An Incomplete Retrospective on half of 2024 and 2025

While my other blog stuff has fallen off (since I was running games) I want to get this done and posted - I feel like things went pretty well for my games after that really angry and depressed post. I'm in a much better space, and though some of the games didn't always go smoothly I feel like I'm getting a better handle on stuff. Inspired by this post I'll try to focus my retrospective on my games with an eye for tangible lessons and possible actions.

Club stuff

A big shift for this time period of August 2024 to December 2025 was that the exco for the D&D club got a huge boost in numbers and activity from Aug '25 onwards. I'm deeply, deeply grateful and happy that the club is back to "real" operations after it floundered under my watch. Yeah yeah I can't blame it all on me as there was COVID and not much interest at the time, but still... pretty sure my decision to keep running games after I graduated helped keep the ember alive long enough for the club to grow organically again after the past... 2 years, at this point in the timeline?? wow.

 

Interest from new players remained high (the key metric is one-shots early in the August-December semester. in both '24 and '25 every table was filled to the brim, and I was running 2 games every week for 3 weeks. That's like 6 to 8 times 6 each semester) and I met lots of great new players, and strong interest from returning players. That's good, because I have a foolish plan at the end of this post that needs that momentum.

Non-club non-game stuff

I think I took a biiig step back from disk horse this period, esp. in later 2025? No specific reason, honestly? It's not like I hate that stuff, but I think I found a lot more valueable discussions from just reading blogs and being in the TA server (oh yeah also I joined the TA server)

 

For hobby things, I think it was about the same as the previous post. Actually more I think - battletech, bunch of Reapers Bones and some other assorted stuff. Recently I bought a lot of cheap china minis and some official warhams and asoiaf stuff. That should be more than enough for, frankly, the next few years.

 

Games I GMed

Almost every session was in school and in-person. At some point I have to find a new location because soon I'll be a creepy 30-year-old old joe on campus trying to lure kids into playing imagination games. Online in the few times we couldn't get schedules to fit and we needed to end the campaign by a certain date.

 

Sem 1 24/25

 

Campaign	System	Sessions
One-Shots	Varied	4
FIST of Vengeance	F.I.S.T. Ultra Edition	8
Champions of Agonia v1	Black Sword Hack UCE	1
Crossroads of Empire	Old-School Essentials	6

Sem 2 24/25

Campaign	System	Sessions
Chaos Among the Stars	Mongoose Traveller	9
Heralds of the Black Crown	Black Sword Hack UCE + OSE	10
Champions of Agonia v2	Black Sword Hack UCE	6

 

Comments about games from the last post:

Quick intrusion here: As a retrospective on my retrospective on those games: The standouts still stand out in my mind. Holiday campaign still the GOAT. Turns out B/X free-form campaigning is awesome, who knew?? The second Crown (OSE hack) and first Champions (BSH) campaigns at the end of that post were seriously fun, and have stood the test of time. I absolutely need to do post-mortems of those three.

I have a secret ranking I maintain of my games and those are still wayyyy up there.

Semester 1 (August-December 2024)

Interest from new players remained high (the key metric is one-shots early in the August-December semester. in both '24 and '25 every table was filled to the brim. That's like, 20-30 new players per semester?) and I met lots of great new players, and strong interest from returning players. That's good, because I have a really dumb plan that requires that at the end of this post.

 

FIST of Vengeance

In the words of the catchphrase my players came up: IT'S FISTING TIME

I cannot fully convey how amazing this campaign was. Every session was a blast, every roll was tense or hilarious or some other entertaining thing, every character was unique and interesting and fun, and the rulebooks tools were SOOOO GOOD. Maybe the best I've ever read and used? And I really like Trav (mongoose and classic both), BSH and OSE already so that's surprising to hear myself say.

Missions included:
1. Stopping a nefarious experiment to spread tainted infant formula in Not-Rangoon in the midst of military takeover
2. Apocalyptic Cult, Haunted Prisons, and Biowaste processors gone rogue in Not-Madagascar
3. Train Fight, Neo-Nazis, and haunted buildings & mines in Not-Montana (well, it was Montana but I made up the town)
4. Assassination mission in a casino in Actual-Vegas

Extremely unrelated but I have to mention: I almost ran a mission in West Berlin centered around finding The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet around the time it would have been made (game was set in cartoon version of the year ~1984) for Mission 3 and saving the band from some nefarious plot to weaponise the airwaves and cause mind control or some such.

When the actual Mission 3 ended.... was almost exactly the day the identity of the song was found.

Also after the assassination mission the Luigi and insurance CEO thing happened. Between these two occurences we can conclude that me running FIST has anomalous properties that affect the real world.

What I'd change: 

The FIST game went so well I struggle to think of what I'd do different. I did write a list during the campaign- one idea was to seed more CYCLOPS (or other adversary group) "minibosses" more frequently and earlier. Like Metal Gear Rising, As it stood, I relied a lot on Gauntlet and the Cyber-Ninja as cross-mission threats (though they never really rose to the importance of being defining encounters anyway so I didn't force it.)

 

I really wanted to run more locations and missions, and if I'd trimmed the fat on some of the missions and reduced the sessions required perhaps I could've squeezed in 1 more mission? 

Champions of Argonia v.1

I could only run the first session as the players for this (all students of the same course and a friend group already) were struck by heavy workloads almost immediately after that week, so I did a do over in the next semester. I'll write about that one in that section.

Crossroads of Empire

Originally intended as a bit of a islandcrawl campaign- however, partly due to schedule issues we couldnt run as many sessions as I wanted. But more importantly, I was sorely ill-prepared to run an islandcrawl. Or rather, mis-estimated how much content can quickly bloat.

The entire campaign ended up only being on one island and most of the sessions in one megadungeon which the players thoroughly exploited through unusual means (working with factions in the dungeon, bypassing the main areas, etc.).

The players were great and had creative solutions, though I think there was a bit of misalignment in campaign style expectations, and that's on me.

What I'd change: 

First off- I underestimated how much content can bloat. You'd think I'd learn this by now...

What started as a starter dungeon and an island with a few stuff was quickly populated by me rolling during prep and making up stuff- and you can generate way more than players can play in the same amount of time. In the end, one island was waaaay more than enough for a short campaign.

 

Another issue was that I really gave no reason for them to set sail- and really, I did not properly prep way for them to interface with the titular empires. Yes they had representatives and teams on the island stealing stuff here and there, undermining local politics and fighting each other but still... Instructively, I think a comparison to Wolves later on might show the differences. 

Semester 2 (January-April 2025)

Biggo mistake. Three campaigns a semester. At least one was almost half the sessions, cos players kept missing... yeah that's not cool either.

Chaos Among the Stars

Great stuff! I took a lot of swings and had both home runs and misses. The hijacking of the gunship and the haunted space station heart in session 1, the miss that was trying to do a Tenet time-backwards thing with an NPC they didn't know they were missing- although they got to board and seize an experimental ship!

Tomb delving, not-minotaur chase, fleeing from an Inquisitor's goons. And then later an acid-rain bunker society planet with a DEATH RACE (an entire session using a variant of some mad max-like wargame's rules I adapted) and later holding up a space casino at the very end.

Technically I used a variant of SWN's planet generation- but seeing CT's now, I think it would've been good to do the latter and roll 1 or 2 world tags from SWN. Either way- the spacefaring, planet-hopping was super fun and kept things fresh (and generated a lot of organic encounters in travel). I can't emphasise enough how good this is. It's not news to many, but it was to me!

What I'd change:

I want to try CT's more broad scope planet generation with less defined strokes next time- and if really needed, only then will I add SWN tags to shake things up. As it stands, I've gotten really into using CT's patrons too to flesh things out. This campaign was largely a breeeze, and a lot of fun.

Heralds of the Black Crown

This one is hard for me to reflect on. Effort went into this, and I had big expectations (fusion of BSH and Crown concepts, how could it be bad?) but it was middling. I don't know if the players liked this, they seemed to, but on my end it was a little disappointing and mostly a lot of little annoyances. Nonetheless, fun twists and turns and high concept weirdness I got to deploy, the players were resourceful and creative, so that's always a good time.

However, I learnt that I still hate 5e-play-culture expectation of personal character arcs the DM has to craft for players and melodrama. Just too much work for the squeeze, and frankly most players don't even know how to capitalise on it. Stop watching APs, they'll rot your brain.

One of the players just kept trying to dispute so many rulings, looking for better loot, focussed only on mechanical spelled-out uses for stuff I gave for his character's RP, optimising stuff... even though he was doing just fine playing to the fiction as I always run my games. No surprise he's a 5e head.

Another player kind of overwhelmed me with all her schemes and plans that were just wayyyyy too big for her character's power and level of knowledge. I humoured her but she wouldn't stop trying to pull the same big stunts she did in previous campaigns. It's just way too much work. Also, AI generated images and text. That annoyed the hell out of me.

What I'd change:

Much more common usages of "No", telling players clearly when I've just had my fill of this or that kind of behaviour, and signal clearly I don't have a lot of affordances for melodrama stuff, especially if they can't even play with it. I simply don't have the time in prep and at the table.

Also, I need to cut the bloat in prep. Stop making so much stuff!

Champions of Argonia v.2

Remember how I said I'd write about this in this section.

Pscyhe, I won't because this campaign - not to put too fine a point on it - was extremely stressful and annoying to run. I'm trying to be objective here so I'll say the scheduling issues was one pillar of it- we could only do like 6 sessions. I liked the BSH tools, I liked doing prep... But this was the first time in a long time where I did not like playing with about half the players.

Again, I will be diplomatic, but it was certainly a real chore and headache to run for some of these players, who didn't listen, didn't care, were chit chatting away from the others, were on their phone... I think the main issue is that this play group came in as a friend group already. So like the classic complaint many GMs have that for some reason the online orthodoxy condemns as selfish and close-minded, they really were just here to hang out. They couldn't give two shits about the game or me as a fellow player. And if they did, they had a funny way of showing it.

Fortunately, some of the players weren't so bad, and were quite fun to play with. One of them, though he could not make it to most sessions, at least clearly gave a damn about the game and we had a fun downtime solo adventure over the course of weeks. A couple of others were indeed very interested and not at all bored, and the campaign 'style' varied so it's not a problem of "different types of players like different things". At some point, we need to stop blaming GMs for running bad games or not catering to players, and start asking some players to just not show up if they don't care.

Yet despite it all, I think the actual play at the table was mostly fun.

What I'd change: 

Never run for a pre-existing friend group if you're not part of it. Even if they all were interested, there's still the practical issue where if some cant make it, the whole group wont come. Hence, only 6 sessions in the semester. Even if you are part of the friend group, most are just there to hang out, which is fine, but if that's not also your aim... well, just don't sweat too much about prepping stuff.

Bad experience, but I liked some of the stuff I prepped, might re-use it again.

Holiday (13 June - 1 August 2025)

So with the middling experience in Semester 2, how was the holiday game?

FUCKING AWESOME

WOOOOOOLVES Upon The Coast. This was absolutely the highlight of the academic year- much like how FIST dominated late 2024, and Crown & Champions were equally amazing in early-mid 2024. A lot of this is thanks to the rules and hexcrawl (thank you Luke Gearing) and really great players- I cannot claim too much credit here. There was a solid roster of players- and because I started later than I wanted in the holiday period, and I kept up a rapid pace (2 games a week), it really pushed me to put on my A-game every session.

 

It also brought out that ever-important GM trait: be impatient and put your best/most interesting ideas forward sooner than possible. This is something I've strived to do with every campaign but Wolves really helped here too.

 

Every session was a blast and, unusually, very memorable. A key reason, I think, is that I was running something new and really challenged myself since I'd never run Wolves or a similar "real" hexcrawl (except the Holiday campaign of 2023)

What I'd change: probably read through the rules again and get combat right- many times I'd forgotten how enemy HD affect their attacks, hit bonuses and save bonuses. I struggle to think of any major missteps in this campaign. Yeah there's always things I can do to improve, but nothing that feels like a bleeding wound.

So What's Next?

I'm going to do a 2025-26 post too at some point. All in all, mixed year. I'm definitely forgetting a lot of things I wanted to write about the last time I was drafting this.

The Naga (Vol. 2 Monsters)

naga

HD 5
AC AS PLATE
DAMAGE 1D6

May spit poison up to six feet. Save v Poison to negate. 1d6 damage
May constrict in melee. Difficult Strength check. 1d6 damage from constriction
Gaze causes Save v Paralysis +2 or be charmed as per the spell Charm

 

Divinity is an action.
Made real by its truth-thirst.
Recall the slitherine heaves of mother egg's birth.
Recall the song-scream of mother moon's burst.


Clad in chalk and dye
Ash and skin
Take the form of gods
Recall the splendour of long dead kin.

A chosen vessel
To pour the hate and woe
Of long forgotten sorrow.

Skin grows dry. Fuse to scale.
Limbs extraneous. Broken, forms a tail.
Eyes bleed true
To see the pain of past anew.

Live amongst the forebears
Formed of silent stone
Their effigies, riotous like a dream
Remember their due.

Suns rise, moons fall.
The memory and hate remains in the bone.
Austere or wild the rites come to holy ground.

The honoured speakers
Crawl like stone
To feed on pain and labour
Or die without a sound.

O bless'd are they!
To die like gods!

Moons rise, suns fall.
Cities burn, tongues forgotten.
The reaper calls, bodies fall rotten.

Wanderers from yonder
Prowl through the corpse of yesteryear
But still the guardians remember
The fate of an invader.

Statues they seem
Lifelike they perch
Carved of masonry and clad in paint.
Silently they deem
These defilers of their church
Offerings worthy of a saint.

From dark tombs emerge
From halls once filled
From memories of hate
From nests once warm

Adorned in skulls of foes
Regalia of jade, bright and cold
Gold threads from 'cross the seas
A crown that recalls rage untold.

In fact and in form
Robbers learn too late
The Naga of legend and Naga of late
Bear the same hate.

///
Divinity is a performance.
It knows it is
And was
It never need ask.

Divinity wears a face for a mask.

This is but one of the paths a man may walk to leave mortality behind.
///

 

Some sci-fi milieus I've been catching vibes for

In brief: I've been pondering some slightly-deeper-than-skin-deep trends in older sci-fi video games. Sci-fi has a really interesting relation to vidya- on xwitter I saw a mention about how Fantasy dominates (vidya)RPGs (and as we know, also TTRPGs), and someone mentioned Sci-fi dominates film compared to its Fantasy cousin.

I'd also posit that outside RPGs, Sci-fi also dominates video games. Anyway of these, I spotted some interesting Vibes TM that could form the basis for future ideas and inspiration- call it the saturated idea-solution from which game-stuff eventually precipitates/crystalises out of.

Dark Industrial 90s scifi
Examples: Command & Conquer Tiberium saga, Alpha Centauri, Marathon, System Shock, Deux Ex 1, some other niche games but Crusader, Mobile Armoured Division Shogo, maybe Red Faction 2001 comes to mind a bit.

Old cyberpunk-genre adjacent, military parts are distinctly post-Cold War, pre-GWOT. The Tiberium saga of C&C is very clear in this, and especially the first 2. The Yugoslav Wars are one of the main touchpoints for its vibe.

There's a close cousin to this Dark Industrial 90s family, and that's the more futuristic projection. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, to me, is the most clear example of this- also very in conversation with genre sci-fi of its time.

A very distinct trope that flashes into mainstream genre fiction prominence in the 90s (and thus leaves its mark on this Milieu I Made Up) is cloning. The 90s laid the groundwork for that trope to be really big in the 2000s, likely spurred by "oh gosh is it just about to happen?" due to genetic breakthroughs in that decade.

[Answer is interestingly, kind of but not really, like many promising fields. Apart from the post-Reagan pre-Dubya coalescing coalition of christian nuts screeching about sanctity of the soul or whatever, there were also a few high-profile ethical cases- not literally related to cloning (except the south korea case where there was black market purchase of human eggs and voluntrary [??] donation from students working on the paper) but largely regards to fraud. In any case, laws came down hard and smote the field to prevent any real progress anyway. That said, viable embryos are indeed hard to induce.]

Clones (and a post-modern eugenics! i.e. eugenics never shown as good, unlike pre New Wave SF were it was "hmm... maybe...?") were big in comics in this era (prominently off the top of my head, Spidey, X-Men, Superman), prominent in some of the biggest blockbusters (Jurassic Park, Alien Resurrection), partly in Star Wars (before the pr*quels were made- the EU was allowed to have some mentions of clone warlords).

There's a cyberpunk-adjacent aspect to this milieu too- big 1990s style yuppie corpos and the like. The criticism is several steps behind the raw 80s cyberpunk literary scene, but still there.

What it does with that cyberpunk-adjacent lineage that is maybe unique to it is jumping into 1990s conspiracy theory paranoia- always a rich scene to mine ideas from. This cyberpunk and conspiracy vibe aspect is somewhat in common with the next on my list, with one big deviation:

DI90 very commonly is set after a mini apocalypse. Maybe it's post Cold War blue balls or that specific "crime is rampant! society is collapsing!" gloom that was around but urban decay in conjunction with miniature apocalypses is pretty common in this Milieu

What about aliens? Aliens in this Milieu are shadowy, strange, probably locked up in Roswell or in the case of SMAC pretty darn not-human.

AI does show up but it really gets into high gear in the next section, perhaps because, thematically linked to the Internet, it all feels more connected to ideas of social control and surveillance in Spyberpunk. Speaking of surveillance- interestingly, this Dark Industrial vibe is quite pre-digital. Like, on the cusp. CCTVs just aren't that omnipresent.

 

Spyberpunk 2000s
Examples: Perfect Dark (a recent? review on it gave me this millieu name), Deus Ex in general (including Human Revolution), Phantom Liberty, Alpha Protocol, Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere, modern Hitman, D20 modern

A lot of this group is as much play-tropes as it is aesthetic and thematic elements. A more refined "Tech-Noir" aesthetic perhaps.

Honorable mention to Equilibrium, Aeon Flux, Matrix, those three films aren't vidya so they're not directly relevant here but I think, although they are [early 2000s late cyberpunk-early New Dystopia] in vibe they do catch that Super Cool Spy-like Character aspect in overlap with Spyberpunk.

Alpha Protocol is an interesting outlier, newer than the others without being outright descended from the Milieu (new Hitman trilogy captures key play elements but not all, and Phantom Liberty is maybe a sideways convergent evolution... maybe it's different enough idk). It captures a lot of the same play tropes of action mechanics mixed with extremely flexible and open problem solving, with a similar feeling, but it's not the same cyberpunk-adjacent thing as Perfect Dark or Deus Ex or AC3 are. [The background radiation is instead peak of the backlash wave to GWOT, while the others are very "last wave of the 90s occurring in the early 2000s"]

Metal Gear Solid has a lot of overlaps with DI90 and Spyberpunk2K but there's enough distinction- perhaps it's the japanese perspective of its writers? Hate to do the Thing, Japan tendency here but something about them do not capture the exact same feel and attitude.

AI becomes a big thing here, with slightly more realistic comparisons to its capabilities (compared to old SF fare like No Mouth) and what it actually is, while keeping some of its vague magical omnipotent danger (as opposed to the theoretically understandable brainswirl of how stochastic and algorithmic manipulation of modern internet controls and ruins people).

Interestingly, I think no aliens here, firmly earth-rooted.

Finally, aesthetically very 90s Anime OVAs. Good stuff, not slop stuff. 

 

Purple sci-fi space opera 2000s scifi
Examples: Halo, Advent Rising (only putting it here because it might be the only "halo-killer" to actually ape Halo's aesthetic- a bit too much, maybe), all the early "halo-killers" pre-Haze and pre-peak-GWOT-brown-sludge-FPS, Mass Effect 1 (and largely only 1), Homeworld, Master of Orion/Sword of the Stars

I don't have another word other than Purple Sci-Fi. There's A TON of other sci fi games from the early 2000s but a lot share this. Probably pushing new hardware of the day with the X360 and PS3 and modern PCs?

It is purple, shiny, chrome, it is peak Y2K, it is big chunky diegetic UI with meaty select sounds. It is the imagery described in the "I feel like i am the only one who understands Halo CE's art direction" tweet.

These guys are very much space operas through and through- talking humanoid aliens, FTL and shiny spaceships, BIG ASS space battles, a heavy throwback to space opera paperbacks of the 80s and 90s (somewhat...). The Star Wars pr*quels are cousins of this Milieu in some parts. The aesthetic is very 

GWOT influence seeps into the military aspects of this milieu eventually- but due to their 80s and 90s mil-sf & space opera roots, reactionary brainworms ain't exactly new to them.

They also frequently use elements of the standard sci-fi plot pioneered by 80s and 90s space opera novels, but I don't think that's too important.

Space magic is pretty prominent in this Milieu, and quite different in tone, theme and appearance from like 60s paperback SF Psionics. Less a metaphor for the need for communication in the new industrial age growing from the stifling old days, and more Wow Cool Power (also some amount of ancient/mystical romanticism. Phooey!)

NOTE: 

someone smarter than me needs to talk about the 80s and 90s mil SF boom and how it parallels the Tolkienesque Boom [note I say Tolkieneque Boom - Shannara, Dragonlance, Extruded Fantasy Product Slop, culminating in Wheel of Time, which I will say isn't slop per se but well, it's definitely That Milieu]

It's so influential that that novel milieu is the root of THE modern standard sci-fi escapist formula. Note how different it is from the Foundation-Dune and related Dumarest/Terro-Human (i.e. Traveller) milieu. Oh look, the Tolkienesque Boom also created its standard backdrop distinctly different from both Tolkien, the many directions of the New Wave and the old pulp formulas.

(interjection: I cite tvtropes here not cos it's gospel but because A. it does after all track things so common it becomes tropey B. those are handy links for me to point to instead of describing every detail and C. Anecdotal backing-up that those plots are indeed standard: because I myself know that despite a sideways and winding exposure to SF and Fantasy my earliest worldbuilding stuff ALSO resembled those formulas WITHOUT knowing about them beforehand. That's how much the background radiation permeates.)

Both booms had what were essentially highly motivated, big-for-pulp publishers behind them (Baen for Milsf, TOR & Del Rey for EFP. Btw TOR, Del Rey/Ballantine and ACE) with editors with clear ideas on what they wanted their Content Mills to produce, both were a sort of re-Conservatisation of their genres after the New Wave, riding the second-to-last wave of paperback novel churn (to be destroyed eventually by IP properties sucking up the new crop of would-be modern pulp writers and then later by the fragmenting and reconsolidation of the industry under the algorithmic eye), both had huge overlaps in editors as mentioned in the brackets above, both became so big they became the new "old standard" just in time for the cultural fragmentation of the internet age.

Belated Bornktober 2024: Prompt 1 SKELETON//FIRE

Written for 2024's Morktober and Bonktober

From the crypts of the doomed castle: Skeleton
From the smoking plains of the volcanic fields: Fire

Thus spake the Chroniclers:

Through the choking ashfall in the Scorcholt, one can sometimes see a lava-bright flame, white-bright and flicker-fast, moving between the endless sea of tree-corpses. Those who live in the shadow of the Great Volcano avert their eyes, though the glare not be strong- they say it is the Terebarch, the Hallowed Unburnt, and on the nights where the winds howl softly, one can hear another form of howl join the chorus. The Seyigians think them cursed harbingers, while the Heregeot clans see them as grim but hallowed signs of ancestral protection.

The Terebarch haunt the Scorcholt of the Great Volcano, flaming bones animated by unthinking malice for the living. They have an uncanny sense for cowardice, vice and discord, ambush travellers to drag them into the flaming crags of the mountain- to be puppeted again, some say, as the newest of their unholy number.

The most detailed chronicles of the Terebarch comes from the Kingdom of Seyig- they tell of a Three-Armed Lord of Kasfen, Champion of Shrin Mer Fourth-Born of a distant time, whose fortress was built in four days and two nights upon the Maw of Garahin, upon the southern Sunken Slopes of the Great Volcano. Different tales abound in the Kingdom between the House of Mentionables and Wandering Chroniclers of the Goatfish. Some bear the marks of Late Shriner hagiography, and others bear the mark of Virtue instruction.

Some say the Lord Kasfen was a virtuous, loyal, oath-sworn vassal of Shrin Mer Fourth-Born, who raised the fortress to defend Their Dominion from Zyglurg swarms and war-breathing Melitanae-in-Brass; others, that he was a greedy, grasping bandit lord who built the fortress to extract the foul gases (and attendant nanoids) for Shrin Mer Falseborn in exchange for Solar Auguries.

Some claim his soldiers stood with him as the gases ignited in the final assault, but as the Merin blessings defended faithful vassals from the dying in the line of Duty, thus were they consigned to eternal burning, losing all sense and their senses, condemned thus to haunt the slopes of the Great Volcano. Others, that the warriors' faith fled them, and they had abandoned the siege. It was for their cowardice that the ancestral spirits of the Volcano cursed them to wander the volcanic slopes forevermore, to dredge up the unworthy dead so that they would live in agonising infamy for their faithlessness.

Outside Seyig, the Chroniclers of the Heregeot Tribes and Scribes of Kyudix refute the Kasfen origin of the Unburnt- for a vassal of the Circles of Shrin Mer would never be titled Hallowed by the dwellers of the mountain. A common belief is that they are ancestral vengeance spirits arising from the cracked, boiling skin of Mother Magma. A small minority insist that the Unburnt are far more recent than these claims- the result of foul rituals of an exiled Zhadur Alchemiral from the War of the Broken Blades who sought refuge in the Scorcholt. While there is some record of such an Alchemiral, there is little reliable evidence to support this claim.

 

Whatever their genesis, all know they are dangerous. Taking the form of flaming bone-frames, in a variety of endodermic arrangements in the body-types of almost every sapient form on the Great Island. Slipping between the charred tree-corpses of the Scorcholt, their bones click and clank, letting out guttural howls from the inner voids of their empty chests, wreathed in the white-hot flame of volcanic off-gas.

Whatever arms and armour they may once have had are melted, their arms and chests frequently covered in a single fused plate of ferric parzar'ma material. The oldest amongst them wear their 'melts' around their feet, their metal plates dripping down over the years to pool at their feet, leading to speculation that even their metal is cursed- though this does not dissuade scavengers and scraphounds bartering with it and smithing it into armour or trophies.

These elder 'tin-howls' (as called by Elders of the Stanush Redoubt) have completely bleached, brittle bones, so long and hot have they burnt that even the water spirits dwelling in the bones have fled, fusing the crystal hearts of the endodermis, creating brittler, higher-pitched clicking and clacking noises. More concerning to dwellers about the Great Volcano is that these tin-howls appear substantially more malevolent and crafty than their 'bone-charred' counterparts, working in groups, keeping silent. Only sudden rises in temperature can warn one of their approach.

Idle chatter, especially towards outsiders, brings up a most elusive claim- the King of Smoke, a claim that there is a single leader of the Unburnt. He is the subject of many legends- great disasters and miracles are attributed to this figure, which has never been definitively spotted. Rare are the sages that directly claim the King of Smoke is the legendary Lord of Kasfen- leading some sages to the idea that the latter might be a later legend reworked into existing sightings of the Unburnt.

Those who have fallen into their clutches- and not merely scavenged the aftermath of such an encounter- know that all this is idle prattle.

For all that one needs to know is that their teeth-chattering clicks and clacks are all too real
the heat they bring unbearable
and the echoing howls are all too familiar...

Thus writ of matters of combattle and war:

HP                        8
Defence                DR 10    /    12    /    14
Armour                -d4        /    -d2    /    +1
Morale                  10
Attack                   As weapon
NA:

HP    8   Morale    10    Defence    DR 10/12/14    Armour    -D4/-D2/+1    Weapon    D6
Special:      

• Haunters of the Ash: The Terebarch are uncannily silent when on the prowl, only their glow and heat marking their presence- increase chance of surprise by 1-in-6 if precautions are not taken
• To seek the Unworthy: They have an uncanny sense for cowardice, vice and discord- reaction roll -1 for each of the aforementioned behaviours in any party coming across Terebarch.
• Embrace of Garahin: When in melee range, all have 2-in-6 chance of catching fire for d4 ongoing damage.
  
• Aging Malice: Tin-howl Terebarch are more nimble and cunning, despite their lack of armour and brittler bones. Terebarch have higher DR with a matching lower Armour score as shown above.
• Pain Eternal: Dousing the flame can only be done by ice or water powers- the earth and air here only inflame it. Inflaming Terebarch flames will drive them berserk, dealing +2 damage. Dousing the flame calms them for 1 round as they turn catatonic, unable to comprehend the lack of pain.

Tererbarch prowl the Scorcholt, their flaming bones animated by unthinking malice for the living. They have a sense for vice and cowardice, and ambush travellers to bring them into the flaming crags of the mountain- to be puppeted again, some say, as the newest of their unholy number.

 

 

 

Credits: pyroblight by Nost343 as the template for collage, Mork Borg cover art, skeletal Matoran, MNOG Charred Forest, most LEGO parts in the collage sourced from Bricklink's images

A double-feature, belated Bornktober and Glogtober: GLAUGUST 2025

So last year I wanted to get into Morktober, which coincidentally was also Bonktober. I decided to combine the prompts for extra fun, because nothing is more fun than adding more things on your plate. My campaigns that semester had ended by then, but then I had to go overseas for work (!?!?) and the prompts helped me along by giving me something to hang my idle imagination on- though honestly, more of my hyperfocus energy at the time was more directed at Warhammer 40K sector generation stuff.

It's been more than half a year since. So might as well finish this combined Bornktober up ! I'm posting this to keep myself accountable- for the rest of June I'll post my ideas for the combined prompts each day- hopefully this also galvanises me to get the brain working again, and perhaps post various sundry RPG stuff that comes to me.

^ I wrote this is June, as you can tell, and I didn't get around to it. Brain was frazzled. BUT that meant when I finally had the wherewithal to start writing again, I got hit with GLAUGUST.

That means a combined ... lots of prompts (if we're going maximalist. Really you only need to do one prompt from each of the six categories for GLAUGUST). Enough to tie up August and September, until the actual Bonktober/Morktober/Glogtober this year. So! A combined challenge: To post as much as I can from the Bornktober combined list, and as much from GLAUGUST 2025 list. 67 ideas, 60 something days until 1st October. Awesome.

 

I can't draw so here's some cool bonkle art that has a more black metal vibe, and morkborg art. Credit Eden Sanders for Tahu, u/Mantleheart for Tarakava and Kopaka, and Johan Nohr for She

 

IN SUMMARY:

I will be doing a belated Bornktober 2024, and hopefully over the next few months GLAUGUST 2025.

Here's Prompt 1!

Quarter Hour of Writing Challenge: Demons

Demons don't hate you, not truly.

They are beyond you, an emptiness. Some simply express their natures- stalking and murdering, the wet spray of blood, the iron-stench that hangs like a red mist after the deed. Some take it slow. Coughs and pus and fevres and pains and bloodied bowels. They have much to show, much to inflict.

Others enjoy their wickedness, their accursed freedoms. Free of the shackles of gold and lead alike- though the telluric bones are another thing entirely. They want to share it with you. Yes, you, because you deserve it. And would it not be fair and nice if you shared something with them?

They hide in the skin, in the air. Glowing in shadows and fading in the light. Floating along the river of word-sounds, mirages of mnemoforms in the mind- was it there? No burly creature are they (unless it suits them). Is it telling you something? Or did you independently use your mind and heart, to derive an inevitable truth, one that conveniently converges with the sickly-sweet whispers emanating from the tongued-forks of Demons.

Let them in. Or don't. It matters not. They want to feel the sensation of flesh again, the warm embrace of skin and the rigid comfort of bones living.

Sometimes they wait for you. If you are so smart and wise and brave and strong, they wait for you to call them. You can extract careful assistance and forgotten knowledge from them. They know of the Dragons Metallic, the innermost desires of your desire, the forumlae alchemick that would throw open the doors barring mortal hands from the hidden compounds, the purpose of the sky-rings, and the elders who fashioned them with artifice and fear. They know of the betrayal of iron and the first of the giant-kin. The Elfin enclaves will not tell you that, you know? And all gods-fearing peoples know that they get their powers from demons, anyway.

The salts and smokes and signs bar them, keep the Demons in an invisible cage of your construction. Arriving in forms of eyes and weeping bark. They are forced to help you, of course. And for such an easy process. And they can help you so much more, if you just loosened the leash...

inspired by this old(?) post here from The Library of Attnam

An Incomplete Retrospective on 2023 and half of 2024

So, I've been planning to write a retrospective of my recent RPG gaming for a while now. I had a draft last December/this January that was... not good. I was in a bad mental state I think. Full of self-recriminations, bitterness; even though I kept trying to edit it out, it just came back in.

Yet there is a lot I can learn from it, and at the very least I feel like I should put out some of my thoughts to work through them.

Campaign Log

Whatever happened to that thing in the first post

Unfortunately, I never did get to do that real-time domain warfare campaign over December 2022. Having prep start IN December was probably a bad sign. No experience of real-time asynchronous GMing was probably another. Then there was the holiday trip... spent the last week of 2022 with a new sickness each day while away from home. Terrible experience, I do not recommend getting sick while on holiday. Pissed me off enough and put enough anxious energy in me to make up for that time that it really pushed me to run my games in the new year, though.

[note: I will be naming the periods of the year according to the university's calendar since all my players and my play locale are from/is there]

There was also mention of a 5e event in this blog's first post- it was surprisingly not teeth-pullingly agonising to run it, though I kind of insisted on just running it the usual way I do, which given it was kind of a 'investigate and run around this area with lots of gifts and goods', it worked. Though when combat started, oh boy, I definitely could feel the cultural divide. I have zero interest in refereeing the kind of video-gamey hard-interface combat combo that 3e and after has. Sadly this also probably means I will be unable to enjoy running or playing LANCER, which I guess is fine, because I spent quite a lot of time this and last year ruminating on whether the fantasy of fiddly vehicular combat (jets, tanks, mechs) can really interface with the kind of open-ended jury-rigged problem solving that I love. And I think no, or rather, either the field of game design or my own brain (definitely the latter) is not sufficiently advanced to create a game that meets both. It might even be a Cursed Problem, idk.

Semester 2 (January-April 2023)

One-shots

I ran a few one-shots to start things off in 2023. On a whim, for one of the games I decided to go with something similar enough to my existing d20 experience, and tried Castles & Crusades for one of the games. It was fine, though I don't think I really used it enough to claim any real familiarity with it. I also ran a one-shot using Mongoose Traveller and two more using my homebrew D6 dice pool system (hereafter referred to as Dii6). That last one was a real blast to run and play, though I'm not sure I can credit the system and myself for that so much as the players that happened to show up for that one... unless...? Stay tuned for a later part of this post

Overall, a good enough start for the semester, though as with most things, I think I was filled with anxiety and second-guessing and kicking myself for forgetting something, or failing to deliver certain parts. The negative memories wash away, though, and now I look at a smoothed, airbrushed memory of those games. It's human nature. Or a self-defense mechanism my addled brain cooked up after many years to deal with failure and disappointment, which is passable for long-term sanity but bad for reflecting and improving on mistakes.

Of the three weekly campaigns I tried to run this semester, one fizzled after the first session, probably due to a confusing and uninteresting first session. It also could be because it was the one I felt required the least work on my part (rule system and setting I knew intimately well) so I started it waaay too late in the semester, around Week 5 of 13. Bad idea. The first few weeks are crucial to get players to sink their commitment into a thing, and any outlier ups and (especially) downs of the mini-campaign would be smoothed out after a few sessions.

It was perhaps good fortune that ended that campaign because as you will eventually see, fate intervened to ensure I did not bite off more than I could chew (this is called foreshadowing, a thing I don't do enough in my games). For the campaigns I did run:

Crown

Ran using Castles & Crusades on the surface, but with heavy boatloads of rules and additions and removals. Off the top of my head I added a spellcasting check for spells, randomised spells using Maze Rats (I think?), and other stuff. Started off the campaign at the junction between mid and low levels (I think it was Level 4), 

One unfortunate issue I had in this campaign was a baaaaad bout of Mental Curdling for a couple weeks- I have decided to excise the details from my original draft. Simply put, minor frustrations and annoyances Curdled in my brain in the days between sessions into bottled up anger. Which was stupid because I had zero problems with the players both on and off the table. So all that stress was for nothing.

Reading my original draft of this part of the blog post, I realised I've completely forgotten those bad feelings that existed entirely in my head. As well as the bad feelings I had about it. Probably not a good idea to read the draft again lol, because I know this stuff can stick in my head for too long.

The sheer ironic tragedy is that the players whose inocuous comments caused me stress ended up unable to show up for later sessions due to work commitments, and by then I was genuinely sad they couldn't come. Well, too little too late. Always I am unable to appreciate when they're here, only able to miss when someone is gone.

On the bright side- each session was generally 'meaty', fun, kept things moving, and ended with a great finale.

Crisis

Mongoose Traveller with a key change- I do not remember at all which version of Traveller I got this idea from (I think it's an optional rule from T5?) but I decided on 2d6+Attribute+Skill > 12 + DM for the skill checks. Using the attribute number itself was one less thing to keep track for players, but it definitely changed the relative importance of Skill levels.

I also did not use the unskilled -4 penalty used in virtually all Traveller editions, and that was also not a good call. It's there for a reason! For niche protection and simulating a totally untrained user of a skill. I think I removed it because it did not make much sense that certain things, if untrained, incur a -4, but oh well, that'll be yet another thing to agonise about if I play MgT again (which I likely will).

While I think the players had a great time, I still think I failed in my overall goal when starting this mini-campaign: the way the sector was laid out with descriptions and small snippets was meant to encourage more open sandbox play, but ultimately due to the starting mission and the nature of it, it dominated the campaign and was mostly about chasing down its whereabouts. Another lesson learned: goals drive actions and if I had wanted to nudge players into classic Traveller style play I should've used, y'know, the tools in Traveller already- the classic one is having to pay off the ship's mortgage, which means making money, which means Travelling TM and getting into all sorts of seedy and suspicious missions, chasing down rumours, running scams and heists, taking bounties etc. You know, Adventure!

And for long-term campaigns, hopefully by the time they pay off the mortgage the players already have other things they care about and their own self-directed goals built off of that and to work towards. I always think of how Baldur's Gate 2 pulls this trick in the first part of the game to get players to go explore and get into trouble, but somehow I always fail to implement it.

This is not to say the campaign was not fun for them or myself- I did manage to be as flexible as I could to ensure that even on weeks where not all players could show up, I could use the chance to shift the "POV" to other PCs separated from the party and link things that would otherwise just be a throwaway background comment by NPCs. By some miracle I think that part succeeded. (I have since forgotten what I meant when I first wrote this paragraph months ago)

An intrusion into the chronology to gripe about Grandfather Time

I think the limitations of the Semester Campaign are what give me this kind of psychic damage when I think I fail to run a good campaign even when the players say they had fun (which I want to believe, and do, and hope). 8 weekly sessions is NOT enough to

1. gel together a group

2. finish the inciting dungeon/mission and go beyond more than one strand of events

3. have time to just wander the campaign world and get up to their own trouble

4. and then have time to build off the hooks that grow out of the first set of adventures that feed back into each other.

There is no space and time at the table and away from it (since it's IN the semester) for playful exploration and fiddling and poking at the imagined world. And of course, there's probably a cultural side to it to- people where I'm from are generally far more goal and rewards-oriented. "Following the main plot" and "don't get sidetracked by Fun Stuff" and "optimise your skills" isn't just ""brain damage"" (as some might say) from vidya gaems or WotC era D&D- in my case it's also the kind of mindset hammered into us by our society. Even more so if they're uni students, which my players are.

[There is of course the extremely high chance that this is all Cope and Mald on my part and instead of blaming society I should blame my bad campaign setup.]

I have decided to add to my original draft in this section: it's definitely also largely my fault. Which is a good lesson- have reasonable expectations. In this case, I know my players have only a couple months and most are new to RPGs in general. Hence, a more trad-style 'story arc' isn't so bad. Now, as I'm writing this in August 2024 I've had more experience and I think I'm slowly converging to a solution that suits the kinda game I like and the practical limitations of play. Which feeds into a lesson I've taken to heart since I've heard it in the rpg blogosphere: there is no substitute to doing. Planning, reading blogs, discussing has benefits, but nothing beats putting the idea to the test and where the rubber meets the road.

More broadly, this also applies to getting better at running RPGs (in the sense of 'increasing the chance your game doesn't suck). Just start doing. A failed or even incomplete 'doing' is infinitely more valuable than thinking about doing. And of course, completing the full process is infinitely more valuable than incomplete project. Which means, yes, ending a campaign early is always preferable to dragging it out beyond the point circumstances force a game to spitter out. I feel pretty strongly about this- this happened once in 2020, partly in February 2023 (closer to a False Start), and as you'll later see, in the second half of 2023.

This is probably the best advice (well, part of a paired series of advice) I've gotten from someone online- to go from not doing a thing to the first step is the key to starting anything. And that a million fizzled out half-done projects is less valuable than one finished project.

This intrusion has gone long enough!

Holiday (May-August 2023)

One-shot

I ran a Star Wars D6 (REUP edition) one-shot for Star Wars day in May. I originally intended to run two, but couldn't find players for a second. It was fun, but again I scrambled to make my prep actually work, and again my time management of the game was terrible and I had to play out the last scene on the way back from school. Embarrassing.

Holiday Campaign

Probably the most positive I've felt about any of my games- though I'm not sure how much of it is a balance between recency bias and 'long enough ago that I've forgotten the bad bits'. I should have finished this post months ago because I'd have more to talk about. Instead I've forgotten much of it. Revisiting that statement in August 2024 and it's still true. Heck yeah, sandbox campaign vindicated, patriots in control.

What I do remember is [d6 table of advice]

1. The power of good random tables. Whether due to my writing style or whatever, seeding ideas from good random tables really helps accelerate my prep process and sends me down idea-paths that I would otherwise never have considered on my own staring at an empty sheet. So much of the campaign

2. It's okay to be lazy. Especially once you get past the first few sessions, if you seed enough random one-off ideas in descriptions and NPC comments, and your players are active, you'll have more idea threads and adventure ideas than you know what to deal with. For most sessions my prep was far more than actually played at the table that session, and the inverse was easily remedied with things like d4caltrops' 100 random hexes or pulling half-formed ideas I'd been thinking of for weeks and slapping it on the table. Over-preperation also led to instances where I felt the need to keep players on a timetable to 'not waste my prep' and while keeping things moving is always good, it can sometimes stumble into light railroading.

[I've stretched this principle beyond breaking point as you'll see later. And it still works. A campaign if constructed with certain design principles is self-perpetuating and self-generative. Adventure and wonder begets adventure and wonder. And if you need to inject more fuel- literally just put in the most recent Other Media you read this week into the next session.

I love RPGs]

3. Listen to the players. They'll tell you what things they like. Encourage them to tell you what they want to do next. Then prep that stuff. Saves on a lot of wasted effort from point 2.

4. Downtime is king, and really helps to expand the verisimilitude of the world beyond what's at the table. Not sure about the chicken and egg relation of this, but the most invested players also did the most downtime texting with me. I feel I could have done a better job doing truncated downtime with the players that were more passive then, but oh well.

5. It seems orthodoxy exists for a reason- B/X is actually quite great lmao, when used for the kind of game it's best suited for. Though I did not fully get to do the hexcrawl procedures in the way they're meant (I went the opposite of giving players too little map info- i gave them too much and they stuck to the 'visible' parts of the map).

I MIGHT have rectified this somewhat by playing the B/X procedures solo many months later and I've got the hang of it too, so hopefully this works better in the future? At least, I now know what it's doing. Speaking of that:

6. West Marches advice is correct- refrain from putting adventures or loot in town. Otherwise players will stay in town where all their allies are resources are. Stupid of me to shoot myself in the foot immediately by having rumour table entries set in town already, but oh well. I guess in the end it was fun, but it definitely discouraged wilderness stuff.

(Update from present me- I think this explains B2's police state. Maybe it's a manifestation of gygax's american cop-brain, but I think it really stems from "emergency button on players staying in town forever and doing their shenanigans there only". Of course, I still don't like the Keep's airtight laws. it's BORING. and also no verisimilitude for me. and also who doesn't like a good urban adventure? But I think I get how it might have been downstream of a band-aid solution. nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.)

Semester 1 (August-December 2023)

so my original draft for this time period was a mess. Full of self recrimination, depression. I'm trying not to even look at it right now- but it was the lowest I felt about my DMing since I started. Hell, probably worse. My first adventure back in 2019 went great.

I am no longer as depressed about it as I was in February and January 2024, but I do still wince thinking about it. And the worst part is that I don't think I've learnt much from it, despite ruminating on it so much. Hopefully I may have accidentally adjusted myself to prevent the same pitfalls, but who knows at this point

I did do a ranking of my games (based on how successful I think they were) just this week and interestingly, the games in this period rank higher than the campaigns I ran in later half of 2022 in my return to RPGs. So I guess it really was like a negative recency bias. Anyway, the draft has been reworked to be more useful.

So what exactly went wrong?

Let's start with trying to run FOUR GAMES A WEEK. You can tell I'm a Middling Engineer because I did not realise that 4 games a week isn't just 2x the workload of 2 games/week- it's around 3.33x the intensity. 4 games/3 free days compared to 2 games/5 free days.

Half a day to prep + remaining free days/campaigns. That's 1.25 'workdays' per game compared to 3, giving around 2.4x less 'worktime'. Add on inefficiency losses from lack of decompression days + 'switching gears' (something I already knew I'd get)... yeah. It was bad. Interestingly, I never did get to literally run four games in a single week, it was always 3 out of 4 games being available in a given week. Don't know if that made it better or worse (worse cos my staccato brain has trouble shifting gears, a problem I still have running more than one game. Throwing a wrench into an already rapidly changing system...)

Of the four games

1. Ended early (actually the best one of the bunch. It basically was a good 4 session adventure wrapped up [accidentally >:)]nicely.)

2. Sputtered out (meant to be a sequel campaign- completely whiffed, players also couldn't get schedules aligned, epic fail)

3. Sputtered out (this one hurts. Every session was fun, surprising, and the players were a joy to play with (if I remember right). But I could not wrap it up, too many missed session from exams, and then final exams came and... yeah)

4. Completed- but with many missteps and missed opportunities on my part

One of which was wasting 15 minutes each session on bookkeeping(??) Somehow this wasnt an issue during the Holiday Campaign which had way more shit, but man keeping track off XP somehow became a chore? Even though it was so little stuff. Maybe I was just tired idk.

I'm really not sure what else to write here. Creatively and in terms of adventure prep I think everything went fine? I made great use of d4caltrops' wilderness hex for one session, I got to run two small dungeons, but the ending felt a little bit of a mess.

Also note to self- don't have PCs make more than 1 PC for the semester campaigns. Or maybe 2 at most? IDFK. At the least, one player plays one character at a time, all reserves stay away doing sometbing. It didn't actually impact much as players stuck to one pretty quickly, but it did suck away XP which I can easily rectify in the future.

My motivation was totally burnt after this period. I just felt like I did a piss-poor job of it all. Maybe there were personal factors too- no idea really. At least some players had mixed reactions to the campaign.

Well, ya live and learn.

Oh yeah one shots. Had a lot of new players for the club, most joined just for a few one shots early in the semester. I ran like 6 games (all fully booked with 6 players!!) in two weeks. It was roughly 50% success rate for me (in terms of "did I think the players had fun") - the homebrew d6 dice pool game rocked again- so now I know the ruleset and scenarios I used work for at least the use case of one-shots. I still need to tweak numbers for sure.

I also ran Black Sword Hack twice- both times did not feel right, but fear not for I finally 'got it' in the next semester.

Oh yeah also I used skerples' d50 mercenary missions for three of the games. Great seeds for adventures.

December holiday

Among other stuff: Solo Chainmail and OD&D. did not amount to actual OD&D play even though i wanted to do one in 2024 for 50th anniversary.

Also got to have pizza party with my old RPG club friends from 2018. First I attended since end of 2019 before The Plague. It felt good to bookend this period in my life, I think.

Semester 2 & Holiday (January-July 2024)

Ran a one-shot again to kick off the semester, then dived straight into campaigns in week 3.

Now here's where I made sure to learn from my mistakes: I gave myself a hard limit of two campaigns a week, an amount that I knew worked. Also with less players this semester I didn't feel the 'obligation' to take on as many players as possible. And there weren't as many anyway!

Tried to join the Jacquays Memorial Game Jam but couldn't complete my entry in time :( same with a couple other jams I think. I did half-finish my LEGOJAM submission as you can see in this blog and did submit it.

So I ran one that was essentially the same core premise as the Crown campaign waaaay above in January 2023. Used basically B/X this time with a hella lot of blogosphere extensions, no pretensions of being C&C this time. I made a hexmap 4x bigger than we needed too.

In any case, it went well! The 14 session campaign actually rolled into the first weeks of summer holiday in May. Neatly, it ended up self-segmenting into a few 'arcs' of several sessions that each focussed on a small region of the map, wrapped up by a final session.

The other campaign which I will call Champions also went well. Ran it with Black Sword Hack and it was fun. The players of course were a major contributing factor- always angling for out of the box solutions and pushing their luck. This one ended up with 19 sessions, ending near the end of the holiday period. This meant no summer campaign but honestly I think the break was fine. It would have been nice to get back into the form of that long holiday campaign in 2023, but fate decided I needed to Do Less this time.

Some hiccups with the middle part of Champions I think dragged a bit due to me just not keeping things moving and allowing a lot of meandering, coupled with players busy with exams. And the last part was stretched over many weeks of being unable to coordinate schedules and a real fear from me that we may not be able to end the campaign with the amount of time we had left in the summer.

Yet! We had many memorable sessions, a great finale, some really standout moments and players that despite meandering were always doing things and had actual goals. I think it really helps if each group has a couple experienced players who already have experience (and also like playing) with the way I give players lots of goal autonomy. Either that or players who really love setting their own goals and working *with* the GM and others at the table instead of against them (on a meta level of "what's the fun option").

Does this mean I need to seed my previous players into my new player groups? I don't know.

Well-seeded maps, good powder keg set-ups, and the campaigns basically ran themselves as the players chased their objectives and bumped into things that bumped back at them. An unstable situation collapsing into a new equilibrium. In fact, this second round of Crown I think overall ran better, and Champions despite its hiccups was less difficult to run than I thought. Also totally reversed my mixed experience with the one-shots.

Also a good chunk of sessions were again just me inserting [most recent Other Media I've Been Interacting With] into a blender and layering it with the basic notes I already had for the neext session. So the approach works. 

Oh I'm caught up now

So what next?

New academic year, new wave of players for the club, and so new campaigns. I have a huge list of campaign pitches though this time I don't feel the same excitement for some ideas- may have to cycle them out of the list then.

It'll be a few weeks until the one shots, then the campaigns start after. Once again I face the bane of 'there's probably not enough time to do the stuff you want' so I'll need to aim small again and focus in- which usually works out, tbh. Maybe string together a couple of module-sized stuff? Almost always, you end up prepping more than you need.

So yeah, happy gaming everyone, I hope I can keep things fun for my players. I'm missing out a lot of analysis and ideas I want to explore in this post- maybe I'll come back to it next time.