Summary
Tabletop role-playing gamesare a perfect medium for experimentation. Sitting with friends around the table and telling stories is a magical experience, but after exhausting the worlds ofDungeons & DragonsandCall of Cthulhu,players might be ready to branch out and try less conventional systems.
These systems try to ramp up the tension or to create lovable, human(like) characters. Although some of them use dice, these strange systems also feature towers, fire, and mobile phones in ways that will make the table light up and can create exhilarating one-shot sessions or fantastic campaigns.
Updated on June 21, 2025, by Connor Hogg:The landscape of tabletop role-playing games is constantly expanding, with more and more games with different styles falling in and out of fashion. With games of all kinds being published everywhere, more strange one-off games are being given a chance. Whether single-player writing games, rules-light games designed for silly one-shot sessions, or games that have players doing collective world-building to exercise the imagination, countless games are out there for any kind of player to get their teeth stuck into. The new entries are just a sample of the massive genre.
11Call Of Cat-thulhu
Simple System With Sinister Setting
Using a pair of six-sided dice for each character,Catthulhuis cutesy and straightforward. Rolling a 1 or a 2 is bad, anything else is good. Different checks have different difficulties, but the core rules never change. Players take control of a personalized cat, with nine lives, treats that let them re-roll dice, and a specialization (‘the right cat for the job’).
The party of cats will team up to overcome their laziness and rally againstLovecraftian horrorsand threats to the kittens' human owners. The simple rules make getting this game to the table easy and light, and defeating cosmic horrors has never been so easy—a purr-fect introduction to the world of RPGs.
10The Quiet Year
A Post-Apocalyptic Map Game Using Just A Deck Of Cards
A community, struggling in a hostile world, experiences a single year of peace during which they have a chance to build up their civilization. Players will take turns drawing cards from a normal deck, check them on the reference tables in the rules, and then discover something about their town. As a table plays together, they will rely on their joint imagination and storytelling to dictate the struggles that affect the people in their little village and how they combat them. Regularly, players will be asked to draw something on the map, a single sheet of paper, whether that be resources, enemies, or strange locations of interest.
A Quiet Yearis a short and sweet game, withheaps of potential for world-buildingand a wholly unique approach to RPGs.
9Thousand Year Old Vampire
A Solo, Journalling RPG
A strange oddity in TTRPGs,Thousand Year Old Vampireis a solo game. Setting it far apart from the other games that are all about cooperative storytelling, this game is more thoughtful, melancholic, and plodding. Players take on the role of the titular vampire, starting from when they first wake in their newfound immortality and deciding what aspects of their life are important.
The vampires will record important events, people, and things in their journals, and the bulk of the game involves writing through their lives. As they age, though, vampires will lose some of what was once important to them. They forget things and must erase parts of the journal. Things that were once crucial to their story become lost names that cannot be matched to faces.Thousand Year Old Vampireis a deeply moving game for one, that is as much a creative writing exercise as it is an RPG.
8Spire: The City Must Fall
Rolling With Resistance
The setting ofSpire, like many of these games,is gripping and exotic. An impossibly large tower built atop a hole in reality where dark elves fight the ruling class for their rights. Player characters take on a part of the rebellion with powerful and destructive abilities. The system, however, pushes characters to their limits and can quickly be lethal.
Players roll six-sided dice against their resistances, getting extra dice to roll if they are particularly skilled. This means that rolls of any kind will result in losses of health, sanity, reputation, or wealth, and lead to players losing characters as they are outed as rebel sympathizers, killed, or driven mad by the magic and mayhem in the Spire.
7Kids On Bikes
Stranger Things Meets The Goonies
Kids on Bikesisvery different from most TTRPGs because of its scale. While the right GM could weave a world-ending threat into this system, the game mainly focuses on the struggles of children fighting eldritch horrors or evil scientists. It constantly draws comparisons toStranger Things, all the way down to the core of its rules; using every die in the dice bag, each skill in the game is assigned either a d6, a d8, a d10, a d12, or a d20.
Not only does this provide an excuse for many players to show off extensive dice collections, but it also makes for veryhumancharacters. They may be exceptionally charming, with a d20 in that stat, but terribly slow or weak. Every character will have a chance to shine, and the exploding dice mechanic means that even the weakest kids will have a chance to defy expectations and face their fears.
6Dread
Tower Of Terror
A beautifully unique RPG system, that must be tried to be believed,Dreadis both simple and scary in its premise. The GM will craft a horror story for the players that will more than likely end with most of the characters dead. The game mechanics all hinge on aJenga-like tower that stands in the middle of the play space ominously. When a player tries to perform any difficult action, they must take blocks from the tower.
More difficult checks will mean more pieces need to be taken. If the tower falls, for any reason, the player who topples it will lose their character. If there is no feasible way for the character to die there and then, they will be made into pawns for the GM, who can kill them as they please for a particularly dramatic moment. The system is as tense as it is simplistic, making for the perfect set of rules for aslasher one-shot session or a horror-themed campaign.
5Ten Candles
Holding Out Against The Dark
Ten Candlesis one of themost atmospheric tabletop role-playing games currently available. Players gather in a circle around a table and light ten candles. As the game progresses, they will burn their character’s traits one by one and the candles will slowly be extinguished until the room is dark, all characters have been defeated, and the story is complete.
Despite the game’s warnings about its hopeless nature, characters are given plenty of opportunity to shine, with players taking ‘narrative control’ and describing their successful actions, the world around them, and their own good fortune. The bleak setting is made lighter with the character’s ‘hope’ tags being used to allow for brief moments of respite. Add in the chanting of “we are alive” that concludes abruptly when the game ends, and here is a system that is both heartfelt and eerie.
4Bluebeard’s Bride
Different Aspects Of One Character
InBluebeard’s Bride,players take control of the different aspects of the titular bride.These aspects define different parts of the bride; how she looks, who she trusts, and how she curries favor with her cruel husband’s servants. This system, with different players all vying for control of one character, makes for a chaotic view of different voices in the bride’s head.
The narrative involves exploring Bluebeard’s house and discovering more and more about the tyrant. The group will slowly receive tokens that decide whether they are faithful or unfaithful, which will culminate in a conclusion where the bride is judged. Players can be damaged by receiving trauma to their part of the unnamed bride’s psyche, and the creepy and curious setting allows for experimentation with the system that allows GMs to create unique adventures through the house for every session.
3Alice Is Missing
A Social Media-Infused Tragedy
Despitemobile phones posing a possible threatto the communal nature of TTRPGs,Alice is Missingbegins with each player sending a voice message to the missing girl. From there, players will work on a timer and text each other. They will reveal secrets, argue, and form a team as they try to find Alice. A timer, set at the start of the game, will determine how long the game runs for, as well as cue any clues to come into play that will direct the group’s focus on where Alice is as part of a mutual story-telling experience.
The game allows players to embody their characters and form emotional connections with each other’s creations and Alice herself - her absence is felt the whole way through the tale they tell. The system is very different in that it does not require a GM, instead asking players to contribute to the narrative themselves and keep things exciting and uncertain.
2Paranoia
Clones and Chaos
Paranoiais a role-playing game, first released in 1984, that never takes itself too seriously. It is set in a dystopian world where players take control of ‘Trouble Shooters,’ a role that requires mindless followers of an all-powerful AI to find trouble and shoot it. A recent re-release through Kickstarter solidified it as a lighthearted look at a grim future.
Mutants pose a threat to the AI’s control, and so players are tasked with shooting any mutants on sight. Simultaneously, all player-charactersaremutants, who must keep their powers or quirks hidden to prolong their lives. The game encourages competitive play instead of the standard cooperative TTRPG. It stands as a parody of established genre tropes while keeping things fun and fast, with players having a backlog of clones that can replace their characters with identical replicas (with random mutations every time). Death is meaningless inParanoia, and the game still holds a beloved place in the hearts of many who are jaded by the more traditional TTRPGs.
