To Be Resolved - Endies 2025
I'm seeing some other blogs start to compose their 2025 retrospectives and thought I'd join in the fun. This has been a pretty dang busy year, so I'll lead with my year in tabletop and then shout out a few other categories of things I enjoyed in 2025. It's still only December 13th, so I reserve the rights to update this post for the next 18 days.
Games I've Run in 2025
His Majesty the Worm
I've had a lot of fun with HMTW in different forms this year. At the end of 2024, my virtual gaming group decided to take a break from fifth edition and I had just started assembling my megadungeon. I frantically put together some materials and started offering sessions about every other week. This was an absolute blast; I've talked about HMTW in nearly every blog post I've made so I won't spend too much more time on it but word on the street is that Josh's turnkey megadungeon is still in preorder at Exalted Funeral.
I also played some stripped back HMTW early this year for use with Prismatic Wasteland's Barkeep on the Borderlands for my birthday and boy howdy it was a hoot.
Black Sword Hack
I really like Black Sword Hack. It's incredibly speedy, the epitome of a system staying out of the way of the adventure. I ran Trilemma's At the Hour of Death for my in-person group and we managed to create characters and complete the dungeon in about 2.5 hours. The Chaos Crier zines are great supplements with lots of weird flavor, too.
Old Gods of Appalachia
I only ran one session of OGOA this year. I still have a lot of affection for the system and will recommend it to people, but I pretty much wrote Hellbenders to be a system for telling Appalachian stories that better suits my sensibilities. One of my coworkers was back in town for a week earlier in the year, maybe spring, and wanted to revisit last year's campaign so we role played a party hosted by some Company Men.
Mythic Bastionland
I got a decent amount of Mythic Bastionland table time in this year! By some miracle, I placed my order with Plus One like...five days before the Quinns Quest video dropped? So my fulfillment was, thankfully, uninterrupted. I love this system. I sort of abused it with my first table experience; I used it as the engine to run Gardens of Ynn for a friend's bachelor party and wrote some wraparound fiction to customize it for the occasion, so it was a blast. After that I played a few "smart shot" sessions with different friends in person. Hell of a game mister Bastionland.
Mausritter
I had some neighbors over in the early summer for a dinner and game night, and my neighbor is a Redwall fanatic so we busted out Honey in the Rafters and had a great time. What else needs to be said about Mausritter other than "I backed Junk City on day one".
Triangle Agency
It's probably not fully fair to say I ran TA. I brought it and printouts from one of the missions from the Vault to a bachelor party over the summer, but the only time we really had for a game was in the middle of the afternoon on a gorgeous day so after character creation and a few scenes of drunken chattering, we agreed to move on to other things. I like Triangle Agency and would like to give it another fair shake but I completely whiffed on the time and place to try it for the first time!
Hellbenders
To my delight, I've gotten a decent amount of table time in on Hellbenders since the original game concept over the summer! It has been a lot of fun to get a half-baked idea all the way to semi-baked but table-ready PDF! It's also been fun to play a session, identify issues, and come to the next session with rewrites. Feels like house rules on steroids because I am the house! I'm really proud of the current state of the game; I'm not sure what else comes next besides more time in the oven on some of the setting and some more testing of the combat subsystem.
Random Access Memory
Another pleasant surprise; I've gotten a couple of sessions in running dungeon modules with RAM and it's been a total treat. Feedback has been very positive, so I will probably return to this one for some refinement in the new year before much more testing.
Games I've Played
Tabletop
I haven't played much this year from the other side of the GM screen, but I've had some good and less-than-good experiences!
Fifth Edition
Had a pretty actively unpleasant experience playing DND earlier this year. No need to tell tales out of school, the GM is a local acquaintance who has been interested in assembling an online campaign. The time commitment was unsustainable (five consecutive hours every other Sunday afternoon) and the setting information seemed to be an AI-generated kitchen sink. Not fun!
Project Wayward
I had a chance to playtest some mechanics that Prismatic Wasteland has been working on this year; it was very cool! Had a beautiful OSR character death in a completely unforced error and I was grinning ear to ear the entire time. Pris is a great designer and a great gamerunner.
Peasantry
Zak has been working on Peasantry for a few years and I was lucky enough to get a session in! We ended up with only two players, which caused a few wrinkles for some of the social mechanics, but it's clear why that system is on such a good track. I recommend subscribing to his newsletter. In the course of his Thanksgiving adventure I managed to turn into a covered wagon mecha in order to help slay Christopher Columbus.
Mothership
I played a few sessions of Mothership with Kati from The Play Reports this year, once with her running and once with one of her friends running. I used the same character between sessions with no shore leave and I'll tell you what, my handyperson from Neo Maine was a lot more high strung on the second session than he was when we tackled The Year of the Rat. Mothership rocks though, everyone knows it. Horror is a cool genre for tabletop.
Blades in the Dark
Noel at Viridian Void offered to run a session of Blades for me and a few other interested folks this past month. What a blast! The scenario he drafted is here. I'd never played a Forged in the Dark game so it was wonderful to finally see what all the hubbub was about, and the hubbub is deserved. I would definitely note that character creation (and Crew creation) is by no means breezy - he had the foresight to ask us to collaborate for the week prior to the first session developing our characters and it was the right decision. This is a game that, just structurally and functionally speaking, requires a session zero. I appreciated getting to participate in the Palette Grid in real time too. If you have a chance to play Blades, play Blades.
Other Games
I played a few new board games this year! I'd played Root before, and now after three sessions playing as the Cats I finally found a winning line and smoked my friends. I also played both the co-op and competitive modes of the Mistborn deckbuilder. It's fun! It's a quick play, which is nice, but I definitely prefer cooperative play - I think that's part of why I like TTRPGs. I also played the pirate game, Plunder!, with some neighbors and it was some good fun.
As far as videogames, this was a lean year but I liked Clair Obscur and Hades 2.
2025 in Writing
My three biggest projects this year were Dungeon25, starting this blog, and getting a handful of game projects off the ground.
All told, I've got a couple hundred pages of writing to reflect on this year and I could never imagine being here!
Dungeon25
From January 1st to about March 25 (coincidence, unfortunately!), I wrote a unique dungeon room key every day. In large part, this was to help build out my megadungeon for His Majesty the Worm, but I realize now that it was an important part of shaking the cobwebs loose on my creative writing and level design. I don't think I would have started the blog if I hadn't done this exercise. I might come back either at the end of the month or in January and format my D25 rooms into a series of blog posts.
To Be Resolved
I started the blog this year! I'm glad that I did, this has been a fun project so far. I'm glad to be capturing my wrongheaded thoughts in a quarantine zone rather than in discord chats.
Game Design Projects
I've got about 4-5 concepts in work now. Hellbenders obviously came first over the summer, but in the last few months I've had a lot of fun fleshing out RAM, the untitled Honeybee game, the Mad Biographers, and a very silly project that is tentatively called Mason Dixonland which has not been documented yet outside of my Onenote.
2025 in Books
Fiction
- Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. Historical fantasy horror set in 1300s Norman France. Strong recommend, makes a great companion piece to Outcast Silver Raiders.
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Experimental historical fiction. Very interesting read, recommended to me by a good friend.
- Never Whistle at Night by various authors. A dark fiction anthology by indigenous American and First Nations authors. Some of these stories really gave me the willies! Generally a cool project though, especially if you have an interest in American folklore and pulp horror.
- Children of Dune by Frank Herbert. I liked it! I know this is around where some people start getting off the Dune train, and I'm not leaping at the opportunity to read more of the series, but I left CoD with a spring in my step.
- Guards, Guards! by Terry Pratchett. I don't need to speak for Terry Pratchett, but if you haven't read any of his City Watch books and you enjoy silly fantasy, it's worth your time.
- The Poppy Wars by RF Kuang. This was not my favorite book this year but I understand why people have a lot of love for it. I really appreciated the premise, and there were aspects of the book that I found spectacular, but it would not be my first recommendation.
- The Great When by Alan Moore. This was a weird one. I didn't find the experience of reading The Great When particularly pleasurable, but the ideas baked into this book have been seriously inspiring in my creative works this year. I can imagine it being a great audiobook, but I would probably not read The Great When again.
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin. I call her LeGOAT for a reason. What an incredible read. Run, don't walk, to your local library or bookstore if you somehow haven't read The Dispossessed yet.
- Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon is my favorite author, and I enjoyed Shadow Ticket but it didn't sing for me the way that Gravity's Rainbow, Bleeding Edge, and Mason&Dixon do. I would still recommend it as a read, it's an interesting commentary on the present day through the lens of 1930s Milwaukee.
- Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. Full disclosure, I'm still reading this as of this post but I have really enjoyed it as a work of historical fiction.
Nonfiction
- The Many Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh. Insanely good read. I love learning about the periods of history captured here and the intention behind providing a voice to working people in a world where the working class hadn't been defined yet was amazing.
- Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Really powerful piece, I referenced it recently in my post about treating TTRPG stories as a historiographical process. Strong recommend.
- The Bird in Flight Leaves no Trace by Seon Master Subul. I didn't know almost anything about Zen Buddhism before reading this book; it's an interesting read, it's a modern translation of and commentary on a 9th century Chinese Buddhist manuscript. It's sort of a similar read to the Socratic Dialogues. It wasn't my favorite thing I read this year, but I learned a lot!
- Seeing Like a State by James C Scott. This one is cheating, I think I started reading it in 2019 but I finally got back into it this past March and realized that I had just stalled out in, like, the one boring part of the book (I simply don't care about Le Corbusier). I love this book with my whole heart, not much else to say.
- Why Should the Devil have All the Good Music by Gregory Alan Thornbury. Very cool biography of Larry Norman, considered the "Father of Christian Rock" despite the decades of drama and scandal between him and the industry. I read this in about a thousand different veterinary hospitals while my beloved old cat was dying, so I have a very warm place in my heart for both the book and Larry Norman's music now.
- A Little Devil In America: Notes on Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib. I think this was my favorite book I read this year. A beautiful collection of essays on the black singers, dancers, actors, and artists that have inspired generations of people in the face of white America's racism. I want every person I have ever met to read this book, and if necessary I will read it to them.
- America, America by Greg Grandin. Friggin hell this book rocks too, I was really on a tear for the back half of the year but this history of the new world will make you feel sick to your stomach (laudatory).
- The Rule Book by Stenros and Montola. I've cited this a lot in my blog posts, but thank you again to Jay Dragon for convincing me to sit down with it and chew on it. I feel like a better thinker about games as systems now for having read this book.
Lightning Round
Top Music this Year
Wallsocket (2023) by Underscores. I learned about this woman from Danny Brown and holy shit this album rips. Lonely People with Power (2025) by Deafheaven. I love Deafheaven. Laurentian Blue (2025) by Panopticon. What if a black metal band made a country album and played it completely straight? It would kick ass, next question.
Best concert this year was The Mars Volta opening for Deftones, I got moshed so hard during Deftones that it reset my spinal column.
Top Movies this Year
One Battle After Another is an instant top five movies of all time. Eddington was awesome, anyone who has seen it knows the scene about two thirds of the way through where I stood out of my seat and started pumping my fists in the air. Mickey 17 was super fun and Robert Pattinson is a great weird little guy. I finally watched Bugonia and it was better than I possibly could have anticipated.