What makes an RPG heavy metal?

17 Sep, 2026

Lots of RPGs describes themselves as heavy metal. Today I will dare the task known to be impossible, but which every metalhead is drawn inexorably to do: I will decree what is and is not truly metal.

Who am I to speak? I’ve never read a biography of Dave Mustaine, I’ve never seen the Big Four live, and I wasn’t born yet when a bat was orally decapitated in Des Moines. I don’t listen exclusively to metal; my musical tastes are diverse. Here is what I have done. I’ve spent a lot of late weekday nights at dive bars and clubs to see small metal bands play $20 shows. I moshed to Theft of the Hammer by Brotherhood of Metal at my wedding. As I write this, my wife is behind me sewing an Alien Weaponry back patch onto her battle vest. I’ve suffered a concussion that left me dazed for two weeks and permanently wrecked my left knee and my right wrist in mosh pits. My credentials are sweat, pain, and sacrifice.

Metal 101

If you already know what metal is, skip this part. But some people don’t know. At the end of the 1960s, heavy metal crawls out of the genres of psych rock, acid rock, and early prog rock. It gets heavy distortion from the blues. People argue about who came up with the name “heavy metal” but the name sticks because it’s accurate. It’s heavy, because heavy means serious. It’s metal because it sounds metallic: electric guitars and Moog synths scream and chug like mad machines. It’s a genre of youthful rebellion, like a lot of genres when they get started. It borrows clothes and actions from other rebellious subcultures: the denim battlejacket and mosh pit come from punks, leather from bikers, BDSM gear from Rob Halford’s favorite nightclubs. Corpse paint is originally from shock rockers, but it’s Norwegian black metal that really gets into the corpse paint. The sign of the horns comes from Ronnie James Dio, who gets it from his grandmother making the traditional Italian mano cornuta gesture to ward off bad luck. Dio also doubles down on the fantasy themes that have shown up in metal from the start.

In the late 70s, heavy metal is reinvigorated by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. In the 80s and 90s metal has a brief moment of mainstream popularity in the US. Thrash metal emerges, powerful and more aggressive than the NWOBHM but not too alienatingly extreme like some other genres. If you know a guy who likes metal, they probably like thrash. The music spreads around the world, and metal bands continue to experiment and cook up new subgenres. Black metal plays even faster, with a focus on instruments over vocals and raw recordings over polished ones. Death metal turns raspy vocals into growling. Metal gets mixed and fused with every other genre known to humanity. It’s not a popular genre in the US today, but heavy metal remains widely popular in the Nordic and Latin American countries.

Don’t confuse heavy metal with punk. Punk is a different rock-spawned musical subculture that focuses on simple, accessible music, DIY ethos, and politics. Punk and metal are artistic opposites in a lot of ways, but sometimes people mix them in genres like crossover thrash or metalcore.

A typical heavy metal band has 1-2 guitarists, a lead vocalist, a base, and a drummer. Lead singers often play guitar as well. Other instruments like keyboards, bagpipes, organs, and violins show up, especially in folk metal. It’s rare but there are some notable bands with backup singers and even full-time stage dancers. There’s a lot of emphasis on the skill of the guitarist and drummer.

A short list of popular genres of metal: Classic, speed, NWOBHM, folk, thrash, power, death, melodeath, black, prog, groove, neoclassical, doom, sludge. I’m not going to bother linking to examples. They’re all on Wikipedia if you’re interested. Yes, there are more genres I didn’t list.

But that’s just a story about how we got here. What is the true nature of metal?

The Heart of Heavy Metal

By three truths do I know metal:

1. Metal is emotionally intense. You can hear it in the voices and feel it in your bones. To find this emotional intensity, heavy metal draws on topics like war, religion, torture, transgression, atrocity, disease, disaster, crime, love, sex, nature, horror, history, myth, fantasy, and science fiction. Metal portrays mental illness sometimes poorly but often sincerely and personally. There is no limit to which emotions metal will portray, from joy and rage to the bleakest depths of depression and fear. There are no limits to the themes metal will explore in pursuit of intense emotion.

Metal never has ironic detachment. Metal can be tongue-in-cheek or explicit parody, but the fun of this lies in committing an unreasonable amount of effort and sincerity to unserious topics.

2. Metal is artistically extreme. Usually this means fast, complicated, and difficult to play, but any kind of extreme works. Doom and sludge go the other direction and are played as slowly as possible. Operatic vocals test a singer’s range and growling vocals require specialized techniques. Guitarists build custom rigs of amps and speakers to get the exact sound they want. In the early days metal was extremely loud, but now everyone plays loud, even pop. In pursuit of the extreme, metal can experiment stylistically, the weirder the better.

Lots of people don’t like how heavy metal sounds. The lyrics can be impossible to understand, the sound can be grating and unfamiliar. It can take time and effort to learn how to appreciate the sound of metal.

3. Metal is art for art’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with changing the world, getting rich, or getting famous, but the goal of heavy metal is to make true metal. Metal musicians are respected for their musical skill and their devotion to the sound. You can be ugly, you can have no charisma, you can have committed heinous crimes against the human race, but metalheads will respect your skill as an artist. Metal is about creating the wildest sound you can and bringing your singular artistic vision into existence, not about catering to an audience.

This combination is what draws me to metal: deep emotion reached through mechanical complexity and technical prowess. Heavy metal is a creature of the machine age that seeks the spiritual via the technical. Heavy metal expresses the beauty and horror of a vast and intricate modern world filled with the creative destruction of human and inhuman forces, raging in electric chaos. Do you see why RPGs are drawn to heavy metal? RPGs also seek the spiritual via the technical. The description of a compelling world and conflicts via strictly codified rules and rituals of play runs parallel to heavy metal. The idea that you can make your friends weep or rejoice through skilled command of an arcane set of game techniques is a similar fantasy to breaking minds and hearts by guitar shredding at lightning speed.

Of course, this is only a single vision of the RPG. We live in a world of diverse cultures of play, many taking a casual approach to game mechanics. And so – not every RPG is heavy metal.

Lesser Trappings of Heavy Metal

There are a few other things that pull RPGs into the orbit of metal. Heavy metal and RPGs both hit their first peaks of popularity in the 1980s. In the modern nostalgia-mush reimagining of that receding era, it’s easy to lump the two together as part of a shared youth culture. There’s a germ of truth to that – more on that below – but I think the big reason people associate metal and RPGs in the 80s is because they were both targets of the Satanic Panic. Propaganda of the time puts both on lists of demonic, corrupting media secretly designed to turn youth into satanists.

Thematic similarity is a deeper link between RPGs and metal. No other genre has as many songs with fantasy, occult, horror, and science fiction themes. The subgenre of power metal is the only music I know of where the default for lyrics is to tell fantasy stories. The most notable other lyrical theme to challenge the dominion of fantasy over power metal is military history – need I elaborate?

A common theme in heavy metal is the struggle of the individual against the world. It’s an inheritance from rock and roll, and it stands in opposition to punk’s focus on collective class struggle. Metal is potent for expressing a lone protagonist’s alienation, rage, and despair in the face of opposing forces. RPGs and heavy metal both tell grim stories of hapless wretches desperate to escape being ground into oblivion and epic odes to heroes who struggle against the tyranny of men and gods.

The genre of black metal specifically has a strong DIY culture that resonates with independent RPGs. They call it trve kvlt sometimes. Both have an excessive interest in zines and an appreciation for raw, unpolished aesthetics. There’s a black and white “gribbly” style that looks great when you don’t have money for color printing, and it’s beloved by both the people who make underground black metal show posters and the people who make interior art for RPGs with small printing budgets. I myself have printed such an RPG and appreciated the merits of the aesthetic.

Let’s talk about art for a moment. I’ve heard fantastic, full color RPG art sometimes compared to heavy metal album covers. I spent some time reviewing the most famous metal album covers across multiple genres, and I found very few elaborate, colorful trad fantasy scenes. There’s a couple, but albums with that kind of cover are mostly from small bands from the last ten years or so. I think people are confusing heavy metal album covers with van art – the fantasy murals airbrushed onto the sides of panel vans in the 1970s. They might also be confusing it with the art of Heavy Metal magazine, the American version of the French Métal Hurlant. Métal Hurlant means “Howling Metal”. It has no direct connection to the music genre.

If there was one thing I did find while looking at iconic metal covers, it was skulls. Skulls and full skeletons show up a lot, in a variety of art styles and settings. Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie and Megadeth’s mascot Vic Rattlehead probably have some responsibility for this, but skulls also show up in the more extreme body horror covers and in the simple gribbly-style covers. Religious imagery, historic imagery, anatomical imagery, and weapons also feature on metal covers. There’s also the old standby of a photo of the band standing around looking cool. I wonder if more RPGs should have covers that are photos of their creators standing around looking cool?

Heavy metal and RPGs meet in the land known as Sweden, where both are widely popular. The country of ten million is home to more RPG publishers per capita than anywhere else in the world and more metal bands per capita than any other country save its northerly Nordic neighbors. The crossover there is beyond the scope of this Anglophone blog. You can find books on the topic elsewhere. Let’s just say the rise of Fria Ligan and Johan Nohr are no coincidence. Heavy metal and RPGs also encountered each other on the ground once before…

When Dice Met Metal

There’s no heavy metal in Appendix N. The American Midwesterners who created the very first RPGs didn’t include a lot of metalheads; they were more into classical, jazz, blues, and folk.¹

RPGs arrive in the UK in 1975, around the same time as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal kicks off. I asked the exceedingly well-connected British game designer and publisher James Wallis about the time. “What you describe as 'heavy metal feel' could also be described as 'Britain in the early 1980s'. Oppressed youth, no future, autocratic government, the threat of nuclear armageddon...” he recalled. “I remember the fanzines of the time had a lot of metal-influenced articles, but not so much the writers who made the jump to the paying magazines.”

The British museum has an archive of those fanzines, but online access is shut down due to a wave of cyberattacks, and tickets to London are outside my research budget for this blog post. Still, it’s an answer that illuminates the second great parallel of metal and RPGs. Metal and RPGs can offer powerful escapism to people who see no future for themselves. The mosh pit and the combat round are both simulated violence, places to release pent-up aggression and rage. Both offer demanding fantasies that are not pure wish-fulfillment, but feel more real because they give equal expression to the dark sides of the psyche, and because they require participation, effort, and risk.

It’s in the UK in 1985 that Bryan Ansell buys Games Workshop from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston. Look at the guy. Dude liked metal. He puts together a team of miniatures painters who call themselves the ‘Eavy Metal Team, based out of the ‘Eavy Metal Factory in Nottingham (where GW game designer Mark Gascoigne regularly DJs at legendary club Rock City). Bryan’s version of Games Workshop has metal in its veins. Their games are full of metal references, from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay establishing that the holy sign of Ulric looks the same as the sign of the horns to an industrial planet named Metallica in Warhammer 40,000. The world of Warhammer Fantasy has a surprisingly punk sensibility at times, but Warhammer 40,000 - a setting home to multiple lines of RPGs as well as wargames - is set in a hopeless, dystopian future of baroque technology and endless wars between factions of fanatical cyborgs, where city-sized starships take shortcuts through Hell and an excess of raw emotion is enough for apotheosis into daemonhood.

GW isn’t just going to take inspiration from metal. In 1987 they convince local band Sabbat to read some WH40K books as inspiration for a song. Their single “Blood for the Blood God” is distributed on flexi-disc in issue #95 of GW’s White Dwarf gaming magazine. Death metal band Bolt Thrower falls under the spell of WH40K and in 1989 release Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness. The album is named after an RPG book: GW’s book on the worship of Khorne and Slaanesh that provides material for all their game lines. Bolt Thrower even gets GW’s permission to use WH40K artwork for the album cover.

In 1990 GW starts their own record label, Warhammer Records, releasing music themed after their games. They start with the hard rock band D-Rok but quickly sign two metal bands, Wraith and Saxon. Unlike other record labels they pay generously and cover band expenses. They have to give it up when the company goes public and their deal with non-metal band Rich Rags goes sour, but for a moment they’re distributors for Saxon, one of the NWOBHM greats.

Heavy metal ends up permanently part of the GW identity, to the point where a lot of gamers, asked if an RPG is metal, would immediately compare the game to Warhammer 40,000. Over in the land of tabletop wargaming, where WH40K rules with an iron fist, it’s hard to find a popular game that doesn’t share WH40K’s take on metal aesthetics.

When Metal Met Dice

Other than Warhammer Records, most metal bands haven’t made a big deal out of RPG influences. The most famous RPG inspired song is probably “Wishmaster” by Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish. It’s a song with lyrical references to Dragonlance, although it might just be inspired by the novels. Power metal legends Blind Guardian also did a Dragonlance song, “The Soulforged”, in 2001.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg released a 2003 album titled Traveller based on a Traveller campaign their vocalist played in. Even the album cover is made to look like a Traveller supplement. Fans of the band consider it one of their best albums. The second track, “High Passage/Low Passage”, sounds like the kind of thing a Traveller might blast from the speakers of a speeding grav vehicle.

You can find articles and interviews online claiming a variety of metal bands play RPGs: Clutch, Three Inches of Blood, Rage Against the Machine, Anthrax, even Metallica. People like to talk up the hobbies they share with celebrities; Tom Morello aside, I have no idea if these guys played a game once in high school or are rolling dice every week. I also don’t know how much RPGs have actually influenced their music. I’ll put a bit of faith in a rumor that Manilla Road’s lead singer played D&D; “The Riddle Master” (1983) just feels like a D&D song.

Since 2015, a few metal bands have begun wearing RPG influences more strongly on their sleeves. Nobody hugely famous, but some talented and well-respected musicians. Visigoth’s “Dungeon Master” (2015) is an ode to the hobby that mentions Traveler and Pathfinder, and a personal favorite of mine. Serbian metal band Claymorean released a Warhammer-inspired album, Unbroken (2015). Black metal band Orcrypt’s “Dice and Damnation” (2020) has a music video showing polyhedral dice rolling over computer animated monsters. Soulspell’s “Dungeons and Dragons” (2021) features Fabio Lione, best known as the lead singer of Rhapsody of Fire. Owlbear and Gygax are both modern bands that play classic heavy metal with RPGs as their major inspiration. Owlbear are a favorite of mine. Throne of Iron plays “dungeon crawling metal”. Leatherwitch, a new band by the former lead singer of Crystal Viper, dropped their first single “Heroes and the Dice” four months ago. The music video features a full set of polyhedral dice.

Dave Brockie, mortal servant of GWAR’s Oderus Urungus, was working on a campaign for Lamentations of the Flame Princess when he was called back to space in 2014. It was completed and published by Jobe Bittman. The campaign is called Towers Two and it gets good reviews, but Dave’s death and the subsequent fall from grace of LotFP have banished it to obscurity. The Black Dahlia Murder released a limited-edition D&D adventure, Depths of Drasted, to promote their album Verminous. The PDF is no longer available, but based on reviews it was a 24-page adventure about killing monstrous vermin in a dungeon. The infamous Varg Vikernes has also written two RPGs, but the less said of him the better.

Maybe the most specific contribution of RPGs to the world of metal is Dreams in the Witch House. Its creator, Mike Dalager, honed his skills in production and performance at the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, a group originally created to play and support Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian LARPS. The HPLHS would eventually go on to create multiple film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, and Dalager would use his HPLHS experience, resume, and I believe some of their resources to record the hour-long “gothic heavy metal musical” that retells Lovecraft’s story of the same name. He even got Doug Blair of W.A.S.P to play guitar on two songs, “The Nightmare” and “Between Reality and Dreaming”.

The Eternal Champion

For a man who has created neither metal nor RPGs, British fantasy writer Michael Moorcock has an oddly looming presence at the crossroads of metal and RPGs. The works of Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft are all deeply influential and oft-referenced in both metal and RPGs. Unlike the other two, Moorcock was in Hawkwind, a rock band that was part of the scene from which metal emerged. For a brief time in Hawkwind, he shared stages with Lemmy Kilmister. Moorcock also gave his personal blessing to multiple RPG adaptations of his work, starting with Chaosium’s Stormbringer (1981). When the inaugural Dragoncon opened in 1987 – at the time primarily an RPG convention – Michael Moorcock was there to play a set with Eric Bloom of Blue Öyster Cult, another psych rock band that didn’t quite play metal but had a big influence on its early days.

Here’s how intertwined his works are: the cover art for Moorcock’s novel Stormbringer was reused as cover art for both Cirith Ungol’s proto-doom metal album Frost and Fire and the 4th edition corebook of Drakar och Demoner, the most popular fantasy RPG in Sweden. The cover art, a painting by Michael Whelan, depicts Elric of Melniboné holding aloft his cursed sword while leaping off a giant, fanged stone skull.

Just Answer the Question

What makes an RPG metal? Skulls are nice but not enough. Being about metal isn’t enough, and neither is using metal lyrics – there’s rap about metal and lounge music covers of metal.

Running a complicated ruleset with rapid-fire expertise that enraptures the table is a metal performance, but it doesn’t make the game itself metal any more than playing a metal cover of Vivaldi makes the Four Seasons metal. The screaming rage of trapped youth is metal, but it’s not something you can try for as a creator. Either it’s happening to you or it isn’t. An RPG is metal when it uses extreme mechanics in pursuit of genuine emotion at the table. It’s time to judge some games. Remember, this isn’t about their quality as games. Metal can be good or bad. This is only about if a game is metal.

Fight me irl uses extreme mechanics but it’s half-joking. Not metal.

War Pigs shares a name with one of the most famous heavy metal songs of all time, but it’s actually a cozy, rules-light game about mischievous goblins who ride pigs into battle. Not metal.

Call of Cthulhu is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, as are many metal songs, but CoC’s rules are mostly a lightweight, generic skill system with a bit of complexity at character creation and for chases. The sanity mechanic is the only nod towards it being a horror game. There are long chapters of spells and eldritch deities, but a typical adventure includes a very limited number of these, with everything resolved in secret on the GM’s side. It’s one of my favorite RPGs, but it’s not metal. The same goes for Delta Green and Mothership.

Stormbringer (1981) is built off the same set of generic rules as Call of Cthulhu. It’s a fantasy RPG set in the world of Michael Moorcock, where characters in the same adventuring party can be anything from sorcerous Melnibonéan nobles to humble beggars – and the beggar is at a disadvantage in every way. It has detailed mechanics for summoning and dealing with the demons of chaos, forging daemon weapons, and becoming a champion of chaos or law. These mechanics are specific to the nature of reality in the Young Kingdoms and evoke the kinds of stories told there. It is metal!

Cairn is a rules-light game about exploring a dark and mysterious woods. It’s one of the games I’m having the most fun with these days. It takes inspiration from the OSR and is built for hex crawls and dungeon dives. The creator of Cairn does everything he can to make it as accessible as possible. You could write a metal adventure for it, but by itself, Cairn is not metal.

In Thrall to the Everhungering Ghoul Sword is a system-neutral OSR adventure. It’s got a bit of obvious Moorcock inspiration. It claims to be system neutral, but it contains items and prestige classes that are loosely compatible with a few of the more popular level-based RPGs. Their descriptions are worded with careful detail in order to be compatible with multiple popular RPGs, but they’re not quite compatible – like a distortion pedal, they intentionally break some of the cleaner principles behind the design of the most popular fantasy RPGs. It is metal.

The Heavy Metal Monster Manual is a collection of 100 heavy metal-inspired monsters for D&D 5e. The monsters are based on literal interpretations of the names and lyrics of metal bands and songs. HMMM uses references to The Who, The Talking Heads, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Kanye West in their advertising and their monsters. Rightfully ignoring that one time Kanye sampled Varg Vikernes, none of those are metal!

Ultraviolet Grasslands describes itself as a rules-light psychedelic metal trip to the Black City on the edge of space and time. One of its Kickstarter rewards was that, for every $1,000 over $99,999 raised, publisher Matt Kelley would spend another minute sitting on a mountaintop, meditating while listening to metal. That would be metal, but it’s been six years since the Kickstarter finished fulfillment and I couldn’t find any evidence of them actually doing it. I cannot call this game metal until I hear the deed has been done.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a virtuouso performance: a veteran laborer on D&D creating a personal iteration on the fantasy d20 genre. The rules are not maximally complicated, but they show a mastery of fantasy d20 as it is played, a topological optimization of mechanics to support a potent game. It has a detailed, gnostic, grimdark setting. A core playable character type is an automaton powered by a soul dragged back from Hell. It is metal.

Mörk Borg calls itself a doom metal album of a game. It is dripping in beautiful doom metal artwork, awash in seas of skulls. The art of Mork Borg is metal. The game as a whole is not. It has less then a page of rules, a bare minimum stat roll system that is easy to pick up and play in any state of sobriety and even easier to hack. The setting details are elaborate but do not integrate with the rules or the stories of most adventures. Like many OSR systems, the Mork Borg rules don’t drive emotion at the table; they just resolve difficult situations and then get out of the way. It’s very accessible. Mork Borg is punk.

Black Crusade is one of the many RPGs set in the world of WH40K. Player characters are cultists of chaos. Starting with little to their names, they strive to assemble a warband, rebel against the Imperium of Mankind, win glory in the eyes of the dark gods, and ascend to the heights of daemonhood before their exposure to raw chaos devolves them into formless, writhing protoplasm. The mechanics of Black Crusade span from detailed, individual body horror to the undertaking of planetary invasions. Like Stormbringer it has rules for summoning and dealing with demons, and for binding them into weapons, but also for using them to power titanic siege engines. Combat includes detailed and gory mutilations based on hit locations and weapon types – and this system, which seems like gratuitously long tables and unnecessary theatrics at first, is gameable and rewards players for mastering it. A character’s abilities and form itself are a battleground between their passions, fortunes, sorcery, and the exotic sciences of the 41st millennium. It is metal.

Viking Death Squad is inspired by the song War Pigs. Characters play cybernetically enhanced Viking Immortals battling a tyrannical empire and the forces of hell across a post-apocalyptic science fantasy Urth. It’s a simple d6 dice pool system with target difficulties and simple, lethal combat. At first, I was going to write this game off as a poser. Then I got to the Ten Only rule. In any campaign, there are only ten active Immortals, including the player characters, and when all are destroyed the campaign is lost. Immortals other than the PCs can be destroyed offscreen at any time. That’s metal. Then I got to the lengthy bestiary with mechanically detailed and creative adversaries. This game is metal.

Shadowrun is a complicated RPG. The 4th edition, considered one of the better ones, combines a detailed life simulator with a detailed combat simulator that stretches across three entirely different parallel realms of reality: cyberspace, the physical world, and the astral realms. It blends high fantasy tropes with cyberpunk trappings: trolls with antimaterial rifles, dogfights between stealth fighters and dragons, elves and orcs deploying combined arms battalions to forge independent kingdoms in the ruins of the US and Europe. A Norse cult’s attempt at triggering Ragnarök includes unleashing malevolent AIs on cyberspace and a nuclear resolution. Cyberzombies are held technologically beyond death in order to make them the ultimate vessels for a spirituality that despises all forms of life. Mirrorshades, mohawks, and trenchcoats don’t fool me. Shadowrun is metal.

Celestial Bodies is a game with a variety of interlocking systems about factions, mech construction, and combat. It’s one-bit, three-color artwork doesn’t have remotely metal vibes, but it’s coming out of the same needs that drove trve kvlt: making art with limited complexity and colors that still looks original and good. It has a variety of interlocking systems about factions, mech construction, and combat. Players actually build their mechs by arranging components on a grid, and then in combat take hits to that grid battleship-style. It has deep lore about the survivors of humanity scavenging the corpses of dead gods in deep space. It’s metal.

What about the new wave of high budget fantasy RPGs that claim to be metal? You know, Death Saves, Deathbringer, and Dark Sun. I guess two of them are settings, not RPGs. I can’t tell you if they’re metal because right now, when I‘m writing this blog post, they haven’t been released yet. Two of them are pretty much just announcements and the third is far from finished. Maybe I’ll judge them when they’re out. I have a hunch Seven Part Pact is metal, but I don’t have time to play it and find out.

Got Any Recs?

If you’ve read this far, might as well talk favorite bands. Most of the big names are pretty good, but here are some bands I like who drive their own vans to the show. Or drive a rental.

Cassowary Carnage is a blackened death metal band out of northern Virginia. They don’t have albums out but if you ever get to see them live, it’s worth it. All their lyrics are about birds, but their sound is brutal. Here’s the only clip I could find of one of their shows.

A Sound of Thunder is a power metal band with clean vocals and narrative albums that tell stories of fantasy and science fiction. It’s the kind of music even someone who hasn’t listened to metal before can enjoy. They crowdfund all their albums instead of signing with a label, so they have something else in common with RPG designers.

The Outlourdes are a swamp-hag themed death/sludge metal band. They’re a good time live, and they do a lot to organize metal shows for smaller bands.

Thus ends my judgment on which RPGs are truly metal. The riddle I cannot answer is this: why do people think that saying their game is metal will help sell copies? I’m one of the few metalheads I know who plays RPGs these days. Almost everyone I know who plays RPGs just listens to the Mountain Goats. You want to sell games, get the Mountaint Goats on the line. That’s a name that sells games. I guess the Mountain Goats also listen to metal and play RPGs. But the Mountain Goats don’t play metal. If they did, I might listen to them.

Lyme Brackish
9/8/2026