Been a hot minute since the last post here but...

2026 has been AMAZING

TLDR; we've run 168 (with 13 more scheduled this month) online and 170 (8 more scheduled this month) physical games! 

THAT'S OVER 300 GAMES IN 8 MONTHS. OVER 1000 HOURS OF TTRPG YAPPING. Besides the short break in July, the average is over 50 games a month since March. Keeping this up, we could potentially break 500 this year. I took two weeks off in July, and somehow August is the best month yet!

We've kept up with new games every month; notably Cain, Demon the Fallen, Avatar Legends, Bluebeard's bride, Heart: The City Beneath, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and my very own self-written game, Charm Person. We also ran a rather successful Gacha Dungeon (we ran 5 sessions in total of pure whack randomness).

Just wanted to do a quick yap about things I've enjoyed and learned so far;

THE GAMES

Heart: The City Beneath is the game designers dream to me - running and reading it was beautiful and really carried a different vibe to dungeon delving. The health system is reminiscent of how The End of the World carries their health system, enhancing the deadly but not lethal vibe of the game. The art is also beautiful and layout is immaculate - it's an easy read to learn. The statistics are exponentially difficult the deeper in the dungeon that you go. That is, instead of getting stronger and succeeding more, you succeed less but have more versatility. 

Having run 3 powered by the apocalypse (PbtA) games (Avatar Legends across 2 modules, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Bluebeard's Bride), anyone who asks knows that I'm not a huge fan of PbtA. It's a great systems light narrative game, and I lean towards either having more crunch or even less mechanics (a la Stewpot/Firebrands or Wanderhome). That being said, I feel that PbtA is perfect at delivering Bluebeard's Bride. The fact that all the players are playing the same character forces them to interact since they are all at risk if someone messes up. In other PbtA games I've run, the individual players have to actively try to interact with everyone else, and more often than not there may be one player that needs to be nudged a bit more to roleplay. I think this is why I'm not such a huge fan for it in TSL or Avatar Legends (I am not saying those games aren't good, more like I feel like there's something that can be done better, and I don't know what it is yet). The ring mechanic in Bluebeard's Bride forces the spotlight to be visible and it's super easy to remember who has had the spotlight and who needs to get the spotlight. This is even more integral given that PbtA games are so heavy on character creation and player character relations that it often takes a chunk of the gaming time we have for one-shots.

Demon: The Fallen and Cain were two games for "cult" month when we had an ongoing gag that the community was a TTRPG cult - and BOY did I almost bite off more than I could chew. Both books are dense, thick, or both and took up a lot of my reading time. Amazing flavor across both games, definitely recommend trying Cain out especially, but also me learning the hard way to not pick two games that are incredibly dense to run. A lot of World of Darkness (Vampire the Masquerade, Demon the Fallen, Mage the Ascension, Hunter the Reckoning, etc.) games are lore heavy. I cheated in a way for Demon as I relied on ol' catholic knowledge to fill in gaps, but while the lore is rich, time is scarce. Will not pick two games like this at the same time again. Cain is great, especially with Chainsaw Man and JJK being some of the most watched anime at the moment. 

Campaigns-wise - Triangle Agency has been a total blast to run. It is truly the anti-GM game as I've mentioned many times before, but I've reached a point where I've sunk so much effort to learning the game that I can't pull myself out of it anymore. It's scratching a weird itch that no other game is getting, and I've got a system to figuring out modules for this system that's just so efficient. Maybe I'll write another blog post on that one day. 

Mothership on the other hand is classic. It's easy to digest, and I can mass read entire modules in one sitting. If you haven't tried MOSH as a GM, do it. This is how I envision all TTRPGs to be presented for Game Masters - quick to reference, even without digital tools, minimum information presented, and very very modular (like OSR games). Fatherfog 0e was recently released, and I've got high hopes that this will make a good fantasy addition to my roster. I'd love to write modules based around filipino myths and monsters, but that's something I'll think about later.

For good ol' D&D5e/5.5e, I've gone ham on the Curse of Strahd train - 6 Strahd campaigns at the same time. No other comments - gothic horror is classique and we all love it. I'm also going through Tomb of Annihilation, Eve of Ruin, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Andrew Kolb's Wonderland, Lost Mines of Phandelver AND I'm currently reading up to run a Drakkenheim game. Overall, super excited!

I'm super excited for Halloween - I'm thinking of checking out Fatherfog 0e, reviving The End of the World, and I'll fish around for more Halloween stuff. 

What's Next?

I'm writing a game - it's been on and off for the past year, but I've got some good people on my team, and I'm excited to start playtesting. I'll like start with physical play-tests first, before building out a prototype on Tabletop Simulator or on Foundry. I wanna keep running games, and keep these juices flowing. I'm not gonna talk too much about it cause it's most probably going to change a lot. Otherwise, I'm always looking for more games to run, and if you know any games with funky systems, let me know!

Don't forget, who's awesome? You're Awesome.

P.s. Thanks for the Birthday Sundeth shirt fried dice fam, I love it.