Monday Musings #153 🤬

The games that rewired me

Good Monday, Gamer!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

I drafted this post with the word impact in the title, and it kept sounding wrong. Impact is what a car does to a wall. These games didn’t hit me — they got inside and moved the furniture around. So: rewired. The games that rewired me. The ones I can point at and say I was one kind of GM/Player before this, and a different one after.

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Burning Wheel 1e → Gold. This game broke up my D&D group. I live in the same town as these dudes, I see them in our FLGS, and we don’t interact. BW showed me what TTRPGs could actually be about — Beliefs, Instincts, Traits, the whole machinery of a character who wants something and the mechanics to go get it. It also opened the door to the entire indie TTRPG space for me.

Apocalypse World. If Burning Wheel made the session about a player’s goals through mechanics, Apocalypse World articulated the part that we never say out loud: these sessions are conversations. Moves, principles, MC agendas — Vincent and Meguey Baker wrote down the things good GMs were already doing intuitively, and once you’ve seen it written down, you can’t unsee it.

Twilight: 2000 — the Survival Sandbox. I’m putting these together. Both from Free League, which says something, and I ran them both sandbox style. IMHO, the encounter mechanics and the encounter deck are the heart of this sandbox game.

• Twilight: 2000 (Free League). 50+ sessions of long-running play with the Kalisz crew, plus open-table con sessions. I went deep on this one. The grimdark Polish countryside is the obvious read, but the actual lesson was about scarcity as a campaign engine — when fuel matters and ammo matters and people matter, the sandbox runs itself.

• The One Ring 2E / Moria. Moria, the OG mega-dungeon. Open table, sandbox during Balin’s run to take back the Halls. The sandbox game IS the campaign. The many, many players are little anthologies with a themed through-line.

Running both taught me that “the TTRPG sandbox” needs to be normalized!

Ars Magica / Nobilis. It’s good to have big goals, big dreams. Covenants that span generations, Powers that command concepts. These are my twin whale games — one day I’ll get a proper table and campaign going.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. Big-ass generational game. It doesn’t matter if you run it with ALL the expanded playbooks available or just two — I know. This game remains BIG in play. Walk away from anyone peddling a one-shot. 4–6 sessions minimum. 8–12 if you really wanna see something.

In a Wicked Age made me a believer. A djinn, a thief, and a talking pig go on an adventure...and I ain’t never been the same. Oracle-driven play, characters built from situational fragments, sessions that resolve into something you couldn’t have planned and wouldn’t have wanted to. And the ‘Owe List‘. IYKYK. Find this game, play it. Thank the Bakers. You’re welcome.

Under Hollow Hills. Love this game so much. It surprised me. I came in thinking “faerie circus PBTA, sure, fine, cozy blah blah” and left thinking about troupe play and circus-as-found-family and the whole design for weeks afterward. And it isn’t cozy...

The Velvet Glove. Gang girls knife-fighting in bathrooms since 1970. Few games are this confident about exactly what they are. The Velvet Glove has a tight premise — that history-through-game-lore that I love — and it’s a feature, not a constraint. Nahual, Saga of the Icelanders, and Cartel all fit in this space for me. It makes me think deeply about Black American culture: what does that TTRPG look like? I think I have a response.

Champions Now. The Jolt campaign is where I figured out I had opinions about supers TTRPGs at all. Champions Now folds a 40-year-old superheroes engine into something that feels like a modern indie game without losing what made the original work. It’s still the reigning champion of supers games for me, especially since Champions Now puts the soap opera of comics upfront and mechanized. The fight mechanics are gamey. Smallville and Marvel Heroic RPG are strong challengers...if Cam could mash those two together ❤️

The Black Sword Hack. Two concurrent campaigns in early 2025 and nine posts in two months. BSH proved to me that player buy-in at session zero isn’t a vibe — it’s a winning procedure. When players design the state of the world from the start, they show up to PLAY. Every session zero I’ve run since has more BSH in it than it does any other game. Remember it’s a conversation — even if the game doesn’t have a session zero procedure, we can talk through that.

Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. Weaves its culture into its lore, mechanics, and play... (yep, another one!) I’m always here for games that do that — where the setting and the system are saying the same thing, where you can’t pull them apart without breaking both. Musing on Birthdays and Jiangshi has more.

Coriolis, 1E Because space doesn’t have to be Federation White. Third Horizon’s whole texture — the syncretism, the Icons, the Arabian/Persian/North African influences carried through as setting bones rather than dressing. You can build a science fiction game out of cultures the genre has spent years ignoring, and the result isn’t novelty.

These are the ones that did the rewiring. The newsletter you’re reading is what came out the other side. You’ll notice some commonality in my picks. I should say I’m not on commission, kickbacks, or affiliation programs. Free League, the Bakers (and some PBTA games) are first class at what they do, IMEO. Games with tight premises and something to say are 🔥 These are all in my head as I consider: in the TTRPG space, what do I have to say?

What about you? What’s the game that broke your group up in the best possible way, or the one that surprised you, or the one you ran two campaigns of back-to-back because you couldn’t stop thinking about it? Drop it in the comments.

3 Mondays Left.

Catch ya next week!