I. Dear Reader
Another little tidbit for you via the good people at Have You Played This, a tumblr blog which runs polls where people can vote on whether they have played or read or at least heard of various tabletop RPGs.
They publish their data publicly in a nice convenient google sheet so I made a copy and visualized it for you. But before we get to the image, some numbers. On average, these polls get 470 votes. For the majority of these polls, more than 50% of respondents said they’d never heard of the game. Out of 81 games that have been polled, only 33 games had even reached the eyes and ears of more than 50% of the respondents. Most people haven’t heard of most of the games!
Anyway, here are those 33 games sorted by most “Played” votes:
The image is a bit compressed. So if you’d like to read it comfortably, you can head to my google sheet and see it at full scale.
While this far from definitive (there’s also a huge variance in the number of votes for each game), it’s interesting to get a sense of what games are relatively popular. For example, Thirsty Sword Lesbians seems to be about as well-known as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay on tumblr. Would you have guessed that? Actually, maybe, you could’ve. But would you have expected to see that Mouse Guard and Mausritter are roughly as popular – maybe tumblr just loves mice equally.
Also bless everyone who said they’d never heard of Pathfinder.
You can actually submit a game to the blog so they can poll it. If the blog keeps running, I’ll come back and do an updated version of this in a couple months and we can see which games climb onto this illustrious list.
Yours chart-fully, once again,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- I’ve never actually played GURPS so this playlist about learning it might come in handy if I ever want to remedy that.
- Please consider joining 100+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
- On Skeleton Code Machine, a comparison of various “depthcrawls”, which are an abstract way of organizing a dungeon-like space so as you go deeper, more interesting things happen.
- James Ward, designer of Metamorphosis Alpha and various TSR/D&D projects, passed away this week.
- On Molten Sulfur, a look at the big hunting expeditions of the Mughal kings and why they’re good scenario fodder.
From the archive:
- John Harper sits down and discusses the slow evolution of Blades in the Dark in a series of streams from 2018. (Issue 19, Dec 2020)
- Ahead of ZineQuest 3, the subreddit RPGZines collected a bunch of resources for people interested in making their first zine. (Issue 20, Dec 2020)
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Travel to a spore-covered paradise & ashen wastelands destroyed by a falling city in the next expansion to Cloud Empress, the Nausicaa-inspired Mothership 1E science fantasy setting. Follow on Kickstarter today!
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
- Grab a Goodman Games bundle of d20 Monster Guides
- Also a bundle of one of the best 2d20 games, John Carter of Mars
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
Indie RPG Newsletter 
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