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Tabletop Roleplaying Games

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King Arthur Pendragon 6th Edition (2024)
4 players
Tabletop Roleplaying Games

King Arthur Pendragon 6th Edition (2024)

High-Fantasy
English
King Arthur Pendragon is a tabletop roleplaying game of Arthurian chivalry, tragedy, and multi-generational legacy, originally designed by Greg Stafford and first published by Chaosium in 1985. It's one of the hobby's oldest continuously-revised games, having passed through five earlier editions and several publishers (including Green Ronin's Arthaus imprint and Nocturnal Media) before returning to Chaosium, who released the 6th Edition in April 2024.  Stafford completed the design draft for this edition before his death in 2018, with longtime Pendragon line editor David Larkins overseeing it to print - a fact the game's own promotional copy leans into, framing it as the culmination of nearly forty years of Stafford's design thinking on the setting. Description Players take on knights of Arthur's Britain, sworn to a lord and bound by a code of chivalry the game asks characters - and players - to genuinely wrestle with rather than simply declare. The Game Master (GM) runs a campaign built to span decades of in-world time: between adventures, a Winter Phase resolves a knight's marriage, estate management, aging, and family events, and campaigns are explicitly designed to carry a player from their original knight's prime through old age and into playing that knight's own heir.  The game asks a lot of a table willing to commit to it - character death by old age is expected, not a failure state, and a knight's personal flaws are written onto the character sheet where they can force bad decisions at the worst possible moment. In exchange, it delivers something few other RPGs attempt: a genuinely generational campaign where a table can watch the consequences of one knight's choices land on their grandchild decades later.

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RuneQuest (2018)
3 players
Tabletop Roleplaying Games

RuneQuest (2018)

High-Fantasy
English
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG) is a mythic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game set in Greg Stafford's Bronze Age world of Glorantha, published by Chaosium in 2018. It is credited to Jeff Richard, Greg Stafford, Jason Durall, and Steve Perrin, with a long list of contributors from earlier editions. RuneQuest first appeared from Chaosium in 1978 and has passed through several publishers since, including Avalon Hill (third edition, 1984), Mongoose Publishing (2006), and The Design Mechanism (sixth edition, 2012, later continued as Mythras). RQG is the Chaosium-published line that returned to Glorantha, and it is a different game from those later editions. The system directly evolved from the original RuneQuest (1978), whose percentile core was later distilled into Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing, the engine behind Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. Description Players take on adventurers from the clans and tribes of Dragon Pass, from homelands such as Sartar, Prax, the Grazelands, Esrolia, and Tarsh, in a world where gods are neighbors and myths are history.  The Game Master (GM) runs a setting built around cults, clan feuds, and the Hero Wars gathering on the horizon, and characters belong to a family, a homeland, and a religion before they ever pick up a sword. The game asks a table to take that seriously: combat is lethal, shields shatter and limbs get disabled, and there are no luck points to buy a character out of a bad round. In return it offers one of the hobby's most fully realized worlds, where a character's gods, ancestors, and passions shape play as much as their weapon skill.

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7th Sea First Edition
3 players
Tabletop Roleplaying Games · 7th Sea

7th Sea First Edition

High-Fantasy
English
7th Sea is a swashbuckling fantasy tabletop roleplaying game of piracy, duels and intrigue in the world of Théah, created by Jennifer Wick and John Wick, with Kevin Wilson co-writing, and published by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) in April 1999. It won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game of 1999, presented in 2000, and was fairly well received. The game originally used a d10 roll-and-keep system, in which players roll a pool of ten-sided dice (d10) and keep only some of them. It also inspired a collectible card game that was discontinued in 2005. In 2004 AEG moved the line to the d20 System and renamed it Swashbuckling Adventures, a change many fans of the original rules disliked. Later books supported both systems. The first edition later went out of print, and volunteer writers have since released e-books and adventures for it. Chaosium acquired 7th Sea and its rights in 2019. The second edition of the game was released in 2016 as 7th Sea Second Edition, a new system from John Wick Presents. Description Players take on heroes in Théah, a fantasy version of 17th-century Europe whose nations are exaggerated versions of real kingdoms. The setting draws on 1600s European literature, with sorcery playing a major role and a dominant religion that resembles gnostic Christianity, complete with a parallel to the Spanish Inquisition. The Game Master (GM) runs adventures of sea voyages, court intrigue and sword fights. The game asks a table to embrace the swashbuckling genre and the era's romance, and to tolerate a 1990s rulebook that is now out of print. Anyone picking it up should check which system a given book is written for, since AEG published for both the original roll-and-keep rules and the d20 System.

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7th Sea Second Edition
6 players
Tabletop Roleplaying Games · 7th Sea

7th Sea Second Edition

High-Fantasy
Chaosium
7th Sea Second Edition is a swashbuckling tabletop roleplaying game of high adventure, intrigue and romance in Théah, a magical continent inspired by 17th-century Europe, published by John Wick Presents in 2016. It was written by John Wick, Mike Curry, Rob Justice, Mark Diaz Truman and Jesse Heinig. AEG transferred the publication rights to John Wick Presents in 2015, and the second edition was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in March 2016 with the core rules appearing in June 2016. It won six ENNIE Awards in 2017. In 2019 Chaosium acquired 7th Sea and its rights, with John Wick joining Chaosium as creative director, and the line is now sold through Chaosium's store. Later books added the Crescent Empire, the New World, Ifri and the Woven Land. The system directly replaced 7th Sea First Edition (1999), although it is a new set of rules and not a revision of the original. Description Players take on heroes who uncover global conspiracies, explore the ruins of a vanished race and protect the rightful rulers of Théah from villains. The Game Master (GM) runs the story and the villains, and the game's structure, built around personal Stories, suits campaigns more than one-shots. A reviewer described it as a narrative indie game dressed up as a traditional one. The game asks a table to be comfortable with negotiating the fiction and with a GM who plans scenes in advance. The setting chapter runs to 96 pages in a hardback of about 300 pages, and players may expect more rules than the game actually uses.

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