Towards the start of this year I shifted my primary hobby in my free time from wargames to TTRPGs. As a preface, I got heavily into miniature wargaming while living in Cambridge, UK from 2023-2024 struggling to find a nearby D&D group. While I continued to play some RPGs online, I was also working remotely and getting tired of being on a computer all the time. There were multiple local clubs within a bike ride (shoutout to 2d6 lodge), so wargaming was a good way to make some friends.
After moving back to the US in 2024, I continued wargaming for a bit but gradually got a bit tired with wargaming, especially given that a) there was a bit less of a scene for non-Warhammer games, b) Warhammer is comparatively much more expensive in the US than in the UK, and c) a lot of regular events required significant travel. So after getting a bit frustrated with different wargaming scenes, I started trying to find some local RPG groups.
Towards the end of 2024, one of the first local groups I found was a long-running AD&D game, advertised on a local Facebook group. It was about a 45 minute drive, but Brad the GM and the other players were very welcoming. Brad has been running his world for 20+ years at this point–it’s a great mix of independent city states and wilderness mixed with HPL mythos. Sessions frequently had 70s and 80s rock playing in the background, the lyrics of which purportedly provided a large portion of the inspiration for the campaign. The style focused more heavily on grid-based combat with miniatures–monsters typically had no interest in parlaying.
One of the standout moments was when during the second session, my wizard read from a Deck of Many Things, which then somehow produced double results, drawing two cards instead of one. The first card teleported away all his items, and the second stole away his soul into some faraway realm, leaving him unable to do anything but babble nonsensically. The fate was actually worse than death, since there was no obvious way to resolve it even with Raise Dead. Since I was a new player, I could tell Brad was maybe a bit concerned that this result would put me off of the game, but I applaud him for not fudging and it was a great experience. I showed up next session with a Fighter, a brother of the original character aiming to find out what happened to him.
I continued with this game for the next 3 or so months. However, eventually the long drive started tiring me out, especially since it involved driving back on the freeway past midnight on Utah freeways, a state with notoriously bad drivers. So even though I ended up dropping out, at this point I was hooked and started joining and running as many other games as I could.
The full list of games is below (as far as I can remember). In total across all games for 2025, I ran about 75 sessions and played in just over 50. The majority were online games, but also had a fair amount of regular in-person groups. On average it was about 2 games a week, but, especially given that I couldn’t play for a couple months while travelling over the summer, many weeks stretched to 4 or even 5 games.
Refereed Games
| Game/System/Adventure | Venue | Sessions |
|---|---|---|
| OD&D: Northern Strata | online | 22 |
| OD&D: Northern Strata | home & bookstore | 9 |
| Troika: Slate & Chalcedony | online | 1 |
| Mothership: Another Bug Hunt | home | 1 |
| OSE: Arden Vul Megadungeon | online | 34 |
| Cairn: Winter’s Daughter | SaltCon | 1 |
| Liminal Horror: The Sprawl | SaltCon | 1 |
| OSE: Hole Under the Oak | SaltCon | 1 |
| Delta Green: Convergence | online | 3 |
| Delta Green: Operation Fulminate | home | 1 |
I won’t give a full description of all of these games, but here are brief descriptions of a few.
OSE: Arden Vul Megadungeon
I ran this game through Discord after watching Eric Vulgaris’ excellent retrospective and getting inspired to try it out. I had previously attempted a campaign in 2024 that fizzled out after about 6 or so sessions, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with many of the major elements of the campaign, but I had forgotten most of it. While I originally advertised it as an open table, the group quickly solidified into 5 consistent players: Saracor, BigPun, Shadowfax, dcterra, and deViate.
How things went: I used OSE rules because I was the most familiar with them and they have relatively decent support in FoundryVTT. The main houserule I introduced was giving 5 XP for every GP. This was because a) unlike some trends in the OSR space, I enjoy high level play, and b) I wanted the game to progress fast enough that they could reasonably see a good portion of the dungeon without the campaign taking 5 years. This had a noticeable impact on progression rate, allowing most of the players to hit levels 3-4 pretty quickly before plateauing for a bit, then jumping fairly quickly to levels 6-8 after finding and looting (over several sessions) a majore secret treasure stash.
Things I might change: if running again, I think I would try running in OSRIC, maybe with some simplifications. This is because after being a longtime B/X player, I’ve gained a new appreciation for 1e, especially for how it handles level training and progression at higher levels.
Mothership: Another Bug Hunt One Shot
I ran this as a backup game for my brother and friend Todd when we didn’t have quite enough people for our in-house OD&D. If you’re not familiar, this is the opening scenario in the Mothership box set and, while intended for a short campaign, also has some suggestions for running as a one-shot. One of the notable things was that the players took the back entrance and managed to confront the main monster in the first room, killing it with several grenades.
I had forgotten that this was the only monster listed in the scenario, but was able to keep the tension enough through some improvised random encounter checks as well as weird stuff from the robot accomplice (not listed explicitly until later scenarios, but was recommended for insertion from a review I found online). Overall it was a really enjoyable session, and good to get a game in with my brother who I don’t get games in with very often.
OD&D: Northern Strata
This game was my first attempt at doing my own campaign and setting since 5e. The campaign’s premise (started as a Gygax 75 challenge) was to do a hexcrawl-focused setting based as closely as possible on Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, mashed up with HPL’s Into the Mountains of Madness. If this sounds like an overly high-concept and abstruse premise, then you’re almost certainly correct–it was only through play that a lot of the more concrete elements came out. Originally I had thought of this as an arctic-based “north” setting, but while I was preparing it Idraluna Archives released The Great Antarctica Hexcrawl, followed by the Antarctica Jam. The maps were absolutely beautiful and so I quickly focused primarily on writing material for the jam.
I ran two parallel campaigns of this setting, one online in the Big Purp Discord and another at my house with a few friends and whoever else I could find. To start, I had a partial ripoff of B2’s Caves of Chaos, using the same map but replacing many of the monsters with more ‘rhizomatic’ elements (taken literally as sentient and anarchic plants), with the prime villain being an Evil Philosopher (Plato). In the surrounding region, I had about 30 or so keyed hexes and a couple of encounter tables, and that was all.
How things went: In total, about 25 or so people played in the campaign througouht the year (you can see some session reports here). Most people joined as their schedule allowed for a session or two, many bouncing off after a session or two, either due to time commitments or likely because certain aspects of the setting were just too abstract or high-concept. Throughout play, I’ve really leaned on a lot of the most consistent players, especially oldhawkeyes, roguewithwhimsey, jay_zero, and Idraluna. They’ve all been extremely generous, not just in terms of enthusiasm, but also with both contributing direction and focus for the game. A lot of the times things they were speculating about were much better ideas than what I had originally planned for an area, so I’ve revised a lot through play.
Things I learned: running this game changed a lot of how I aim for in preparing and writing content. Originally when writing, I had come up with a lot of subsystems for things like shelters in cold wilderness or fairly abstract Deleuzian reaction tables, with results like ‘deterritorialiaztion’ and so on. In practice, not a lot of this came up. What did come up was often the more specific locations, names, and boring details. That doesn’t mean it has to be very extensive, but it did have to be specific enough to provide a guide to how things could progress. For instance, one of the listed NPCs in the Scholar’s Tower was Prof. Bateson, based on Gregory Bateson, one of the citations within ATP. Through a set of unplanned circumstances, he progressed quite quickly into a major villain of the campaign. Even though it wasn’t planned that way, having the real-world analogue provided a lot of context where I could read the real Bateson’s books and find more details of things to draw in.
That doesn’t mean these details were necessarily extensive, just that they were specific enough to work with. One specific example is worth mentioning. Originally, I had a table of “fodder” for locations. One of these results (rolled randomly in session 2) was the following: “A large triangle carved in the snow, 20’ each side.”
When this came up, I wasn’t really expecting the players to focus so much on it, but they were really focused on digging through the snow. This eventually led to them recovering and exploring a spaceship buried beneath.
You can read an excerpt from the session notes here (written by roguewithwhimsy):
The party resolved to journey north toward a rumored ruin with religious artifacts guarded by crabs. Along the way, a triangular depression in the snow was sighted, and by consensus the group opted to investigate. Jorcal & Boris found a metallic excrescence and, after chipping ice off with their spikes & hammers, uncovered part of a much larger metallic mass and located a triangular hatch.
Prying open the hatch, they entered a room with a metal chair and assorted control panels. Toward the south was a triangular door, which Jorcal was able to dilate by presenting the triangular symbol on his mace. Meanwhile, Morgan was keeping watched, and witnessed an altercation between approaching creatures, who eventually withdrew after some died.
The door Jorcal had opened led to a trapezoidal chamber with contraptions and three humanoid (but not human) cosmonauts in red jumpsuits. Boris examined their pockets and found three green wheat seeds and a square tablet of lightweight stone.
Jorcal and Roald cleared debris away from another south-facing door, behind which could be heard watery sloshing & gurgling. They opened the door, and found five fish-men in waist-high water. In the ensuing fight, the fish-men were slain and Jorcal was seriously wounded.
This room appeared to be some kind of aquarium, prompting the realization that the fish-men and cosmonauts could constitute a lucrative scientific discovery. Spurred on by the thought of sweet, sweet, academic funding, the party explored two smaller rooms to the south, one of which was full of garlic, the other containing 12 magnetic snails on a conveyor belt, seemingly acting as a power source for what was evidently some kind of space(?)ship.
The snails, assorted corpses, and garlic were loaded onto the sled and transported via ferry to the tower in 29.17. There, the party was directed to speak with the biologists (taxidermists?) on floor 3. The corpses were deemed a ‘significant’ contribution, meriting 1,000 g.p. The adventurers then consulted with the mineral spirit experts on floor 6 regarding the magnetic silver snails. Professor Lafar expressed interest in retrieving the entire ship, but was unwilling to supply adequate resources for its extraction & transport. However, he was willing to assign his most expendable student, Mikel, to aid in recovering whatever mechanisms could be retrieved.
Regrettably, this was not to be. Returning to the ship was uneventful, but the decision to gamble on reactivating the ship (by returning the snails) and attempting to fly it away was met with disaster. Boris unthinkingly hit a large square button that activated a self-destruct sequence, then ran away like a coward while the others attempted to halt the countdown by removing the snails again. Although all adventurers (& Mikael) made it out alive, the student’s notes and the ship were lost in the ensuing implosion.
from Northern Strata Session 2 Report, by roguewithwhismey
The hex originally was empty, but its description has since been revised to the following:
A large triangle impression in the snow, 20’ each side and 6’ down. A half foot of snow below the bed is a metallic hull. The hatch is a 3’ triangle and can be removed with crowbars or other suitable instruments.
Hex 309-368 – Crashed Spaceship
- Command Room – A large metal chair sits in front of a control panel with green buttons, one of which is 2’ square and triggers the self-destruction sequence (triggers in 1d6 turns, can be stopped only by pressing the button again). Three twisted bodies in red suits. Their stomachs are bloated, faces the colour of a sunset with spiralling ears. Inside their pockets are seeds of wheat, a single square tablet of lightweight stone (Alien Tablet). A triangular door to the south (2) is stuck.
- Aquarium – Filled with cold water 8’ high that spills out into the command room when the door is opened. 7 Devilfish (1/2 HD, AC as Leather, Attack 1 × 1d3 bite) swarm to attack. Triangular doors along the bottom wall open to the Engine Room (3) and the Storage Closet (4).
- Storage Closet – Crates filled with garlic, well-preserved. Two human bodies (Theodor and Max, friends of Karl at 310-367).
- Engine Room – Glass panel covers the engine, a conveyor belt with 12 magnetic power slugs (worth 500gp each). Detaching them and reattaching will reset the ship’s systems, turning on the lights and activating the defence systems (incapacitating gas).
This was one of the standout sessions. I’m not sure I have a main point here, except to say that following through the logical conclusions of what PCs are interested in through play has provided a lot more guidance and inspiration than designing things in a vacuum.
Things I might change: I think it would have been useful to do more dungeon prep early on, especially for smaller dungeons. While I had offloaded a lot of work into a couple bigger dungeons, a few scattered 3-10 room dungeons can really help out a balance a hexcrawl so that there’s a mix of locations that have different levels of density.
Player Games
| Game/System/Adventure | Venue | Ref | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|
| AD&D 1e, Homebrew setting with city states | ref’s house | Brad | 8 |
| AD&D 1e, Eye of the Serpent mashup with Star Trek | ref’s house | Craig | 6 |
| Vaesen | SaltCon | — | 1 |
| Call of Cthulhu, The Necropolis | SaltCon | Chris | 1 |
| Call of Cthulhu, introduction scenario | SaltCon | Chris | 1 |
| Mausritter | SaltCon | — | 1 |
| Old Gods of Appalachia | SaltCon | — | 1 |
| Pulp Cthulhu, The Twin-Headed Serpent | gamestore | Chris | 14 |
| Mothership, Decagon | gamestore | Tiff | 1 |
| OpenQuest | GaryCon | Justin H | 1 |
| Castles and Crusades | GaryCon | — | 1 |
| AD&D 2e, Fight Greek Monsters | GaryCon | — | 1 |
| Ars Magica, The Bats of Mercille | GaryCon | — | 1 |
| Wolves Upon the Coast | ref’s house | gromb | 3 |
| OD&D: A Thousand Statues | online | mr. mann | 2 |
| Vanilla Game: The Isle | online | bread | 2 |
| Pendragon: The Great Pendragon Campaign | online | Justin H | 6 |
| Violet Flower: Wolves Upon the Coast hack | online | mr. mann | 1 |
| OSE Homebrew | ref’s house | blake | 2 |
| Delta Green | online | oldhawkeyes | 1 |
| Delta Green Christmas One Shot | game store | Josh | 1 |
Pulp Cthulhu: Two-Headed Serpent
My most consistent player game of the year was Pulp Cthulhu, ran by Chris at an open table in a local game shop. Chris invited me to the game after I played in a couple games of his at SaltCon, since I mentioned I was looking for Call of Cthulhu groups. This was very generous, especially given that the game already had 6+ players, making me the 7th. When I joined, we started in the Oklahoma scenario. My character was a Buster Keaton knockoff who got into trouble quite quickly after jumping off a barn to dive-tackle the Sherrif and getting shot in the chest.1 We’re now in the final stages of wrapping up the campaign.
Non-Conclusions / Tangents
Again, there was too many great games and I don’t have the space to summarize them all. Particularly with respect to in-person games, there were also ups and downs–for instance, in both AD&D and Pulp Cthulhu, there were a couple of situations around PVP and antagonistic characters that definitely led to hurt feelings.
One of the things that I do want to emphasize is that many of the best experiences were through random invitations from people who were friendly or just open to new things. This includes the aforementioned Pulp Cthulhu game, but also gromb‘s excellent Wolves on the Coast game, who was nice enough to reach out after seeing that we lived in the same city.
If there is one thing I’ve taken away, is that I think it’s important to not be overly moralizing with respect to play. Given the philosophical-historical context within which most of us live, we often tend to think of games, systems, and experiences in terms of whether they are/were Good or Bad. For instance, this is the implicit context between a lot of GM advice, which aims to progress your skills from being a bad (unskilled) GM to a good (skilled) one.2 At the level of TTRPG production, this often expresses itself in terms of making “good” layout, producing “good” art, writing “good” dungeons, and so on.
Sometimes to combat this, people focus on the notion of ‘fun’. A game’s success, by that criteria, depends on whether everyone had fun. The problem with this is that sometimes boredom (e.g., mundane tracking of equipment) is useful in generating meaningful decisions. Given that TTRPGs are as complex as other art forms like film, insisting on fun is a bit limiting. Art can produce all kinds of affects, and this can include enjoyment, but can also legitimately include disgust, boredom, frustration, and confusion.3 When applied to games, the overfocus on enjoyment is analogous to Marvel producers trying to introduce jokes into every scene–as a Ref, you feel pressure to entertain the players, to explain everything, and so on, and this can sometimes detract from the game on the whole.
In contrast to this distinction, I think it’s often more helpful to think in terms of Interesting versus non-Interesting. The full credit for this idea, of course, belongs to Deleuze & Guattari:
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. […] We will not say of many books of philosophy [TTRPGs] that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought or beget a persona worth the effort.
What is Philosophy, 82-83
With respect to play, this shifts the main question: not am I a good player/GM/whatever, but are we creating something interesting together?
- If this was regular Call of Cthulhu, I would have almost certainly died, but that’s the beauty of Pulp. ↩︎
- This is why GM advice articles often read like a priestly declaration, aimed to help the ignorant and sinful GM achieve gaming salvation. ↩︎
- Consider, for example, Malevich’s black square. Doesn’t seem very fun to me. ↩︎