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UK Games Expo 2025 – The RPG Report

by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn on July 4, 2025

I’ve gone through my journal of places I went, people I saw and my favourite non-game experiences at UK Games Expo 2025, but I’m saving the best for last.

I like playing and talking about board games and was covering that beat as Mike wasn’t able to make the Expo, but my heart belongs to roleplaying games. I had some lovely long chats with people at different stalls and thought I’d share any scoops and updates here:

Pelgrane Press

It’s always nice having a catch up with Cat from Pelgrane at their stand. The company’s one which is small but has grown a bit, adding Robin Laws as their creative director.

We discussed Robin’s arrival, something which I was surprised wasn’t already the case. Something of particular interest was how Robin’s looking to cultivate talent and run workshops. The industry’s full of and encourages a lot of talent who have been in around for years. They’re all getting older, so a focus of Robin and Pelgrane is to look into legacy and what can be done to get new voices to the table.

Fear Itself, from their site as I didn’t have time to photograph their stall.

13th Age – The second edition PDF is imminent and looking to print in August.

Trail of Cthulhu – The second edition’s manuscript is done and they’re evaluating feedback. They’re hoping for the end of this year or start of next. The screen apparently looks gorgeous.

The Yellow King – The Spanish collaborators who handle layout are being brought in to handle Cassilda’s Song’s layout. It’s looking like it may end up being four books, like the core Yellow King.

Fear Itself – Cat mentioned that it doesn’t get enough love and that the Book of Unremitting Horror and Ocean Game are some grand products for it. They’re still working on the recently completed Backerkit and putting together an adventure collection.

Night’s Black Agents – There’s a Threat Profiles book being worked on. As ever, it’s difficult to live up to the Dracula Dossier, and this antagonist book sounds like it’ll be a really nice tool. Like Quest’s Character Book or iHunt, this is one which doesn’t focus just on types of monster, but profiles of individuals. This makes a lot of sense for something like NBA.

That’s the rundown of progress on existing games, and as ever with Pelgrane, it’s a long process, so we’ll see how it all goes in the next year. What about new games?

Foot Patrol (originally nicknamed ‘Shire’s Out’) is something with a bit more of an all ages focus than a lot of Pengrane’s output. This is a standalone Gumshoe mystery game which sounds charming and provisionally is looking to crowdfund in the future.

Ballad Hunters (originally Shanty Hunters) is about folk songs which have come to life. Investigators have to determine whether they are a threat and how to use the material in the song to solve them. The style is intended to be on a lay-flat book like a songbook. Again, this should be crowdfunding at some point in the future.

Page Turners is mostly written. It’s a Gumshoe One-to-One game, with one player and one GM. I admitted that while I have digital a copy of Cthulhu Confidential, I’ve chickened out of running it so far. The core book for Page Turners look to cover different genres, and is easily expandable.

One of the protagonists of Page Turners.

Paragon Blade is another One-to-One game, set in a fantasy world with three adventures for three specific characters: a barbarian, a sorcerer and a rogue. It’s about three quarters done and mainly needs indexing.

Pelgrane Press can be found here and if you want any development updates, you can check out their See Page XX articles.

Soulmuppet Publishing

The Soulmuppet stall is always gorgeous, with several books being shown off with lovely displays. Mol from Soulmuppet gave me a whistle-stop tour while my normally incredibly trad RPG friends were drooling over Inevitable.

When the Walls Fall is a game in a small folded booklet, where you build a dice tower and watch it fall to build a ruined city. I picked up a copy but have yet to read it.

Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are gorgeous system-agnostic books which allow you to build a garden and library, respectively. The worlds made are weird and ever-changing, embracing tables and anti-canon approaches.

Orbital Blues’ expansion Afterburn was being shown off with new ships, adventures and a VHS tape box of adventures. The display for Orbital Blues is always surrounded by charmingly analog technology.

There was a brief detour for a rant about crowdfunding after my RPG friends had brought up another larger company selling books which they hadn’t fulfilled to backers. I’ll spare you all the details, but tread very carefully with that sort of thing, ideally keeping everyone in the loop, arranging potential pickups and so on.

Paint the Town Red had a lovely display, but was not on sale yet. The digital version is imminently due to be released which is great as it’s still a while until Interview with the Vampire Season Three comes out.

Later in the year there’s a plan for something called Doomspiral, which Mol sold to me as, “defy fate, fight gods”. It’s a Soulsborne-type game by Nick Spence with a die pool to use for stamina, as a resource for players to spend. It’s probably going to be two books totalling roughly the size of Inevitable.

There have been a lot of RPGs which capture the vibe of Souls games, but this is one which takes death and respawning into account. They’re hoping to crowdfund it in September. Further information can be found here.

Modiphius Entertainment

Modiphius and their giant Pipboy were back again, and had a little time to chat about what’s happening with them.

Hardwar is a mech skirmish game which they acquired the license for and are going to be crowdfunding later in the year. Quick update, it’s live now.

Heroes of Might & Magic was funding at the time of the con and the RPG version of Cohors Cthulhu being fulfilled. Dreams and Machines is going to get a new setting and campaign, but little more was shared about that.

I’m not a big Discworld fan, but I asked how that was going. The RPG’s manuscripts have been approved by the Pratchett estate and layout is nearing completion. Modiphius are hoping that the PDFs will be out shortly after their pledge manager finishes. They have a close relationship with the estate and after they release the book to retail, they have other things they want to do. Unfortunately I couldn’t pry more out of them about that.

Black Armada

Josh and Becky from Black Armada are always fun to talk to and they had Nick Bate with them, too.

Lovecraftesque Second Edition took up most of their display and looks gorgeous now it’s finished. They said that board gamers have been intrigued by the box and kids loved playing with the UV torch and all the hidden elements in the books.

First up, I spoke with Nick about what’s going on with him.

He’s almost done with Against Time & Death, even meeting the project’s artist for the first time at the Expo. Folks will remember that this was one of the ‘hot games of 2025’ predictions from Dragonmeet last year. It’s currently in editing and working to fulfil on schedule.

Nick’s next big game he’s working on is called Speed Demons. It’s a mech racing game at the end of the world. Inspirations include Fast & Furious and Matrix Revolutions. In a dark apocalyptic future, people resolve their conflicts by mech racing, which is a conflict resolution method I think we can all get behind.

Currently it uses some Forged in the Dark ideas, but changes things up. One aspect is that downtime actually increases your pressure as the world’s so grim, then you blow off steam by racing.

Josh Fox took some time to talk about his big new game: Ex Tenebris.

I admit I’d not paid a huge amount of attention to it as someone who 1) was done with Warhammer 40k back in the 90’s and 2) is fully Brindle-pilled and saw him saying about trying to ‘fix’ some of the issues he had with Carved from Brindlewood games. In a short amount of time, Josh turned me round on both these points.

Ex Tenebris is a gothic space horror RPG, where the grim dark future where there was only war has changed. The endless was has stopped, but there are still remnants out there. Demons, sorcerers, and an underfunded government agency who have to deal with it. The concept was a, “Less fashy Dark Heresy” which as someone who’s played Dark Heresy, I can entirely get behind.

Players carry out investigations and can go down ‘shadow pathways’ a kind of metacurrency which can give bonuses, but drive you down a dark path as the campaign goes on.

The influences from Carved from Brindlewood games are clear in the mystery-based investigations and clue-gathering. What I should have expected, was that there are elements from Lovecraftesque which are also being used here. The GM ‘leaps to conclusions’ like in Lovecraftesque, but in this case it’s the bad result if the players fail their roll to theorise about what happened. The core mechanic is the part that’s in flux, and I love that a game’s mechanics can be worked on with whether you roll d6’s or d10’s to do things being less of a priority.

The game will have multiple conspiracies as multi-investigation mysteries. Players will also be able to use downtime to look into them, along with linking individual mysteries to the overall conspiracy.

Hopefully the game will crowdfund later this year. Black Armada are some of the best creators who use crowdfunding campaigns. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses and well done Josh (and Nick!) for getting me on board with it.

Rowan Rook & Decard

I generally leave Black Armada and Rowan Rook & Decard until last as I always have a nice time chatting with them. I know they’re always going to be my jam as far as games go, and they should spend their time pitching to people who haven’t already bought their games. That said, this year I left RRD a bit late and was almost out the door when I got hit by Hurricane Grant.

Grant Howitt’s got a magnificent presence and runs on an enviable amount of energy at conventions. He showed off his rummage box which was a new thing they were trying this year. After having experienced folks at other conventions selling miniatures which people would gather up from a selection and then the staff would eyeball a price for, they decided to do that with old RPG stock. It’s a fun idea and Grant explained how entertaining it was watching (and being) an English person with no real experience of haggling.

Voidheart Symphony has approached completion in a backwards-seeming way. Layout is done, editing is next. This is what happens when you get the person doing the layout also doing the art. Mina’s layout work is gorgeous and something I’ve used in process design talks at my day job before.

Heart: Ways & Means is nearing crowdfunding and Grant was proud he’d only added one bard. It can be followed on Backerkit.

Hollows is in final editing. There’s also a quickstart on their Itch page.

Rowan Rook & Decard have also announced Salt, the follow up to Spire and Heart, this time set outside of the titular Spire. Players will get to sail the seas and see what’s out there in the wider world.

Grant mentioned that he wants to play with the Havoc Engine again, given how well it worked with Eat the Reich.

With that, my time at the convention was over, I had a coach to rush to (via the wrong door) and hopefully, I’ll catch up with each of these companies over time, whether at conventions or outside of them.