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After five sessions in the Delian Tomb adventure, my group discussed and reviewed Draw Steel, the tactical heroic fantasy game currently in the spotlight.

Here are our full thoughts on the game.

A Summary

While we liked the system, most of the negatives we brought up came from the adventure, particularly its open-ended second Act. After the initial dungeon, the adventure appears to become a small sandbox of different tasks around this small village that needs help with several small tasks, many of which balloon into larger ones. As-written, the game literally throws 6 quests at you at exactly the same time, which I found really poorly paced.

The system itself has a very strong specific vision, and some members of our group didn't click with it as well as they expected to, trying to approach some obstacles with an OSR mindset of leveraging tools and approaches in the narrative to bypass rolls or fair fights, which isn't something the game care for.

It's also a spectacularly tightly balanced game, with difficult encounters often invoking a powerful "kill it before we die" feeling. Again, really well done, so much so that some group members discovered they wanted less desperate fights.

The book itself has great D&D-style art, but has a pretty basic layout. I love that the index is at the start, but there were a few times where I missed information right in front of me (looking at you, minion squad leader buffs). There were also a few times I had to look up a rule for more clarification, and the search function of the compendium is useless.

Overall, several members of my group felt it was a good game, but not for them. I personally really liked it and would be happy to keep playing or GMing it.

Also the fishing mechanics automatically make it a 10/10.

In my search of favourite 'narrative' RPGs and trying to enjoy them as a Traditional RPG enjoyer, there's a whole new playstyle out there that was so different from my own and my group that I was very intrigued in trying it. I have seen PbtA games be recommend in these kinds of discussions along with other titles. So for the rest of 2025, I dedicated some my free time and my group (much to their detriment) on trying out a bunch of games that uses the framework.

And I wanted it to be right, I wanted to "get" this style within the hobby I have loved for so long so I looked past Dungeon World and went on what the people consider "True" PbtA experiences: Apocalypse World, Masks, Monster of the Week, Chasing Adventure, etc. But every time I have tried it, I always have this sinking feeling that I was constrained by its inner workings, almost as if the system is taking the wheels off of my games and I'll get to that in a bit because I have learned that it's a feature.

It's the same feeling I got when I was playing more rules-heavy games where I get bogged down by all the rules and mechanics and I have to keep turning down cool stuff because it's apparently not allowed within the system, except PbtA isn't exactly rules-heavy and it explicitly doesn't even do that at all in the first place. It was the same feeling but in a different way and I wasn't exactly sure what it was at the time. The GM moves, the Player Moves, the Playbooks, they were all so interesting to me but as time passes I'm starting to not enjoy them at all.

And I get it, if I want cool stuff to happen I'll just ignore the rules, it just so happens that PbtA also does something like this where if a player wanna do an action that isn't triggering any moves, you either let it happen or you dictate what happens with your own set of GM tools. But understand me that the reason I like this hobby is because I wanna see the intention of a Certain Playstyle from the authors who make these games. So we leaned on the archetypes and cliches of the Playbooks, we trigger moves when it makes sense in the scene, we started collaborating on the story and adding our twists it.

And it was not fun. It's becoming more like a Writing Room than playing a game to us. This is the first time we tried a "Narrative" game and things weren't looking great. We are predominantly roleplayers too, we should've loved this. But I always go back to that sinking feeling I had on Paragraph 2 and 3. Due to that, it left a bitter taste in our mouths and we just went back to playing traditional games, I despaired for a moment, that I'll be feeling left out on another side of a hobby that I will never get.

Until one day, some 8 months ago, I learned about Freeform Universal. I already talked about this in detail in this post I made in this subreddit a while back but TL;DR it's the closest to something I want for a "narrative" game. And you might've noticed that I usually put "narrative" in quotation marks in this post quite often, because even I am not sure if I am using the term correctly or if it's even the correct term to use at all. But Freeform Universal (Along with FATE and more) does something that helped me a lot in writing the types of stories I want in my games: It's the fact that they don't do anything at all.

OKAY, They do in fact do something but it mostly boils down to if a description or aspect of your character is relevant in the scene, you'll get some form of advantage either through a bonus dice or a something the GM cooks up. Nothing more or less. That open-endedness is something me and my group enjoy in our games quite a lot. And that's when I started to realize it.

PbtA is explicitly designed to lean on a genre's tropes and cliches, hence why a lot of the moves and playbooks were designed that way is because it wants to narrow down to a very specific story it wants you to tell. It's meant to drive you along the path of its designed genre so that you won't stray away from it, and it's a feature not a bug. I feel this is something that's already obvious to a lot of PbtA fans but it was something I have to realize before the end of the year. The reason why I enjoy other contemporaries rather than PbtA was purely because I was able to do more on those games with less, hence I was able to place such a higher value on them.

I was not the Target Audience for this playstye. And I think that's okay. I'm still sad that I will never be able to get it for a long time but with this realization, it has basically made it easy for me to come to terms with it. It's actually a good thing that the hobby has a lot of styles for different kinds of people too, and that I was able to experience all of them at some point in time. Who knows maybe I'll come around some day and dust off Apocalypse World again and I start to get it, but I'm not in the right place and neither at the right time.

As much as I rant about disliking dnd, I do miss playing warforged. Any good games out there where you play as robots?

I've been working on a dungeon generation procedure for a little side project, taking inspiration from the realm generation of Mythic Bastionland, as well as the dungeon, forest, and setting seed procedures from Cairn. The goal is for the procedure to help the GM create a mega-dungeon that is similar in scope to a Dark Souls game world: various different regions, each with their own theme, all interconnected.

I realise there's probably plenty more to take inspiration from besides the two games I listed, so I'd love to hear about your favourites. Please also explain why it's your favourite.

Thanks!

The Merry Mushmen (the folks who make Knock magazine) have a new kickstarter. It's for a game in which you play the monsters of a dungeon. Core rule system is apparently based on Macchiato Monsters (itself a blend of Whitehack and The Black Hack). I think it looks pretty interesting. Check it out!

Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with the creators of the project. Just think it's neat.

If not directly in that setting, I’m looking for games (or modules for existing systems) with a similar tone and atmosphere; scrappy crews, frontier space, moral gray areas, crime to be done, character-driven stories, etc.

I know there’s a board game, but I’m specifically looking for a TTRPG with player freedom, evolving storylines, and long-term stakes rather than a fixed scenario.

Any system recommendations, supplements, or homebrew-friendly frameworks would be appreciated.

Edit: nvm it's actually in the game recommendations (of which I was not aware of). Thanks in advance to anyone who would've had recommendations, feel free to still drop them if you have something interesting.

There was a ttrpg Kickstarter that was ready to go, and just waiting for the okay from the printer to continue. He had a team and he stopped replying and no one in the team could get in contact. The team couldn't give the printer the okay because it needed the guy's signature. They were afraid something happened to the guy.

I don't remember which game it aas, bur does anyone know what I'm talking about and if there was ever an update?

I'm talking about the Rowan Rook and Decard boss fight game. The last news article about it on their site is over a year old, with older posts implying it's coming soon. It successfully funded on Backerkit a while ago, has anyone that backed it heard about its progress? I didn't, but I've been looking forward to it coming out because it sounds really interesting.

I was thinking about setting up a horror sandbox with the players being ordinary humans with a focus on weird places, occult items and mystical lore. I was thinking about making knowledge more tradeble in order to get more npc's invested in acquiring certain books, relics and other things. The rest is pretty much open. I was thinking about using Cthulhu, Public Access, Liminal Horror or maybe one of those Monte Cook settings like Old Gods of Appalachia or maybe the Magnus Archives.

From the FL newsletter:

Get ready – Dragonbane: Trudvang, a stand-alone tabletop roleplaying game based on the multiple award-winning Dragonbane RPG, will be launched on Kickstarter on February 17, at 3 pm CET (9 am US Eastern, 6 am US Pacific).
That's right – we have listened to the community and decided to offer Dragonbane: Trudvang as a stand-alone RPG, not requiring the Dragonbane Core Set or Rulebook – but still 100% compatible with the Dragonbane core rules.

I like that decision and look forward to the campaign!

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