Colby

If you join one of Kenny'sgames, you're in for a real treat. He's a friend of mine, he's played in my games, and I've played in his; clearly I'm biased. That said, what you get from Kenny's games is incredibly thorough world building, a deep understanding of the game, and the sportsmanship to keep everything fun. I think that's the most important thing I have to say in this review; any GM can know the rules and have a cool setting. Not everyone brings the grace, optimism, and an earnest drive to create fun which means that his games will start with a bang and then STAY fun.

Played as a sandbox with player-driven goals, Rime of the Frostmaiden can be a fantastic adventure, especially if the randomly-assigned secrets are used and taken seriously. However, if you run it directly from the book with no tweaks, you'll find it a disjointed and anticlimactic time. The various chapters have very little to do with each other, even more so than in most WotC-authored campaigns, so it is up to the DM to link everything together. The book also seems to assume that everyone playing the adventure is a huge fan of the Legend of Drizzt books, which in my experience is not a reasonable one. Game balance and difficulty are almost as disjointed as the narrative, as some early encounters are punishingly difficult, and have a tendency to wipe even veteran parties. Meanwhile, the themes of survival horror on one hand an a Ghibli-esque sense of wonder in the natural world clash with each other, and your DM would do well to choose one or the other. Complaints aside, some of the smaller encounters and adventures which make up Rime of the Frostmaiden are excellent, and if you're a DM looking for inspiration or adventures to slot into your own campaign, this will be a fantastic addition to your collection!

A flawed adventure with a strong emotional core, Call of the Netherdeep is going to be what your DM and players make of it. Overall, it tends to be a bit of a railroad, although the individual sections of track are pretty good on their own, with one notable exception in the form of a chapter of travel early in the adventure. Most importantly, a rival adventuring party is an amazing addition IF the players take them seriously. The same goes for Alyxian, the figure at the heart of the adventure. If your players make things intentionally complicated with the rival party and Alyxian, you will find incredibly memorable moments. If they treat both like additional bad guys to be beaten, it will be a lackluster adventure with a couple of good dungeons.

I'm going to take a risk and put Delta Green's biggest flaw up front: like many TTRPG systems on the market right now, it trades on the strength of its setting more than making major innovations in game design. If you know Call of Cthulhu or any of the other BRP-based games out there, you won't find very much to surprise you; minor tweaks make combat faster (and even more deadly, if that's possible) and the Bonds system is good enough to steal for other TTRPG systems. Again, where Delta Green shines is in its setting, themes, and style. Every page absolutely drips with atmosphere, and the way it treats the Lovecraft mythos is unlike anything else. Where Call of Cthulhu shares its sense of slow-burning investigation punctuated by brutal violence, Delta Green injects a sense of realism by putting you in the shoes of a person you could meet at Starbucks. Where D&D and similar games give you the chance to slay the monster, the best you can hope for in Delta Green is to cover up the monster's tracks. Delta Green is different from any other TTRPG you'll ever play. There are no easy answers, no big victories, and no comfortable space between yourself and your character. If you're a fan of the X-Files, True Detective, or Annihilation; and if you have a strong stomach and an urge to plumb the extremes of human experience, then give it a try!

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium is another iteration of the core system used in the Conan RPG and Star Trek Adventures, and if you're thinking of trying it I have to advise that you be ready for something different from any other TTRPG. Its core systems manage to work at such an incredible breadth of scales, from a pair of opponents dueling with knives to full-scale warfare between major powers played over the course of years, the system somehow manages to adjudicate everything with a very simple set of a few dice rolls. The downside of this is that the system can fell highly abstracted, and requires a great deal of judgement calls from both the GM and players. But groups that are willing to put the fiction first will find it an incredibly rewarding system, as it tends to step out of the way and allow you to tell your story the way you want!