Last month, Legendkeeper paid a trip to the UK Games Expo: the largest tabletop gaming convention in the UK. UKGE 2025 featured some really exciting tabletop RPGs from a variety of creators, each of which could provide the perfect canvas for you to start building your own worlds and stories in. Here’s some of the best:
Salvage Union by Leyline Press
The world of Salvage Union is a post-apocalyptic wasteland wherein players craft and control their own mechs, cobbled together from whatever bits and pieces they can find. Human society is almost entirely restricted to enormous settlements, with the players operating outside of these settlements via their Union Crawler - a gigantic mechanical moving structure containing a community that’s entirely free from the control of repressive corporations.
The main conceit of Salvage Union is the opportunity to create and pilot your own mechs, all whilst exploring a rustic wild west, where freedom and community are its rarest and greatest resources. The Salvage Union core book provides just enough background and context for you to construct your own original settlements, mechs, scenarios and storylines. Alternatively, there is also a series of setting books designed to add different unique flavours to the game: from mutant horror to espionage noir.
Eat the Reich by Rowan, Rook and Decard
Eat the Reich is a highly stylised, incredibly violent roleplaying game about being vampire commandos on a mission to suck out all of Hitler’s blood. Players are literally coffin-dropped directly onto the front-lines, with the goal of cutting through waves of Nazi soldiers in order to reach the Fuhrer’s stronghold. The entire storyline takes place over three sessions played via a rules-lite system, with pre-set characters who have the opportunity to improve and advance throughout the campaign.
Though Eat the Reich has a set storyline built into it, there is room for worldbuilding and storytelling beyond this. The concept and setting of Eat the Reich are so strong that they provide the right foundations for your own Nazi hunting, anti-facist campaigns starring vampire commandos - perhaps even your own original crew of blood-sucking characters, faced with an entirely new set of challenges to overcome.
King Arthur Pendragon: 6th Edition by Chaosium
Mediaeval-themed roleplaying games are a dime-a-dozen, but none are quite as unique as the King Arthur Pendragon series. Whilst the majority of RPGs using this setting tend to favour a more fantastical approach, Pendragon prefers to take a more realistic stance: swapping out dragon fighting and goblin slaying for knightly duties and estate management. In many ways, Pendragon is more of a mediaeval life-simulator game than a straight-forward adventure RPG, with campaigns taking place over several years and players able to start their own families.
Pendragon 6th Edition is the perfect roleplaying game to build your very own settlements, villages, towns and kingdoms in, each with their own troubles and problems for your players’ knights to help solve. Stories work organically in Pendragon, with the choices your players make having consequences that can echo through multiple generations, if you want to run campaigns that feel epic in a timeline sense instead of grand adventures.
Dreams & Machines by Modiphius
At first glance, this science fiction roleplaying game might appear to be a slight reworking of the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn: a lush, primal post-apocalypse caused by a rampaging army of aggressive robots. However, Dreams & Machines is an entirely unique setting thanks to its more positive approach to the post-apocalyptic genre, wherein players are encouraged to form communities and work together to better their current world, instead of mourning a lost past. Though there certainly is danger aplenty to be found in Dreams and Machines - from once dormant mechs to rival factions - the game’s storylines trend more towards hope over fear.
Dreams and Machines has plenty of space for original worldbuilding and storytelling, with the Player’s Guide and Gamemasters Guide providing an open but sturdy framework to construct your own ideas on. Worldbuilders are free to create their own settlements and factions for their players to discover, as well as adding their own lore to the history of Dreams and Machines’ world, to shape it in whatever direction works for their version.
Mothership by Tuesday Knight Games
Mothership is a tabletop RPG that’s clearly been inspired by classic science fiction and horror films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Event Horizon. Players take the role of a crew hired to perform all manner of incredibly dangerous jobs across the galaxy, from excavating derelict spacecraft to surveying uncharted alien worlds. Beyond the usual hazards associated with these sorts of assignments, players will also likely encounter some kind of terrifying phenomena or creature that their employers will certainly not help them survive.
This is a TTRPG that’s entirely designed to enable your most bone-chilling and devious sci-fi horror stories, which is most evident in its rules on Stress and Panic. Player characters acquire Stress whenever they’re put in a stressful situation (obviously), the more Stress a character has the more likely they are to experience a Panic event: whose effects can vary, but are always bad. If you’re a fan of the aforementioned classic sci fi and horror films, then Mothership is a game master’s and world builder’s dream - providing a strong foundation with which to tell your very own Alien-esque stories.