Musings & Reflections on 2025
In my great wisdom and originality I am here to present you fine readers with my thoughts on a year of tabletop gaming. This has been a pretty wild year for me on that front, it's been quite some time since I've played in and run so many games, and it's been very fun to get back into it. I'll start with the games I've run and follow up with those I've played.
Games I've Run
Aryngrave
Ah Aryngrave, my return to running tabletop after a fairly substantial hiatus. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this game went and how I dealt with the challenges that arose along the way. You can read more about my thoughts in a retrospective post here but in short: it was a great return to tabletop and I really learned a lot about what I do and don't like in games. Vanilla fantasy can be fun and very functional, but after a while it begins to lose its shine for me, it needs more juice.
Dolmenwood
I made a very brief foray into the world of Dolmenwood this summer, as I ran some friends through Winter's Daughter as an introduction before we had a couple of sessions in Castle Brackenwold, but it eventually fizzled out. Mostly because we all reached the realisation that while we're good friends, the style of game I enjoy and the one they enjoy are fundamentally different. I'd definitely like to return to Dolmenwood at some point, I think it quite nicely fits that "vanilla fantasy with juice" I talked about above.
Mothership
During the interim between Aryngrave and the game I'm currently running we played through Another Bug Hunt for Mothership. We had a whole lot of fun with this, it was such a wild change of pace for our group and I'd never done any sci-fi roleplaying before so it felt very fresh and exciting. After the first couple of sessions the group TPK'd and due to a corner I'd written myself into, I couldn't think of a way to bring in a new group of PCs without substantially retconning established information that players had acted on as truth. Another Bug Hunt gets a big recommendation from me, not only is it well-written and fun, it's also extremely easy to use as a one shot, standalone adventure or slotted into your ongoing campaign. A word of warning though: The list of NPCs on the inside cover is not a handout, even though there's a moment where the adventure really implies that it is. I fell into that trap rather unfortunately.
The Days Between
Now, this year I utterly fell in love with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, and in particular I've had a brilliant time with the infamous modpack for it, G.A.M.M.A. This naturally led me to thinking about how I could run a game in a similar setting of my own creation, as I think its setup is ripe for gaming. It's a place where the brave, the foolhardy, the curious, and the desperate congregate, full of danger and potential for riches beyond your wildest dreams. The clashing philosophies and motivations of different factions drive people into conflict, and it's all contained in one small area. It's a powder keg. Now, I could easily have just 1:1 recreated the zone from the games - or indeed from real life - and picked up the actual RPG for the franchise and run that. But I'm extremely hesitant about falling into the Media In -> Media Out cycle as quite frankly I think it leads to games that can't stand on their own two feet. So I set about making my own anomalous zone, but after bashing my head against it for a while I just couldn't think of a way to make it feel original while also capturing what I love about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I thus decided to change course, and follow a different thread.
I've been really enjoying the works of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique Cycle, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, reading them for the first time this year. Science-fantasy really grabbed my imagination, and so I decided to work with that as the basis for my next game, along with a healthy dose of both Elric and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. I made some pretty good headway on this and was close to writing up the pitch for it when disaster struck. Catastrophic data loss befell me, and like a fool I had not backed up what I was working on, thus losing weeks of work. This, as you can imagine, was deeply frustrating.
I still desperately wanted to run more games, but I was so tired of building out a playable setting and then having to start over when something happened to it. So I decided "fuck it, we're playing Stonehell."
Stonehell - The Closed Table
The day I had that thought, I wrote up the pitch and sent it to my players. They were hyped for it so we rolled up characters and got playing. It was really just that easy. I know basically fuck all about the wider setting, some vague notions of it playing into the dying earth trope, some demons ruling disparate city-states, but nothing other than that really. And honestly? It's been pretty damn good, we're having fun with the dungeon and have been so focused on it that I haven't really needed anything else. We've only played a few sessions so far, but I know we're all excited to get back to it in the new year.
Stonehell - The Open Table
Yep, I'm running it twice. I'd been making noises and threats all year about running an open table, and indeed the S.T.A.L.K.E.R-inspired stuff would have been a really good fit for such a game. But, similar to my closed table, I just got tired of worldbuilding and wanted to run a damn game. So now I'm running Stonehell as an open table in the Big Gay Communist OSR Server, and it's been pretty fun! It's nerve-wracking to run for people that I not only haven't run for before, but that I don't know (though a couple of friends have been regulars so far), but I'm leaning into it. If I have one piece of advice to give about this: for the love of all that is holy, don't try starting a new campaign in November or December (particularly an open-table). It's just way too hectic and the inconsistency in scheduling has been deeply frustrating, I really wish I'd just waited until January or February to kick it off.
Wrapping Up
And that concludes my year of running games! I did intend to talk about the games I've been playing in as well but this post would get really very long were I to do so. Needless to say, it's been great. I'd like to post more regularly next year, maybe one post per month would be a good goal? But I've also gotten into learning programming and game dev, which is eating a chunk of my time, so we'll see.
Man, that S.T.A.L.K.E.R thing sure would be cool to run...