The promise of a roleplaying game is to inhabit another life and do things you could never do in the real world. I am a writer and not a magic-user, but for decades I’ve been able to step into such empowered lives, one saturday game at a time.

Picking up the controller and starting up an RPG on a game console or PC is a similar undertaking. You step into another world, whether fantasy or scifi or contemporary, and use this new persona to have fun shaping the world with your actions. With Cyberpunk 2077, you are entering a high-tech future with elements of corporate dystopia. But to understand the issues with beginning your time in that world, we should take a look at the worlds that have come before.

Since it was first published in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons grabbed the imagination of gamers. And every new game starts with the act of character creation. You would roll some stats with dice: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, constitution, and charisma. You then choose your race like human or elf or dwarf, then pick a suitable class, like a skilled fighter or crafty rogue or pious cleric. You would choose, or roll, for things like height and weight, eye and hair color, religion and homeland. You even pick an alignment, where you fall on a morality scale of Good and Evil. Players really into the acting side of things might write a backstory and build a personality that differs from their own.

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Monte Cook Games is a tabletop RPG publisher that specializes in the weird. It their first game, Numenera, players walk around an earth a billion years in the future where eight other civilizations have come and gone. Rules focus on story, action, and the bizarre adventure you find in this truely unique setting. Exploring scifi ruins millions of years old that are crawling with forgotten monstrosities has never been so fun.

MCG followed that up by upping the ante. In The Strange, players control government agents exploring countless worlds that are based on other works of fiction. The GM can bring you to Middle Earth or Silent Hill or Neverland. Their next big release was the Cypher System Rulebook, that had additional options for campaigns of many different genres, from Lovecraftian Horror to High Fantasy.

Ever wanted to control gravity? Manipulate time? Talk to machines? The rules of the cypher system let you do some pretty extreme things in these exotic worlds. Would you rather become a simple warrior or a warrior that can also turn into lightning?

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Every game is a space you explore, a foreign country that you spend time visiting. It could be a single screen with falling shapes that you learn to navigate or an open world to wander through, learning to understand the local customs. With tabletop roleplaying games, it is an all-inclusive package to a destination, only limited by your imagination.

Walking through the wastes of a forgotten continent, my comrades and I have faced unspeakable horrors. I’ve explored the corners of my own kingdom to discover the ruins of fallen empires. And in the deepest dark below the earth, I have faced legendary beasts and feared for my life.

With the release of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the trio of core books that also includes the Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual, these famous guidebooks for traveling to fantastic worlds have been reinvented once again. But the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and D&D as a whole, is about more than traveling through worlds. It’s about mapping them.

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The fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons was just released. Why does that matter? Well, to start with, it’s supposed to. This edition is designed as an entry point for people who haven’t tried the series before. A preview of the new rules coming later this year, this “Starter Set” has everything needed to get a game of D&D going: a book with 32 pages of base rules, another book with an adventure, some characters ready to be played, and a set of dice to use at the table. It is a simple beginning for the new version of an old game.

Dungeons and Dragons began over 40 years ago in 1974 when a pair of writers, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, began customizing rules for a miniature war game that applied them not to an army, but an individual warrior. Soon parties of adventurers were questing in dungeons and living the kind of epics only previously seen in fantasy books. This new game would have all of the strategy of war games, but also the limitless imagination of storytelling.

Throughout the decades, millions of people have played some version of D&D. As a player you could create a character as detailed and as unique as you wanted, assuming the Dungeon Master running the game allowed it. And you and your friends could do just about anything you wanted. This was a game of imaginative storytelling and clever combat. And it began in the ’70s.

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A hunter stalks his prey through a forest. Both are planeswalkers, wizards who travel between worlds and duel each other. Years ago, a necromancer named Liliana cursed the hunter Garruk, turning him into a mindless killer. He has gained some control of this cursed rage, but can he master it completely before he kills again?

Such is the narrative underpinning of the new release of the 2015 set for Magic: The Gathering, which puts the popular character Garruk back at the forefront of the story. It’s just the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the popular game.

The premise for Magic: The Gathering is simple, sort of. Players control wizards who duel each other, using different kinds of magic: green is for nature, red is for destruction, blue is for mental magic, white is for protection, and black is for necromancy. Cards are played to summon creatures or cast spells, all with the goal of reducing your opponent’s health to 0 and defeating him. Complex strategies emerge where the special abilities of various cards play off one another.

This game of strategy is given new life each year. Publisher Wizards of the Coast release a base set in the summer and followed by an expansion block throughout the rest of the year. In July 2013, Wizards released Magic 2014, aka M14, and, subsequently, the Greek-mythology themed Theros. And the game was renewed again with the release of M15 on July 18. Such constant revitalization of the game’s rules and story elements is a complex undertaking that gets started years in advance.

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A party of adventurers sneak their way through Cragmaw Cave to surprise a clutch of goblins and their pet wolves.

As the bloody battle wages on, bodies fall one by one. The Dwarven priest and the vicious leader Klarg are all that remain standing. The duel rages on and only one can emerge victorious. A player tosses his dice eagerly to see if he can roll that critical hit and win the day.

This could be a scene from 1970s or the 1990s or today, from the first version of Dungeons and Dragons, to the second edition or third or fourth. But this scene unfolds in the latest D&D release and it comes with one big, modern difference: the players themselves had a hand in shaping the rules. It is all part of D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast’s embrace of the online world and digital lives of those who play this iconic paper-and-pen-based game.

“The rules provide the engine for great adventures and our focus shifts squarely to creating the best stories for players to share and enjoy in their preferred format,” says Nathan Stewart, brand director for Dungeons and Dragons.

Read the full article at Fast Company.

The dice come to a stop with eight pips showing. I move past Go and collect additional resources. But then I end on a property owned by an opponent and I have to pay him his due. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But this isn’t Monopoly, and I’m not controlling a mere thimble. I am the powerful Hastur and on my next turn I will get my revenge.

The Doom That Came to Atlantic City is a new boardgame being published by Cryptozoic Entertainment. The creation of the game by Lee Moyer and Keith Baker is a twisty story, but it is finally seeing the light. The backers of the project on Kickstarter will be getting their copies later this month and it should reach stores not long after. The box labels Doom as, “A light-hearted game of urban destruction set in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft.” But when it comes down to it, the game is a Lovecraftian take on Monopoly, a comment on and send-up of the venerable boardgame.

There is the familiar square board with properties; the names and colors have been changed, but it is still the familiar streets from our childhoods. But rather than going around buying the properties and building houses, the player controls a Great Old One from H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, and you are destroying the homes there, opening gates to the outer planes on the razed land. In the meantime, as you travel the colorful squares, you are fighting the other players for more cultists, using infernal powers on each other, and breaking all the rules to the original real-estate game.

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The cluemaster Victor finishes his countdown to 0. Our hour is up. My group, eight of us in total, did not solve all the puzzles. We remain locked in the room. Victor takes off his ringmaster hat. He says we were so close. And then he figuratively peels back the curtain and explains what we missed. We will not die in this room, it turns out; here the cluemaster shows us his grand design and how to defeat it.

This is the experience of Escape the Room NYC an interactive play space created by Victor Blake. A group of up to 10 people are locked up for one hour, trapped in a one-room office in midtown Manhattan. The room is littered with things to solve; some are obvious puzzles and others are subtle clues waiting to be deciphered. If you figure them out, you will be able to get the final key and unlock the room.

The interactive event is styled after the videogame subgenre Room Escape, a type of point-and-click puzzle game where the protagonist finds themselves in a closed room—by kidnapping, cosmic intervention, or whatever—and has to decipher clues, use objects, and solve puzzles to eventually get out. There are many browser-based Flash games of the genre. The most well known example is for iPad though, simply titled The Room, made by Fireproof Games, which is currently free to own and has a recently released sequel for $4.99.

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There is this alien artifact weaved into the fabric of space. The Strange is a dark energy network filled with different worlds. These imaginary worlds are called Recursions. And from this spring of creativity there can be anything, any fictional world a roleplayer could ever wish to go to.

Creator Bruce Cordell said, “There are all of these little instances of a world. I can imagine, as you walk farther and farther away form the main point of the recursion, you walk into mist, the world just slowly starts to lose its focus. And then suddenly you are in The Strange.”

The Strange is a new tabletop roleplaying game from Monte Cook Games. It launched on Kickstarter on October 16, hit its goal of $60,000 in less than 5 hours, and has since raised $200,000 and counting. It’s a game built on Cook’s own Cypher rule system which debuted with the Numenera book, an RPG that was Kickstarted last year to the tune of $517,000.

More importantly, The Strange, like Numenera before it, was really built on the idea of freedom to play. Numenera allows players to make characters with unique powers, like “controls gravity” or “rides lightning.” In tabletop gaming there’s often a game master—someone who runs the game and tells the story—and in Numenera the game master could create sudden complications if they chose to, raising the stakes in an encounter. Numenera‘s setting had few boundaries as well, taking place on an earth one billion years into the future, when players could meet any sort of nano-technology-based, alien-made, multi-dimensional anything.

Read the full article at Kill Screen.

Two wizards face off on a battlefield, summoning monsters, casting spells, wielding artifacts. The action isn’t on a screen; it’s mostly in the players’ minds. They try to outwit each other by tossing down cards that signify combinations of powers and strategies. And in most cases, nary an iPad, laptop, or mobile touchscreen is in sight.

For 20 years players of Magic: The Gathering have been collecting cards, building decks, and facing off in real time, person-to-person. Today, the game features almost 14,000 different cards. Every August, a new set hits shelves–Magic 2013 or Magic 2014, for example. Then a block of three related expansion sets follow–Theros launched in September; Born of the Gods is slated to come out in February 2014; and Journey Into Nyx is the set scheduled to complete the Greek mythology-themed block in May.

“One of the great things about Magic and one of the reasons it has endured for the last 20 years is its ability to evolve,” says Magic brand director Mark Purvis. “Every year, we present a new world to players. That’s one of the things that keeps the current game itself fresh.”

Read the full article at Fast Company.

“Waterdeep” was originally an unofficial side project of game designers Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee. Thompson said, ” ‘Lords of Waterdeep’ began with a discussion between Peter Lee and myself. I had an idea for how to add some more interaction to standard worker placement mechanics, and Peter had the idea for what would eventually become quests. The next week, I was taking a train from Seattle to Chicago when I started to put those two ideas together. When I got back to Seattle after my trip, I cooked up a prototype and we sat down to play.”

That was just the start for building “Waterdeep”. “We continued to iterate on the game over and over again for a couple of months until we finally decided that it was in good enough shape to pitch to our boss, at which point it became a real project,” said Thompson. After months of testing and iterating, the final game was finished and released.

Read the full article at MTV Geek.

Theros features monsters of myth, such as Hydras, Minotaurs, Centaurs, Gorgons, and more. It also has gods and heroes that are reminiscent of Greek myth. These all work toward the new mechanics found in this set.

With all of these terrible beasts in Theros, there is a new mechanic called Monstrosity, where a creature can be pumped up with a bonus at an extra mana cost. In this exclusive look at the Arbor Colossus, it can be seen that when it becomes Monstrous, this Colossus can instantly destroy a flying creature.

Read the full article at MTV Geek.