I wrote a post a couple of years back called Eponymous Dungeons and Dragons which asked, essentially, whether D&D had so thoroughly colonised the cultural idea of a tabletop roleplaying game that all other games had become, in the public imagination, just variants of D&D with different decorations on top. Horror D&D. Space D&D. Mystery D&D. I was being provocative and the answer, obviously, is no — but the question was worth asking because the gravity of that brand is real and it warps the conversation.

What I did not get around to in that post, and what I want to address properly now, is just how many alternatives exist, how good they are, and why the hobbyist in 2026 who has only ever played D&D 5e is, with genuine respect and affection, missing most of what this hobby has to offer.

The irony is that Wizards of the Coast helped cause this. The Open Gaming Licence debacle of early 2023, when WotC floated proposed changes to the OGL that would have significantly restricted the ecosystem of third-party creators who had built entire businesses on D&D compatibility, triggered what I can only describe as a moment of mass re-evaluation. Players who had never considered anything other than D&D suddenly had cause to look sideways. Publishers who had been nudging players toward alternatives for years suddenly had an audience willing to listen. The OGL crisis was ugly and WotC handled it badly. But the hobby emerged from it with a renewed appetite for alternatives that is still very much active.

So. Let us go through some of them.

Shadowrun and the Cyberpunk Lineage

I have mentioned Shadowrun multiple times in various posts here, most recently in the Digital RPG Books post when talking about Catalyst Game Labs appearing in Humble Bundle offerings. My affection for it is real and so are my frustrations with it, and both are worth acknowledging.

Shadowrun, now in its sixth edition and published by Catalyst Game Labs, is a game that asks what happens when you take the Tolkien fantasy races — elves, dwarves, orks, trolls — and drop them into a late-21st-century cyberpunk dystopia where megacorporations have replaced nation states as the dominant power and magic came back in an event called the Awakening. You are a shadowrunner. You take jobs from a fixer, run them against megacorp targets, get paid in nuyen and keep a low profile. The premise is genuinely brilliant and the game’s aesthetic — neon-lit streets, chrome augmentations, shamanic magic flickering in corporate boardrooms — remains one of the most distinctive in the hobby. It has been going since 1989 and has earned its place in the canon.

The system, to be honest with you, is a mess. It has always been a mess. The Sixth World edition tried to streamline things and generated sufficient controversy in the Shadowrun community to warm any edition-war veteran’s heart. The dice pool system — rolling fistfuls of d6s and counting hits — is satisfying when it works and punishing when it does not, and character creation can feel like filing your taxes in a language you are still learning. I say this as someone who loves the game. If you can find a copy of the Fourth Edition — widely regarded as the best-balanced edition — it is worth the effort of tracking one down.

For the cyberpunk aesthetic without the fantasy overlay, Cyberpunk RED from R. Talsorian Games is the current edition of the original Mike Pondsmith game that spawned the 2077 video game. I wrote about Cyberpunk quite a bit in the Trauma Team 2077 post in terms of LARP concepts, but Cyberpunk RED as a tabletop game is worth its own attention. The system is cleaner than Shadowrun, the setting is tighter, and if you have played the video game you already have a feel for the world of Night City that translates directly to the table. The Interlock system handles combat with a lethality that makes every firefight consequential in a way that D&D, where characters shrug off sword wounds as though they are minor inconveniences, simply does not. Getting shot hurts. Cyberpsychosis is a mechanic, not a flavour note. It is a harder game in both senses of the word.

Both of these systems occupy a space that D&D cannot credibly claim. Fantasy adventure and cyberpunk are different genres with different tonal requirements, and the mechanical differences between systems reflect that meaningfully. This is worth remembering every time someone describes Shadowrun as just “D&D with guns and elves.” It is not, and the distinction matters.

Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green

If you have any interest in horror gaming at all — and I mean actual horror, the kind that operates on dread and inevitability and the slow realisation that the universe does not care about your character’s hit points — then Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium is required reading. It has been published continuously since 1981 based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and is, in the Seventh Edition currently in print, one of the best-designed rulebooks in the hobby. The Basic Role-Playing system is elegant in a way that older games often are not — percentile-based, human-scaled, with no character classes or levels, just skills and fragile, improvable people who encounter things they cannot fight and cannot reason with and cannot survive without cost.

The core loop of Call of Cthulhu — investigate the mystery, discover it is worse than you thought, try to stop it or contain it, probably fail in some meaningful way — is entirely unlike D&D’s progression from levels one through twenty. Your characters do not become godlike. They become more skilled and more scarred. The Sanity mechanic, much imitated and rarely matched, means that exposure to the genuinely horrible has in-game consequences. Investigators do not shrug off the sight of a shoggoth and move on with their day. They are changed by it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. This is horror gaming done properly and with over four decades of published scenarios — many of them genuinely excellent — the depth of material is extraordinary.

Delta Green from Arc Dream Publishing takes Lovecraftian horror and grafts it onto a very specific American context: the intelligence community, the federal government, the military-industrial apparatus, and the secret conspiracy operating beneath all of them to hold back forces that would end civilisation. You are agents — FBI, CIA, military, law enforcement — recruited into a clandestine network that officially does not exist, investigating cases that the official record will never acknowledge, handling threats that cannot be explained in a press briefing. The setting owes as much to The X-Files, 24 and contemporary spy fiction as it does to Lovecraft, and it is all the richer for it. I mentioned in the Nine Years retrospective that Delta Green mixing Cthulhu and 24 is one of my favourite examples of genre collision done right, and I stand by that emphatically.

The game uses the Agent Handbook rules, a refined version of Basic Role-Playing with a contemporary procedural flavour that suits the setting. Bonds — the relationships that keep your character tethered to humanity — are a mechanical element that makes the game’s emotional stakes tangible. As operations take their toll, those bonds fray. The game is asking you to think about what this work costs your character and the people they care about, which is a different and more interesting question than “did you roll high enough to hit.”

Both systems have extensive published adventures and campaigns, are professionally supported, and operate in spaces that D&D cannot and should not try to occupy. They are also available digitally through DriveThruRPG and have appeared in Humble Bundle offerings for exactly the kind of PDF-library building I described in the books post.

Free League Publishing and the Swedish Invasion

Free League Publishing is a Swedish tabletop publisher that has, over the last decade, quietly become one of the most interesting and consistently excellent companies in the RPG space. If you have not been paying attention to them, you should be, because they are producing games that are simultaneously ambitious in scope, distinctive in aesthetic, and grounded in system design that serves their themes rather than working against them.

Their flagship engine is the Year Zero Engine, a dice-pool system built on d6s where you count sixes as successes and can push rolls — rerolling failures at the cost of increasing stress, damage or other resource attrition. It is a system that builds pressure mechanically rather than narratively, which is a genuinely clever piece of design. The engine underpins a family of games that share a bloodline while feeling distinct from one another.

Mutant: Year Zero is post-apocalyptic survival in a world where humanity has been reduced to mutant survivors scavenging in a wasteland. The base-building mechanics and the procedurally generated zone exploration give it a quality that feels different from standard RPG dungeon-crawling even when the underlying activity — exploring dangerous places for resources — is structurally similar.

Tales from the Loop is based on the artwork of Simon Stålenhag and deserves special mention because it is one of the most tonal games in the hobby. Set in an alternate 1980s Sweden (or, in a licensed variant, the American Midwest) where a particle accelerator has made strange things possible, you play children investigating weird events in your community. Characters cannot die, violence is not really an option, and the focus is on mystery and the particular texture of childhood adventure. It is charming in a way that most RPGs are not, and it is a remarkable achievement for a game that sounds, in summary, like it should not work as well as it does.

Forbidden Lands is their take on fantasy adventure — a hex-crawl game set in a world that was under a magical curse for a century and is only now beginning to be re-explored. The survival mechanics, the stronghold-building, and the legendary monster system give it a flavour that sits apart from D&D’s dungeon-centric assumptions. It rewards players who want to carve out a home in a dangerous world rather than simply proceeding from encounter to encounter.

Vaesen is Scandinavian folklore horror, set in a 19th-century Scandinavia where the old mythological creatures — vaesen — are becoming visible and aggressive as industrialisation erodes the old ways. The mechanics are quieter than much of Free League’s catalogue. The tone is melancholy and strange and deeply rooted in a specific cultural mythology that most English-speaking gamers will find fresh. It is genuinely beautiful as a book as well, which brings me to a broader point about Free League.

They produce beautiful books. The production quality across their catalogue is consistently excellent, which is part of why their physical editions carry a price that makes bundles and PDFs attractive. But if you can find a way to get a physical copy of the Alien RPG or the Blade Runner RPG, they are worth having on your shelf as objects. The Alien game, based on the film franchise, uses a system built around stress and panic that produces moments of genuine tension at the table in a way that is mechanically generated rather than relying on the GM to carry the weight. Characters accumulate stress as things go wrong. The panic table produces results that cause cascading problems. It feels like surviving a horror film because the rules are pushing you toward that experience, not because the GM narrated it at you.

Dragonbane, which is actually the modern English edition of the classic Swedish game Drakar och Demoner, is their fantasy game with the widest appeal to players coming from D&D. It is lightweight, accessible, focused on exploration and adventure, and carries the DNA of old-school gaming while being genuinely playable without the historical baggage. It is on the shortlist of games I would recommend to a D&D group looking to try something adjacent.

Twilight: 2000 deserves its own mention — a cold war gone hot, set in the ruins of 1990s Poland as global superpowers collapse. The game uses a hex-and-encounter map approach that sits somewhere between wargame and RPG, and the resource scarcity mechanics are relentless. It is not a comfort game. Neither is The Walking Dead: Universe RPG, which Free League produce under licence. Free League are not in the business of comfortable games, which is a significant part of their appeal.

Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark Family

Blades in the Dark by John Harper, published by Evil Hat Productions, is the kind of game that changes how you think about game design once you have engaged with it properly. Set in Duskvol — a gaslit, ghost-haunted city of canals and desperate criminality powered by electroplasmic lightning towers — you play a crew of scoundrels pulling heists, building criminal enterprises, and navigating factions in a city that is very much not on your side. The game is mechanically innovative in ways that have spawned an entire family of derivative games using the same Forged in the Dark framework.

The key mechanics are worth understanding even if you never play the game, because they represent a different design philosophy from D&D and its descendants. Position and Effect replace the binary pass/fail of most dice systems — when you roll, you establish how risky your action is and what impact it can have, and then the dice determine which of several possible outcomes you get. You might succeed at a cost. You might succeed fully. You might fail but learn something. The point is that the fiction moves forward and failure is not a dead end, it is a complication. This produces a very different table experience from the standard roll-to-hit, hit-point attrition of D&D combat.

Flashbacks are another stroke of design brilliance — rather than planning your heist in advance in laborious detail, the crew executes and when circumstances arise you can flash back to establish that you prepared for this. It sidesteps the planning paralysis that bogs down heist scenarios in other systems while still rewarding player creativity. The stress and trauma system, where pushing yourself costs stress and accumulated trauma permanently changes your character, mirrors what Shadowrun and Delta Green are doing with their own resource systems: making consequences tangible and personal.

The Forged in the Dark family is extensive. Scum and Villainy takes the engine to space opera. Band of Blades puts it in a fantasy military setting, retreating across a demon-haunted landscape as a mercenary company trying to survive. Beam Saber uses it for mecha warfare. Root: The TTRPG is the board game brought to the roleplaying table with the same engine powering faction conflict in a woodland civil war. The variety within the framework is itself an argument for the design — when the base system is this adaptable, you know the fundamentals are sound.

If you are a GM who leans toward fiction-forward play, who finds the three-action economy of D&D 5e fiddly and combat grids unnecessary, and who wants a system that rewards creative thinking over character build optimisation, Blades in the Dark is the game I would put in your hands first. It is available in a free SRD version online and in a beautifully produced physical edition. There is no excuse not to at least read the first few chapters.

Palladium Books, TMNT, and the Resurgence of Classic Systems

Palladium Books occupies an interesting place in the history of the hobby. Kevin Siembieda’s company has been publishing RPGs since the early 1980s, has a catalogue that spans fantasy, science fiction, horror and post-apocalyptic gaming, and has maintained a fiercely loyal community across decades of intermittent publication difficulties, near-bankruptcy moments and the kind of institutional stubbornness that is either inspiring or infuriating depending on where you are standing.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, originally published in 1985, is the game that let players create anthropomorphic animal characters and run them through adventures that mixed superhero action, martial arts and the kind of gonzo creativity that the TMNT franchise embodies. It has been out of print for years — the licence expired long ago and the game has been unavailable in any official capacity for long enough that physical copies command collector prices. The recent Kickstarter campaign to bring it back into print is exactly the kind of moment that says something meaningful about the state of the hobby in 2026.

Palladium ran a campaign for a new edition of TMNT and Other Strangeness and it funded very successfully, which is significant for a few reasons. First, it demonstrates that nostalgia for older systems is real and commercially meaningful — there is a generation of players for whom TMNT was their first RPG or one of their formative gaming experiences, and they will back its return with genuine enthusiasm. Second, it indicates that the market for games that are not D&D, and specifically not D&D-adjacent in their design philosophy, is healthy. Palladium’s systems — the Megaversal System, built on percentile skills and class-and-level structures from a particular early-80s design tradition — are not for everyone, but they are for someone, and quite a lot of someones as the campaign showed.

The broader point here is that classic systems are coming back and there is a market for them. Old School Essentials, a careful reconstruction of the Basic D&D and Expert D&D rules from the early 1980s, has sold well enough that Necrotic Gnome can sustain a growing publishing programme built almost entirely on making those old rules available in modern, well-produced formats. OSRIC, the AD&D 1e reconstruction, has a dedicated community. Kickstarter is regularly home to campaigns built on older system lineages — not because those systems are mechanically superior to modern designs, but because there is genuine affection for the kind of game they produce and the kind of play they reward.

The OSR — Old School Renaissance or Revival, depending on who you ask — has also produced genuinely original games that use old-school mechanical assumptions as a starting point rather than simply republishing historical rules. Mörk Borg from Ockult Örtmästare Games and Free League is the most striking example: a doom metal aesthetic applied to a rules-light system set at the end of the world, where characters are expendable, the writing is deliberately provocative, and the book design is as much an art object as a functional game tool. It won the ENnie Award for best game and best production values in the same year, which is not a combination you see often.

Kickstarter and the Independent RPG Scene

The current Kickstarter landscape for RPGs is, depending on how much time you want to spend on the platform, either exciting or overwhelming. It is probably both. The short version is that crowdfunding has genuinely democratised RPG publishing in a way that has produced a significant amount of genuinely interesting material alongside the inevitable quantity of projects that did not quite reach the finish line.

The major publishers use Kickstarter differently to independent creators. For a company like Palladium or Pelgrane Press or even Free League, a Kickstarter is effectively a pre-order campaign with community-building benefits and a way to gauge appetite for a project before committing to print runs. For an independent designer, a Kickstarter might be the only way to fund the production of a game that would otherwise remain a Google Doc. Both uses are legitimate and both produce things worth your attention.

Current campaigns — and by the time you are reading this the specific projects will have changed, because Kickstarter moves quickly — consistently feature companion material for D&D and its adjacent systems. Adventure modules, setting sourcebooks, custom dice and tokens, GM screens, card decks and other accessories designed to work within D&D 5e and its derivatives remain a significant proportion of the RPG space on the platform. This makes sense commercially — you are reaching the largest possible audience — but it is worth being aware that a substantial amount of what presents itself as “RPG content” on Kickstarter is specifically D&D content, and that the category is broader than it might initially appear.

Look for the tags and categories that take you to games and supplements built on their own systems. The TTRPG space on Kickstarter in 2026 includes funded campaigns for narrative horror games, post-colonial science fiction, games built around specific cultural mythologies, and various iterations of the Forged in the Dark framework. There are campaigns for zine-format one-shot games that exist to do one specific thing very well. There are campaigns for large, ambitiously produced games that are asking for significant funding on the strength of a compelling design document and a strong creative reputation. The variety is remarkable if you know where to look.

BackerKit has also become a meaningful secondary platform for tabletop projects, with some publishers preferring it for its fulfilment features and others running late pledge options there after successful Kickstarters have closed. It is worth having an account on both if you are the kind of person who might back a project, which I suspect you might be.

The Direct Alternatives: Fantasy Games That Are Not D&D

This deserves its own section because the question “what should I play if I want fantasy adventure that is not D&D” has considerably more and better answers than it did even five years ago.

Pathfinder 2e from Paizo is the most obvious starting point. Paizo was formed largely by former Wizards employees and Pathfinder began as a response to the 4th edition of D&D, which divided the player base significantly. Second Edition Pathfinder is a complete system in its own right — a complex, carefully balanced game with a significant depth of mechanical choice and an enormous library of published adventures through the Adventure Path programme. The rules are more granular than 5e, the character options more extensive, and the published support is exceptional. If you want the production values and scope of a major publisher’s fantasy game without the specific flavour of D&D, Pathfinder 2e is the leading candidate. The recent OGL crisis brought a meaningful number of players over from 5e and Paizo handled the moment well, releasing the core of their system as free Open RPG Content.

Dragonbane from Free League, which I mentioned above, is a genuine alternative for groups who want something lighter and more immediately playable. The adventure included in the starter box is a solid introduction and the game rewards creative problem-solving over mechanical optimisation.

Daggerheart from Darrington Press — Critical Role’s publishing arm — launched in 2024 and positioned itself directly as a fantasy adventure game for groups who might otherwise default to 5e. It is not a revolutionary system but it is thoughtfully designed, particularly in its approach to managing fear and hope as mechanical resources, and its card-based proficiency system. The Critical Role brand means it has significant reach with an audience that the hobby has been trying to convert from viewers to players for years.

13th Age from Pelgrane Press, designed by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet who were D&D designers themselves, is a game that keeps the D&D DNA while doing interesting things with it. The escalation die mechanic, which makes fights more dramatic as they progress, and the One Unique Thing system — where each character has something true about them that is true of no one else in the world — give it a character that sits apart from both 5e and Pathfinder. It recently released a second edition that builds on the first’s strong foundations.

Shadow of the Demon Lord from Schwalb Entertainment is darker in tone than most fantasy games, more brutal in its economy, and deliberately willing to go to places that D&D’s market positioning prevents it from visiting. If you want fantasy with genuine stakes and a genuinely grim flavour, it is worth knowing about.

Dungeon World, built on the Apocalypse World engine by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker — the Powered by the Apocalypse framework, or PbtA — puts a D&D aesthetic on top of a very different mechanical foundation. The 2d6+modifier resolution system, the move-based character actions, the principle that the GM never rolls dice but always reacts to player actions, produces a game that tells D&D-shaped stories using entirely different creative muscles. It is not for everyone but it has shown a lot of groups a different way to approach fantasy play.

The point is that the space labelled “fantasy adventure roleplaying game” contains somewhere north of twenty credible alternatives to D&D right now, with solid system design, meaningful published support, and active communities. This was not really true even in 2010, when D&D dominated the shelf space so thoroughly that alternatives were niche objects you sought out deliberately. The current landscape is genuinely different and it is better for it.

A Word on System Plurality

I want to make a point that I think gets lost in the excitement of talking about all of these games. The fact that there are many excellent alternatives to D&D is not an argument that D&D is bad or that you should stop playing it. If you and your group love 5e, that is a perfectly reasonable and defensible position. D&D 5e is, for all its limitations, a well-designed game with an enormous support infrastructure and a community that makes getting help, finding players and accessing material easier than any other system available.

The argument is simpler than that. If you have only ever played D&D, you may not know what you are missing. The systems above are not doing worse versions of what D&D does. They are doing different things entirely, in spaces where D&D’s design cannot follow without becoming a different game. Shadowrun is not D&D with a cyberpunk skin. Call of Cthulhu is not horror D&D. Blades in the Dark is not heist D&D. They have their own logic, their own pleasures, their own things they ask of their players and reward with experiences that are specifically theirs.

The hobby is bigger than any single game. It always was. It is just easier to see that now.

Coming Up

I am aware that writing about games you have not yet reviewed at length is easier than actually reviewing them, and I want to be specific about what I intend to follow up on here. Intentions have a way of becoming indefinitely deferred on this blog, so treat these as commitments I am making publicly and will be embarrassed not to honour.

I want to do proper write-ups of both Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and Delta Green as systems — not just as summaries but as genuine reviews from the perspective of someone running them. Both have scenario collections I want to work through, and the comparison between their approaches to the same Lovecraftian material is genuinely interesting and worth a dedicated post.

The Free League catalogue deserves more than a paragraph each. Forbidden Lands in particular, as a fantasy alternative with genuinely different design priorities from D&D, and Tales from the Loop as an example of what a licensed game can be when the designers genuinely understand what makes the source material work. The Year Zero Engine as a design object is worth understanding in its own right.

Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark family warrant a session report and a system review. I have been meaning to run it for longer than I am comfortable admitting. Publicly stating that intention here is a mild form of self-coercion.

Dragonbane as the leading candidate for a D&D-to-something-else transition game for groups considering their options.

And honestly, now that Palladium have brought TMNT and Other Strangeness back into the world, a proper look at the Megaversal System and what it was doing in the 1980s that was genuinely inventive, even if the system has aged in ways that make modern play an acquired taste.

There is a lot of good gaming out there. Some of it has been there for forty years waiting patiently. Let us go find some of it.

The invite to the circle, as always, remains open.