We need to talk about the wave of new games from Italy
What is happening with RPGs in Italy? Should you pay attention? The answer to both: yes.
In the last four years, games from Italy have racked up more than 20 nominations at the Ennie Awards across all categories. For Product of the Year, arguably the most prestigious category, there was Brancalonia in 2021, Fabula Ultima, Household and Broken Tales in 2023, and Outgunned and Not the End in 2024. That’s 6 games in 4 years spread out across 5 different publishers. Historically, RPGs have flowed one way: from the USA to everywhere else. What’s changed?
Since 1966, the Lucca Comics and Games convention has been held in the historical city of Lucca in Tuscany, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. The city is normally home to about 90,000 people. In 2022, 300,000 poured through the streets for convention. That isn’t just a turn of phrase. There is no convention center—the festival sprawls through the old part of the city. It isn’t contiguous—attendees step in and out of ticketed spaces, walking from one section to another through the streets of the city. Traditional shops shut down and give way to more geeky interests. “Outside, there is a [sign that says] shoe seller, and inside, there is somebody that is selling Harry Potter wands”, said Osiride Luca Cascioli.
Cascioli has been coming to the convention since he was a child and now he’s one of the judges for the Gioco di Ruolo dell’Anno (RPG of the Year) award announced at Lucca. Somewhere in between, he made the time to get an impressive tattoo of the daggers from Blades in the Dark on his arm. It’s impossible to summarize the whole history of a country’s gaming scene but in the records of the awards at Lucca, there is one version of it. The earliest year listed on the website is 1993 and the winner of the Best of Show award (the predecessor to the Gioco dell’ Anno) was the localization of Call of Cthulhu. In fact, almost all the early winners are localizations, not original games. It’s worth noting that localizations are more than translations—they can involve substantive changes to content, presentation, and anything else.
In 2018, the list of nominees for Gioco di Ruolo dell’Anno looked silly. Like ants lining up beside an elephant, there was a clutch of indie games and D&D 5e. 5e was the obvious favorite. It had been a global phenomenon. People had been playing with the English version or small fan translations for years by then already but the arrival of the Italian version was opening the gates for a whole new wave of players.
One of the nominees was Lovecraftesque, a GM-less horror game by UK-based Black Armada Games. The Italian edition was produced by Narrativa, a company that has won multiple awards for its localizations, including for Apocalypse World in 2011. As with many localizations, Narrativa remade the entire book for the Italian market. The cover was pure white with a simple eldritch-looking rune in dark red in the center. But under a UV light, it transformed—a swarming mass of lines spiraled out of the rune, like tentacles, and filled the entire space. They had taken the theme of lovecraftian horror—of a truth hidden beneath the surface—and embedded that into the book itself.
Lovecraftesque won.
