2025 – Page 5 – PopCult Reviews

31 Days of Character Creation #30 – Ryuutama

Not all fantasy tabletop RPGs are the same. Ryuutama is a great example of that. World building is a collaborative effort between players and GM with a world creation sheet passed around the table allowing everyone to add an element. XP isn’t typically derived from killing monsters, but from traveling and exploring. The more difficult the terrain the greater the reward for passing through it. The general feel here is of a Hayao Miyazaki game with a lush, verdant world to explore.

31 Days of Character Creation #29 – Marvel Multiverse RPG

I don’t typically like most superhero ttrpgs because they focus more on the crunchy minutiae of powers and fail to provide anything regarding the sprawling soap operatic nature of the medium. I’m less interested in the power ratings of one character over another than I am the deep lore of the different people who’ve held the title Green Lantern, the zany Rogues Gallery of Shazam, or the legacies of the Justice Society. When the Marvel Multiverse RPG dropped I didn’t even pick it up and after looking it over yesterday for this character I probably wouldn’t play it unless someone else was running the game and knew it like the back of their hand.

31 Days of Character Creation #28 – Forbidden Lands

This is another Free League game, a company I have come to adore over the last year. Forbidden Lands has arguably been Free League’s biggest success outside of popular IPs they make games for. It’s another fantasy game which may feel like more than well-trod ground in the tabletop space, but they do offer some unique twists to this world that makes it feel quite different from the Tolkien-inspired Dungeons & Dragons fare that has become a sort of default.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Everspark Part Three

Read my previous world building session here
You can purchase Everspark here

Everspark leans heavily into its narrative roleplay over simulationist fare. The first thing you notice is that your character sheet is all words, no numbers. You don’t add any modifiers when you roll Skill checks. Instead, Cezar Capacle presents us with the idea of Leverage and Drawbacks, representing potential risks and rewards. Most of the time, you will roll if the skill falls outside your character’s ABCs (Ancestry, Background, Career).

31 Days of Character Creation #27 – Vampire: The Masquerade 5e

I can remember having a vague awareness of Vampire as a LARP from picking up magazines like Wizard or Inquest as a kid. It seemed like something “weird goth kids.” I don’t think I was completely wrong in that evaluation, but in the following decades I’ve learned a bit more and seems like a fine game. There is a solo ruleset for Vampire, so maybe one day I’ll give it a spin.

PopCult Podcast – Oops, All Nosferatus

A vampire from Transylvania seeks possession of a young woman and manipulates his way into coming to her home.

31 Days of Character Creation #26 – Spire, The City Must Fall

I saw the compelling review of this game on the YouTube Channel Quinn’s Quest and it made me want to play it at some point. If you haven’t seen Quinn’s Quest it is one of the best produced tabletop RPG review channels I’ve ever seen. Watching his videos introduced me to this and The Wildsea and also helped me know a game like Lancer wasn’t for my particular tastes. Spire is a game where the characters are Drow in a vertical city ruled by tyrants. The player characters are intent on bring this power structure down.

31 Days of Character Creation #25 – Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds is a game I’ve known about for over a decade, but just have never sat down to play. In solo tabletop RPG circles, I see it being written about often and decided to go through character creation to get a feel for the system. Savage Worlds doesn’t have an official setting, but many creators have made settings that add elements to character creation.

31 Days of Character Creation #24 – G.I. Joe

Ironically, I was a huge G.I. Joe fan as a kid. Jump to 43 and I think the U.S. military is one of the most evil institutions on the planet. Life is funny that way. I decided to make a character for the G.I. Joe, but with my take. I wanted this to be G.I. Joe as if it was continuing on in 2025 after being started in the 1960s. In this political climate things are not so black & white.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Everspark Part Two

Read the first part of this actual play here.

I decided there were a lot of pieces generated in my last session, so I needed to sit down and flesh them out a little more to have a sense of what has happened so far and the kind of immediate situation I would be dropped into.

For our adventure I had generated this sentence:
Qazid Icebreath wants to conquer the Crown of Titans, located in the Whispering Mountains. I must explore The Goblin Kingdom of Murkspire for a solution, otherwise Icebreath will assume control of all the colossal beasts in the land.