Games I'm excited to play in 2024
New games churn out of the content mills every day, demanding our attention as they scramble to the top of the vat, chalky mouths opening and closing soundlessly. Every group I play with has the same lament - too many games, not enough time!
This is partially also a function of getting older and having less time, of preferring multi-session play, and having old favorites that I like to revisit. That said, 2023 saw the Kickstarting of some games that I feel I've been waiting for forever, and 2024 promises those releases and some really exciting other ones.
I will say that Dungeon Crawl Classics gets an honorable mention, as it's the campaign I'm currently running and I am pumped to mess around in the Dying Earth for the next few months.
Dolmenwood
Dolmenwood from Necrotic Gnome, makers of Old School Essentials, raised approximately 20 billion doll hairs on Kickstarter. People who don't play games were sending me their instagram ads. Many of you will probably be playing Dolmenwood this next year, and count me as super-excited this setting is finally getting a full release.
Dolmenwood is a haunted fairy tale wood inspired by things like The King of Elfland's Daughter and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, among many other things. It's been ages in the making (anyone else pick up the Wormskin zine when it was called that?) and survived the OGL kerfluffle with only minor changes. One of my favorite modes is low-prep, exploratory OSR style play and Dolmenwood is an incredibly complete version of that with beautifully evocative worldbuilding and art.
Break
Break is another project that I feel like has been in development the entire life of my gaming hobby and finally Kickstarted in 2023. It's another game based on classic fantasy role playing, although this feels less indebted to the standard mashup of B/X and AD&D, with thick layers of JPRG/Zelda/Anime painted on top.
The core rules are as evocative as Dolmenwood - the classes and their options are incredible. There is also a lot of helpful procedural stuff that feels battle-tested. The art and design feels ripped from a TTRPG manual adapting an anime that never was (the art REALLY looks like screenshots from a cartoon sometimes, which is so great). I think might resonate with my main group even more than Dolmenwood.
Arkham Herald
Arkham Herald is another release from the Gauntlet, again using the Carved from Brindlewood system. I'm a big fan of the way this system subverts traditional investigative gameplay. Brindlewood Bay itself is probably my favorite original game to come out in the last five years. I believe the author, Jason Cordova, is close to my own age, as Brindlewood Bay invokes a love of a certain kind of television that I think is situated in a certain generation. This is kind of confirmed with Public Access, another game from the Gauntlet.
Arkham Herald uses this same system, where the Game Master (I kind of hate that they are ditching Keeper of Arcane Lore for the incredibly boring, if universally understood generic) provides the clues but the mystery has no pre-determined solution - instead the players create the best explanation they can and make a roll to confirm correctness. It changes the milieu of Brindlewood Bay from Murder She Wrote to 1970's paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View, All the President's Men, and my personal favorite, Three Days of the Condor. The marriage of this with Lovecraftian horror feels straight out of a Brubaker/Phillips project and makes the kind of sense that is only obvious in retrospect.
Cthulhu Eternal
It's just Call of Cthulhu, folks. Cthulhu Eternal is essentially a modified Delta Green, designed specifically to build a community around the permissive OGL license, replenishing the Cthulhu commons by returning authorship to the people.
I do think I prefer the DG/CE ruleset to CoC 7th. I've found that I can get up and running a little more quickly. The lethality rolls can potentially speed up combat (never a good thing to focus on in CoC) and the bonds system works as a role-playing prompt and to drive home the horror of a home life after you've been good and tickled by a night-gaunt.
Don't Dream
Well, I just spent three paragraphs describing the Carved From Brindlewood games but I made my own (we all have our heartbreaker). It's inspired by VHS horror and Twin Peaks, among other things, and I ran a playtest campaign recently that was a lot of fun. I may post more about here it as things progress.