Books RPGs RPG Tourism: Five Games To Help You Travel Vicariously Experience the trip of a lifetime — without having to deal with planes, passports, or other tourists… By Sarah | Published on November 13, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Many Americans might like to explore the delights of far-off lands, but cannot, lacking the time or the funds. However, they can travel vicariously, by means of movies, television shows, YouTube videos, even novels. All worthy endeavours… which I won’t discuss here. They’ve been well covered elsewhere. But there’s one entertainment possibility for vicarious tourism that I suspect has been overlooked: tabletop roleplaying. Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPG) have been entertaining us for more than half a century. Time enough for nations across the world to develop their own local TTRPGs, games that reflect their nations’ unique customs and settings. If you doubt me, consider that games like Call of Cthulhu, Twilight 2000, and Paranoia reflect the boundlessly optimistic American psyche1. If you wish to travel via TTRPG, you might want to consider these five games, drawn from across the world and across the decades. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay By Richard Halliwell, Rick Priestley, Graeme Davis, Jim Dambra & Phil Gallagher (1986) Whereas certain other, better-known, subterranean tunnel and fire-breathing monster-branded TTRPGs focused on increasingly heroic characters, the United Kingdom’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP), published during the grimmest years of Thatcherite England, focused on more humble adventurers. WFRP characters might come from such occupations as “footpad,” “grave-robber,” and the ever-popular “rat-catcher.” Armed with skills and resources appropriate to their backgrounds, characters navigate a socially stratified Renaissance-level world filled with dangers about which it would best not to think…if only survival did not depend on constantly thinking about them. To underline the nature of the world in which the player characters were living, WFPG’s game mechanics were not survival-friendly. Getting stabbed or bitten—or worse, set on fire—was often lethal. This may sound like a downer, but in play, WFRP could be very funny, even upbeat and life affirming… at least compared to Warhammer 40K. Heavy Gear By Jean Carrières, Gene Marcil, Martin Ouellette, Marc-Alexandre Vézina (1995) A product of Montreal’s Dream Pod 9, the eye-catching Heavy Gear rulebook offers players adventure on Terra Nova, a world that (rather like Canada) enjoys abundant resources, a challenging environment, mutually hostile regional governments, and an external enemy as rapacious as it is heavily armed. Elbows up! Character generation is points-based, so players have considerable control over what sort of characters they get to play. As the combat system leans lethal, players may also get considerable practice designing characters. As an additional enticement to buy the game, Heavy Gear was two games in one. In addition to the roleplaying game, Heavy Gear is a tabletop wargame. Even better, the two elements could be easily integrated… at the risk of player characters discovering the hard way just how lethal heavy armaments can be2. Golden Sky Stories By Ryo Kamiya & Tsugihagi Honpo, translated by Ewen Cluney (2006) This Japanese game features characters that, while they may appear human, are in fact supernatural. Golden Sky players adopt the role of “henge,” magical shapeshifting animals. Every character has special gifts unmatched by humans… modest gifts in keeping with the game’s modest setting. Rather than starring in world-altering epics, the henge contend with personal problems, using their special knacks to mediate disputes, steer lonely kids to new friends, and other challenges of similar weight. Relentlessly wholesome, Golden Sky Stories incentivizes cooperative and community-minded strategies. After all, you cannot help little Ryu find a friend by stabbing him in the face… but you might help things along if you caused a light rain, forcing Ryu into the same bus shelter as young Akane. Vaesen: Nordic Horror Roleplaying By Nils Hintze, translated by Niklas Lundmark (2020) Swedish publisher Fria Ligan provides players with the opportunity to explore not the quasi-utopian Sweden of today3, but the roots from which it sprang. This is a 19th-century Sweden not so far removed from the age of myth as Swedes might prefer. This is yesterday’s Sweden with deep class divides, widespread poverty, a society in which rapid industrialization brought radical change but not security… and where relentless urban and agricultural expansion is encroaching on the territories of fantastic beings that older generations prudently avoided. Enter player characters, who despite diverse archetypes share one common element: all have the Sight, a trauma-induced ability to perceive the supernatural. Therefore, it falls to the player characters to act as intermediaries between the blind mundanes and the eldritch folk. Or, as this is a Year Zero Engine game, to be ground between the millstones of oblivious conventional society and the increasingly irate supernatural. Generally speaking, modern TTRPGs have art that is phenomenally better than most of the art in old-time TTRPGs. Even in a modern context, the art of Vaesen stands out. Outgunned By Riccardo Sirignano and Simone Formicola, translation by Caterina Arzani (2024) A product of Italy’s ongoing golden age of tabletop roleplaying games, Outgunned is a love letter to high-octane action movies of the not-too-distant past. You too can play a character who (somehow) charges nearly unscathed through automatic weapons-fire, (somehow) vaults between buildings, and (somehow) outruns explosions, in pursuit of that One Big Payoff… unless the character’s luck runs out first. I don’t know what’s in the water over in Italy, but judging by the pace with which the Italians are producing innovative new games, it must be pretty good stuff. Outgunned, for example, is marketed as an action movie game, but its sourcebooks already cover a wide range of film genres4. [end-mark] Or not. After all, these are games, and perhaps no more reflective of their nations of origin than were Lost in the Barrens, Jake and the Kid, or Anne of Green Gables. ︎To quote from an old review of mine, “if hit by a round from an autocannon, a heavily armoured character might be identifiable from dental records, whereas you’d need a DNA analysis to ID an unarmoured character.” Note the “might.” ︎I assume. It stands to reason places I have never been to and haven’t researched must be better in every respect than places with which I am familiar. ︎Although I probably wouldn’t use Outgunned to simulate Fellini films. ︎The post RPG Tourism: Five Games To Help You Travel Vicariously appeared first on Reactor.