It’s become a tradition to look at which titles have done well on sites like DriveThruRPG. This year, nine products added to the DriveThruRPG catalogue in 2025 finished the year at either Mithral or Adamantine status.
Adamantine Best Sellers
(5,001 or more sales)
- Fabula Ultima Atlas: Natural Fantasy by Need Games.
- Daggerheart Corebook by Darrington Press.
It is telling that the two biggest hits are both departures from the standard dungeon crawler. Fabula Ultima Atlas captures the aesthetic of JRPGs, while Daggerheart brings the narrative-forward style of Critical Role to the table. That Darrington Press appears here is expected, and Fabula Ultima standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them proves that the market is hungry for non-Western fantasy tropes.
Need Games, which publishes Fabula Ultima, has done well in previous best-seller lists. It is tempting to view Darrington Press as the mainstream juggernaut and Need Games as the ‘in-the-know’ favourite.
Mithral Best Sellers
(2,501 or more sales)
- Grimwild: Cinematic Fantasy Roleplaying by Oddity Press.
- Daggerheart NEXUS Corebook by Darrington Press.
- West Marches Campaign Playstyle Guidebook by Karl Otto Kristoffersen.
- The No-Prep Gamemaster: Train Your Brain to Run Tabletop Roleplaying Games by dicegeeks.
- The Fat Dragon Guide To Printing FDM Miniatures by Fat Dragon Games.
- Interface RED Volume 4 by R. Talsorian Games Inc.
- Single Player Mode by R. Talsorian Games Inc.
While the Cyberpunk universe remains a powerhouse for R. Talsorian Games (especially with the solo-play trend represented by Single Player Mode), the real surprise is the dominance of utility books.
Gamers are buying books on how to play, not just what to play. The success of the West Marches Guidebook and The No-Prep Gamemaster suggests a community of GMs looking to reduce burnout and streamline their hobby. Furthermore, The Fat Dragon Guide hitting Mithral status highlights the intersection of 3D printing and TTRPGs, a physical crafting hobby supported by digital PDF sales.
As we saw with the official Fantasy Grounds data, pre-written adventures and scenarios have not made the list.
Why is this chart in a new format
Regular readers will have noticed this best-seller list is not in the usual style. Previously, we’ve been hugely helped by DriveThruRPG and the Roll20 team, who provided sanitised lists. With their help, we have analysed the data by genre and highlighted new publishers. This year, they withdrew their support, a decision we respect.
The metal best-seller badges are public, and we felt this chart was not just a Geek Native tradition but also a valuable commentary on the TTRPG scene, so we collected the data by hand.
No AI was used. Instead, yours truly opened up dozens of Chrome tabs at once, adding URLs of products published in 2025 (added to the catalogue in 2025) to bookmark folders. Chrome’s Bookmark Manager lets you copy and paste saved URLs as text strings directly into a spreadsheet. The disadvantage of this approach is not only that it takes a significant amount of time (I started in early December), but also that errors may creep in. I’ve checked twice and am confident, but I’m only human. However, I am confident in the integrity of the dataset I’ve built, which allows us to analyse these trends in greater depth despite the lack of official charts.
