Indie RPGs that found their audience after HLGCon

In 2018, a four-day convention at the Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City pulled together an eclectic crowd of LARP enthusiasts, designers, and small-press publishers under one roof. High Level Games Convention, or HLGCon, positioned itself as a launchpad for indie tabletop creators, hosting workshops, escape rooms, and panels that ranged from diversity in gaming to improvisation techniques. The official event page for that 2018 convention still lists the full programme, and many of the designers who demoed prototypes on the Atlantic City floor went on to shape the indie RPG scene of the early 2020s.

The games that followed HLGCon shared a common thread: they were small, design-forward, and built to be played in a single evening or a few short sessions. They leaned on community resources, crowdfunding, and word-of-mouth from conventions, often spreading through local stores from Perth to Brisbane. Below is a quick comparison of the titles that have stuck most firmly in Aussie rotations, followed by a closer look at why each one resonated.

Game	System	Players	Session length	Tone
Heart: The City Beneath	d20-derived, custom	3–5	3–4 hours	Horror, melancholy, descent
Mörk Borg	d20-OSR, custom	2–6	1–3 hours	Apocalyptic, metal, bleak
Wanderhome	Belonging Outside Belonging	2–6	2–4 hours	Pastoral, cozy, gentle
Trophy Gold	Custom, d6 pool	1–4 (solo–co-op)	2–3 hours	Horror, exploration, tense
Coyote & Crow	Custom d12	3–6	3–5 hours	Adventure, Indigenous futurism

HLGCon's role in surfacing narrative-first design

The convention's programming gave voice to designers who had grown tired of trad fantasy tropes. Panels on inclusive worldbuilding and workshops on player-led improvisation encouraged creators to rethink dice mechanics and authority at the table. The energy carried over into online discussions, Discord servers, and the Kickstarter campaigns that funded several of the comparison entries above.

The improv-for-gamers workshop, in particular, stressed listening, agreement, and collaborative failure. Attendees walked away with tools that later showed up in games built around freeform moves and shared narrative authority. The improv workshop recap captures five practical exercises that many Aussie groups now run as warm-ups before one-shots, and those exercises fed directly into the design DNA of the next wave of indie RPGs.

Heart: The City Beneath and the dungeon crawl reinvention

Rowan, Rook and Decard released Heart in 2020, two years after HLGCon, and it quickly became a favourite with gaming groups in Melbourne and Sydney. The game keeps the dungeon-crawl loop of OSR play but reframes the dungeon as a living, bleeding wound beneath a fantasy city. Characters carry wounds and traumas that mechanically feed back into the world, turning every delve into a story about sacrifice and memory rather than loot and XP.

Australian groups have adapted the system for homebrew settings, from flooded post-colonial ports to the mines beneath Broken Hill. The game's reliance on a single d20 keeps onboarding fast, which matters for one-shots at conventions like PAX Aus and ConQuest in Adelaide. Players who previously bounced off OSR rules find Heart's clean wound and blight mechanics easier to teach to newcomers.

Mörk Borg and the metal aesthetic hitting Australian sessions

Mörk Borg arrived in 2020 from Stockholm's Ockult Örtmästare Games, pairing a doomsday setting with stark black-and-red graphic design. It spread through Australian gaming circles largely through Instagram posts and word-of-mouth at local stores, appealing to players who wanted something heavier than the standard fantasy pallette. The game runs in an evening, uses a stripped-back d20, and leans on random rolls and charts that produce cultists, omens, and terrible fates.

In Brisbane and Perth, Mörk Borg has become a regular one-shot pick at hobby nights, often run as a palate cleanser between longer campaigns. The game's third-party scene, with zines like Pirate Borg and unofficial Australian supplements, has made it easy to slot the system into local settings. Its brevity also suits the way many Aussie groups play: a few hours after work, a shared meal, and a session that ends before the trams stop running.

Wanderhome and the pastoral, cozy counterweight

Wanderhome, published by Possum Creek Games in 2021, sits at the opposite end of the design spectrum. It uses the Belonging Outside Belonging engine, which has no dice and no failure state, and instead asks players to travel a pastoral world as animal travellers. The tone is gentle, the rules are light, and the game has found a home with Australian groups looking for a calmer alternative to crunch-heavy systems.

The game resonates with players who run sessions in living rooms rather than game stores, and it has been picked up by therapy-adjacent gaming groups in Canberra and Hobart. It also travels well: a single booklet, no dice, and a setting that feels close enough to rural New South Wales or the Tasmanian coast that little adaptation is needed. For many groups, Wanderhome has become the go-to game for introducing newcomers to tabletop, especially those who have never rolled a die.

Trophy Gold and the solo journaling wave

Jesse Ross's Trophy Gold, a 2022 revision of the earlier Trophy Dark, gave solo and small-group play a serious mechanical spine. The game uses a d6 pool system where players hunt monsters in a doomed landscape, and the core loop rewards careful planning and brutal consequences. Its solo tools have made it a favourite for Australian players who travel for work, from fly-in-fly-out miners in Western Australia to academics conferencing between universities.

The journaling aspect, where players record expeditions in a shared log, has also fed into a wider Australian hobby of keeping game notes in dedicated notebooks. Many groups pair Trophy runs with a cheap notebook from a local newsagent and a thermos of tea, treating the session as both game and creative writing exercise. The system's modular hunts, each with bespoke maps and twists, make it ideal for a single evening of play.

Coyote & Crow and Indigenous-led worldbuilding

Coyote & Crow, released in 2022 by Connor Alexander, is set in a future North America shaped by Indigenous cultures and free from colonial contact. The d12 system powers adventures that feel familiar in genre but radical in setting, and it has drawn interest from Australian designers thinking about First Nations-led analogue games. Several Aboriginal-owned game projects in the Torres Strait and Victoria have cited Coyote & Crow as an influence, though the game itself is rooted in a different hemisphere.

The book's careful worldbuilding and detailed lore have sparked conversations in Australian zine scenes about what local-led science fiction and fantasy could look like. Those conversations echo the broader push for inclusive spaces that the diversity and inclusion panel recap captured back in 2018, and distributors like Aetherworks have stocked Coyote & Crow alongside local zines, making it easier for groups to buy a single copy and support a creator-led model.

Where these games thrive in Australia

The indie RPG wave that grew out of HLGCon found fertile ground in Australian local game stores, from Good Games franchises in suburban shopping centres to independent shops in Fitzroy and Newtown. Many stores now run indie RPG nights that rotate through the systems on the comparison above, and online retailers like Games Crusade ship Australia-wide with GST-inclusive pricing. The Australian Classification Board does not formally rate tabletop RPGs the way it does video games, so creators and publishers rely on community standards and clear content warnings on the page.

Conventions have also played a role: PAX Aus in Melbourne dedicates space to indie tabletop, CanCon in Canberra runs dedicated RPG streams, and ConQuest in Adelaide has hosted Trophy Gold demo sessions. Crowdfunding through BackerKit and Kickstarter remains a common launch path, and Australia Post's parcel service makes it straightforward for creators in regional areas to fulfil rewards. The combination of physical meetups, online communities, and a strong distributor network has helped these games settle into the regular rotation of Australian groups.

For anyone keen to explore these systems, the most concrete starting point is to pick one title from the comparison, message a local store like Good Games or your nearest independent hobby shop, and book a session for the coming weekend. Many shops will order a copy in if they do not have it on the shelf, and a single rulebook is usually enough to run a one-shot for three to five friends. From there, the rest is a matter of turning up, rolling dice, and seeing where the story lands.