Many tabletop RPGs distinguish themselves from the staple fantasy themes of classic Dungeons & Dragons with unconventional settings and more narrative-focused rulesets, and then there are tabletop RPGs that are simply, utterly weird. The bizarre world-building style of Death Stranding and the reality-warping powers and phenomena of Silent Hill 2 are staples of the RPGs below. These surreal tabletop RPGs, in their own ways, push the limits of what roleplaying games can be and what stories they can tell.
Dungeons & Dragons is frequently seen as the default template for fantasy roleplaying. It's a system players can use when they want to run campaigns in standard medieval worlds, with goblins and dragons to fight. There is, however, a lot of weird stuff baked into the D&D brand - the product of its many fictional inspirations and over 50 years of development. D&D has dungeon modules with crashed alien spaceships, strange monsters like mind flayers and gelatinous cubes, campaign settings like Planescape, where belief and philosophy can reshape reality, and so on.
Seen in this light, the following experimental RPGs may just be evolutions of the roleplaying entertainment pioneered by Dungeons & Dragons, rather than a complete rejection of the D&D model. These games are simply fascinating offshoots that question and shake up the longstanding traits of classic roleplaying games, like creating character sheets, exploring dungeons, randomly generated events, and rolling dice.
Surreal Tabletop RPGs - The Walls Will Swallow You
Explicitly inspired by the nonlinear novel House of Leaves, The Walls Will Swallow You is an RPG about exploring an ominous, labyrinthian house with rooms that constantly shift and change, much like a roguelike video game. During a session of The Walls Will Swallow You, players roll dice and draw playing cards from a deck to "reveal" new parts of the churning house, new discoveries, and new supernatural evils to confront or flee.
Surreal Tabletop RPGs - Delver 2e
Delver 2e is, on paper, a classic, dungeon-crawling fantasy RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, where a group of adventurers explore an underground space filled with strange magic. In the world of Delver, however, this "Dungeon" is a surreal, possibly conscious space that shifts like a dream, absorbing memories from the world above and using them to generate new rooms, treasures, and perils. The shape and form of the dungeon is generated collaboratively by players, who take turns describing individual aspects of the labyrinth during certain gameplay phases. Delver 2e player characters might enter the Dungeon by falling asleep in the branches of a tree or opening the wrong door in the right building, and they can choose to brave the Dungeon for reasons ranging from the pursuit of power to remembering what was lost.
Surreal Tabletop RPGs - Glitch
Glitch, a tabletop RPG by Jenna Katerin Moran, is a spinoff of her earlier roleplaying game Nobilis, a phantasmagorical, Sandman-esque RPG about godlike Nobles who personify fundamental concepts of reality. Glitch, in contrast, is an RPGs where players take on the role of metaphysical abominations, bitter enemies of the Nobles from Nobilis striving to break reality and end the world... Until, to quote the Glitch Kickstarter page, "they realized that was dumb."
Each Glitch roleplaying session is essentially about creatures of void and paradox who've given up their ambitions to destroy reality in favor of just living their lives - solving mysteries, doing cool things with their unnatural powers, learning to appreciate Creation and Existence, etc. The mechanics of Glitch, much like Nobilis, don't involve the use of any dice. Player characters have abilities that let them alter, shape, or bend reality. If an ability is at a certain level of strength, a player can accomplish certain tasks automatically, or they can invoke certain "Costs" in order to accomplish tasks beyond their limits.
Surreal Tabletop RPGs - Don't Rest Your Head
Don't Rest Your Head, an early publication of Evil Hat Productions, is a fever dream of an RPG that mixes Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Alice In Wonderland, and Fallen London (although Fallen London came later). Player characters have severe cases of insomnia and have been drawn into the Mad City, a supernatural world - or perhaps just another layer of normal reality - filled with strange Nightmare creatures straight out of a Salvador Dali painting. To survive the dangers of this Mad City, player characters must, at all costs, avoid falling asleep and avoid losing their sanity; however, every time players use a mundane ability or a supernatural talent, they increase their Exhaustion or Madness score, respectively, drawing them closer to doom.
Surreal Tabletop RPGs - Normality
Free-to-play tabletop RPG Normality, frequently compared to House of Leaves, is set in a 21st-century America as shattered and disrupted as the setting of Death Stranding, where everyone has been driven to madness by a war waged with experimental, psychic superweapons. To reflect this disjointedness, the text of the Normality game book resembles the scribblings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist. There are sentences that are faded, misaligned, upside down, or blotted out with marker; character sheets where players need to fill out traits for narrative aspects such as "Sex," "Drugs," and "Rock & Roll"; and extracts of hard-to-parse fiction with blank spaces players are encouraged to fill in with their own imaginations.