Last week, I did a general review of stuff from 2025, but seeing Endies posts from the Indie RPG Newsletter and Cannibal Halfling Games inspired me to think some more about which games I managed to get to the table this year.My gaming schedule can get a bit sparse from hectic other things, like the spring and fall softball schedules but I still had a good time with a few different campaigns.Games That Hit the Table in 2025Dungeons and DragonsD&D was the big one of the year running both my Eberron campaign titled Aftershocks of the Last War and a friend’s Oops All Bards campaign titled The Ballad of the B-Team.My Eberron game started off last year as one meant to feature the players taking on the Aurum in this convoluted attempt to war profiteer the way back into a new Last War. Instead the party ran completely away from the original city it was set in when a Player Character’s criminal family tracked them down to ask for a favor.Moving from Passage to Thaliost, the players ended up removing a bigoted, nigh on genocidal Archbishop, but accidentally cracked open the prison of one of the Overlords, primordial demons sealed away in prehistory. To quote The Good Place, “Boom! Right away I had a different problem.”This campaign’s been on a break during B-Team while I plan a new fiend themed arc for the players.The Ballad of the B-Team has featured a team of six, who all have at least one level of bard, working as propaganda for the Mining Union of a mostly Dwarven nation where power is by vote of the unions with the Mining and Logging unions currently holding the most sway.The campaign has involved following behind the team that was sent ahead of us to solve a big problem, discovering the new problems they’ve left behind while fixing original problems, then trying to put a good spin on it to make the Mining Union look good.So far, our Emo dwarf, Dwarven stripper, Tabaxi fixer, ancient gnome, half-giant bard-barian, and the shapeshifter from far away have faced their biggest problem in the A-Team leaving a red dragon corpse in a lake, which caused a whole ecological collapse we had to call in favors to fix. It’s been great. I’ve also been playing with my session notes to write each session into a new verse of a song that I’m setting to Diggy Diggy Hole. I’m putting it together as an in-universe Ballad of the B-Team to do our propaganda job. It uh, kinda does our job of making the Union look good, if you ignore the chorus about how the A-Team are incompetent jerks.I have absolutely loved running my emo dwarf using the College of Tragedy subclass from Tal’Dorei Campign Setting Reborn. Or as we’ve taken to calling it, the College of Sins Not Tragedies.Sketching Hroðvar was so much funMagical Kitties Save the DayThis session came up by most of game night getting canceled and then my daughter asking if she could play. One of the other members of the gaming group decided to play along, and we had a great time.Magical Kitties Save the Day is a game where the players play the titular magical Kitties. Each Kitty has a human, who like all humans, has problems. Their town is also full of problems. Each session revolves around one of the Problems taking center stage and the Kitties trying to fix it.In our game, the Kitties were trying to track down their missing humans and ended up in the town library where the books had come alive and were at war over which genre would take the best placement in the library. It was the intro adventure from the box set.We had a lot of fun, and the rules were simple enough for a seven year old to manage her own sheet and strategize about how she wanted to handle things. I am already writing my own campaign to get this one back to the table for a couple of seven year olds, and maybe a different member of the gaming group.Oh Captain, My CaptainI only played this one once, as a quick thrown together session when we had a lot of cancelations on the day of game night. It is, however, one that is sticking close by my computer for just that sort of situation in the future, because we had a blast with it.Our interpretation of The Captain was our shift lead in a restaurant, who was famous among the staff for never having dropped a single dish, no matter how busy the rush. We had to work with the Captain to navigate our restaurant being bought out by a chain. This all came out just by us riffing off each other and off the prompt cards.Oh Captain My Captain is the first Descended from the Queen game I’ve played, but I like the format for something quick to bring to the table and responsive to whatever weird whims we bring to the table on a given night.Ironsworn StarforgedI picked Ironsworn Starforged up on sale this year and playing it in the Stargazer app has been a fun little side thing when I get little bits of time.I’ve been running a story about a young Indiana Jones type character running around space searching for ancient ruins to learn secrets about these electromagnetic storms that plague the sector. It has been really fun and I really enjoy the exercise of following the threads of the story from place to place. I plan to edit some of the journal entries to get them posted.Games I Planned to Get to the TableSome games I had sessions prepped, everything was ready, but the session just fell through last minute.Call of CthulhuI picked up the collection The Things We Leave Behind from Stygian Fox and had planned to run the scenario Forget Me Not which features a group of TV show paranormal investigators who wake up crashed on the side of the road with amnesia and have to piece together how and why they got there. Things get weirder when they notice one of their original number is missing. The writing on the scenario really pulled me in so I’ll need to keep looking at it. We actually were scheduled to play this right up until a bunch of family stuff hit us all with only a couple hours to game time.Delta GreenDelta Green is a game I get a bit conflicted on sometimes. The everyone’s a government agent and sometimes things need to be kept secret no matter the cost vibe from both the program and the outlaws can grate at me, but like I like the idea that someone knows this stuff is out there and is trying to make sure that your day isn’t wrecked by it.So I had this idea where maybe the federal agencies the players work for aren’t law enforcement. Maybe we’ve got EPA looking into some weird spill or Fisheries handling some weird aquatic life. Honestly, fisheries protecting food sources to uphold a treaty with deep ones sounds like a fun game.The idea came out of playing Last Things Last with a couple members of my gaming group in summer 2024. Both players played jaded law enforcement and when faced with strange voices coming from an enclosed space they just set a fire first, asked questions later. My own job revolves around double checking for mistakes and abuses made by law enforcement, so that sort of cavalier attitude toward possible mythos involvement didn’t get me the same sort of escapism I was looking for.I think I’m going to keep working toward my third path Delta Green campaign in the new year and see how it works. I envision the burn it all attitude of the outlaws to actually make them a decent antagonist faction.Games I Want to Bring to the Table in 2026I read a lot of games in 2025 that I might have made notes on or initial plans about what I would do but never got around to scheduling.TravellerThis is actually the game that has the longest history of me trying to find time to get it to the table this year.I took both the Mongoose Traveller Second Edition book and the Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition (available for free on DriveThruRPG) with me on my trip to Tacoma when my sister had her stroke on New Year’s. I spent a lot of time that week repeatedly rolling 2d6 to create sectors that I imagined what sort of shenanigans my players would get up to.I also spent a bunch of time with Classic Traveller’s famous character creation where you can die in creation.Traveller has a whole binder set aside for it ready to get it to the table when I can. My table would probably prefer the structure of Mongoose Traveller to the chaotic way that skills don’t really apply to rolls except when they do or maybe apply 4x the rank of Classic Traveller.Fabula UltimaThis one I actually picked up the same night as the Mongoose Traveller bundle around last Christmas.The description of Fabula Ultima as a TTJRPG sold me, plus that the title basically translates to Final Fantasy and also that the artwork keeps an originality to it while simultaneously looking like it would be right at home in the manuals for Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Advance.I’ve got some notes in Obsidian about an isekai game using Fabula Ultima, the drop one die to raise another character creation feels like a nicer way to let my players base characters on themselves than like “WHAT WOULD YOUR PERSONAL CHARISMA SCORE BE?” And yes, this idea did pretty much come from the fact that the art looks straight out of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.The Techno Fantasy premise I have for the isekai is that some billionaire is experimenting with multiversal travel and the players get sucked into the fantasy world and have to find a way home while also helping with the environmental devastation the dimensional portal machine is creating.Mage the AwakeningI ran a Mage The Awakening game as like my third campaign ever and really badly want to run another.So far, I’m imagining the Seers of the Throne causing disunity by throwing support behind extremely xenophobic politicians around Cleveland, Ohio.Am I inspired by real Ohio? Why are you asking?PathfinderI have loved Pathfinder and Golarian since I first bought the first edition core book in the middle of Constitutional Law class in like my first or second week of law school.I then went on to buy basically every hardcover rule book and bestiary as they came out up through 2015.So the current campaign idea I have is that after Anastasia Nikolaevna has been queen of Irrisen for a bit, an invasion by evil fey who helped Baba Yaga take over Irrisen must be faced. That Tsarevna Anastasia was transported from 1917 Russia to Golarian is one of my favorite lore facts.13th AgeLast year, I preordered the new second edition of 13th Age. I have my PDF copies and am excited for my hardcover copies to arrive.I have an idea of a campaign surrounding the Great Gold Wyrm and the Crusader differing in how to deal with demons and the Diabolist laughing all the way home pitting the two against each other.Magical Land of YeldI’ve had the Magical Land of Yeld for a couple years and have had a blast listening to the official podcast that covers the Mermaid Hunters intro adventure.Sort of like I’m planning with Fabula Ultima, Yeld is focused on an isekai game. Totally want to get a sort of Stranger Things crossed with Narnia thing going.
