Many of my most anticipated tabletop role-playing game books of 2025 won’t be released until convention season kicks off this summer, but the year has started strong for the hobby. While Wizards of the Coast seeks to maintain its dominance by emphasizing customization and adding more support for high-level play in the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons rules refresh — a very welcome change for my gaming group, which is in the midst of a level 10 adventure using the new rules — small designers are offering alternatives for medieval fantasy using systems with lighter rules and less baggage.
Beyond spanning multiple rulesets, the best games of the year so far also offer the opportunity to play through stories with a wide variety of tones and themes, from restoring harmony with nature to finding your place in a city full of supernatural creatures. Some of my favorite game systems have new editions or supplements that make them better, offering exciting play options for existing campaigns and inspiration for new ones. Not everything on this alphabetical list is likely to still be on my list the best of books of the year once 2025 draws to a close, but all of them are worth a read if you’re looking for a new adventure for your gaming group.
Benjamin Tobitt embraces the old-school renaissance mechanics and art-heavy style of Mörk Borg in Black Powder and Brimstone, swapping the heavy metal for folk art. Inspired by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Dark Souls, the game is set in a grimdark world of outer gods, holy wars, demons, and witches, where morally questionable characters fight to achieve their goals by facing religious zealots and twisted creatures. The art is phenomenal, and the book packs in plenty of ideas without too much text, as it emphasizes developing characters and the world as you play.
The Ennie-winning Fabula Ultima was one of my favorite games of 2023, and the release of Fabula Ultima Atlas: Natural Fantasy makes it even more compelling. While the series’ previous entries are based on bombastic, globe-trotting JRPGs, Natural Fantasy emphasizes more grounded tales focused on smaller communities reckoning with their pasts and seeking harmony with nature. The book offers rich new character options, like a gardener who cultivates plants with a wide variety of effects and a gourmet who experiments with ingredients to buff allies and incapacitate enemies. It also enriches the base game with rules for downtime and quirky characters, including robots and talking beasts.
This is going to be a big year for D&D alternatives with the release of Daggerheart and Draw Steel (formerly the MCDM RPG), but Grimwild is already making a strong case as an option for gaming groups who want the flavor of D&D with more of a focus on collaborative storytelling and intraparty dynamics. Drawing on mechanics from Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, and Fate for a new Moxie system, designer J.D. Maxwell has produced clever mechanics that reward cooperation and a little friendly bickering with your fellow adventurers. The rules are great for building suspense and produce extremely flexible options for spellcasting.
Dungeons & Dragons’ 2024 rules refresh was completed in February 2025 with the release of the game’s biggest Monster Manual to date. The book refreshes classic monsters with striking new art while introducing new foes with an eye toward high-level play, which hadn’t gotten much love in earlier 5e resources. Encounters are spiced up with the addition of more creatures of the same type, and the book offers plenty of inspiration for ways to unleash and utilize foes, from kraken attacks to ways a party might persuade a manticore to stop fighting.
Effectively a sequel to Pathfinder’s popular Wrath of the Righteous adventure path, Rival Academies provides rich opportunities for stories focused on rebuilding following a long war with the forces of the Abyss. Seeking to recover their lost history, the people of Sarkoris have invited magical schools from across Golarion to exchange knowledge, bringing together mad scientists, theater-kid spies, and fae wanderers. The book is packed with exciting new character options and quirky magic items, plus plenty of plot hooks set during the gathering and in the surrounding area, which still features plenty of dangers and secrets.
Wizards of the Coast upped the complexity of 5e a bit with the 2024 ruleset, but if you’re really looking to enrich your game with new character options and systems, you should pick up Ryoko’s Guide to the Yokai Realms. The follow-up to Loot Tavern’s spectacular Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting features rules for fighting kaiju by climbing them to access their vulnerable spots and a roster of really rich creatures for memorable encounters. It also spices up martial classes with new abilities based on their weapons that go far beyond Weapon Mastery, offers a bender class for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and provides plenty of flavorful new subclasses and species for games focused on Asian folklore.
The Ennie-winning Urban Shadows was already one of my favorite TTRPGs, but the second edition takes the game to a new level with updated playbooks and rich settings. Using the Powered by the Apocalypse system, the game is relatively rules light but packed with drama as werewolves, fae, wizards, and regular people try to find their place in a city full of secrets. A Corruption system provides a clever way to make players feel the temptation of giving into their darkest desires for power while running the risk of becoming a monster outside of their own control. The book offers great ideas for campaigns set in Chicago and Santiago, but you can go beyond those locations to tell any stories based on your favorite supernatural series.
