10 TTRPGs I played in 2024

From Daggerheart to Pulp Arcana, this is my year in games

Fun fact about this photo: it’s from a selection I sent to the CBC to accompany a story I wrote for them in 2020 about playing TTRPGs online.

Welcome back to Sebastian Yūe’s Newsletter! For the past couple of years, I have endeavoured to play at least 10 new games a year, big or small. With a little help from the projects I’ve been working on, and the kind creators who ran their own games for me, I managed it. Check out what I played in 2024!

Anomaly (Sniperserpent)

I went to Indie RPG Night in Toronto at the end of August and had the chance to play Anomaly in person. It’s a multiplayer tarot-driven storytelling game where players take the roles of researchers investigating a supernatural anomaly. Creator Carter Richmond facilitated my group, and I’m always excited to play games with the people who designed them.

We told a fantastic story involving mind-controlling tentacles, portals, time travel, and more. The prompts were well crafted and made it easy to add details to a complex and evolving plot. I had a great group who got excited about each other’s ideas and created memorable characters: a German scientist-turned-novelist, a Jane Austen superfan, a reckless novice. I’m certain I’d get a story as fantastic as this one if I played Anomaly again.

Cosmere RPG (Brotherwise Games)

I’m an editor for the Cosmere RPG and have been working on it since February this year. While I can edit games I haven’t played, my work is much better when I understand how the system is supposed to feel, and what players can accomplish with it. The Kickstarter campaign launched with incredible digital support and a dedicated event over on StartPlaying.Games, so I took the opportunity to join a public playtest game.

I didn’t want to interfere with the table dynamic, so I didn’t tell the GM or the players that I was one of the Cosmere RPG team members. Even though I knew what would happen storywise, seeing it come alive at the table was inspiring.

My favourite mechanic is from the combat system, which gives players the choice between a “fast turn” or a “slow turn” at the start of each round. A fast turn allows you to act before opponents and grants you two actions, while a slow turn means you act after them, but you get three actions. This mechanic invites comparison with Shadow of the Demon Lord, which also has fast/slow turns, but the Cosmere RPG allows the characters to both move and act, even on a fast turn. I took fast turns when I could accomplish my goal in two actions or when I wanted to set something up for another player, and I chose slow turns when I needed a little more time to decide what to do or when I just wanted to make a bunch of attacks.

Daggerheart (Darrington Press)

I’m also an editor for Critical Role’s Daggerheart and I participated in a playtest. I was fortunate to have the incredible Cai K as my GM, and Daggerheart writers and consultants as fellow players. I chose a pregenerated character, a ribbet (an anthro-frog ancestry) rogue called Barnacle, and had a lot of fun with his Shadow Stepper ability, which let me move from shadow to shadow.

We used the playtest adventure “The Marauders of Windfall,” in which our characters were travellers on the fastest airship in the sky. We got attacked by pirates, who brought an excellent plot twist with them. My character class abilities were easy to pick up and I found plenty of opportunities to use them. The game lives up to its promise of heroic fantasy and I’m excited for the full release next year.

Dragon Slayers (Gila RPGs)

I played a oneshot of Dragon Slayers (currently in its public playtesting phase) and my group had such a blast with the high-fantasy quest vibe that we started a mini campaign. This is another instance where I’m spoiled by having the creator run the game for me. Along with Spencer Campbell, I’m playing with three other game designers—it’s a riot, as you can imagine. We thought it would be funny to play as a stereotypical adventuring party, so we are a human fighter, a halfling rogue, a dwarf cleric, and an elf wizard (no prizes for guessing which one I am).

We embarked on a journey to retrieve a mysterious egg from the tower of a local warlock. My favourite mechanic comes from the background options at character creation: “One of your senses (choose one) is especially heightened.” Ever the freak who wants to lick everything, I chose taste.

The combat is punchy and enemies fresh; we’ve fought dragon-human amalgamations with the power to create black holes and steal memories, hydras, and human spellcasters. I’m also enjoying the asymmetrical class design (an iconic feature of this game and its parent game Slayers). I previously played a bard and I like how different the classes feel while maintaining a low level of crunch.

The Final Girl (Gas Mask Games)

I played The Final Girl as part of a charity stream series run by Diversity Saves. I don’t stream much anymore and I miss it—not because I fancy myself an actual play performer—but because of the opportunity to meet new people and play new games. The GM for this was Urvy, with whom I’ve crossed paths before on a different charity stream a few years ago.

The Final Girl is a horror movie RPG where each character gets picked off one by one. It uses the skeleton of the 52-card deck game war as its engine, adding a mechanic whereby suits matter and you can substitute cards played by others, potentially changing the narrative. We set our story at a holiday office party invaded by zombies, and I had a lot of fun embodying the workplace politics from my days working in a corporate office. You can watch the game on the Diversity Saves Twitch channel.

Gothic Society (Martian Machinery)

I played a mini campaign of Gothic Society, which is a Penned to Good Society game with a Gothic horror twist. If I haven’t already mentioned, I love Gothic literature; my favourite novel is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and my undergraduate degree is in English literature with a concentration on the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, so this game was exactly my thing.

My friend and colleague Agatha Cheng facilitated the game and I made a hedonist called Aloysius Valentine, known as “Delicious Aloysius.” I most enjoyed the epistolary phase of the game, where I described in great detail the harsh strokes of the pen, the passive-aggressive em dashes, and the cold semicolons Aloysius used to make her true feelings known. She was a lot of fun and I’ll find a way to play her again, in one form or another.

Oh Captain, My Captain (Simon & Schuster)

I got to play Oh Captain, My Captain at Big Bad Con, once again with its creator James D’Amato. Though I own For the Queen, I haven’t actually had the chance to play it, so this was my first experience with the iconic card-based prompt game.

I never got around to naming my character because I was so engrossed in the story we were telling: we were graduates at a deathmatch academy where we had to fight teams from other academies in televised matches. I played a sinister entity who afflicted our captain with a degenerative disease, which satisfied my constant desire to play evil. Our conversations were lively and I love how we built on each other’s prompts and answers. Also, the art for the captain cards is gorgeous.

Pasión de las Pasiones (Magpie Games)

I mentioned offhand to my friend Thomas (of the Indie RPG Newsletter) that I wanted to play Brandon Leon-Gambetta’s telenovela game Pasión de las Pasiones, and he kindly offered to run it. This is my new favourite PbtA game ever. I had so much fun with it and I’d play it again in a heartbeat. Our group played the given playset “El Sabor del Amor.” I picked La Doña as my playbook because I wanted to be a toxic abuela with many schemes.

The villain of our show was Nacio Ibarra, a wealthy restauranteur looking to buy the restaurant I owned. Ibarra was later revealed to be my ex-husband Alejandro Ibarra, except that I knew all along he was my ex-husband and he thought he was playing me for a fool. I manipulated him into revealing that he wormed his way out of our divorce and that technically, we were still married. Also, I gave my granddaughter a gun and suggested she shoot her fiancé, whom she’d caught in an intimate moment with her cousin.

Mechanically, the moves came naturally and fit seamlessly with my character’s objectives. Narratively, I love how the game encourages you to lean into archetypes for a fast-paced, plot-heavy story. It’s all drama all the time—exactly how I like it.

Plant Girl Game (Sly Robot Games)

I’m designing a new playbook for Plant Girl Game, a game where players are plant children trying to prevent an ecological disaster in their community. Creator Dominique Dickey ran a game for some of the contributors as part of the onboarding process. I played the Echeveria playbook because I was drawn to the central conflict of developing confidence as your body and mind continue to change.

We chose a volcano for our ecological disaster, and we made things spicy by deciding that our mother works at a power plant that is hastening the ecological disaster. I love how the worldbuilding is included as its own phase of play; this stage got me really excited for our story. In the short time we had, I was able to take my character on an emotionally satisfying journey of self-acceptance.

Pulp Arcana (Scott Gilman)

I met Scott Gilman in person at Big Bad Con when I ran a game of Humblewood: Shock in Stormcrag for him and two other players, then he invited me to try out Pulp Arcana, a 5e-compatible comic book action-fantasy game he’s developing. I chose a pregenerated character, a fire sorcerer. I had a lot of fun with how powerful the characters were (I dealt 4d12 damage with a 4th-level spell) and how well the class features synergised.

I was impressed by how smoothly the combat flowed, and how I was able to take advantage of the physical space; I repelled an enemy such that they fell off a pillar and took a load of fall damage. I don’t play with terrain and levels as often as I could, and this game reminded me why I should.

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I’m glad I got to play so many different RPGs this year, and I’m excited to play even more in 2025.

What new games did you play in 2024? Tell me about them in the comments!