Welcome home.
It’s December 27th, and the episode title is “The VTT ecosystem”
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #314]
[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Gear Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight. We won’t get the interview back from them in time, but we’ll publish it in January.
I can tell you about their flagship game, the high-fantasy Vulcania, as I reviewed it in 2021 and found a lot to like.
I especially liked how Gear Games made the setting feel like an anime. The art helped, of course, but the setting also felt like it could belong to a Crunchyroll show.
This year, Gear Games published High School Cthulhu, which, in one sense, is very different from Vulcania, but also an interesting mashup. In this game, you’re a student in Innsmouth.
I’m going to come back to anime vibe games in just a second. First, though, I want to remind patrons – those awesome people – who they can vote for in the January RPG Publisher Spotlight.
Your options are:
Now, I mentioned anime RPGs, and this week I took a look at Mana Project Studio’s quickstart for Runeway and was impressed.
Mana Project is known for their Cowboy Bebop RPG and their forthcoming Ghost in the Shell RPG, and I got proper Ghibli vibes from Runeway. Well. Ghibli mixed with Adventure Time. If you don’t think that’s possible, good news: Runeway’s quickstart is free to download, so you can check it out yourself.
Runeway is set in the World of Weyrd, and did you know that Geek Native’s old name was GameWyrd? GameWyrd was a sandbox in which I discovered I’m not smart enough to be a web developer but it was an educational experience.
I recommend Runeway based on its strong quickstart. However, this festive season, if you’re home alone, then you might be more interested in Snail Mail, which you can play alone. Or, if you want, you can play with friends.
I’m not as impressed with Snail Mail as I am with Runeway, but Slug People Games is a small indie band, and this RPG is a solid success. It’s all about the micro, and while I’d call it wholesome, I won’t say it’s without danger. It’s not easy being a snail and delivering the mail.
This week’s big story on the blog is a two-parter. Firstly, we posted the top ten selling titles on Fantasy Grounds.
Fantasy Grounds is the only retailer that helped out this year and so deserves special thanks.
The top three books are the D&D core books, and the Monster Manual takes the top spot. I think that makes sense because you need the module to make use of the VTT’s powerful automation.
Outside official D&D products, there’s Fantasy Ground infrastructure, such as dice packs. That’s the whole top ten. It is interesting because it helps clarify TTRPGs as operating systems. You need the mechanics and then you can take it from there.
In fact, no adventure makes the top ten. D&D Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything does but that’s a module that gives PCs choices. That’s a double-edged sword of knowledge, though, because ‘big gun’ syndrome, when each splatbook has to be sexier than the next is a slow way to kill a good TTRPG.
As Fantasy Grounds are good egg, they also gave me a list with D&D and ecosystem products stripped out.
That top ten is very interesting as is dominated by Pathfinder and Starfinder, which take up 70% of the chart but not the top two spots. In number one is a TTRPG that I did not think needed a VTT. That TTRPG is Shadowdark.
In contrast, in number two, there’s the Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion. Just to make things even more interesting, Call of Cthulhu 7E ranks in number 10.
I think what this says is that you don’t just use VTTs for crunchy games. You can use them to coordinate any sort of tabletop RPG.
In other TTRPG news and what might be making future best-selling lists, comes news of a new playtest from Posthuman Studios. We know Posthuman best for the transhuman Eclipse Phase.
Posthuman’s new game is called The Snarl, and it’s a weird fantasy RPG. The setting here, which is all the playtest gives us, is called the Weald. Eclipse Phase was about existential risk and real danger. The Snarl is also dangerous, but with a stronger focus on the hostile environment.
I wrote up the Kickstarter for Puzzlemaster’s Mind Bending Metal Puzzles and in doing so, found out about the Canadian site Puzzlemaster. Gang, this year, I got a puzzle out of a Christmas cracker. I had no idea that people played several hundred dollars for celebrity-designed challenges. I was this many years old when I found out that professional and recreational puzzling was a thing.
For our outro, we have two bundle offers and a competition.
The bundles are for Rowan. Rook and Decard’s DIE RPG. It’s a game in which heroes are people from one life sucked into another world. The other is Kobold Press’ Black Flag and OGL drama born Tales of the Valiant. If you’ve been holding off, then now is the time to jump in cost-effectively.
The competition is for a Tarot deck and guidebook. It’s for the official Dune Bene Gesserit Tarot deck, which, I think, is a great mashup of ideas.
As usual, you have a pretty good mathematical chance of winning if you can enter, because you have to be in the UK to enter. Given how many new RPGs use cards, even tarot cards, as a replacement to dice, I found myself buying a deck this year. Win this one, and you can shortcut that step.
On that note, take care and see you in 2026.
