Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (2021)

Rogue Trader is a science fiction tabletop roleplaying game of exploration, trade and profit at the edge of the Imperium of Man, set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2009. Ross Watson was its lead designer. Players take on a Rogue Trader, a ship captain licensed to trade and explore beyond the Imperium's borders, and the crew who serve them. It is the second of five independently playable Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay games from Fantasy Flight, which ran from Dark Heresy (2008) to Only War (2012). A limited release sold out at Gen Con 2009, with a wider store release in October 2009. Fantasy Flight lost the Warhammer 40,000 licence, and official support ended in September 2016. The system directly evolved from Dark Heresy, the first game in the Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay line, and it was succeeded by Wrath & Glory. Description Players take on an explorer's dynasty: the Rogue Trader, the officers and specialists who crew their ship, and the retinue that follows them. The Game Master (GM) runs voyages into uncharted space, deals with alien species and hostile worlds, and the party earns a fortune doing it. The career paths include Arch-Militant, Navigator, Explorator and Void-master, and sourcebooks add alien player characters such as Kroot, Ork and Dark Eldar. The game asks a table to run a business as well as a crew. The rules cover interplanetary trade, ship operation, travel and combat, and a group that enjoys managing a ship, a fortune and their reputation will get more out of it than one that wants a single dungeon crawl. The 41st Millennium is a grim setting, and the book does not soften it.

Fallout: The Roleplaying Game is a post-apocalyptic tabletop roleplaying game set in the Fallout universe, published by Modiphius Entertainment on its 2d20 system. Modiphius acquired the Fallout licence from Bethesda in 2017 and released the wargame Fallout: Wasteland Warfare in 2018. The roleplaying game entered beta in 2019, was delayed by COVID-19, and released digitally in March 2021 and in physical form in July 2021. The core rulebook is a 438-page hardcover with an 18-page introductory adventure, "With a Bang or a Whimper". The game uses the 2d20 system, which Modiphius also uses for Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 and Dune: Adventures in the Imperium. Description Players create survivors in 2077, after nuclear war has devastated most of the planet, and help rebuild civilization. Characters can be vault dwellers, ghouls, super mutants or robots such as Mister Handy, and they can ally with or work against factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. The Game Master (GM) runs a wasteland that mixes post-apocalyptic danger and retro-futuristic style with dark humor, and the book includes story hooks, random encounter tables and random generation of locations and loot. The game asks a table to be comfortable with survival and resource management. Radiation, crafting, building a settlement and tracking Action Points are all part of play, and the GM chapter addresses tone and quest structure.

Achtung! Cthulhu is a pulpy World War II horror tabletop roleplaying game in which Allied and resistance agents fight a secret war against Nazi occultists and the Cthulhu Mythos. It was created by Chris Birch and published by Modiphius Entertainment, which launched the setting in 2012 as an adventure series for Call of Cthulhu, with versions for other systems announced. The 2d20 edition, with rules designed by Nathan Dowdell, launched on March 9, 2021, as a standalone game with a Player's Guide and a Gamemaster's Guide. The 2d20 edition replaced the earlier versions of Achtung! Cthulhu, which were written for other systems, and uses the same 2d20 system as Dune: Adventures in the Imperium. Description Players take on soldiers, spies and resistance fighters in a war where the real enemy is behind the enemy. Campaigns run from 1939 to a confrontation in Antarctica in 1946, with scenarios in places such as occupied Czechoslovakia and Dunkirk. The Gamemaster (GM) runs the war, the Black Sun cultists and the creatures they command, including undead, Deep Ones and a Shoggoth. The tone leans towards action rather than dread. The supernatural is a threat to be overcome, at least for a while, which sets it apart from the more fatalistic horror of Call of Cthulhu. The game asks for a table that wants a combat-heavy war story with a thin layer of cosmic horror.

The Fifth Season Roleplaying game is designed for you to play out adventures and stories set in the world described in the Broken Earth trilogy of novels by N.K. Jemisin—a world where constant and unstable tectonic and volcanic activity threaten all life; a world whose peoples have learned to adapt in order to survive. It is a world where everyone learns that Father Earth hates his children and is always trying to kill them, where metal rusts and even stone crumbles, and the best you can do is be prepared for the next disaster. In the world of the Broken Earth, community— the comm—is everything, because in community there is support and a chance to persevere.

Codex Cryptica is an AI-assisted worldbuilding and campaign management tool built around a living knowledge graph instead of a folder of loose documents. Every character, faction, location, and event you create becomes a linked entity, so your world stays connected and explorable as it grows. Genre-agnostic across fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, post-apocalyptic, western, steampunk, and more.

Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) is a tabletop roleplaying game design framework created by Meguey Baker and D. Vincent Baker for Apocalypse World, which Lumpley Games published in 2010. Its hallmarks are playbooks, rolls of two six-sided dice plus a stat, three tiers of result and "moves" that tell the table when the rules apply. The Bakers don't define PbtA by its mechanics. Vincent Baker describes it as a self-applied label for games inspired by Apocalypse World or by other PbtA games, so only a game's creator can say whether it qualifies, and many games share the mechanics without using the name. The framework spread because Baker encouraged others to publish hacks, and itch.io listed more than 800 products tagged PbtA as of April 2023. The framework is built on Apocalypse World, a post-apocalyptic game published in 2010 and revised in a second edition in 2016. Description In a PbtA game, players take on characters from playbooks, which are archetype templates rather than classes or races, and the game's setting is shaped by the table. The game master (GM), called the Master of Ceremonies (MC) in the original, creates conflicts for the characters to resolve, and creative responsibility is shared among all players. Players and the GM build the world together and often create non-player characters together. The framework asks a table to play by the fiction. A player has to describe what their character does to trigger a move, and if something that should trigger a move happens in the story, it has to be rolled for or walked back. It suits groups who want a story that keeps moving and don't mind a GM who doesn't prepare fixed encounters.