Welcome to 2026. I hope the holidays have treated you well. So, on to a look back at my gaming in 2025.

Firstly, most of my Gaming took place on the Raspy Raven Discord; you can see the link to it below, and you are very welcome to join us!

I occasionally escaped to conventions around the UK and to what is seemingly becoming a monthly excursion into London, mainly at The Arcanist’s Tavern.

Some Statistics: 117 sessions, 4 conventions, 34 different systems. Top five: Dragonbane, Coriolis: The Third Horizon, The Yellow King RPG & The Electric State. I ran all of these apart from Dragonbane.

I will delve into the top three playing highlights of the year, followed by the top three games I ran, which really hit the mark.

Playing

Dragonbane - Path of Glory

Our GM, chekmx, does a great job of herding cats, as we do our best to, unintentionally, make things difficult for him. Mainly, this is in our choice of PCs, we were almost at a point where there was no more space at the back of the party, crowded as it was with wizards, rogues and folk that could barely lift a dagger, let alone a sword and took flight at the first sign of danger.

Over time, Dragonbane has certainly become a “Goldilocks” RPG for me, not too much and not too little crunch. I rarely run fantasy RPGs, but I do enjoy playing in these sessions. I get my fantasy/OSR fix in these Sunday evening get-togethers, which we’ve been a part of for over ten years.

This group have quickly gone from the Dragon Emperor campaign to Path of Glory (PoG). All seemed straightforward in the first phase as we gathered McGuffins to find a grand McGuffin before entering a complete hell hole, where character after character perished, until we eventually blasted our way through and out the other side. There, the story pauses to be picked up again in January.

As mentioned, it’s my fantasy fix, but it is also my only regular playing fix with a long-standing group. It’s a great way to start the week, and long may it continue, though I worry about the longevity of my latest character, Hackleswell.

Swords of the Serpentine - Swords of the Bosphorus

I sadly had to drop out of this wonderfully inventive take on Swords of the Serpentine (SotS) due to life stuff. Martin was the GM and had a bit of a track record of creating these unique, ingenious hacks. So we took SotS and ended up in 12th-century Constantinople. I played a Portuguese explorer who’d fallen on hard times, but still kept his trust in St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of finding lost things, amongst other miracles! Martin had cleverly replaced the SotS magic system with reliance on Saints and other deities to grant miracles to the PCs.

The PCs spent much of their time trying to decipher passages from an ancient Prophecy, while battling foes both supernatural and mortal, but just as deadly. Sessions were undertaken around a series of wonderful brain teasers, linked to scripture and myth, and I got a lot of my kicks out of following up on our perceived understanding of them, sometimes rightly, sometimes a right royal red herring. Tremendous fun, endlessly inventive and shows how much the framework of SotS can stretch, much kudos to Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner, along with Martin!

17th Century Minimalist - Bring us that Book!

This was a face-to-face oneshot at Owlbear and the Wizard’s Staff. Aerkane ran an excellent game, getting the mix of history and play just right. There were also some nice improvisational tweaks to the character creation and at key points along the adventure via hidden prompts.

17th Century Minimalist is a strong little OSR game that has enough variation in it to make those seeking system over vibes happy at the range of tactical options and equipment.

Ultimately, though, any play comes down to the people, and we had a wholly committed group, who, even though they cut down my duplicitous PC in full flight, were to be applauded for sticking to such great roleplaying principles. Curse them!

Admittedly, there are many, many more games I’ve played that deserve a mention, but there is only so much ink in the Buttondown reserves.

Running

The Electric State - Into the Dust

Probably the most fully realised of the campaigns I ran AND completed. It also leaned into more narrative and less mechanically focused sessions, though I would say it is perversely one of the more complex Year Zero Engine games.

Again, we had an excellent group, fully committed to the setting and their characters and always up for introducing aspects of their character or the setting that didn’t always make it easier for them, but always added interest and enjoyment to each session.

I did put together a detailed review of the campaign, which you can see by searching back through my archives, but I’ll highlight some thoughts that have come to me since we completed the campaign.

I’ve reversed my feelings of restoring Hope via resolving conflicts. It felt clunky on the page, but for our group, it produced a series of lovely little vignettes as relationships deepened and the previous scenarios were reflected upon. An impressively realised bit of design.

The setting for me perfectly reflected the art and words of Simon Stålenhag; ignore the rancid Netflix movie, this for me pinpointed a certain set of pre-apocalypse conditions, which are easy to recognise in today’s world. They are horrific, and again, the designers have done a brilliant job in reflecting these elements - decaying societies, The Neuroscape, Hope vs Bliss dynamic - into the mechanics.

It is still a mini campaign I continue to reflect upon, now to get my Pilgrim’s Way UK version of The Electric State to the table.

Liminal Horror - The Bloom

I could have picked any number of scenarios for this system: The Chair, Gongoozler, One Night at the Shelterwood Inn, Messenger National Park.

The Bloom, though, was what I plumped for, in part, because the scenario coincided with reading lots of articles about the main protagonist in The Bloom. It was a joy to set up. I transferred it all into FoundryVTT, which worked perfectly.

The guidance in the scenario for campaign versus, in our case, one-shots, was so helpful, as was the community on the Liminal Horror Discord, always happy to give advice or comments, but above all, super enthusiastic about their games.

So I was on a wave of positivity as I dropped the players into this sandbox and sat back as I improvised or rolled on tables to create an increasingly creepy wilderness survival game. A highlight was a shot ringing out in the forest at night. I’d linked a gunshot sound to the Discord voice channel, though it eventually went off at about a hundred times the volume I’d anticipated! A public apology to my players is warranted!

Definitely more Liminal Horror in 2026!

Tales of the Old West - The King of Santa Fe

I’d loved what the Effekt folks had done with this setting, and given it was Year Zero Engine, I thought this would be easy to pick up and run. In retrospect, it has proved to be much more challenging, mainly because it is so unlike anything else I’ve run or played.

I did a fair amount of prep and reading for this, particularly on session zero, to tease out what the players wanted in terms of game experiences and to give them enough agency to drive the story.

A slow burn, as we got to grips with the mechanics and each other, but it’s now throwing up regular Western tropes - card games, duels, survival in the wilderness and shady goings on.

It is definitely the campaign that has got my brain whirring the most, given my other campaigns are off the written page. It’s a direction I want to go in, but I think it’s also something that I need to ramp back on other games to accommodate some brain space.

Looking forward to more epic events with this excellent group.

Honourable mentions: Coriolis: The Third Horizon, The Yellow King RPG, The Silt Verses, Cosmic Dark, The Dee Sanction, First Responders & Pressure

Overall, very happy with the gaming for 2025, I feel I’m at the limit on what I can comfortably cope with and given my wish to do more writing in 2026, I may have to ramp back. But there is still enough innovation, creativity in the TTRPG community to keep me excited and engaged with this excellent hobby.