With the release of Monument of Triumph, Destiny 2’s story has finally come to some semblance of a conclusion. Now that the limited-time event is officially live, players are jumping into the game to celebrate a final hurrah, and pay their respects to a game that has been getting steady updates since 2017 yet won’t be getting any more presumably ever again. For many, this feels like the end of their respective Guardians’ stories–which is such a shame, as the game’s overarching story was just beginning to get really good. But this doesn’t have to be the end.
Destiny has always felt like a series of campfire stories. Its fantastical tales are filled with grand heroics, incomprehensible horrors, and cliffhanger conclusions that leave a rapt audience desperately wondering what’s supposed to happen next. Destiny’s stories are also told communally, first framed by a team of multiple writers and then repeated over and over again by excited fans recounting their own experiences.
These retellings often recraft the original tales, adding newly learned information or omitting details that no longer matter. This makes for stories that seem to continuously evolve, simultaneously becoming more grand and more personal over time. But despite the series’ penchant for weaving bold, new narratives, they are never treated as so important that they are eternal. So many of Destiny’s stories have disappeared entirely via the Vault, much like a legend that continues to only exist in the memories of those who were around to see the myth first come into being in the first place. In that respect, Destiny reminds me a whole lot of playing a very different type of experience: tabletop role-playing games.
Almost every TTRPG encourages its players to collaborate in the storytelling, like a group of kids around a campfire all chiming in to add more spooky details to the speaker’s scary story. This makes them a fantastic framework for the types of stories told in episodic live-service games, like Destiny 2, Warframe, or Apex Legends. So if you’re bummed that the story of your Guardian is coming to an end, it might be time to contact your friends and make sure this isn’t the last tale you all tell together.
But where to start? While there are plenty of TTRPGs out there that can help scratch that mythical sci-fi itch if the genre is all that’s important to you–Austin Walker’s Realis, for example, as well as Evil Hat’s Scum and Villainy and the Motherboard campaign frame for Darrington Press’ Daggerheart. However, there are four RPGs that I think specifically work best for delivering a squad-focused, loot-centric, mythical sci-fi action-adventure experience. Those games are LIGHT: Beacon Edition, Songs for the Dusk, The Brightest Things We Know, and Dungeons & Destiny.
“I’ve been a huge Destiny fan since the alpha,” tabletop RPG designer and LIGHT: Beacon Edition creator Spencer Campbell told me. “I remember playing that, [then] calling my cousin–who I played an unhealthy number of hours of Borderlands with–and telling him that this was something special. Fast forward to 2020, I was now playing an unhealthy number of hours of Destiny with that same cousin. I was also playing a lot of TTRPGs–something that he hadn’t experienced. I asked him if he would be interested in playing one if it were like Destiny, and he said, ‘Yeah.’
“I got this drive in me to try and capture the feeling of Destiny on the tabletop,” Campbell continued. “I knew my cousin would bounce off of the more popular TTRPG systems at the time–especially [Dungeons & Dragons] 5E–so I needed to do something different. And so, LIGHT came to be. So while there are a million things about Destiny that I love–the setting, frenetic gameplay, badass powers–my biggest driving force at the time was to show my video-game-playing cousin that TTRPGs could be just as fun, if done right.”
The original LIGHT was structured to be a copy and paste of how Destiny works mechanically but in TTRPG form. However, the newer LIGHT: Beacon Edition adds more elemental-themed classes–the decay-centric Wither, chaos-focused Fractal, and cold-aligned Shiver–to complement Destiny’s original three elements–the fire-focused Solar, lightning-focused Arc, and gravity-centric Void–which are packaged into the Pyre, Volt, and Nether classes in the TTRPG. With this change, Campbell opted to create a game with six classes rather than follow Destiny 2’s example of giving the three original classes several distinct subclasses.
“I moved away [from mimicking Destiny exactly] in the Beacon Edition for a couple reasons,” Campbell said. “First of all, [LIGHT] was too 1-to-1. This game was supposed to be a love letter and it was feeling more like a carbon copy in many ways. Second, I tend to prefer simplicity in my games, so cutting it down made sense. Finally, I prefer focus in my games. LUMEN–which is the system that didn’t exist at the time, but would be made from my time designing LIGHT–is about giving you a very flavorful class with a curated suite of powers. If I had all these different possible combinations [with different subclasses], the feeling of focus would go away. Instead, giving six classes that have intentionality behind their design was a much better direction to go.”
LIGHT: Beacon Edition is perhaps the most rules-lite (heh) RPG for a Destiny-like experience thanks to its LUMEN system, giving you and your friends just enough to run a game but leaving a lot open to how the story is framed and told. In this RPG, you play as an immortal guardian known as a Beacon powered by light, and you’re tasked with going out on missions throughout the solar system to defeat enemies and find powerful loot. It’s still a TTRPG, meaning everyone at the table is collaborating on the narrative, but much of the storytelling legwork in LIGHT: Beacon Edition, like the lore, is up to you. This is very freeing, letting you add essentially whatever you want to LIGHT–which can be Destiny, but can also be your own world. However, if you want a bit more structure, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
If you want a system that gives you rules for a narrative framing so that it’s easier to make each session feel like an episode in a season of a television show, and takes place in a world that has a more firmly established lore that is Destiny-like but unique all its own, then Songs for the Dusk is for you. The RPG uses the Forged in the Dark system, best known as the blueprint for Blades in the Dark, but reframes the system’s focus on completing heists/assassinations and building a criminal empire to instead focus on going on strike missions for loot and building up a community for your fellow “striders.”
“In spite of [Blades in the Dark’s] focus on shadowy criminals, I don’t think the Forged in the Dark system is all that grim in tone–frankly, the stress system feels downright optimistic at times,” tabletop game designer and Songs for the Dusk creator Kavita Poduri told me. “But the aspect I found most compelling is its focus on episodic storytelling. The mission-downtime cycle excels both at developing high-intensity action sequences and at providing opportunities for character expression. People love expressing their characters if you give them half a chance–it’s the reason half of them even play–and most Forged in the Dark games, Songs for the Dusk included, provide at least two after every mission.”
She continued: “Forged games also tend to produce characters that have a kind of scrappiness to them, which suits Songs’ tone. I once heard someone say he liked Destiny the most when it made him feel small in a big world. An important corollary of that feeling is the sense that, with the right combination of cleverness and teamwork, you can survive–maybe even triumph–in that world anyway. This is the feeling of scrambling for reloads and getting down team buffs to tear through a raid boss’ final stand, or trying to chase down a teammate’s Ghost during a Grandmaster Nightfall, and it’s a key part of why victories in Destiny feel so triumphant. The desperation that players feel searching for the right combination of stress, abilities, and teamwork to save a town or escape a crumbling ruin helps, I hope, to produce a similar kind of triumph.”
I love the Forged in the Dark system, and subsequently Songs for the Dusk is the Destiny-like I most want to pick up and play. Though I haven’t had the chance to play this RPG specifically, I have played a lot of Forged in the Dark games and appreciate the way that system utilizes classes that are highly niche to their specific purpose to promote teamwork within the squad, gives the Game Master progress clocks to keep the action rolling, and builds stress and trauma into character creation to make interestingly flawed heroes. Some of my best characters have been made in Forged in the Dark games, and two of my favorite top 10 TTRPG stories that I’ve been a part of have been in campaigns that were Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy.
“A lot of [Song for the Dusk’s] techniques are drawn from the broader pool of narrative RPGs: turn players’ questions about the setting back on them and make their answers true, allow everyone to contribute to discussions about tone and direction, talk to each other about what kinds of missions you want to go on and what themes you want to explore, etc,” Poduri said. “My favorite, though, comes early in the process: the community. At the beginning of every Songs for the Dusk campaign, you’re asked to create the science-fantasy community where you live, and to invent NPCs tied to various parts of it: the mysterious robot who helps with the farming, the friendly gene-modded animal person who runs the scrap shop, the spirit who helps you develop new machines. People love these communities; they love getting the chance to develop the context for their characters as much as the history, and just about any time a new set of players comes back from a session they’re almost more enthusiastic to talk about the weird NPCs they made than about their own characters.”
Like the other games in this article, Songs for the Dusk has a narrative set-up that should be familiar to anyone who has played Destiny. You play as empowered heroes known for going out into the world after a terrible cataclysm destroyed almost everything. The RPG keeps the conflict very human, though–you and your squad explore the world in search of old technology and contend with the politics that continue to linger in the world, not go into space to fight alien robotic hiveminds.
“On an immediate level, I wanted to evoke both the technical and the fantastic, the sense that there were a dozen different ways to push the limits of possibility,” Poduri said. “But in terms of feeling, I was aiming for a mix of vibrancy, awe, and solemnity. The first Destiny game was incredible at communicating a strange mix of melancholy and wonder. So much had been lost, and there was so much to do, and things were not good or safe, but look, look, isn’t this world amazing? Isn’t it brighter and stranger than you might ever have dreamed? The artists–Ashanti Fortson, Annie Johnston-Glick, and Taiga Runnel–did a fantastic job at communicating this, in my opinion; I’d be hard-pressed to find better.”
Because of the nature of Forged in the Dark, downtime is caked into Songs for the Dusk, putting a greater emphasis on role-playing your characters through scenarios where they’re relaxing, talking to NPCs, and building up a community. While these elements can certainly be played in other RPGs, Songs for the Dusk seems to handle them the best by making them a central part of the episodic gameplay loop, cultivating calming lulls to better amplify the action-packed highs. This is probably the RPG you want if connecting with beloved NPCs and talking about random stuff with your friends in central hubs is your favorite part of games like Destiny.
If you and your friend group already play TTRPGs, there’s a good chance y’all play the biggest game in the space: Dungeons & Dragons. And while branching out and trying new systems and RPGs is good for both Game Masters and players, it can also be tricky to convince people to move away from what they’re already comfortable with. If you like Destiny and you also like D&D (specifically 5E or 5.5E), then the RPG for you is clear: Dungeons & Destiny.
Similar to Star Wars 5E–which reframes the swords and sorcery of D&D 5E to fit the blasters, lightsabers, and Force powers of Star Wars–Dungeons & Destiny flavors the classes, items, species, and magic of Wizards of the Coast’s famed TTRPG to emulate the Destiny universe.
Helmed by Velvet Fang, Dungeons & Destiny is a massive rework of an already wargame-heavy system, meaning combat and loot is the main focus. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell interesting stories with it–there are plenty of actual-play podcasts out there that showcase how you can use D&D to tell a compelling tale–but there’s little within the rules that promote that aspect of play. You and your group have to be the ones to bring the narrative framing.
With Dungeons & Destiny, you’re getting a lot. There are a ton of third-party resources out there devoted to telling sci-fi stories in D&D, and the Dungeons & Destiny RPG has a free player’s guidebook to help new players learn to make a character and start playing, a free architect guidebook to help fledgling Game Masters learn to run Dungeons & Destiny, and a free monster bestiary, map pack, and token pack so that you can start running combat encounters immediately. You’ll still need to familiarize yourself with the rules of D&D 5E to run this game, meaning this RPG has the most prep time of any game listed in this article if you’re brand new to playing TTRPGs. But like we said before: If you’re already playing D&D, you essentially already understand how Dungeons & Destiny works. If that’s you, this might be the easiest of the four games to pick up.
The first edition of Dungeons & Destiny launched in 1.0 back in 2018, making it one of the earliest Destiny-like TTRPGs and the oldest in this article. The new Dungeons & Destiny 2E is currently being playtested, which will update the game with more classes, feats, species, and loot.
Finally, like Songs for the Dusk, The Brightest Things We Know is also built on the Blades in the Dark system. However, unlike Songs for the Dusk, The Brightest Things We Know hasn’t launched in 1.0 yet. This isn’t unusual–lots of RPGs remain in an early-access playtest state for years prior to their official release. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try The Brightest Things We Know, though; at the very least, since it’s not finished yet, it’s free.
“[Blades in the Dark] is a system I have a lot of fondness with, and have a lot of fun playing around with and altering, because I feel like it’s made of a lot of individual parts you can very easily exchange and alter,” tabletop game designer and The Brightest Things We Know creator Briar Sovereign told me. “My big pet peeve with a lot of FITD-based games is that they don’t change enough! It’s a great kit, and a great foundation. But it’s one best used with some of your own pieces swapped in, because Blades is a very specific game for a very specific setting and feel.”
In The Brightest Things We Know, you play as–as Sovereign describes them–“star-blessed demigods” who have risen from the dead after the arrival of a great alien being known as the Visitor. While the stories you tell are up to you, the crux of the setting makes the past of these demigods the main mystery of each story, with players trying to do all they can to protect their allies before their god-like powers diminish. It feels very coded to the starting plotline of Destiny 2 back when it first launched in 2017.
“TBTWK was pretty directly borne out of games like Destiny and Warframe–these sprawling, complicated sci-fantasy settings full of factions and weird superhumans with mysterious pasts, both of which were games I had played a lot of but had eventually given up playing for various reasons,” Sovereign said. “Nothing in the TTRPG space really satisfied me when it came to what I’d liked about them, so I took my own spin on it.”
They continued: “In The Brightest Things We Know, every mission you as characters go on, the group designs and assembles for themselves out of little pieces of mission briefings they’ve collected–so you’re always working together to figure out what kind of story you’re going to tell before you even touch the ground. I think my favorite part of making and telling stories with other people like this is the surprises it brings. There’s always going to be some angle or incredible little detail that you never would have thought of that someone else brings to the table instead, and that’s probably one of the most exciting things about tabletop games for me.”
I won’t sit here and pretend these games are a perfect fix–TTRPGs are a completely different medium to video games, so even if these four RPGs feel like Destiny, they’re not exactly the same. But I know that there are people who enjoyed Baldur’s Gate or Dragon Age and then went on to find a lot of joy in Dungeons & Dragons; that people who enjoyed Alien Isolation and Dead Space went on to love Mothership; that people who enjoyed Citizen Sleeper and Mass Effect went on to appreciate Scum and Villainy. You’ll find a lot of similarities between your favorite video games and certain tabletop games if you’re just willing to give the latter a chance, and Destiny specifically happens to have inspired a handful of great-looking games. So if you’re not quite ready to see your Guardian’s journey come to an end, and you want to keep experiencing their story through the lens of a campfire-like tale that you and your friends tell together, don’t fret. Go grab some dice.
