Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?

Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.

For today, though, we’re just shooting across the bow of the biggest games outside of the D&D ecosystem here in 2024. All of these games have fairly long histories, and have been mainstays in the hobby since they were new. Now, in their fourth, fifth, and seventh editions respectively, these games continue to fuel massive communities, popular spinoffs, and (thanks to the history and numerous revisions) a lot of vigorous debate. For the biggest games to jump into after D&D, I’m talking about Cyberpunk, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Call of Cthulhu. In addition to being very popular and having deep benches of supporting materials, these games are also all mechanically distinct, offering a few different variations on what game mechanics look like outside of the d20. It’s also worth noting that none of these games are based on dungeon exploration; the gameplay loops in all three of these games are unique from D&D and provide solidly different experiences.

Cyberpunk

Published in 1988, Mike Pondsmith’s third game (after Mekton and Teenagers From Outer Space) is rightly considered part of the original cyberpunk canon, drawing from and adding to the subgenre typified by authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, movies like Blade Runner, and anime like Bubblegum Crisis and Akira. Pondsmith drew inspiration from other authors, notably Walter Jon Williams and George Alec Effinger, both of whom worked on Cyberpunk supplements.

Cyberpunk takes place in an alternate history America centering around Night City, a Disneyfied planned city gone horribly wrong located on the real-world Morro Bay in California. Characters are typically ‘Edgerunners’, mercs and lone operators trying to make it in a world owned and controlled by massive megacorporations. Of note is that the character options extended far beyond the combat-focused roles from D&D; characters could be mercenaries or hackers, but also reporters, rock stars, or even corporate executives themselves.

This is all fine and good. Cyberpunk sold well and kept the momentum going through the 90s and into the early 2000s, competing with (and often losing to) the flashier Shadowrun for market share. In 2005 Cyberpunk v3 was released and it landed with a thud, both due to a departure from the setting that most fans were used to as well as cut corners in both editing and art direction. Mike Pondsmith shifted his focus to the video game world, and for a while Talsorian was fairly quiet. Then CD Projekt Red happened.  Hot off of the success of The Witcher 2, the Polish game studio licensed the Cyberpunk IP, and it was off to the races. Cyberpunk 2077 may have had one of the worst launches in video game history but it also had the biggest comeback since No Man’s Sky. It also enabled the Pondsmiths to turn their attention back to the Cyberpunk universe and release the fourth and current edition of the game, Cyberpunk Red.

Cyberpunk Red’s design philosophy is ‘once bitten, twice shy’, and the game walked back and de-canonized essentially everything that was written in Cyberpunk v3. Thematically, though, the game continues the throughline of an apocalyptic shift in the world, focusing on a corporate war which kicked off the destruction of the Net, conveniently allowing the game to reset its tech level. Night City was also nuked, creating yet another chance to reorganize and rebuild. Among all this rebuilding, though, the game has remained remarkably similar to its previous editions. Roll a d10 and add your stat and skill values to see if you exceed a Difficulty Value.

Both Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2020, the second edition, are still in print, and there’s a vocal portion of the fanbase that prefers the earlier edition. Cyberpunk Red’s combat has been tightened and balanced to run faster and appeal to players who are more familiar with the hit point totals of a game like D&D. Having both run and played my fair share of Cyberpunk Red I can say that combat works well and keeps the tension up, but having played and run my fair share of Cyberpunk 2020 I can say that the old fans aren’t completely wrong when they say that some of the flair and flavor has been lost.

The version on this list, though, is Cyberpunk Red. Thanks to both Cyberpunk 2077 and the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime, interest in Cyberpunk is at a fever pitch, and there’s reason to believe that since the 1.5 patch of Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk Red has been essentially the bestselling non-D&D game in the country. Now’s a great time to get in, too: The Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit connects the world of 2077 to Red’s setting of 2045, and does so through the popular anime. A full 2077 sourcebook as well as a new Night City sourcebook have also been recently announced. With the setting as popular as it is, finding a group shouldn’t be too tough. If you need to convince your group to give it a whirl, though, both the Edgerunners Mission Kit and the original Cyberpunk Red Jumpstart Kit are all-inclusive starter packs for a reasonable price.

Vampire: the Masquerade

Unlike Cyberpunk, Vampire:the Masquerade didn’t find its biggest success recently. Released in 1991, Vampire took the RPG world by storm. Instead of crawling through dungeons searching for loot, Vampire characters are, well, vampires, who must balance their thirst for human blood and bestial impulses with the need to maintain ‘the Masquerade’ which enables them to walk freely among human society. While the game’s mechanics were loosely based on those of Shadowrun, dice quantities were constrained and the focus of the game was shifted towards setting and storytelling. The setting of Vampire is intense, bringing in alternate theology where Cain (of Cain and Abel) is the first vampire, and tracing vampire lineage back to 13 clans which descended from elder vampires who survived the great flood (the one from the Bible). Layered on top of all of this is a series of intrigues among Vampire society, mostly focusing on the Camarilla, the Sabbat, and the Anarchs. Of course, there are sourcebooks for each of these sects, and more in-game fiction than you can shake a stick at.

The setting of course is even bigger than that; Vampire originally took place in the same setting as seven other game lines, the World of Darkness. Each of the other game lines (Werewolf, Hunter, Mage, Mummy, Demon, Wraith, and Changeling, abbreviated here) added more organizations, more in-world events, and yet more intrigues that players could engage with. One thing that made this setting interesting, though also incredibly unwieldy, was an overarching narrative that tied the books together across game lines. This lasted from 1991 until the initial World of Darkness series was concluded in 2004. At that point, publisher White Wolf started a new set of game lines, called Chronicles of Darkness; Vampire in particular was superseded by Vampire: the Requiem. Well, kind of.

White Wolf was acquired by Paradox Interactive (yes, the ones who make Crusader Kings) in 2015, after having been previously owned by another video game developer, CCP Games. This is the era of a lot of confusion for outsiders trying to follow what happened to White Wolf: Onyx Path Publishing, a company created by former White Wolf creative director Rich Thomas, licensed World of Darkness to keep producing tabletop games, something that CCP wasn’t doing effectively. When Paradox bought White Wolf, internal tabletop development was prioritized again and the fifth edition of Vampire: the Masquerade was released in 2018. There were…problems. Without going into too much detail on the controversy or content issues, Paradox ended up dissolving White Wolf, switched up the staffing, and after several rounds of to-do, Vampire: the Masquerade is now published by Renegade Game Studios.

While Vampire’s most influential days were at the beginning of its history, it’s still a juggernaut; Renegade’s World of Darkness products slotted right behind Cyberpunk in 2023 sales rankings, and the 5th edition of Vampire has been well received (at least since the content changes from 2018). Just like for Cyberpunk I’d say the best place to start is the most recent edition; it will be more polished and a bit easier to get into than the earlier books. That said, the basic mechanics of the World of Darkness haven’t changed much. Technically Chronicles of Darkness is still being supported by Onyx Path; the most recent game, Deviant: the Renegades, came out in 2021. Whether you go with the newest version or any of the older ones, you’re likely to find a massive fanbase and seemingly endless lore about the World of Darkness, arguably one of the most influential settings in the TTRPG hobby.

Call of Cthulhu

Of course HP Lovecraft has influenced countless genres outside horror and media outside literature. One of the most dramatic impacts of Lovecraft’s work, though, was to the realm of the  Tabletop Roleplaying Game. Call of Cthulhu was first released in 1981 by Chaosium, using the same Basic Roleplaying system which powered their earlier game RuneQuest. What gave Call of Cthulhu power, though, was not the rules so much as the framework and procedures it created. In Call of Cthulhu, characters are investigators which are drawn slowly into the world of the supernatural. As they go further and deeper into the various conspiracies and machinations of forces beyond their comprehension, their mind is as likely to be tested as their body. Call of Cthulhu somewhat infamously gave each character a Sanity score, and witnessing gruesome events and happenings they didn’t understand would lower that score, until eventually the character would go mad. While now seen as archaic (and a bit problematic), the Sanity mechanics in Call of Cthulhu were a big deal, especially in 1981. In addition to creating a classic downward spiral progression for characters, Sanity was important for creating tough choices: there would be magical artifacts and potent rituals available to investigators, but using them always came with risk. This extends to the whole body of mechanics in Call of Cthulhu: Death or Insanity are easy end states, working around the threats to the characters always requires creativity and some detective work. While Vampire: the Masquerade really pushed on the broader, bigger story, Call of Cthulhu greatly expanded the palette that gamers were able to work with to overcome challenges.

Call of Cthulhu’s publication history has come with changes, and the current edition is the seventh edition of the game. This is made a bit more confusing due to the publications in the 90s (though still nowhere near as confusing as the World of Darkness); the fifth edition which was originally released in 1992 was revised three different times by 2001, including 5.5, 5.6, and 5.6.1. This is less of an issue for the contemporary releases, though: Seventh Edition was released in 2014 and thanks to the relatively incremental refinements to the BRP skeleton, it works just as well as the previous versions if not better.

In addition to the core rules, Call of Cthulhu was blessed early on with highly regarded pre-written adventures. Both Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express are considered high watermarks not only in adventure design but also in production values, with both campaigns coming in boxed sets with some wild handouts. The standard for all of the original boxed set campaigns was that the handouts would contain actual clues which tied into the scenario at hand, eclipsing most other RPGs of the time in terms of immersion and setting a standard that wouldn’t be exceeded until Invisible Sun was released many years later. While it’s very difficult to find some of these original materials, the campaigns still hold up, and are getting their own edition count: Masks of Nyarlathotep had a fifth edition released in 2018 to go with the seventh edition of the game. The handouts aren’t as fancy, but they also come in PDF.

For getting on board with the Mythos, I’d recommend starting simply with Call of Cthulhu; the seventh edition is the most recent one. There’s an extensive supplement library available, and this is one system where the first-party adventures, especially the classic ones, are likely to be top-notch. If you want to extend out from there, the possibilities are vast: Mythos-related games have been written for d20 systems, Savage Worlds, GUMSHOE, Fate, and others, and the core Call of Cthulhu setting has inspired forks like Delta Green and Harlem Unbound which continue to expand the possibilities of horrors beyond our comprehension.

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What makes these three games stand out in the hobby is that they’re big. Big sales numbers, big player counts, big supplement libraries. When you get into Cyberpunk, or Vampire, or Call of Cthulhu, you’re diving into a game with a rich history, a ton of fans, and all of the benefits that come with both of these. Does that make these games perfect? Absolutely not. While we’re lucky enough to have three big games that cover different genres (cyberpunk, urban fantasy, supernatural horror), they are as narrow as the fantasy milieu that D&D occupies. True as that is, they’re still different, and that means you can discover a new way to play while still having the same access to supplements, houserules, and people to play with as you would for D&D.

Of course, even with three new genres and a ton of reading material, we’re still just scratching the surface. Next time, I’ll wander into a few fine retail establishments and show you what you can find at both a highly specialized game store and also at a Barnes and Noble. Beyond that, it’ll be time to wander into a few online communities and see how you can find exactly what you’re looking for in a game, if only you join the right Discord. It’s a big gaming world out there, but sometimes the easiest way to try something new is to latch on to another big game.

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