Roleplaying Reccomendations for A Mutant Experience (Patreon)

 Hello there! I’m Leena, head editor and lab girl for Access Labs. But you may not know that I am also a professional GM. (That’s Game Master for everyone in the audience who actually had friends in high school.) That means that I go around to different events and conventions and run tabletop roleplaying games for people, and sometimes I even get paid.

And what I have found in my many travels to thiscon and that, is that many people have an interest in having a mutant roleplaying experience, even if they aren’t necessarily a part of our little close knit mutant community.

So I’m here to provide you with a few roleplaying game recommendations that allow you to play as the mutant of your dreams, right under the nose of everyone else who is just looking to kill a dragon and loot the corpses of their own dead party members. (I’m talking about you Steve! Stop being a murder hobo!)

Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast

Look, we all know DND. It’s the OG, the one that started it all. It’s the thing that Matt Mercer popularized and Brennan Lee Mulligan perfected (I have strong opinions about this OK?) But it’s not just a way to foolishly die to obvious mimics over and over again. It’s also a game full of things that we might call mutants.

To start, there are a TON of player races that we might consider mutants. From the cat folk Tabaxi, the bird folk Aaracokra, everyones favorite queer demon icon the Tieflings, and so much more. You have Centaurs, Changelings, Dragonborn, Faeries, Minotaurs, Satyrs, Tortles, Owin, honestly I need to stop because I realized I could just keep going forever. I mean even fans of slime girls can play Plasmoids.

And that’s JUST player races. Expand to monster races, of which there are expansions to make each and every one a playable race, and you start to see naturally multi-armed demons like the Marilith, or the human that controls two bodies at once, the D’Vati. Heck there is literally just a race called “Mutant” if you go into the races of Ravnica. Not to mention plenty of homebrew races that share mutant perks.

But if that’s not your flavor you can always get your mutations the old fashioned way, botched polymorph spells and chaos magic.

Now that I have talked about the most popular TTRPG in existence, let’s talk about some of my favorite and more obscure ones.

Exalted by Onyx Path

Exalted is amazing. It is my favorite TTRPG, period. While DND draws its inspiration from Tokien, Exalted draws its inspiration from ancient epics and pure anime bullshit.

Exalted takes place in Creation, which is a time before time when larger than life myths were still real. Creation is a land of order awash in a sea of chaos called the Wyld. Travel far enough away from the center of creation and you get to the Wyld which may hold the greatest unimaginable of the chaos born Rakshasa, but also twist and mutate any who enters the lands. Yes, mutation is a CORE MECHANIC in Exalted and a major part of its world building. Many adventurers seek treasure and fame by pushing their way into the wyld, many soldiers sit at their posts in the wild defending the realm from the Fair Folk, only to find themselves changed forever. These are the people known as the Wyld-Touched.

But if getting warped by the pure unrestrained power of chaos incarnate isn’t your thing, there’s still lots of other ways you can play a mutant in exalted. There is an entire race of Beastmen and Dragon Kings which are exactly what they sound like. There are “God Blooded” mortals, who are children of gods and men who often have some mutant-like characteristics. There are the Fair Folk themselves, beings of chaos from beyond creation who prefer mutated forms to human ones simply for their beauty.

And then there is the core player class that is all about mutation and transformation, the Lunar Exalts. Lunar Exalts are given the divine power of Luna, goddess of change. All of them MUST have a mutation of some sort, whether it’s just animal ears, multi-limbs, a tail, whatever you like. In exchange for this “tell” to always be present on their body, they gain incredible shapeshifting powers, able to take on the forms of the smallest fly to the largest Kaiju. They can also shapeshift others temporarily. They also have moonsilver tattoos on their body which prevents them from being corrupted mentally, physically, or spiritually, instead turning that corruption into new forms and abilities for them to use. They are epic mutant heroes that shape the world, and they are awesome!

Oh and if that’s still not your thing, the Unconquered Sun, strongest of the gods and ruler of the second age, is just a four armed mutant as well.

God I love Exalted, you should really check it out.

To Change by Ulysses Duckler and Ewan Albright

Now both of the games I have talked about previously are fantasy epics with mutation elements. But what about games in which the mutation IS the game. Well here are a couple for you to try.

To Change is an indie roleplaying system that was first published on Itch.io and later made available in hardcopy, and its entire purpose is to tell stories about transformation much like we do here. It uses a card based system modeled off of the Tarot, and each card you draw tells you more about how you are changing, why, and how you react to it.

To Change is a very light system that is open to telling lots of different sorts of stories, with options for both single and multiplayer play. The way it ties in mutations and transformations into its action resolution mechanic is very clever, and mimics the way that characters tend to mutate at thematically relevant points in stories quite well. It also has a ton of great art in it from many artists in the transformation community, including lots of multi-limb and animal girl art. Honestly, if a second edition ever gets published I will be nagging Access to do some art for the project… lovingly.

The thing I love most about To Change, aside from its single and multiplayer variants, is that it also has systems to generate story ideas as writing prompts which I absolutely have used to write certain stories here in the Accessverse. It also has an “introspective” mode which makes you slowly write out a mutation day by day and what it means to you. I cannot professionally say that this is a replacement for therapy… buuuuuuut it’s ceratinly helped me in some of my darker times.

Transformation by Absurdist Productions

Speaking of dark times, what if you don’t want your mutation to be all sunshine and rainbows. What if you are into some real, dark, screwed up, emotional stuff? Whjat if you are more into Kafka and Chronenberg than Tolkien?

Well the tabletop game simply titled Transformation is the game for you.

Transformation is a journaling game which means it’s single-player only, but don’t knock it till you try it. Journaling games have been inspirations for fully published novels. Sometimes all you need is a little push.

The game takes place over seven in-game days of you being isolated with a companion or two. The changes start small, subtle urges, small modifications, but start ramping up quite quickly as the days go on.

You use a simple deck of cards for this game. You separate them into red cards, clubs, and spades. The clubs deck determines what changes you encounter. The spades deck determines what events happen to you as you undergo your change. The red cards are then used as skill checks to determine what happens as you encounter challenges. You also have bonds and mementos that remind you of your life before the transformation started, which can steer the game into outcomes you want.

Your goal? Either retain who you were, or become something new that is better. Your failure state? You become a monster, not just outside, but inside. While this game certainly does include its fair share of body horror, it’s clear that the horror does not come from the mutations you undergo, but rather from the horrible things you and people around you can do when pushed to extremes.

The real monster is always man.

And those are four tabletop RPGS that allow you to play as mutants. I highly recommend all of them (with an extra special heavy recommendation for exalted). Pick them up, show them to your friends, and you’ll be roleplaying as the mutant of your dreams in no time.