This is a review of the Player’s Handbook for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s taken me a while get my sweaty fingers on the book… a long while. In the meantime there have been plenty of reviews and the great majority are overwhelmingly positive. But what does this mean? I’m a roleplayer […]
TTRPG news, reviews and interviews
Welcome to the heart of Geek Native: the Tabletop & RPGs category. This is your primary source for the latest RPG news and essential TTRPG news, from blockbuster releases to indie Kickstarter discoveries. We provide in-depth reviews of roleplaying games, board games, and card games, helping you decide what's worth your time and your shelf space. Whether you roll dice, shuffle cards, or push miniatures, you'll find your community and your next obsession right here.
Stay ahead of the curve with our popular Routinely Itemised summary. This regular feature is your essential digest of the TTRPG industry, curating the biggest news, trends, and hidden gems into one unmissable roundup. It's the best way to stay informed on the business of tabletop gaming.
Magic: The Gathering unboxing flips out as $25,000 card turns up
I think you’d have to be a hardcore Magic: The Gathering fan to watch an unboxing. Yup; even if it’s a competition to win a card and even they’re opening an alpha starter pack. So how come we’re approaching 1.5m people watching this video? Not a single ad on it either. Right at the end […]
Mapping Minas Tirith
Have you ever been a mapper in an old style dungeon crawl? It’s not easy. If you have then you’ll have an additional level of respect for this very detailed map of Middle Earth’s Minas Tirith. It’s fair to call out old RPGs for this map as it was surfaced over at Reddit as an […]
Fantasy Ground puts Pathfinder top, eclipsed only by the D&D collective
At the start of the month Geek Native shared some stats from the virtual tabletop software Roll20. It showed that Dungeons & Dragons dominated the list of RPGs gamers wanted to play. The catch? To give D&D the lead you had to add up the share of all the slices of D&D. You had to […]
Cosmic pizza battles: Solar Slice
This is a board game in which the controllers of Earth – pizza delivery companies – discover alien life and battle to control the franchise rights. [Back this Campaign] Pledges for Solar Slice go $1, $2 and then $45. The jump goes from expressing an interest, getting digital assets to re-create your own version of […]
War of the Worlds meets Achtung Cthulhu in this great video
This is a must see video. It’s called the “Great Martian War” but this gamer took one look and immediately saw War of Worlds meets Achtung Cthulhu. The footage here comes from World War 1 footage… with, yeah, aliens added. It gets better. If you pop over to History.co.uk you’ll find more of the same. […]
Elementary: a Review of Darkly Through the Labyrinth
Despite its immense popularity in other entertainment mediums, police procedurals are a relatively-untapped genre in role-playing games. Sure, there’s the old stalwart Call of Cthulhu, but hacking that horror RPG into a game that can emulate a TV show like True Detective, or a movie like Silence of the Lambs can feel a bit awkward. Enter […]
Free until the end of January: The Great Game
While in playtest The Great Game from Aetheric Dreams is free to download. ENnie and Origins nominated for Nights of the Crusades, Aetheric Dreams is an indie RPG publisher to watch. The Great Game takes a Lovecraftian steampunk spin to the historical Great Game. This was a time when the Russian and British empires fought […]
10 ways to keep your Commoner or low powered character alive in Pathfinder
by J.M. Perkins – author of The Ultimate Adequate Commoner – the everyman’s guide to surviving and thriving. 1. When in Doubt: Run Away! Normal adventurers don’t retreat often, assuming (usually) that any challenge they are likely to face is ‘balanced’ to their level. Commoners never have this luxury, and so you should run away […]
Roll20’s survey shows Dungeons & Dragons still dominates the RPG hobby
D&D or Pathfinder? That’s a question which has done the rounds. The market stats from ICv2 seem to have been telling a consistent story over recent years; Pathfinder rises and Dungeons & Dragons drops. The latest survey suggested D&D was in 4th place. There’s a catch though. It’s not just that few groups were buying […]
