His Majesty the Worm, Dungeon Crawling Nightmares!
Its wormin' time
Genre: Dark(?) Fantasy, Dungeon Crawler, OSR
Touchstones: Classic TTRPGs, Dungeon Meshi
What is this game?: His Majesty the Worm is a Tarot-Based game that aims to take all the boring parts of OSR and make them into goofy and fun features
How's the gameplay?: Hoo boy, this is gonna be a dense one His Majesty the Worm takes on a Maximalist approach to game design, with many sub-mechanics affecting your overall performance, the core game's mechanic is using Tarot instead of Dice for randomization, while a Tarot deck (w/ minor arcana) is recommended, the game is designed so a standard 52 card deck could also work, albeit not recommended. Whenever a character needs to do something a TEST OF FATE starts, characters have stats based on the Arcana's suits, Wands, Pentacles, Cups, and Swords, and whenever a TEST OF FATE starts, they draw a card from the Minor Arcana deck, then add that stat to the number they drew (Face cards are 11-14, Fool is a 0). Characters have a choice between 4 paths (also corresponding to the Suits in a minor arcana deck), a Kith (species), and a Motif (a quick sum up for your character), if I wanted to play a crotchety wizard asshole I would play a Path of Wands character with the Motif "Grumpy Scholar" and the Kith Underfolk, since my wizard is a halfling. The game is split between two distinct phases, Crawling and Citying, The crawling phase is going into the megadungeon and looking around for loot, while the City phase is going into town and buying shit! This game really focuses down on the minor, mundane parts of adventuring, Food management, Managing what you're currently holding, Torch supplying, Equipment Upkeep, and Weight management are all vital parts of a character, this might sound boring, and in any other game it'd be! BUT his Majesty the Worm is built entirely around these granular, seemingly inconsequential mechanics, they feel warranted and fun. The game also has an in-depth Guild building mechanic, after paying the 50% tax that all adventurers must pay to enter town, you gotta use up all that gold from dungeons somewhere! and the best place to put it in is equipment, but second place is helping out your community by starting an adventurer's guild! By investing your hard earned gold into your community you can build many things! like Taverns, Unflattering statues of your rival guildmasters, Monasteries, and other such fun things! This isn't even getting into things like Sorcery and Alchemy and how those end up mattering, Status effects, Language management being a part of gameplay... His Majesty is a maximalist game in every way, but it knows how to blend all of its strange and seemingly menial mechanics to make a very fun experience, it takes some of the most unfun games in the market and goes "Ok but what if it worked?"
What's the setting (If any) like?: Uhhhh, there's a setting alright! It shows up in bits and pieces of flavor text and the like, but there doesn't seem to be a setting guide or anything, the setting is fairly malleable, but a general dark fantasy vibe is the norm, the game explicitly says its not supposed to have a set in bedrock setting
What's the tone?: Goofy Dark Fantasy, its a grim world, but its also silly and pokes fun at tropes of the genre as well as just has copious amounts of poop jokes, its not a game to be taken seriously tonally speaking
Session length: 4 hours minimum, this is a complex game
Number of Players: 5 is my recommendation, 1 gm and 1 player of each path
Malleability: Very malleable! its an explicit design goal!
Resources: The game's website has many resources available, including an online tarot deck, player sheets, and a guild sheet
I really didn't think I'd like this game that much! it's an extremely well made and well thought out look at the OSR genre, if we keep getting OSR game I hope they look more like His Majesty, I do wonder just who the fuck is the worm, though