What’s Hot in Indie TTRPGs 2022

A compilation of data and opinion

Produced by Epistolary Richard and with contributions from Chris McDowall, Robert Carnel, Austin Ramsay, Charlie Etheridge-Nunn, Fiona Howat, Jon "Starshine" Greenall, Ryan Howard, Thomas Manuel, Yeonsoo Julian Kim, Samantha Leigh, René-Pier Deshaies, Chris Tung, Aaron Voigt, Mayday Roleplay, Andre Novoa, Penance RPG, Modified Roll, Danger Club Podcast, Sharang Biswas, Thursday Garreau, Long Tail Games, Marx Shepherd, Pearse Anderson, Sarah Moore, Women of DnD, Sean F. Smith

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Table of contents

Purpose of this document, disclosures and caveats

What’s Hot in Indie TTRPG contributors

Indie TTRPGs played in 2022

Upcoming indie TTRPGs

Indie TTRPG trends from 2022

Community & industry

AI art

Collectives

Game reviews and helping games reach new audiences

Newsletters & blogs

Women

Trends in play

Shorter play sessions

Trends in design

Hyperfocused design

Physical components

System Reference Documents

The Eerie & Surreal

TTRPG crowdfunding in 2022

TTRPGs by funding level (>$100k only)

TTRPGs released

TTRPGs 2022 January to March

TTRPGs 2022 April to June

TTRPGs 2022 July to September

TTRPGs 2022 October to December

Purpose of this document, disclosures and caveats

Why have I compiled this? Two reasons. One, ever since I got back into tabletop roleplaying games as an adult, I’ve been interested in trying to wrap my head around the hobby. What are the hottest new games? What are the shifts in design and production? How the games are made and how they’re played? Where did those trends come from and where are they going? Who is out there designing games? What play communities are they from? Every year I seemed to have a new revelation just as to what was going on around me. I wanted to know and so I asked people whose opinion I valued and I wrote down what they said (or they emailed me and I could just copy paste it). And because I figured that other people may also be interested, I’ve compiled it together here so others can read it as well.

So the first reason is to record what I’ve learned. The second reason is to try and inspire others to do the same.

I would really like a better version of this document to exist. One that’s more comprehensive, more detailed, more balanced, more accurate. One that’s put together by people with more time, ability, resources and connections than I have. Not even that (though that would be great), I would really like to read something like this written by anyone who has a different perspective, different contacts, different data or analysis than I have. I really hope this document helps encourage others to create their own. If it does, please let me know.

For the written opinions, I invited those who had contributed last year, who were recommended to me by those who had previously contributed, and anyone else who replied to a tweet I sent or who were recommended by others. While I didn’t filter or select any of them I’m also aware that there is an element of self-selection, that they do not represent the full diversity within the hobby and exclude non-English speakers. Everyone’s opinions are just that, their opinions. They don’t necessarily represent my opinion, and they’re based on folk’s personal experiences with ttrpgs this year.

Finally, please be aware that - while this document is free - I receive a small commission from OneBookShelf as an affiliate if people go on to buy a product from DriveThruRPG. If you don’t like this, please remove my affiliate id (487648) before you buy. This document is pay-want-you-want so if you’d like to pay me something for this then please go back and add what you’d like.

What’s Hot in Indie TTRPG contributors

Indie TTRPGs played in 2022

Kingdoms by Sophia Tinney is a distillation of Pendragon-style generational play, moving through eras as play goes on. Alongside managing their domain, players fight Kingdom Death style boss monsters and harvest their parts. It has a generous amount of brutally simple systems for things like power, family, war, all crammed into a small A5 book.

Chris McDowall is a game designer based in Manchester. As the creator of Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and The Doomed he combines minimalist rules with evocative flavour. Chris writes at bastionland.com and produces video and podcast content around game design.

The game I enjoyed the most this year was MiniBX which reinvents the Hit Dice mechanic to create a dice chain that allows for tactical nuance, quick play and mechanical compatibility with B/X systems and Old-School Essentials. It fuses minimal mechanics with the freeform play espoused by advocates of pre-D&D game play, it brings together the OSR and FKR to cre tate an enjoyable table experience that isn't pure negotiation or mechanical exploitation. This is original D&D as it lives in your memory rather than what it actually was.

Robert Carnel

Red West by Briar Sovereign is an incredibly flavourful hack of Heart: The City Beneath. It's about people protecting their home, an abandoned Wild West themed amusement park on Mars, from demons after humanity lost a war against Hell. It's an extremely well put together Weird West game on the surface, but when you look a little deeper you see how the unique bits of the setting bubble beneath its skin. Mentions of automated guns in the distance, being haunted by a candle spirit that annoyingly sets things around you on fire, or a whole playbook about being the corporate representative from a cyberpunk megacorp. It's still very early in production, you need a copy of Heart to play, but what it could become is extremely exciting and with Armor Astir: Advent Briar Sovereign has proven that they've got the chops to make Red West something truly special.

I'm Austin Ramsay, a TTRPG designer, podcaster, and streamer. I'm best known for making Beam Saber, but have several other games available at http://Austin-Ramsay.Itch.Io. Keep an eye out for CalazCon! my upcoming mega game actual play series featuring THIRTY (30) performers!

I love deep, meaningful RPGs rich with theme and emotions. I love how games can really say something about our current times, about politics, about gender, history, our environment and more. I also love the Halo series of games, which I have never bought sober. I love being a big dumb spaceman firing glowing lasers at yelling aliens and their giant plastic-looking spider vehicles. This year, I tried Nova, a game using the Lumen system, and it perfectly reflects bombastic FPS fun. Its head is empty and its ammo clip is full, ready to take everything on. In the future of Nova, the sun blew up and rained shards into the Earth, allowing humanity to eke out an existence in isolated cities protected from monsters by people in massive mechs with cool abilities. This is a combat-first game, where you’ll paint targets and launch volleys of homing missiles at them. You’ll spread viruses which make people explode. You’ll combo powers so that when you empty your clip, you explode! Long story short, there’s a lot of exploding. The gameplay loop is fairly simple, with you burning fuel to kill enemies and health when you suffer at their hands. Killing these warped bastards will earn you loot drops of fuel and health to keep you going. When you die, you blow up with one last move, then power down for someone else to recover. I’ve had a lot of fun with different systems, but having a break from the drama and having an evening of big dumb fun with Nova from time to time was a real joy.

Charlie Etheridge-Nunn; Writer for Who Dares Rolls & host of the Casual Trek & Playing With Ourselves podcasts

Not an indie RPG but one D&D sourcebook which came out this year and I feel needs to be mentioned is ‘Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel’ - the first ever D&D anthology book to be published with a PoC team leading it and all the material written by BIPOC writers.

This was the first D&D book in a long time which made me excited to run adventures again. Each adventure is set in a new plane of existence which has been inspired by the writer’s cultural heritage.

There’s incredible stories, plot hooks, artwork, new monsters, use of gender neutral names, advice on playing sensitively when playing characters from these planes AND most importantly - Pronunciation guides.

Highly recommend this book. It’s a milestone in the history of not only D&D but RPGs everywhere. And I hope there’s more to come!

Fiona from What Am I Rolling? & The DM’s Book Club

"My Girlfriend Turned into the Moon, So My Friends and I Built a Rocketship to Go Visit Her (but to my surprise things have gone terribly wrong)," by Trystan Goetze, is a wonderfully charming game. Built on the already great "What's So Cool About Outer Space?" system. It is touching, warm, and whimsical all at the same time. It perfectly balances the symbolic and abstract with the grounded and relatable. And it pulls it all off effortlessly.

Jon "Starshine" Greenall is an analog game designer and freelance writer who focuses on making unreservedly weird games.

In 2022, the biggest indie RPG release for me was the new edition of Hyperborea. It's a beautiful set of books that really capture the feel of R E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith-style weird fantasy. Anyone looking for a pulpy and brutal game should check it out. Also, check out my show, Rollin' Bones with Ryan Howard live every Tuesday night at 8 PM CST over on YouTube.

Ryan Howard

My game of the year is Bloodclotte by Nick Duff and Silion L. This is a gothic horror comedy masquerading as a steampunk medical drama. You play doctors in a hospital curing strange, eldritch diseases. All the playbooks satirize some form of quackery and I contributed a playbook about Indian medicine based on my own personal experience. If you enjoy body horror and are not icked out by medical stuff, this game is so fun. It has inventive worldbuilding, a rock-solid premise, and gameplay rooted in player-proactivity. The players are always framing scenes because there is no game except when the characters propose treatments or diagnostic ideas. And because every patient is explicitly under two doctors, the scenes are always interpersonal. These changes really enhance the mechanical basis of the game which is the Resistance system first seen in Spire from Rowan Rook and Decard. Bloodclotte is currently only available as a quickstart but I can't wait to see where the game goes as it is fully developed.

Thomas Manuel, writer of the Indie RPG Newsletter.

The game I’ve been most excited about recently is Coyote & Crow. I’m a big fan of games that mix science fiction and fantasy, and the world is unlike any other TTRPG world I’ve encountered before. I love that we get to see an uncolonized America written by a primarily Indigenous team, and that our characters are contending with the aftermath of a mysterious apocalyptic event. It’s an interesting take on the post-post-apocalyptic genre, where you get to explore what happens after the rebuilding phase is already well underway. The game world is so rich and the mechanics encourage you to get creative with your problem-solving. Not everything needs to be - or should be - resolved by combat.

Yeonsoo Julian Kim

Some of the most fun I’ve had GMing a one-shot was with Raefenheim by Tadhg Lyons. In this one-page game, each player creates a character based on an archetype from gothic literature such as The Romantic, The Byronic, and The Haunted. The Estate (the GM), crafts a mystery for the players that takes place in a crumbling castle. As the Estate, you not only drop clues for solving the mystery, but also play as the hundreds of crows occupying the castle grounds. I typically have trouble creating mysteries, but I had a great time leaning into the tropes from this genre and the planning came naturally. The best part of GMing Raefenheim is the crows: depending on the characters’ actions, the crows will either provide help or cause mischief, and it was a delight to give them personality and weave them into the story. I highly recommend this game for any fans of gothic literature.

Samantha Leigh (@GoblinMixtape) is a TTRPG designer who publishes under Blinking Birch Games. She is best known for her solo game Anamnesis and her TikTok/YouTube channel that covers a variety of indie TTRPGs.

Another thing that had me really excited this year is the release of Banda’s Grove, by Pandion Games. This is a game where you are a resident camper at the quantum convergence campgrounds from across the universe. It is a diceless, cozy, slice of life RPG that uses an original system which I’m quite a fan of. Its designer, Andrew Boyd, is working on releasing an open licensed system reference document for people to make their own game based on this fantastic role-playing experience, which has me even more excited.

My name is René-Pier Deshaies, and I design tabletop role-playing games as Fari RPGs. I’m mostly known for my free, open and generic system Charge, my survival horror minimalist game Breathless, my solo game of exploration and survival Nomadic, and my grunge industrial fantasy game Hopes & Dreams. You can find my games at https://farirpgs.com and subscribe to my blog at https://farirpgs.com/blog.

Lancer, an indie TTRPG game by Massif Press, had been in my peripherals for quite some time throughout this year. Hearing about various friends’ campaigns, and how Lancer was basically a roleplaying game that brought to life your favourite mecha animes, was truly something that I could not ignore. How many of us tuned into our televisions late at night while we were kids and watched Gundam Wing, only to have dreams of piloting our own giant fighting robots? Well, Lancer is certainly the game to make that happen. Though the combat system is crunchy and can take some time to master, the customization options and mech system is so robust and intricate, players can essentially create whatever kind of mech their creative minds can think of, and then thrust them into tactical combat and roleplaying scenarios reminiscent of many trendy post-apocalyptic landscapes. They’ve even created a helpful website called COMP/CON that serves as a companion tool to help keep track of your pilots, mechs, encounters, games, and more. The lore Massif Press has provided for the Lancer universe is deep, but the system is flexible enough to also offer a more homebrewed path as well. I am currently working on a slick new show inspired by both Cowboy Bebop and Gundam, which utilizes all aspects of the Lancer system. And the games have been some of the most thrilling tabletop sessions I’ve ever played.

My name is Chris Tung (@lil_tungsta) and I am one of the co-founders of http://PinkCity.ca, an anime/gaming streetwear brand from Toronto, as well as the producer/editor/current GM for the Super Journey Dudes podcast - stay tuned for the release of our Lancer show early 2023!

One of my favorite things about the indie space is that, despite the fact that we're all little shrubs struggling for light, blocked out by the canopy of Dungeons and Dragons, we still manage to wrap our tendrils up its old trunk and steal glimpses of the sun for ourselves. I don't expect longform campaigns will die out anytime soon, and I especially don't think D&D is going anywhere. But the games I loved most this year were both interstitial texts, meant to supplement an ongoing campaign and introduce weirder, more experimental mechanics that larger RPGs could never risk.

Emily Zhu's Houses of the Sun by Night and Everest Pipkin's World Ending Game provide, respectively, thirteen and twenty minigames to be played within the context of your pre-established campaign. While World Ending Game's intention is to be played as the final session of a campaign, both it and Houses use short, narrative-focused, crunch-light snippets to delve deeper into characters and build out the details of a setting, encouraging players to collaboratively answer questions not generally posed by the text of a combat or action-centric RPG. The fishing minigame in Houses' base mechanic is waiting for a clock's hands to pass over a certain number and hoping that your amiable conversation ends at the same time. World Ending Game allows players to layer music and quick hits of imagery together to craft their own Anime Music Video.

I believe games like these are gateways for more conventional RPG players to peek their heads through the overgrowth of D&D to discover the rich indie ecosystem wriggling beneath its surface. By providing short, quick tastes of indie mechanics helpfully sprinkled into a longform campaign, I desperately hope to show people a world beyond the d20+stat roll. Games can be AMVs. They can be a lazy day at the lake. They can be, to quote Zhu, "the weirdest shit imaginable."

Aaron Voigt's reviews and essays on indie TTRPGs can be found on Youtube.

The one indie ttrpg that has captured Mayday's interest this year is the Caltrop Core system created by TitanomachyRPG (titanomachyrpg.com). The system is easy to understand (d4 based) and over 300+ games have been designed using it. Our own Eli has authored several of her own including; We Lick Toad Goblins, GhostFi, and Salads 'N Sandwiches (aghostofeli.itch.io/). We've streamed several of Caltrop gameson VOD @ youtube.com/@Maydayrp

Mayday Roleplay is an award-winning ttrpg actual play channel rolling out exciting stories and memorable characters. No one brings chaos and drama like us. Our podcast, “Doomed To Repeat” uses the Ennie award-winning system Delta Green and has garnered several awards of its own on the festival circuit. This chilling auditory experience is in its second season with a third in pre-production in 2023. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

This year, one indie RPG that caught my attention was Electrum Archive by Emil Boven. A simple and elegant system with a fascinating implied setting set in the world of Orn, a place abandoned by an alien species, now turned into a wasteland of sorts with lots of technology and magic to explore. Check it out.

Andre Novoa here. I’m the main person behind publisher Games Omnivorous, known for putting out games such as Mausritter, Vaults of Vaarn and Frontier Scum, as well as settings like Death Robot Jungle, Undying Sands and Bottled Sea.

Two months ago we had a chance to play a fantastic indie RPG - Witch: Fated Souls prior to their KickStarter for the second edition. Not only is it well balanced, but it blends a range of cultural influences in a sensitive and vibrant world. I love its moral complexity - you have struck a deal with a demon, and must use your powers to find a way to reclaim that part of your soul!

The crowdfunding aspect made me think of another, small, RPG creator and his struggles to raise funds for his game. While both games are created in Europe, Ordoalea can't use crowdfunded as they live in the Balkans. Sadly this means that a gritty RPG with lots of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) is taking a long time to get funded and finished. You can find him and his work under Ordoalea on social media and itch. If we want more indie or unusual RPGs, we need to look beyond the US, Western Europe and indeed, KickStarter!

Penance RPG produce variety TTRPG podcast and stream content with a heavy focus on indie and homebrew games and settings. We've been producing shows since 2017(?) and are always on the lookout for new worlds to explore! Find us at http://penancerpg.com or http://twitch.tv/penancerpg

The Indie game I wanted to shout out was Ryne! Ryne is a wild fantasy roleplaying game of community and connection, in a world shaped by broken titans. Using a tailored Powered by the Apocalypse system built around emotion and change, Ryne invites you to weave stories of people living a world in its Autumn. You'll journey through vibrant landscapes, inhabit communities reliant on the indifferent titans, and learn the secrets of the faltering Remnants. Developed by Furtive Shambles with some of the team from the These Flimsy Rituals podcast it's a game that focuses on running a ttrpg with emotions instead of your normal physical/ mental stats and I believe will generate some fantastic roleplay opportunities. The game has been fully funded through Indiegogo and I am excited to get my copy and give it a play!

We are Modified Roll, and D&D 5e Actual Play podcast who focus on collaborative storytelling to deliver an engaging and enjoyable listen with a carefully selected soundtrack and SFX to enhance the listening experience. We are currently on our second season with a new story in a new world with some new cast members, so it's a great time to jump in and come and join our table!

So we here at the Danger Club Podcast have always been a fan of all things 80s, from Stranger Things to Stand By Me, so any chance we can get to put on our leg warmers and show off our mullets we relish. When we learned about the Kids On Bikes RPG, a role playing game about big adventures in small towns we were sold! This year we launched our very own Kids On Bikes home brew story exclusively on our Patreon. We thought we would return to the story at some point then we learned Hunters Books launched a Kickstarter for Kids On Bikes Second Edition! So we immediately backed it and they managed to raise $182,049 over its $20,000 goal. The second edition will bring in new rule clarifications, refined power character rules, player-scalable stakes for violence and an expanded gamemaster section that will elevate an already great system! You can get lots of different extras as well depending on the tier you choose like character journals, arcade tokens and maps that can really immerse you in the worlds you create together. We are really excited about this Kickstarter and are already planning a second season to release in conjunction with the kickstarter exclusively to our Patrons

So who are the Danger Club Podcast I hear you ask? We are an actual play TTRPG podcast that uses Pathfinder 2nd edition. We have up to 150,000 downloads and an exclusive Patreon. Our Patreon offers fans even more TTRPG content from DnD 5e, Delta Green and of course Kids On Bikes!

Upcoming indie TTRPGs

Mothership 1st Edition (the previous one was Edition 0): Second Editions can go multiple ways. Bloated expansions, radical shifts that feel like a new game, but it's rare to find one that feels like a genuine refinement of the original. The Warden's Guide in particular is up there with the best GM guides and feels rooted in actual gameplay experience, all told through a consistent, encouraging, informal voice of Sean McCoy's writing.

It shows real RESTRAINT. Sean has talked about how he had so many ideas that went into the drafts but he cut, saving them for an adventure. A masterclass in how to tackle a new edition of a game.

My upcoming game is You Meet in a Tavern, You Die in a Dungeon. I feel everything you need to know about the game is there in the title and all it needs to do is deliver on it.

Robert Carnel

WOAD; Stone to Stone is a fascinating solo journaling game focusing on Celtic Mythology. Celtic myth is a rich and remarkable tapestry with many gripping concepts ripe for exploration. And I think a solo game will really let players immerse themselves in these myths. I also love that the game will come with a custom tarot deck, which will make the game stand out even more.

Jon "Starshine" Greenall is an analog game designer and freelance writer who focuses on making unreservedly weird games.

My last flatmate opened my eyes to the wonderful (and very gay) world of sports anime. Something must’ve stuck, because Hayley Gordon and Vee Hendro’s sports-team themed RPG Fight With Spirit is definitely the upcoming game I’m most excited about! “Team” is the operative word: the game is as much (or more) about interpersonal drama between friends, lovers, & rivals within a sports team (for any kind of sport really, even one in which players hurl flaming balls at each other from atop dragons), as it is about points and tournaments.

I had the pleasure of playtesting the beta last year with a few other game designer friends, and we had a blast! Gordon and Hendro have crafted mechanics that integrate deep explorations of character and relationships directly into crunchy sports-mechanics. Matches feel tense and visually exciting, even if your knowledge of the sport in question is spotty. And the system of managing team rivalries promises to create a nice sense of progression (both narrative and mechanical) when the full game is released!

Sharang Biswas (He/Him)

https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/

An upcoming TTRPG we're excited about is the newly released Ironsworn: Starforged by Shawn Tompkins. Mayday ran the original Ironsworn on stream as well as the beta of Starforged and we loved the system's ability to generate epic narratives either solo or cooperatively. The Kickstarter fulfillment is currently being shipped and we think everyone should try out Starforged.

I want to promote Songs for the Dusk, by Kavita Poduri

Kavita is a good friend and a brilliant designer; Songs pushes the Forged in the Dark space forward with inspired playbook design, a unique science-fantasy setting, and a brilliant focus on building a community as a group. I can't praise it enough - thank you for the chance to speak!

I'm Thursday Garreau, a trans woman and game designer; my most recent work is the 199X Trilogy, a trio of interlinked retro-cyberpunk microgames.

Indie TTRPG trends from 2022

Community & industry

AI art

My trend for the year is AI created images and text. This whole area is surrounded by moral, ethical and financial issues and it is definitely the case that a lot has been released to the general public without a lot of thought about whether this is a good idea or has been done fairly. However there's no putting the genie back in the bottle so it's important to engage with what is good or bad about these technologies. Artists and writers were already not being compensated appropriately for their work. We discussed this at the last panel and I suspect we'll be discussing it again next year, data mining is just one dimension of exploitation and compensation. However there is genuinely a rich corpus of public domain material that can be legitimately used and if you want an NPC portrait in the style of Albrecht Durer you can now create one in seconds. Some of this technology is transformative, the average GM wouldn't commission and artist for their one-shot but they will use generative art. The popularity of Solo and Journalling games in the Lockdowns also indicates that there is probably a market for the first chatbot that can generate a meaningful game narrative on demand. I'm not sure anyone is going to get rich off this generation of the technology but someone is going to make money off it. There are also interesting implications for DIY creators where they can create far more complex material through AI assistance than they were able to before. This is exciting and legitimate concerns should blind people to the fact that some of this technology will be liberating for solo creators in the same way that the photocopier allowed bricolage as a creative form.

I don't believe that this generation of technology is going to put writers and artists out of work but it is going to bring the discussion about fair and sustainable compensation into sharper focus.

Robert Carnel

To quote Michael Shannon in the criminally overlooked Take Shelter (2011): “You think I'm crazy? Well, listen up, there's a storm coming like nothing you've ever seen, and not a one of you is prepared for it.”

Machine learning, big data, and venture capital came together in the last year or so to concoct a growing list of generative systems capable of producing custom images on demand. You’ve probably noticed a string of weird pseudo-art popping up on your social media feeds, with not-quite-right anatomy placed firmly in the uncanny valley. How does it work? From the end user’s perspective, it’s like magic: type in a phrase and get a series of images. The technical execution can be sloppy, but quality is improving in leaps and bounds. The ultra-psychedelic dreamscapes produced by the first systems already seem quaint and archaic.

But how does it really work? Imagine a giant sausage machine. Millions of original images are scraped from the internet without consent and tossed inside. The invisible hand presses a button marked 'grind' and all of these reference points are sliced and diced and shredded into their constituent elements, ready to be reassembled and grown into theoretically novel images upon demand. From the perspective of the tabletop RPG scene these systems bring opportunity, risk, moral hazard, creative toy, and concrete example of capitalism's deadening effect on art all at once. However, the perspective shifts slightly for each role within that industry - publishers, graphic designers, writers, merchants, and of course illustrators each have different views and interests. What does it all mean? The scene as a whole currently has no unified response. Some platforms have banned AI art, and are now faced with the increasingly difficult task of actually identifying the bad actors. Some publishers and self-published creators have embraced AI art, and found themselves hounded out of Twitter's more progressive bubbles.

In this environment each creator will be forced to declare their own approach. Long Tail Games, for instance, has publicly promised to never use these systems under their current structure (the source images are blatantly used without the creator's consent). But there is no dodging the issue. We are all faced by the question of AI art. Even doing nothing implies a kind of bet: that the market will be happy to pay a premium for 'handmade art' even as the cost of visually-similar AI art trends inexorably towards zero. I do not share this faith.

Long Tail Games, an experimental tabletop games publisher.

Collectives

In the last year or so, I think that we’ve seen a change in how indie TTRPGs are created and published. Contrary to the traditional ownership models of a company with employees and a boss, the rise of DTRPG and Itch.io made solo publication increasingly feasible, but now, creators are increasingly coming together to combine forces and skills to form cooperatives and other models of shared ownership. There are publication collectives, like Sandy Pug Games and the Far Horizons CoOp, distribution collectives like Peregrine Coast Press and The Chapbook Coop, and other organisations too like Knave of Cups.

I think there are many benefits to working together like this. Firstly, the risk and profit is more evenly shared between contributors: Creators put in their time and energy together, and reap the rewards collectively. Secondly, the members of these collectives have more creative control and ownership of the things they make, instead of risking management cutting out their contributions or changing them beyond recognition. Thirdly, working together to make something allows people to create better things that might never have seen the light of publication otherwise.

From my own experiences at the Far Horizons CoOp, it’s amazing to see weird little games get the same treatment as you’d expect from a triple-A publication, with high-quality editing, illustration, and layout design. New, innovative projects get made, allowing a greater diversity of voices to get wider access to the scene. This has direct benefits to the creator, but more widely makes the scene a more welcoming and inclusive space for marginalised creators, something which hasn’t always been the case. Long may it continue!

Marx Shepherd is a community manager for the Far Horizons CoOp, an international creator-owned collective of indie TTRPG creators, focused on providing better pay and conditions in the TTRPG space. A safe, supportive, and diverse place to make cool games and wage class war, the Far Horizons CoOp has been making incredible collections of games and supplements since 2019, including their flagship Short Games Digests, the highly regarded Guide to Heists, indie vampire-killing hit Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants, and the forthcoming devilish story game O Morningstar!

Game reviews and helping games reach new audiences

This year, Stout Stoat Press developed a Google Form and Sheet to build a reviewer list. It listed those in the media interested in reviewing, receiving, or promoting tabletop games. If this development has previous incarnations, I hadn’t found one in the years I’ve been a games journalists, but it’s come as a constant resource and help on both sides of the industry: as a freelance journalist, I’ve been given dozens of interesting offers and tips to cover games, while as a game designer, I have a better sense of the news landscape out there. It’s a grim landscape, that being said, with game criticism going underfunded and newspaper shuttering, but one where tabletop games can still shine through with luck, persistence, and creativity. The work of Sam and Sean on TikTok (as @goblinmixtape and @scene_four, respectively) is a great example of using shortform vertical vlogs to help games reach new audiences. With Twitter imploding, the TikTok indie tabletop community (often known as #beggartok) isn’t a 1:1 replacement, but a healthy new media stream I hope more designers consider investing in as it grows. You never know who in media is going to care about analog games until you ask. I was speaking to an advertising executive who told me about her 5e character’s complex corduroy business ventures, and I’ll never forget the Rolling Stone editor who said she’s in love with Dominion. My one-page TTRPG is getting coverage in Eater and Teen Vogue, publications that you might think of as covering analog games. Thanks to Stout Stoat Press, Plus One Exp, interested journalists, informed designers, and enthusiastic vloggers, I’m leaving 2022 proud of how media relations and coverage have grown.

Pearse Anderson, he/him, is a journalist, game designer, and freelance press consultant for indie projects.

Newsletters & blogs

More creators are setting up blogs, newsletters, tumblr, and other longform platforms. These platforms never went away, but it's refreshing to see the spotlight start to shift to these more longform formats.

As somebody who's written on a number of formats I feel like I get a more authentic voice when I read somebody's newsletter or blog, and love being able to back through their catalogue and get immersed in their thoughts.

Women

“Women. That’s the tweet.” That’s how it started for us back in April ‘22. Our founders saw the need to carve out a space for women and femme presenting people to find themselves represented and celebrated at roleplaying tables. We wanted a place where being a woman, being autistic, being Black, being from outside the US wasn’t the exception; that it wasn’t merely accommodated. We wanted a place built FOR us to thrive. The rich and nuanced stories are as innumerable as the stars in the night sky; and the worlds that are created are as textured, detailed, and tangible as the lives of the storytellers themselves. Our stories are shared from the multiple intersections of womanhood including BIPOC, Latine, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, chronically ill & disabled, creators outside the US, and all the ways that gender is defined and experienced. We greenlight shows based on simple premises “What stories need to be told? What stories won’t be given a voice elsewhere?”

From my position as one of the Founding Four, and now as CEO, I have lived the nourishing culture of an organization that encourages, uplifts, and backs up their priorities with action, support, and mentorship. In just 9 months we have 28 series under our belt, another 20 in pre-production, and a creator app full of amazing pitches to be told. We won the 2022 GameHERs TTRPG Campaign of the Year. We also launched a sister company to help women get into publishing. Girls Write These Worlds launches it’s first ‘Zine on January 19th, 2023, and includes 7 original additions to TTRPG canon. All of this is based in a powerful truth that women and femmes embody the best of TTRPGs.

So when asked what aspect of this hobby I’ve noticed in 2022? Women. That’s the answer.

Sarah Moore is the CEO and palm coloured founder of Girls Run These Worlds and Girls Write These Worlds. She is an autistic creator, mother, and champion of voices and stories that need hearing. She can be found @SMooreAD on most social media and at GirlsRunTheseWorlds.com.

Women of DnD was born of a want to see more women celebrated in an industry traditionally dominated by men. Women creators can often be overlooked and Women of DnD set out with a simple goal, to spotlight and uplift women creators. In a few short years, the founders of WoDnD have had the pleasure to connect with women creators from across the world. From dice designers and map makers, to writers and game masters, each of these amazing women have carved out a space for themselves and contributed to the community in their own unique way. We have been lucky to speak with these women and hear their stories. We share these stories to show this great work, to inspire others, and to build a network of women supporting women in an otherwise very male space. We hope to continue this work for years to come and to connect with thousands more women creators across the world. The goal of Women of DnD started out simple but this project has grown to become something very dear to the hearts of its founders. We have enjoyed every minute spent with these awesome women. We have been lucky enough to build something that people connect with and our team grew a little bigger in 2022. We believe this proves that there is a need for small communities like ours and we hope to keep growing year on year.

Through our work and that of so many amazing projects in the TTRPG space, we aim that one day, women will be treated with equal measure and importance in the gaming world.

Women of DnD

Trends in play

Shorter play sessions

One thing I've noticed in play culture this year that I expect will be happening more often this coming year is really short sessions. The most common length for this seems to be an hour, though ninety minutes is also pretty common. Pretty much the same sweet spot for a punch film or play.

What's been interesting with this trend is that games tend to burn brighter for that shorter time: everyone knows there's not a lot of slack so decisions get made more swiftly, or more strongly.

While there's no "one true way" to play this way, it does tend to favour less complex systems, and I'm really interesting to see if there are any shifts in the games or modules put out by gamesmasters, players, and designers who spend a lot of time playing this way.

Sean F. Smith (he, him) is a writer + editor, magician, plus games designer. He's on a QUARREL + FABLE kick this year.

Trends in design

Hyperfocused design

Games are becoming delightfully specific, aiming to capture a precise mood or life experience rather than a broad genre. While this has been bubbling up for a while, this year saw it really come into the spotlight, with loads of games focused on specific emotional and life experiences. This trend opens up many new avenues for game design that bring players into traditionally overlooked settings and moments.

Jon "Starshine" Greenall is an analog game designer and freelance writer who focuses on making unreservedly weird games.

I’m particularly excited with the trends of minimalism in current RPG design. I like the idea of exploring rules light systems and games, and coming up with innovative formats for them. I believe there are incredible people today working in this front with aweing concepts. I’m happy to somehow be involved in this trend.

I'm Thursday Garreau, a trans woman and game designer; my most recent work is the 199X Trilogy, a trio of interlinked retro-cyberpunk microgames.

Physical components

There’s been a growing trend in trying to create TTRPGs that use cards and other physical tchotchkes, and while some attempts feel gimmicky and marketing-minded, our entirely Zoom-based session showed us that Fight With Spirit’s meatspace manipulables meaningfully modify the gameplay experience. So yay for Gordon & Hendro’s upcoming game, and GO TEAM!

Sharang Biswas (He/Him)

https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/

System Reference Documents

One of the most exciting thing that has happened in the last year is how many indie designers have released system reference documents, or design toolkits for their systems and games. This has prompted the community to organize game jams, which we are to thank for many of the best indie TTRPGs that were released recently. Seeing the community work together as colleagues and collaborators, instead of competitors, has been a wonderful thing to behold.

From LUMEN (Spencer Campbell), Push (Cezar Capacle), the Bad Time SRD (Kyle Tam), or the Breathless SRD (by me, René-Pier Deshaies). People have designed more than 250 games just with those 4 SRDs alone, which is quite the feat.

The Eerie & Surreal

Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed many TTRPGs about the mundane twisted into the eerie and surreal. These games (often presented as horror) often involve travelling through a warped environment, like Locus, or exploring a building that defies explanation, like Green Dawn Mall. Similar inspirations are listed across these games: Annihilation, Control, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., House of Leaves, and The Backrooms, to name a few. They also appear to have a wide audience, as shown by the overwhelming success of The Zone’s recent Kickstarter.

Personally, I love this genre and I’m even working on a similar game myself. I’ve been curious, though, if the recent rise of this trend is in part a byproduct of the pandemic. These games are often about the indifference of our environment and how it exists and adapts without concern for human wellbeing – it survives just fine (if not better) without us. In these games, humans are the “other”, intruders in the space like parasites in the body. The environment is actively hostile to people, attempting to either purge or assimilate them. During the pandemic, the mundane suddenly turned dangerous. Places to go for comfort, such as favorite restaurants, became hazardous overnight. Even getting basic necessities from the grocery store meant putting yourself at risk. These TTRPGs about hostile spaces allow us to examine our feelings towards the pandemic through a fantastical world. The exploration of the extraordinary mundane may also appeal to those of us who’ve been stuck in our homes and immediate surroundings, as it brings excitement and adventure to an everyday setting.

Whatever the reason for the growth of this genre, I hope we continue seeing more of these games in the future. I don’t think I’ll ever grow tired of inventing and exploring these strange spaces.

TTRPG crowdfunding in 2022

While ttrpgs can be crowdfunded through various sites, Kickstarter remains the biggest as well as the only site from which I have data for the year. This data comes from Kicktraq via The RPG Pipeline, as per the methodology of that site, this only lists standalone TTRPGs and not settings, adventures or other TTRPG projects. Data is based on manual review of Kickstarter’s Tabletop Games category and is likely to be incomplete; currency conversion from USD was done close to the end of the year and will not reflect the USD rate at the time of funding.

TTRPGs by funding level (>$100k only)

Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game

Funded: $2,097,526 of $50,000

Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme

Funded: $1,933,426 of $200,000

BLADE RUNNER The Roleplaying Game

Funded: kr16,513,148 SEK of kr100,000 SEK

Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders + Cypher System RPG

Funded: $969,257 of $50,000

Drakar och Demoner / Dragonbane

Funded: kr7,819,654 SEK of kr100,000 SEK

DIE: The Roleplaying Game

Funded: £523,784 of £30,000

Cowboy Bebop - The Roleplaying Game

Funded: €481,674 of €20,000

Brindlewood Bay: Cozy Murder Mystery RPG

Funded: $477,518 of $10,000

Household

Funded: $458,492 of $20,000

Paranoia RPG - The Perfect Edition

Funded: £274,323 of £25,000

THE ZONE RPG

Funded: $317,335 of $10,000

Koriko: A Magical Year

Funded: £235,725 of £5,000

TOKYO : OTHERSCAPE - A Mythic Cyberpunk RPG

Funded: $274,801 of $35,000

OVERISLES

Funded: £183,621 of £13,500

Pericle: Gathering Darkness

Funded: $182,379 of $60,000

Kids on Bikes: Second Edition

Funded: $182,049 of $20,000

Fragged Empire 2nd Edition | ttRPG

Funded: $252,778 AUD of $60,000 AUD

Apocalypse Keys

Funded: $165,883 of $30,000

Astro Inferno

Funded: €153,302 of €9,999

One More Quest - a dexterity comedy RPG

Funded: €115,215 of €10,000

Absolute Power Superhero Role-Playing Game (2-Volume Set)

Funded: $119,095 of $20,000

Across a Thousand Dead Worlds

Funded: €106,101 of €20,000

TTRPGs released

This listing is taken from the What Did I Miss? series provided by The RPG Pipeline. It is based on keyword searches followed by human review and is not a complete listing of all ttrpgs released.