Wild and Plucky Indie TTRPGs You Could Be Playing Instead of D&D

An Unranked, Curated TTRPG Recco Series With Editor, Reviewer and Player Walton Wood

Meeting Walt of Līber Lūdōrum and The Bogfolk Collective gave Breakup Gaming Society a more passionate and discerning window into the vibrant, freewheeling world of indie TTRPGS. Following are Walt’s criteria for featured games — and capsules of our ongoing series of interviews about them.

Walt’s Criteria, in His Words:

1) It has to be an RPG

Calling something an RPG has become a marketing gimmick, and that often goes hand in hand with a neglect (sometimes even a self-righteous refusal) to critically examine what actually distinguishes an RPG from other types of formalized games (and also from abstract play and other media that mimic them). For my purposes here, an RPG has to be played through a conversation that is supplemented with some formal rules rather than being played exclusively through the formal rules themselves (as board and card games are).

Needless to say, it also needs to be playable—otherwise, it’s experimental literature using the game-manual genre and form. It also has to give you an actual role to play, distinguishing it from language games like the elegant corpse game. Ideally, the formal mechanics will support and reward roleplaying, though this often isn’t the case—but we can dream.

2) It has to be indie

Defining what makes a game “indie” is a lot murkier than establishing a basic working definition of RPGs. The true, hardcore indie games are made by a few scrappy nonprofessionals laboring nights and weekends, embracing the DIY ethos inspired by music subcultures in the days before the internet, but it also includes organizations like small co-ops and publishing houses. For the sake of breadth, I’m going to at least consider anything that isn’t churned out by a major publisher (the Wizards of the Coasts, Paizos, Chaosiums, etc. of the world) to be indie even though it may not fit neatly into the traditional image of indie creation.

3) It probably has a “gimmick”

By gimmick, I mean a unique aspect or approach that provides a hook and makes the game stand out from the vast, vast sea of noise that is indie RPG publishing. It could be a novel mechanical approach, a meaningful gamification of real-world issues, a clever implementation of a high concept, or anything else that sets it apart from the herd of heartbreakers.

4) It has to be something I haven’t discussed extensively before

I know a lot of words, and I’ve used most of them to analyze and comment on games over on my own blog, Liber Ludorum, and the companion podcast, Loqui Ludos. I’ve already given plenty of gems their due attention, so I’m going to avoid double dipping. If you like what I have to say on the show, though, please do click your way over to LL and check out any articles that strike your fancy.

5) It has to be something I wasn’t involved in producing

I work full time in game publishing, and my CV is now well over 10 pages long. In most cases, I work on commission and make no residual income based on sales, so there’s usually not many conflicts of interest.* But I am inherently biased toward projects that I’ve contributed to, so I want to keep my rose-colored glasses stowed when talking about games here.

*Breakup Gaming Society overrode this rule on a couple occasions because Walt creates and edits interesting games we wanted to hear about. - Ed.

6) It can’t be the work of a douchebag

There are some really amazing, wonderful people in the RPG scene, and I’m fortunate enough to work with many of them. I’ve also worked with a few really horrible motherfuckers, and I know the dirt on even more of them, some of whom I’ve had the misfortune of casually interacting with. Long and short, if the creator is a verifiable walking, talking piece of human shit, I’m not going to promote their game, no matter how well crafted and compelling it may be.

Carolina Death Crawl
Bully Pulpit Games

A Southern Gothic card-driven and GM-less roleplaying game set during the American Civil War. Only one of you is going to live. Discussed in Episode 96: Carolina Death Crawl RPG (Lemonade Beer Punch Sold Separately)

Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel
SandroAD

The future is here, the bills are due, and we can’t pay ‘em. Time to harvest organs. All kinds of organs in Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel, discussed in Episode 100: Pyrotechnics Review, Playing With Dystopia, Surrendering Secret Wars

Lichoma
Bogfolk, Strega Wolf van den Berg

Learn what to expect from life in The Wen — a collapsing city where meat is the last remaining unit of economic value. Lichoma is beautifully conceived and fearsome to consider. Discussed in Episode 104: Lichoma TTRPG Deep-Dive Interview + SETI Preview

---

Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Hear my work with the Dwelling solo journaling RPG.

Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel TTRPGs: Walt Shows Us Two Challenging Itch.io Refugees

In the wake of the stir created by Itch.io’s mass purging of darkly themed TTRPGs in the face of pressure from payment processors and others, we talk with Walt (Līber Lūdōrum, Bogfolk) about two wild creations in that exodus: Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel by Sandro AD.

As related to me, Alessandro AD pulled these games from Itch.io at first news of the culling; they survive for now on a Google Drive, where they are free to download and play.

What are we in for here? Walt outlines these bleak near-future systems where economic exploitation manifests in debt, desperation, sex and violence. [FAIR WARNING: Heavy themes all around. In addition, The F slur appears in this audio as part of a quote from Digital Angel’s description copy.]