like Conan the Barbarian) but also heist stories like The Lies of Locke Lamora. It’s set in a human-centric world where sorcery is evil and corrupting by nature. The city of Eversink, central to the setting, reminds me of a fantasy version of Renaissance Venice.
Mechanically, the game is based on the Gumshoe engine but it tweaks it significantly. Gumshoe is mostly about investigations. SotS isn’t. It’s about heroic adventuring. I worry that some people never checked this game out because of it being Gumshoe and they lost out on an amazing experience.
The author examined every single bit of Gumshoe mechanics and reshaped them to support the genre he wanted. You don’t have to take my word for it: the book is peppered with designer side-notes explaining why a certain mechanic is there, and how it supports the desired game feel. And after having GM-ed this game a bunch of times, I can only nod in agreement as I read along.
Let me touch upon combat to show you what I mean. Especially since combat is the one area where Gumshoe doesn’t particularly shine but SotS absolutely does.
Firstly, it has two kinds of conflict: physical (managed by the Warfare ability) and social (managed by Sway). The genius thing is, you can mix and match them. By way of example, let’s say you try to intimidate a bunch of guards into backing off (social combat). One PC is a silver-tongued politician, and another one is a stereotypical barbarian who can barely talk. SotS lets the barbarian make a physical attack but pass on the damage dice to the politician PC to strengthen his social attack… which is a mechanically elegant way of saying that the threat of violence from the barbarian helps the “face” PC convince the guards that it’s in their best interest to fuck off. This ability to mix social and physical conflict lets you create situations very difficult to otherwise achieve in RPGs. Like my players managing to break the villain and have them repent their sins during the grand finale as opposed to the typical trite ass-whooping you’d expect.
Another genius combat mechanic are maneuvers. Whenever you want to do something atypical (say, throw sand in your opponent’s face, disarm them, what have you), it is a maneuver. You declare it and make an attack. The target then has the choice of either letting the maneuver happen or taking regular damage. This achieves so much with so little. It maintains player choice in face of enemy shenanigans. It lets powerful enemies resist cheap tricks but makes lesser foes satisfyingly vulnerable. And most importantly, it creates dynamic combat where you can attempt just about anything, and have robust mechanical support for it.
I could go on and on about SotS but this is already going to become a monster of a post so let me say this: if you’re into heroic fantasy RPGs like modern D&D, Daggerheart and such, chances are that SotS would actually let you achieve your desired gameplay better. You should check it out. The free quickstart scenario provides you with just enough rules to do it, and is a genuinely good adventure module to boot.
Orbital Blues
Orbital Blues is a game by SoulMuppet Publishing aimed to tell stories reminiscent of works such as Cowboy Bebop and Firefly: retrofuturistic sci-fi tales about space cowboys dealing with their traumas and hang ups. It uses their in-house system: a lightweight engine hovering somewhere between the OSR and story game sensibilities.
The book is beautiful. The writing and the illustrations telegraph the setting masterfully. However, I am the most impressed with the way its mechanics deeply integrate with the desired campaign feel.
Let’s talk character advancement. In Orbital Blues, you basically get XP for being sad. Each character starts with a Trouble – some shadow of their past weighing on them – and may get more through play. It might be an addiction, a terrible secret, lost love, plain old depression, or even the fact that you are a nobody with no claim to fame. Each Trouble has narrative hooks which let the PC gather Blues points. (Confronting your demons shakes you but also lets you grow.) Once you gather enough Blues, you can declare that your “Trouble is brewing” changing you into a total badass for the scene and letting you improve your character at the end. In addition, for each two Troubles your character has, they gain a Gambit, i.e., a powerful, unique ability.
There’s more to it but you get the picture. It’s the deepest, most meaningful advancement system I’ve ever seen. It’s like a poetic metaphor which also happens to be fun to play.
In another nod to Cowboy Bebop, every player chooses a soundtrack for their PC, and can play it when the PC has the spotlight and is doing something suitably dramatic. At any point, the player can decide that their PC’s story is coming to an end, and declare the current scene as their Swan Song. They play their soundtrack, and the PC becomes practically indestructible for the scene. The catch is that they suffer a mortal wound sometime during the scene and die at the end of it. It’s straight-up the grand finale of Cowboy Bebop in game form. Amazing.
Favorite Publisher
This category started as the “Most Beautiful Book” but I quickly realized that all books I’d added to the list were from the same publishing house: Games Omnivorous. Andre Novoa, the man behind the company, has excellent instincts, and has released a bunch of truly unique, visually stunning products. Guillerme Gontijo, the legendary indie RPG layout man, has been his partner in crime for some of them3.
Games Omnivorous is probably best-known for their editions of Mausritter but I would like to talk about some of their other games I own and adore.
Frontier Scum – a Mörk Borg hack in the Weird West. A great game in its own right but what makes it unique is the way it’s produced. It has no spine, the covers are made of thick cardboard, and lay completely flat when opened. This retro look is further strengthened by the fact that the whole book is laid out to look like an ad catalog from the 1800s. Ridiculously good!
Haunted Almanac – a collection of games by the one and only Nate Treme. Its pages are color-coded to easily identify sections pertaining to specific games. It features beautiful illustrations by Nate himself. I am not an expert on graphic design so I lack the language to properly articulate my feelings here but this book basically manages to take a bunch of separate products and make them feel like a beautiful, cohesive whole.
Prismatic Wisdom – this one actually won an ENNIE this year. It’s already inspired a blog post on here earlier this year. It’s a collection of posts from
’s blog. A best-of, if you will. The blog is excellent in itself (and has also won an ENNIE) but having a curated collection of most useful posts organized thematically and in stunning layout? The knee’s bees. I especially love the cutout cover.Vaults of Vaarn Deluxe – perhaps my favorite book of the bunch. If you’re unfamiliar, Vaults of Vaarn is a post-post-apocalyptic setting by Leo Hunt who’s also won an ENNIE this year for his adventure module, The Shrike. The setting itself and the ruleset are great but the book… Man, the book. The Vaarnish deserts are blue, and this book is all in shades of blue, with a beautiful navy-blue cover. There is actually a subtle bas-relief etching on the cover which I believe shows a part of Vaarn’s geography. Again, I’m not a graphic designer and my words fail me once more but I get excited just thinking about this book and how beautiful it is. By the way, Leo is currently crowdfunding the second edition of Vaults of Vaarn, and you should check it out since the Deluxe version is long out of print anyway.
I have to finish this section with some bittersweet news. Andre decided to pivot his business from game publishing to game design. I wish him tons of success on this new path but I can’t help but shed a tear. We are losing an indie RPG publisher whose books were like nothing else on the market. True works of art.
The One I Always Come Back To: Best Game
There are so many amazing games I’d still like to talk about but won’t: Hard City, Electric Bastionland, Everspark, The Electrum Archive, and more. They all made an impression on me. I keep coming back to them, I love them.
However, there is one little booklet that seems to have grabbed my attention for good, and now lives rent-free somewhere at the back of my mind. If I had to take just one RPG with me to a deserted island, it would be this one. It’s Whitehack, now in its fourth edition.
Whitehack is in many ways a game that speaks directly to my needs as a GM:
It’s firmly in the OSR school of play which, as you would have noticed, is where I spend most of my time and energy.
It adds freeform elements making it easy to translate nebulous character concepts to concrete mechanics, giving it a little bit of Fate-like feel.
Although defaulting to fantasy, it is a universal system: it proposes mechanical solutions to things like cyberware, and even space combat.
Its unique approach to classes speaks to me. Character classes in Whitehack provide a touch of asymmetrical play, with unique mechanics for each class changing the way you interact with the game. You can realize practically any character concept within most of the classes. Character creation gives you two separate choices: whom do I want to play in the story and how do I want to represent them in the game. As an additional benefit, it gives you a freeform system you don’t have to worry about that somehow also has enough moving pieces to interest fans of the character-building minigame.
Whitehack has a set of smart subsystems such as Auctions and Bases, providing easy ways of mechanizing just about anything at various levels of granularity.
It is one of the easiest games to GM, ever. Its GM section is chock-full of actionable advice, you can effectively create monsters on the fly, and the aforementioned mechanics prop you up when you need it.
You can take any old school module and run it with no conversion (or rather, with effortless on-the-fly conversion). As long as it has HD/levels for monsters, Whitehack’s monster rules will take care of the rest.
Combat can get very granular if you want, with things like reach, situational advantages, etc., but it doesn’t have to. It’s the best of both worlds.
Whitehack is not a perfect game. It is very densely written, and requires some effort to internalize at first. Its XP rules are clunkier than they need to. Finally, the author is vehemently opposed to relinquishing the tiniest bit of control. He forbids others from creating modules for it nor does he agree to translations. A pity.
But still. It is the one I keep coming back to. The one that has shaped my thinking about what a good RPG needs to be. And all that in a book that fits in a pocket.
I could tell you more but I am getting worried that David will ban me from his server as an unhinged groupie, so I’ll stop the fawning here.
As a side note, there are some changes coming to this product. The author is working on a fantasy RPG that will integrate it. If I understand correctly, there is a new version coming which will no longer be fully system-agnostic. This may be a reason to wait or a reason to buy now, depending on your perspective.
I just learned from Andre that two Portuguese designers did most of the work for GO. Gontijo was only involved in some projects. I’ve edited my post accordingly.
Love that your award categories are a bit different from the usual categories! Definitely going to be checking out some of these games.
You're right about the Eco Mofos discord, I think it might be one of the most wholesome forums on the internet. 😁
curious if you have any thoughts on running swords of the serpentine solo or gm-less?