Messages from the Far Havens

To some my 2024 of tabletop RPG play may seem a decent haul of games, and I expect for others they remain rookie numbers. At over 150 sessions for the year, I am happy with the volume, it has felt an engaging and absorbing part of my year, and I wonder if a lot more would start to overwhelm the other parts of my life. It’s great to have so many diverse opportunities to play, and I have found a number of welcoming communities that are now an important social outlet for me.

Let’s dive into the meat of things with an overview of the RPG systems that I have played this year. I have filled out the list with the games that I’ll be playing over the Xmas period. The three standouts speak of the continued pattern of playing and running ongoing campaign style games.

The top runner is Mongoose Traveller 2e, strongly bolstered by regular fortnightly play on the Dungeon Muser’s YouTube channel. Backed by a Discord server community, it represents one of the key places I go for some RPG escape. The game itself is an ongoing and RP heavy play of ‘The Borderland Run’ adventure and now into the edge of the ‘Pirates of Drinax’. This year has seen a completion of my character’s story arc, wrestling with the trauma and stress of a black ops past, only to find purpose and redemption in the service of an Aslan noble’s retinue. One of the most satisfying character progression journey that I have played, and particularly satisfying to see an end that continues off camera. I’m enjoying playing a very different character, as the camapaign continues into 2025 and, potentially, beyond! Tom’s ‘Darrian Academics Exploring the Reaches’ game is a refreshing change of pace.

I predicted early that Dragonbane would be an important game for me, so no surprise that it figures large in the numbers for this year. In addition to some sporadic face to face play, including family Xmas RPGs, Dragonbane has become the vehicle for my Trudvang campaign that has continued to run throughout this year. A BRP game at its core, the mechanics reach back to my youth, with a number of Free League flourishes. Although rules ‘too light’ for some in the group, I think the engine has adapted well to the dark forests and soaring mountains of Norse and Germanic inspired Trudvang. Our company’s journey is reaching a climax against the insidious return of the Snow Queen. I’d like to return to Trudvang once this epic is complete, either with Dragonbane or another.

Dom’s Achtung Cthulhu 2D20 has machine gunned its way through 2024 in a series of pulp explosions, that takes our group ever close to the complete artefact of doom, chased by Nazi agents across the globe. A fun game that is also nearing its special effects laden conclusion. I have already started to think how I might fill the void once we have saved the world, or fumbled its messy ending. I was going to suggest a desire to break from the 2D20 system for me, until I realised that the game after my Trudvang will be Simon’s Star Trek Adventures!

Two further notables include an Age of Arthur 2e playtest series of adventures and a Tripod powered Moorcock tale at LongCon. The variety of other games attests to my covention attendances and pick up games with the Dungeon Muser. These have introduced me to new ones and opened fresh vistas of play for 2025, the subject of a separate post.

It’s been great to have a healthy 2:1 balance of player to GMing throughout 2024, with an opportunity to experience many a GM at conventions. As much as I love to GM, my style is traditional and overly prep heavy, which limits my outings to the table. Recognising some great advice on lightening this load, and opening more improv style play, I am happy and comfortable with the way I run games and will probably stick to my approach.

As has been the case since the days of lockdown, the majority (3/4) of my play is online. Face to face gaming is especially lovely, with the immediacy and completeness of the shared table, emotional responses and surrounding social experience. However, I also really enjoy online play, allowing me to play with folks from across the globe and to save on travel and extraneous time around the session.

Roll20 predominates due to its use by many of the GMs that I play with. You can play a perfectly good game on this platform, though I prefer Foundry immeasurably, and have been delighted with the way it promotes information exchange through its journaling system and the excellent webcams through the LiveKit module. 2025 will see me creating and GMing extensively on Foundry. I’m unlikely to pursue interest in Alchemy, as pretty as it looks, and I think my PlayRole days are much more limited, as much as I like the approach of ‘webcams first’.

A backbone of continuous campaign play, laced with interesting episodic and one shot adventures, played with a wide variety of people and places has made for a very good hobby year of gaming. With my convention organising and game writing also featuring throughout the year, it is safe to say that I am experiencing a rich and fulsome peak of my hobby now that I have retired.

I’ll be attending my first Contingency in January, which will serve as both a break from routine, some beach walks, some play, and a writing retreat for Age of Arthur. I’m looking forward to it a great deal.

The GM response to AireCon Harrogate in March has been staggering. I’ve filled virtually every table I have been given, amassed more than player 600 seats over the weekend, and the submitted  programme of games is top notch. My Garricon events are looking good and hopeful for 2025. North Star and LongCon will be launched over the Xmas period, which prompts me to wonder if I should return to running something all weekend. I have an idea… Revelation has ‘surged’ and will happen with a full programme. Furnace in October is in its 20th Year!

More to relect on and plans for 2025, but for now I’ll make myself a cuppa and appreciate all the good hobby things that have happened in 2024.

I trust you have all recovered from your Black Friday / Cyber Monday purchases? There did seem to be some real bargains for RPG PDFs and books, and I picked up a few. Although I have plans for both Symbaroum’s ‘Throne of Thorns’ and Warhammer Fantasy 4th Ed’s ‘Enemy Within’ campaign, I failed to resist picking up volumes 1 & 2 of Gods of the Forbidden North at a knock down price. This is a sprawling campaign, designed with Old School Essentials in mind, but easily playable with your fantasy game of choice.

On the arctic frontier, at the border between the mountains and the wastes beyond, looms Castle Thar-Gannon. For centuries, the Skull God ruled his domain from his blackened throne. But twenty years have passed since the routing of his armies, and the castle lies abandoned with riches unclaimed. Yet, death still lurks in the shadows of the ruins. An ancient doom arises from the depths of this place…

A frigid sandbox, with broad enough shoulders to also provide an adventure path journey through its 480 pages (Book1). Book 2 heads into subteranean realms, with a final book 3 due to arrive in 2025. It’s a vast yet accessible campaign landscape, full of bite sized adventures.  The player characters have travelled to the Forbidden North, and not without purpose. They have seized a valuable Inilgaan artifact, the Eye of J’karaa, from distant ruins. Pursued by their rival, Zarcand the Black Magician, the heroes race to elude their enemy and profit from the heirloom’s secret. 

It’s really tempting to get this to the virtual table straight away. Although Dragonbane is an obvious system choice, I thought I’d branch out and use something else.

Recent play of both Warhammer Fantasy and the slightly more accessible Zweihander, based on an earlier edition of Warhammer with some design changes, have got me tingling. A grim and perilous set of rules cast out into the Forbidden North seems like an excellent ice frozen combination. I’d be playing it on Foundry VTT, my online gaming home. Zweihander is due a new ‘Reforged’ edition in about a month’s time, with some Kickstarter promises for a Foundry module in 2025.

This will either prompt me to be patient and wait for the Foundry module to arrive, or forge on with another game engine. My thoughts turned to my own Heroic Fantasy, a simple Black Hack based game that could quickly be brought into this campaign. An advantage to this game system is its light and flexible approach to describing things, which would make any conversion work a chilly breeze.

Heroic Fantasy emulates early D&D, very much the base for Old School Essentials. Although the two differ mechanically, they occupy similar traditional game space. This prompted me to pick up the Heroic Fantasy book and remind myself of it! I still like its unpretentious and simple mechanics, shallow power curve, and largely player facing rules. It feels a bit ridiculous to waver on offering Heroic Fantasy to possible players due to it being my own game (albeit based on David Black’s solid framework). I think it is a confidence thing.

As I looked through the game I had an idea for a rules variant on difficulty modifiers, so have written it down here to remind me! 

Continue reading →

This is the one that almost got away. I have to go back to October 2020 for the end of the Kickstarter campaign for Here Be Dragon’s ‘Monte Cook’s Diamond Throne. In that dim, dark plague epoch, I was in the midst of some Cypher system love which, paired with my endless exuberance for portentious heroic fantasy, seemed like a great combination.

Since then, Cypher has faded somewhat down my list of go-to systems, though it’s core simplicity and player facing mechanics continue to appeal. High heroic fantasy has most recently arrived in the shape of more inventive F20 with Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and fantasy in general is now dominated with anything Dragonbane. The Lands of the Diamond Throne are chock full of tippy toe high fantasy treats, a gorging of magic and protentious heroics against carefully mechanical odds.

So, four years then. Well, I just remembered that I never got the books that had been sent out. I think, sometime in 2023 I said to the company, Here Be Dragons, that’d wait for the last big thing, The Width of a Circle epic campaign. Of course, it never arrived, although it looked as though it was being worked on. So that patient approach almost cost me everything, as the whole thing slipped from my cosciousness as I was very busy retiring and loafing about.

Cut to today and I went on a quest of my own, to navigate old email threads and dust strewn Kickstarter pages to work out how, or even if, I could still get hold of my pledge books. After some faffing about, I discovered a whole sequence of coupons available to me on my account at Monte Cook Games’ webstore. For a shipping cost of £14, my Kickstarter rewards would be shipped to me. Hoorah! I still think that the campaign pack will be produced and sent through at some point, but I will forge on without it.

Worth noting that the slipcase set of the two core books are about to become available through retail at the MCG Store. 

An unexpected turn, and a curve ball to my gaming plans, which will see some Cypher in my play, at the very least at some conventions. My immediate next step is always to see what is available on Foundry VTT. As far as I can tell, there is a fairly rudimentary system sheet for Cypher play, which is better than anything I could put together, so I have something to work with.  The character creation process of assembling an “I am an adjective-adjective noun who verbs” is just as much of a delight now as when I was fooling with it a few years ago.

Perhaps this will be my Tier 2 group of heroes:

• A Fierce Human Fighter who Was Foretold
• An Honourable Dracha fighter who Performs Battle Rituals
• An Intelligent Human Channeler who Attunes to Mystical Forces
• A Contemplative Human Emmisary who Delves into Akashic Memory
• A Tough Verrik Wanderer who Reveres a Totem Spirit