Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Talislanta is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game created by Stephan Michael Sechi, first published by Bard Games in 1987. It draws its inspiration from Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels and the travelogue spirit of the Arabian Nights rather than from Tolkien. It built its identity around a single blunt promise printed right on the box: "no elves". No dwarves, no halflings, no standard-issue fantasy races at all - just dozens of original cultures found nowhere else in the genre.  The game has passed through five editions and nearly as many publishers, including a stint at Wizards of the Coast in the early '90s, and creator Stephan Michael Sechi now makes the entire back catalogue - every edition, every supplement - available for free through the official Talislanta Library. Description Playing Talislanta starts with a choice. Instead of creating a character from separate race, class, and skill lists, players pick one of well over a hundred archetypes. Things like the Cymrilan Rogue Magician, the Jaka Beastmaster, or the Mandalan Mystic Warrior - each one a fully realised character tied to a specific culture. Complete with attributes, skills, gear, and a place in the world already worked out. A little light customisation (a point moved here, a skill added there) and the character is ready to play.  What makes the game distinct isn't its mechanics, which are deliberately light, but the scale of its setting: the continent of Talislanta is home to more than a hundred distinct peoples, and the rulebooks spend far more pages on culture, custom, and worldview than on combat math. It rewards players who want to explore a genuinely alien fantasy world over chasing mechanical optimisation. System Overview & Key Features Archetype-Based Character Creation Character creation isn't a build process, it's a selection process. Every archetype in the book arrives fully statted, dressed, and equipped, tied to a named culture and a defined role in Talislantan society. Archetypes are deliberately unbalanced against one another, since staying true to the setting mattered more to Sechi than parity between character options. The Unified Action Table Skill checks, combat rolls, and magic all resolve on a single d20 chart. Attacking works exactly like any other skill roll: add a skill rating, compare to a target number. There's no separate combat subsystem to memorise, which keeps the rules themselves down to a few dozen pages even in the densest editions. Modes and Orders Magic runs on two interlocking pieces: Modes (twelve broad effect categories like Attack, Heal, or Illusion) and Orders (culturally rooted schools of magic, from Cartomancy to Elemental Magic). A magician's Order shapes how a Mode behaves and looks when cast, so the same underlying effect plays out completely differently in different hands - which lets a short list of Modes support a near-endless variety of actual spells. A World Built Without Tolkien Every culture in Talislanta was designed to avoid genre default: no elves, no generic barbarians, no standard dragons. In their place are peoples like the Thralls (identical clone-warriors distinguishable only by tattoo), the sky-sailing Phantasians, and the shapeshifting Sindarans. The setting material - not the rules - is where most of the page count and most of the game's reputation live. Links talislanta.com - Official Talislanta website talislanta.com/talislanta-library - Free official PDFs of every edition and supplement ever published

Fabula Ultima is a tabletop roleplaying game designed by Italian creator Emanuele Galletto and published by Need Games!, released first in Italian and then in an English edition in October 2022. It bills itself as a TTJRPG - a love letter to Japanese console RPGs like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Dragon Quest.  Built by a designer who tried reskinning other systems to capture that feeling and, failing to find one that fit, wrote his own. The game found its audience fast, taking home the Gold ENNIE for Best Game and the Silver ENNIE for Product of the Year in 2023.

When Sky and Sea Were Not Named (WSSWNN for short) is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. To play, you'll need a set of gaming dice, your imagination, and a few friends. One player, the Guide, narrates the story and sets up challenges for the rest of the group. The other players take on the roles of heroes who set forth upon doomed floating islands, rescue people from their fates, and rebuild civilization. A game of When Sky and Sea Were Not Named might be limited to a single island that players explore in a few hours. Or it can be a sprawling adventure spread out over months of play, with heroes steadily gaining more powerful abilities and technology. Beyond action scenes and combat, WSSWNN is about your heroic characters and their journeys together. You can learn new lore from other characters—perhaps allies you've rescued, or even foes you've graced with mercy. You can invoke your hero's ideals in dramatic moments, potentially turning failure or struggle into success.

Thirsty sword lesbians battle a tyrannical ruler when her enforcers march down from the frosty north. They rocket through the stars to safeguard diplomats ending a generations-old conflict. They sip tea together and share shy glances at the corner cafe, until they need to take up their swords to defend their community. Even in conflict, they seek peace with their opponents—and sometimes connect more deeply than anyone expects. Your thirsty sword lesbians may be fantasy heroes, or may inhabit a galaxy of laser swords and starships. Anywhere that swords cross and hearts race, thirsty sword lesbians are there. A sword duel can end in kissing, a witch can gain her power by helping others find love, and an entire campaign can be built around wandering matchmakers flying from planet to planet. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a roleplaying game for telling queer stories with friends.

Everyday Heroes is a modern-day action roleplaying game designed by Sigfried Trent, Chris "Goober" Ramsley, and D. Todd Scott, with Jeff Grubb - co-designer of Wizards of the Coast's original d20 Modern - serving as design consultant. Published by Evil Genius Games following a 2022 Kickstarter, it takes the 20-year-old d20 Modern concept and rebuilds it entirely on the 5th Edition SRD chassis: same six ability-driven hero archetypes, same "why play an elf wizard when you can play Rambo" pitch, but running on rules 5e players will recognize instantly.  The line has grown around a string of officially licensed cinematic settings - Escape from New York, Highlander, The Crow, Pacific Rim, Kong: Skull Island, Total Recall - letting the system double as an action-movie conversion kit as much as a standalone game.

The Cosmere Roleplaying Game is an officially licensed tabletop RPG based on Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe - the shared setting behind The Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, and a dozen other series - designed by Andrew Fischer and published by Brotherwise Games in partnership with Sanderson's own Dragonsteel Entertainment. Announced in late 2023, its August 2024 Kickstarter raised over $15 million, making it not just the most-funded tabletop RPG in the platform's history but the most-funded tabletop game of any kind. The first campaign setting, covering Roshar from The Stormlight Archive, released digitally in mid-2025 and in print that October; a second setting covering Scadrial from Mistborn is planned for 2026, with more of the Cosmere expected to follow as Sanderson's novels do.

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game is an officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, designed by a team led by Brendan Conway (with James Mendez Hodes, Yeonsoo Julian Kim, Sharang Biswas, Daniel Kwan, and Sen-Foong Lim) and published by Magpie Games. It launched via a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $10 million - one of the highest-funded TTRPG crowdfunders ever run - with a digital release in October 2022 and the physical core book following in January 2023. The system is built on the Powered by the Apocalypse engine, the same design lineage that traces back to Apocalypse World, adapted here around the show's elemental combat and character-driven melodrama. Description Players take on benders, martial artists, and technologically-minded specialists living somewhere across five playable eras of the setting - Kyoshi's age, Roku's era, the Hundred Year War, Aang's timeline, or Korra's modernized world - navigating a world of four elemental nations where manipulating earth, water, fire, or air is a normal, visible part of daily life.  Sessions mix character drama with fast, narratively-driven combat: a Game Master frames scenes and plays the setting's antagonists, who are written to have their own motivations rather than serving as disposable obstacles. The game leans hard on internal conflict as much as external - characters are built around competing values as much as combat skill, and are expected to be pulled off-balance by the people and ideals they care about, not just by getting hit.

Blue Rose: The AGE RPG of Romantic Fantasy is a tabletop roleplaying game of heroism, intrigue, and romance, originally designed by Jeremy Crawford, Dawn Elliott, Steve Kenson, and John Snead and published by Green Ronin Publishing. It first appeared in 2005 running on the True20 system, a simplified offshoot of the d20 System, before Green Ronin funded a full second edition through Kickstarter and rereleased it in 2018 rebuilt on their own Adventure Game Engine (AGE). It holds a real place in the hobby's history as the first roleplaying game to explicitly write acceptance of every gender and sexual orientation - including polyamorous relationships between adult characters - directly into its rules and setting, well before that became common practice. The system is built on the Adventure Game Engine (AGE), the same engine Green Ronin uses for Dragon Age, Fantasy AGE, and Modern AGE, replacing the True20 rules the original 2005 edition ran on. Description Players take on envoys of the Sovereign's Finest, agents of the Kingdom of Aldis charged with defending it through diplomacy, investigation, and magic as much as combat, often partnered with a rhydan - one of Aldea's psychic, sapient animals, treated as a full citizen and frequently a fellow player character rather than a pet. The Game Master sits across a conflict between Aldis's tolerant, magic-embracing society and its neighbors: the zealous Theocracy of Jarzon and the corrupted Kingdom of Kern, both shaped by the legacy of the ancient Sorcerer Kings and the creeping influence of the Shadow. The game asks its table to take relationships and personal conviction as seriously as any fight - romance, loyalty, and belief are built into the character sheet, not left to sit outside it - and it leans toward stories that resolve through negotiation and investigation at least as often as the sword.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium is a tabletop roleplaying game of political intrigue, feudal warfare, and desert survival set in Frank Herbert's Dune universe, published by Modiphius Entertainment with lead designer Nathan Dowdell heading a large credited design team. It released in 2021, timed alongside Denis Villeneuve's Dune film, running on a version of Modiphius's house 2d20 System adapted specifically for the setting's politics-first, duel-heavy tone. The system is a setting-specific adaptation of Modiphius's 2d20 System, the same engine family behind Star Trek Adventures and Fallout: The Roleplaying Game. Description Players build elite agents in service to a noble House - Mentats, Swordmasters, Bene Gesserit Sisters, Spies, devious Advisors, or Fremen of the deep desert - and, before a single character is even built, the whole table designs that House together in a dedicated House-creation mini-game, deliberately keeping play away from the canon Houses Atreides or Harkonnen.  The Game Master runs missions where combat is only one of several ways a scene can go wrong: duels, skirmishes, open warfare, espionage, and courtly intrigue all resolve through the same underlying system, and a table can just as easily spend a session at a negotiating table as on a battlefield. The game leans hard into its source material's core promise - that plans, loyalty, and leverage usually matter more than a blade - and asks players to think as much about their House's long game as their character's next roll.