A Year in Gaming 2025

The year has come to a close, and as I have done for the last few years, I will review my gaming over the last twelve months. Overall, I managed a cool 88 session. This year, there were no extracurriculars, only my regular gaming groups.

Games Played


Of the games played this year, of course, the most sessions were committed to the One Ring. This has been a stalwart game since 2020, with 111 sessions under our belt to this point. We are nowhere near the end of the Darkening of Mirkwood (plus extras) campaign, but we're also in no rush to complete it.
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The game I enjoyed most for system was Jackals. This is a BRP-like system that reminded me of the old Stormbringer in terms of character abilities, this really hit a nostalgia spot I was not expecting. The game was dropped for reasons of unwieldly lore for the GM to deal with. From there we moved to Black Sword Hack, which while much more Moorcockian in feel, is very far from the Strombringer RPG.

Games Run


Those following along at home, you can see that there is no Masks of Nyarlathotep in that image. For reasons, that campaign didn't make it to the table this year, and is on indefinite hold. What did make it to the table was two other whole campaigns, and a bunch of one-shots. 

The Order of the Stone

I had not planned too far in advance to run this campaign, but I was looking for something simple to hit the table with. The Order of the Stone is that. This really feels like My First Campaign for Call of Cthulhu. I bulked it out by rooting the characters in the Arkham Sourcebook, allowing for these characters to be used for further games in that era. Unfortunately, the natural end of the scenario left 2 characters resigning, 1 dead, and one heading off for an internship in Ireland. Still, 2 characters can act as the seed for a new party.

As to the campaign itself, there are much better ones out there, and this one did need some work, but a lot less than the Lost Mountain Saga...

The Lost Mountain Saga

This year, was by far, the year for Vaesen. We set up a troupe style campaign, where I would run the Lost Mountain Saga, and another GM would run some other adventures in between, allowing me to play with the same group. This worked very well. The game is set up in a way that really facilitates this, and also players dropping in and out for various sessions.

What I loved less, was the campaign itself. The Lost Mountain Saga started life as an actual play. I have not listened to this production, so I won't comment to its quality, but it must have been of a level for Free League to pick it up and print it as, to date, the only Vaesen campaign.

Vaesen is an investigative game, but the scenarios in this campaign fail to give all the information an investigator would require to come to the conclusions that scenario expects. The scenarios in The Last Mountain Saga push towards certain outcomes, and are more on rails than an investigative game should be. This may be due to the original actual play production, but it did lead to many of the scenes as written in the book being completely ignored by my players, as I would have had to literally told them where to go in some cases. It also meant me adding other avenues for the players to get the information required to get to the end of the scenarios and the campaign. 

The conceit for Vaesen is that the players are looking to find and rebalance the realm of the Vaesen with the modernizing world, but in many cases, this campaign resorts to monster hunts in a D&D style, where combat is the only option. This was one reason why my players were actually annoyed with the campaign, they didn't want to fight, but no other options were coming to mind, due to them being funneled in that direction.

In all, I'm glad we did the campaign, as it opened us up to the system, and it has given me great confidence to actually write my own Vaesen campaign. The research for which is already under way, and the writing and running of which is planned for this year. If you want to help out in the playtest, let me know!

Alien

With the release of the new Alien TV show, there was much happiness around the table to play Alien. We went through two scenarios, Chariot of the Gods, and Destroyer of Worlds. These are two wonderful scenarios that I can wholeheartedly recommend. I will be looking for the third in the set to complete the trilogy. 

Eat the Reich

The year rounded out with a game of Eat the Reich. This game was a blast to run, and worked out pretty much as well as I though it could. 

Thank you for reading to the end. I wish you all a very happy 2026 to you all, and may all your scheduled games happen!

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