Games

if this is just a friendly one-shot with the coworkers kinda thing, you don't gotta worry too much lmao, you could even just pick a system made for one night of fun like Boy Problems/Honey Heist/Lasers & Feelings/CBR+PNK, etc

but generally new-ish rpg trends over the last decade off the top of my biased ahh head:

the D&D-sphere is mostly 5e and Pathfinder 2E for the trad hour long combat every time someone tickles a goblin gameplay

Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark still dominate a lot of the indie-space. I think they're great for new players, since they come with less gameplay expectations from other RPGs. Me personally, it took a while and a few attempts to get the hang of these since I came from GMing primarily 3e and 5e D&D, but I love a lot of these games now. Since it's an indie boom, not every game is gonna be good, or even similar to each other mechanically, but

FitD/PbtA games I'd recommend: Apocalypse World 2e (Mad Max If They Had Sex), Blades in the Dark (edgy victorian burglars but london is like really fucking super haunted), Scum and Villainy (Blades in the Dark but Star Wars/Firefly/Bebop), Masks: A New Generation (Teen Titans), Slugblaster (interdimensional hover-skateboarding for clout), Chasing Adventure (D&D if it was PbtA, but like, even more than Dungeon World was), Bump in the Dark (modern day monster huntin'), Hearts of Wulin (Wuxia with a very unique approach to combat), Night Witches (Night Witches), Fellowship 2e (LotR inspired peoples vs overlord game), Girl by Moonlight (Magical Girls but Blades in the Dark), Band of Blades (On the run from the bone men)

Carved from Brindlewood is the newest boom in the pbta/fitd adjacent indie scene, its progenitor game Brindlewood Bay is essentially "what if Murder She Wrote took place in a town with a Lovecraftian cult" and approaches mystery gameplay in a pretty unique way -> players collect clues throughout the day and night, and once they have enough to collaboratively make a solid deduction, roll to see if they were right. Haven't gotten around to trying these, but The Between is on my radar, victorian penny dreadful-esque monster hunting with these mechanics sounds fun af. Public Access seems fun too with an analog horror theme

OSR became a big thing, which is essentially an attempt to make the nostalgic ideal of D&D real: huge focus on expendable PCs, deadly traps, and players grinding their way through ridiculously deadly scenarios with out of the box thinking. Not personally experienced with this but I hear Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Mothership are all good in this field

There's a bunch of other stuff out there too, Agon 2e is a fun greek myth game with gameplay focused on contests, I've heard great things about Trophy Dark/Gold.