Mediums and Messages

2025 in Review

Winslow Homer. The New Year. 1869.

It's good to chew before you swallow. With the year coming to a close, I figured I'd write up some brief reflections on how I interacted with tabletop RPGs this year and set myself some goals for the year to come.

By the Numbers

Based on my notes, I played 68 sessions across 10 different games this year. Some of these were oneshots, but many of these were micro-campaigns I ran. I was a player in 18 of those sessions and GM'd 50. That's a little more than a a game per week, but in practice I was playing two games per week for around half the year.

On my blog, I wrote 90 posts, including this one. By views, the most popular of those were the following:

  1. Schematic Dungeons from Everyday Objects (2/21/25)
  2. Low Prep Faction Play (3/19/25)
  3. GLoG Class: Guild Assassin (2/8/25)

I note that all of these were from earlier in the year, when I was still making the effort to post my work to the Rainbow OSR and Prismatic Wasteland Discord servers. I'm not really motivated by maximizing views, but it's nice that these posts reflect some of my better practical writing and a class that sparked a small bandwagon.

45 of those posts were session reports! By comparison, these posts are barely read by anyone, but anecdotally I have the sense that folks who read one of those reports read tons of them. More thoughts on session reports ahead.

I sent 4,887 messages on Phlox's server this year. Admittedly, that number means nothing to me. I feel like my engagement with Discord (and with the broader OSR / pOSR) came and went in waves this year with big spikes around January and mid-Summer with long tapers in between.

Of the four goals I set for myself last year, I'd say I accomplished two. I did not, in fact, publish a roleplaying game or write a mega-dungeon - though I did get Dungeon Mail out as a draft! I did write an ample amount of content for this blog and I did continue to explore the micro-campaign format.

Micro-Campaigns

This year, my remote group played Dungeon Mail, Heart, Beyond the Wall (with an asterisk), and two GLoGhacks. Each of our games ran between six and eleven sessions - enough time to get to know a system, but not enough to settle into the rhythms (good or bad) of long-term play.

This format continues to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. Heart in particular really put my strategies around prep to the test. The game presents very little detail on how an actual session or campaign should be structured, and I filled that void with habits cherry-picked from pOSR play. Ultimately, though, those procedures didn't work, and I ended up having to develop a new approach on the fly. I essentially collated a list of story beats the players wanted to see play out at the table (a Heart mechanic) and rolled on them like an encounter table as their characters traversed a pointcrawl. As opposed to my usual games, where consistency and player agency are derived from a stable map and the under-the-hood operations of factions, the only real constant in Heart was the characters themselves.

Dungeon Mail was a lot of fun, but too generic. The draft we played was a competent enough dungeon crawler, but in the intervening months I've been whittling it down into something a little leaner and a lot more focused on the core narrative mechanic of delivering suspect packages to weird dungeon denizens. I appreciate my playgroup's willingness to dive in.

While the GLoG is a bit of a comfort food game for me, we put it to the test in two interesting ways this year. With both Captain's GLoG and Beyond the GLoG, we took familiar mechanics and used them to translate a new setting or the unsatisfying wreck of another game. My inner Benjamin scholar loves this mode of play and design - GLoGhack as critical exegesis. While I have a trusty rules doc for our house hack, I'm inspired by Hilander's House Rules to punch those up into something public facing.

Overall, this mode of play has been working well. Logistically, I think I want to invite a few more faces into the group, even if not everyone can make it for any given micro-campaign. So far every new member has brought a fresh perspective and energy to the group and I want to get to a stable roster of something like four regulars and four on-call or occasional players.

Eyes Unclouded

This game was conceived of as an in-person 5e game with a mix of friends and new acquaintances from work. I adapted Eyes Unclouded, an interesting (if scattered) collection of Ghibli-inspired one shots, into a dense sandbox (very spoiler-y, players!) by applying Against the Wicked City's "old school space vs. new school time" paradigm. When we went to roll up characters, everyone wanted to play a ghost or a squirrel or a sentient flame, so I persuaded folks to make a hard pivot into Cairn 2e.

Almost twenty sessions in, this campaign has been very gratifying - both as an opportunity to get to know a new group of friends and as an opportunity to flex different skills as a GM. I have done very little additional prep since that initial sandbox doc and I would say that the players have explored (or at least started to explore) something like 1/3 of the hooks and adventure sites I penciled in. The game more or less propels itself as a mixture of improv and lightly proceduralized exploration. I just draft specific room-by-room details using something like Marcia B.'s Bite-Sized Dungeons.

As I write these reflections, I realize I have some qualms about Cairn 2e. I don't think we are using that game to its fullest:

All that said, at this point I think it's worth sticking with the system we have rather than attempting any dramatic mid-stream conversion. Folks know it and our sessions are fundamentally working. Why mess with a good thing?

A Few Highlights

In addition to the writing I've linked to throughout this post, I want to highlight some of what I think of as my best work this year:

I could imagine a more detailed post, reflecting on trends in these, but maybe that's better suited for a diary.

Next Year

Just like last year, I want to set a few goals for the coming year. As I increasingly teach game design in a college setting, these goals have larger stakes than just hobby interest, but fundamentally they'll just be benchmarks for reflection in December 2026. I'd like to:

#impressions #year in review