2025 in Review
2025 in Review
This was a banger year for actually playing games. I got to be part of five campaigns:
- Castle Mordengard (OD&D, in-person, referee), was a great learning experience & opportunity to bust out some of my weirder ideas for a dungeon game setting. Though it is currently dormant due to several players moving away & the resumption of REDUX (below), I do hope to revisit it someday.
- The Northern Strata (OD&D, online, player) has been an absolute pleasure to participate in. EvilTables is a skilled & engaging ref, and the world he has invented is one where I'm eager to see what lies around every corner. If you're in Big Purp, I highly recommend dropping in sometime.
- REDUX (OD&D, in-person, player), is a continuation of the campaign that was my first introduction to OD&D. The referee has a brilliant, original milieu & some clever innovations for organizing the game. The maps of REDUX dungeon are the best dungeon maps I've ever seen, hands down.
- A Darkling Archipelago (Pathfinder 2e, online, player) -- The fact that the people I play with are lovely & the GM hardworking & creative leads me inexorably to the conclusion that Pathfinder 2e is pure ass, a vapid mess crafted by agents of the demiurge as a means of deadening the creative spark that flickers in every human soul.
- Tower of The Manticore (DCC, in-person, player). DCC is pretty cool!
Also a smattering of one-shots: Arden Vul in Cairn, a session of Murex Canyon in Cairn, one session of Delta Green, a brief delve in Decree, & a hair-raising session of 1000 Statues. And, I got to run two sessions of my WIP Antarctica Jam setting.
I have a friend who is down to play hex-and-counter wargames, so we've been borrowing games from our fathers' collections and slowly playing them. So far:
- Hastings, 1066 by Richard Berg -- Pyrrhic Norman victory
- Zeppelin, by William Koff & Mike McVeigh -- German defeat, entirely due to maintenance issues rather than British air defense.
- Verdun, A Dagger at The Heart of France by Marc Miller (the Traveller guy) -- currently in progress
I don't have anything interesting to say about these but I fuck with them heavily.
That same friend also wrote a dungeon wargame called Assault on Castle Slazzo, playtested twice. It is truly one-of-a-kind and if/when he ever decides to publish or release it I will be plugging it as hard as I can.
Finally, I played in two rounds of Committee Nomic (one of which I wrote about here).
My Things I've Made page grew substantially this year. I also started posting stuff on itch. Despite everything being PWYW, I brought in a cool $600. (As seems to be typical, that money has pretty much all been recirculated to others in the hobby). I'm sharing this not as a flex (I genuinely have no clue whether it's a lot relative to other itch sales) but because I hope(?) transparency about hobby-related earnings will help others make informed decisions about buying & selling games. In any case, whatever success I have had is entirely due to blundering into an untapped niche (big speculative GIS maps) & not any kind of premeditated business strategy.
Putting things I've made out into the world has inclined me to be more active online, & getting to participate in DIY communities has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the year (despite my strong natural tendency to lurk). I benefitted immensely from the feedback, encouragement, collaboration, and conviviality of others -- in particular I'm grateful to EvilTables, Oldhawkeyes, Slothyyyy, Blindaudelay, Chaoclypse, Vodka Gobalsky, Checco, Kirkouh, MTB, others in the Wednesday CCCC on big purp, and everyone sharing what they've been up to in the Antarctica Jam discord.
The Antarctic Adventure Jam has been running for ten months, with two remaining. If you're reading this and are at all tempted to join, it's not too late! Even if you only have the time to do a one-page dungeon or 7-hex flower, it's more than welcome -- there's still lots of space on the map.
I have rough notes for a series of Antarctica Jam roundups/postmortems, but for now I'll just say that I am so psyched to see it come together. The drafts and submissions I have seen so far exceed anything I could have imagined.
One early contribution that deserves explicit thanks is the beautiful webmap that EvilTables developed & hosted. This has made it so much easier to run the jam, and has already been really useful for running games off of the draft submissions.
For my own jam entry, I've been working on a chunk of 2,000 hexes in the upper left corner of the mainland. The process of keying them has been humbling. After a year of work, I have around 360 finished hexes, one nearly-finished 450-room dungeon, another nearly-finished 150ish-room dungeon, & a plethora of ancillary notes, illustrations, spells, monsters, etc. Much of it sucks, but the parts that are good wouldn't exist if I hadn't churned out the garbage along with it. Writing is an area where I have a lot of room to grow, so the practice has been invaluable.
2026
I am determined to step back into the role of Referee -- it's long past time for me to start running an open table Antarctic hexcrawl campaign.
Much of my energy will be going to wrapping up Antarctica Jam. I'm still figuring out what the "end" of the project will look like, but I'm looking forward to compiling the jam submissions into usable & aesthetically pleasing web & print formats that honor the hard work that went into them.
When that's done, I'd love to tackle some other project ideas on the backburner:
- A map of a tidally locked version of Mercury -- can I tune exoplasim to simulate a thin band of habitable temperatures??
- A zine of "Bard spells" based on passages from Shakespeare
- Littlest Brown Book supplements 1 and -1 (house rules and Chainmail/domain-play, respectively)
Aside from that, I plan to keep playing games, making maps, & corresponding with cool people; if 2026 ends up looking a lot like 2025 I'll be very happy.
Thanks for reading & happy new year!