fantasy – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

31 Days of Character Creation #31 – Dungeon Crawl Classics

Wow. This is the first time I’ve ever done one of these X Days of Y things and I actually completed the damn thing. I mostly see drawing related challenges and I can’t draw to save my life. I really enjoyed getting to look at several systems I’d never even cracked open before and see the mechanics and how characters work. It’s led to me choosing several systems I want to play sometime in the future like Outgunned, Star Trek Adventures, and Dragonbane. Here’s our final character.

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 #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 #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 #23 – Runequest 6e

I am conflicted over the Basic Roleplaying system, the engine that runs things like Call of Cthulhu and this game. I see these character sheets and my eyes just glaze over because it’s so much stuff. I’ve found the layout for the character creation process in these books is…not great. I think perhaps I’ve been spoiled from rules light games and systems with great flowcharts. I think I created this character correctly, but I’m not editing this. Took me three hours.

31 Days of Character Creation #21 – His Majesty the Worm

Like I said a few days ago, fantasy dominates the tabletop roleplaying game world because of Dungeons & Dragons. However, we are in a golden of age of really creative fantasy/dungeon delving systems that do a lot different than the old classic. His Majesty the Worm is bleak and grim, just like Darkest Dungeons and has some interesting things going on in it.

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.

31 Days of Character Creation #18 – Dragonbane

There’s no deficit of fantasy tabletop RPGs. Because Dungeons & Dragons was the runaway success in the early days of the industry, fantasy has become a default of sorts. If you tell someone who is unfamiliar with the depth of games out there that you are doing ttrpg they will probably imagine D&D or at minimum fantasy tropes. So why do we need anymore fantasy games at all at this point?

31 Days of Character Creation #17 – Black Sword Hack

The dark fantasy world is one I haven’t really explored in any medium, but have always been curious about. Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Robert E. Howard are names I’ve known since I was a kid thumbing through genre-related magazines like Wizard, Starlog, and Fangoria. But I’ve never read a word of their work. In 2025, I’m hoping to sample at least one of those writers. They certainly have fans as evidenced by Black Sword Hack, an OSR game that seeks to recreate the tone of these stories.