The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying 5E (2023)

Dragonbane is a classic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game published by Free League Publishing in 2023. It is a modern English translation and reimagining of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia's first and longest-running TTRPG, originally released in 1982. The game carries over four decades of Swedish gaming heritage into a sleek, accessible package designed around the philosophy of "mirth and mayhem": fast-paced adventures with minimal prep, where danger is real, luck matters, and even a humble merchant can become a legend. Unlike many modern fantasy RPGs, Dragonbane deliberately avoids the power-escalation treadmill of level-based systems. Characters are capable but mortal from session one, and the game works equally well for a single one-shot evening or a sprawling long-term campaign. It was a strong contender for TTRPG of the year on release, praised widely as one of the most accessible entry points into tabletop fantasy roleplaying. Description In Dragonbane, players take on the role of adventurers in the Misty Vale, a hidden mountain valley, ancient and full of ruins from fallen kingdoms, only recently cleared of orc and goblin occupation. The world is shaped by the eternal cosmic struggle between two great powers: the Dragons and the Demons, rival godlike forces whose conflict bleeds into mortal life. Players choose from six playable Kins: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, the duck-like Mallards, and the feral Wolfkin and one of ten Professions (Fighter, Mage, Hunter, Thief, Artisan, Merchant, Mariner, Scholar, and others), each providing a distinct set of skills and heroic abilities. One player takes the role of the Game Master (GM), who builds the world, voices NPCs, and runs the dangers the adventurers face. The tone balances genuine peril and dark fantasy with moments of levity and absurdity.

Vagabond // Pulp Fantasy RPG is a d20-based OSR fantasy game designed by Taron "Indestructoboy" Pounds - an ENnie Award-winning designer previously known for third-party D&D 5e class content - and published through his own studio, Land of the Blind. It funded its development on Kickstarter in 2023, with a print run funded via Gamefound in 2024, and fans have taken to calling it "the Pathfinder of the OSR": an attempt to bring modern character-build depth to old-school-inspired dungeon crawling without losing the rulings-over-rules, low-prep philosophy that defines games like Knave, Cairn, and Into the Odd, several of which are explicitly credited as influences. Description Playing Vagabond means playing pulp-flavored fantasy adventurers - the kind of setting where a Goblin Gunslinger might delve a mummy's tomb alongside a Dwarf Witch hunting Excalibur - built specifically to keep GM prep and mental overhead low while still giving players a genuinely deep character-building toolkit. It's explicitly compatible with B/X-derived monsters, classic TSR modules, and Old School Essentials adventures, so existing OSR content drops in with little to no conversion. All rolls are player-facing, meaning players roll rather than the GM rolling against them, and creature stat blocks include a built-in "Action Gambit" describing exactly what a monster does in combat, aiming to strip improvised tactical decisions away from the GM entirely.

Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game is a cosmic horror tabletop roleplaying game about investigators in 1920s New England, published by Edge Studio, the roleplaying arm of Asmodee, together with Fantasy Flight Games. The Core Rulebook, a 256-page hardcover, reached stores in November 2024 and includes the full rules, a guide to Arkham, Massachusetts and the surrounding Miskatonic River Valley, a chapter on the Ancient Ones and their servants, and a complete adventure, "Terror at the Tick-Tock Club". A beginner-focused boxed set, Welcome to Promise, was announced for July 2026 and moves the action to a town in 1920s Louisiana. The game shares its setting with Fantasy Flight Games' Arkham Horror line of board, card and dice games, but runs on its own engine, the Dynamic Pool System (DPS). Description Players take on investigators drawn from eight pulp-inspired archetypes, who look into strange events, track down occult clues and face things the human mind isn't built to understand. The Game Master runs scenes of conversation, exploration and, occasionally, violence, with dread building through the investigators' own sanity and health pools rather than through a separate monster roster alone. The game asks for a fiction-first table. Rolls are made in the open, clues aren't locked behind dice, and the GM is expected to say yes to creative ideas rather than send players back to their sheets. It is a game where failure can wreck a character's mind or body, and the rulebook includes advice on setting up a safe table and checking in about sensitive themes beforehand.

Untitled Game is a Dungeons & Dragons actual play podcast and the premise is pretty simple: A group of strangers crash lands on a remote tropical island and survival instinct quickly kicks in. The deeper they go into the jungle, the stranger things get—old cave paintings, impossible storms, things whisper threats in the dark. It’s played pretty loose and natural—no actors, no heavy editing polish—just a group of nerds leaning into the creepy weirdness and seeing where the story goes. Sometimes tense, sometimes funny, occasionally very bad decisions, always a bunch of cursing. If you’re into: slow-burn mystery horror with a weird edge tabletop actual play that feels more like a late-night campfire story …you might just enjoy it. Join our survivors as they peel back the layers of a mystery where every choice matters - and one wrong step might just be their last. Links rss.com - Podcast feed youtube.com - Youtube channel spotify.com - Spotify feed podcasts.apple.com - Apple Podcasts feed untitledgame-alpha.vercel.app - Modified 5E rules patreon.com - Patreon page

The Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game (MMRPG) is Marvel's own tabletop RPG, designed by veteran game designer Matt Forbeck (with Michael Capps) and published directly by Marvel rather than licensed out to an external studio, following a public playtest starting in 2022 and a full Core Rulebook release in 2023. Rather than licensing an existing engine, Marvel built a custom system specifically for the game: the d616 System, named for the numeric designation of Marvel's flagship comic continuity, Earth-616. Development has continued since launch with expansions, including a Godzilla-themed kaiju-battle sourcebook and additional hero and villain profile books. Description Playing MMRPG means playing an established Marvel hero or villain - complete with an official published profile - or a homebrewed original, using rules built specifically to let wildly different power levels share the same table without breaking. Characters are given a Rank from 1 to 6 that broadly sets how powerful they are, from ordinary civilians at Rank 1 up to cosmic-tier figures like the Hulk or Magneto at Rank 6; anything beyond that, like Galactus or the Living Tribunal, gets a special Rank X designation and skips normal statistics entirely in favor of narrative-only rules.  The system leans hard into feeling instantly familiar to comic fans: six abilities that spell out M-A-R-V-E-L, over 300 selectable superpowers, and full stat profiles for dozens of iconic characters straight out of the comics.

PORK MORT is an old-school fantasy tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Balearic folklore and traditional folktales. Created by Sergio Amat, Mercedes Prats, Jaume Mayans and Daniela Kropeit, the game combines dark fantasy, absurd humor and a distinctive visual style in a strange and dangerous world known simply as The Island. Players take on the roles of unlikely adventurers trying to survive in a land inhabited by witches, giants, demons, talking animals and other bizarre creatures drawn from Mediterranean folklore. Exploration, danger, unpredictable encounters and dark comedy are at the heart of the game.  PORK MORT uses a fast, rules-light system that is fully compatible with MÖRK BORG, allowing characters, monsters and adventures to be easily used between both games. Description In PORK MORT, players take on the roles of disgraced knights, peasants forced into adventure, cursed hunchbacks, outcast bear-men and other kinds of antiheroes trying to survive on The Island, a magical land ruled by the Porkos (pig-men), who govern all its inhabitants with an iron hoof.  As if that were not enough, the Moiras (anthropomorphic spiders who can supposedly predict the future) have foretold that three of the four pillars supporting The Island have collapsed, and that the end is near. The game prioritizes creativity and exploration, with simple rules designed to adapt to any crazy situation the players might encounter on their journey to become something more than mere wanderers, perhaps even the protagonists of the tales of the future.