“If you get on the wrong train, immediately you realize it, get off at the next nearest station. The longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.” – Japanese proverb

For various reasons, this version of the blog is not working for me, so I’m off to Blogger to try something different.

You can find the new blog here in a day or three, and I hope you’ll join me there.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

As we gradually hand over responsibility for the Christmas and New Year festivities to the younger generation, I have more time at year end to read, think, and plan…

Predictions

I’m expecting another uptick in sessions this year, chiefly from adding a Monday night FATE session (Leaves of Chiaroscuro) to the existing rota of Saturday night (the Aslan Route), Sunday afternoon (Deadlands), and solo play whenever I can fit it in, plus whatever games of OD&D and Traveller may come my way. Games which we schedule “every week” actually average about 25 sessions per year, so that should give me some 100 sessions next year, probably around 300 play hours.

Plans

I was starting to lose momentum for the Aslan Route, but plotting over the holidays gave me an outline for the rest of the campaign which mashes up bits of many different products; that’s usually more successful for me than writing adventures from scratch. It will probably change the Trojan Reach to the point that I can’t use it again, but there’s no shortage of other sectors to play in, and I’m tempted to go mapless for the next one.

28 Months Later is ticking along nicely, and I feel no urge to return to Hayastan at the moment; but there are a few things I want to try out in Dark Nebula, so that’s next up; among other things, the solo games are places to experiment with new ideas before unleashing them on my players.

Resolutions

I haven’t done New Year’s resolutions for a long time now, but this year I decided to break out of my comfort zone and set myself some goals, which in turn define my activities. The relevant goals and their associated activities are:

Be more intentional in my gaming. No impulse purchases; each item must serve a specific purpose and not duplicate anything already in my game library. Avoid joining games unless I like the premise, the rules, and the players; temporary exceptions granted if I don’t know them yet.

Expand my circle of players. Play with at least 15 different people this year through campaigns, One Shots, and local groups.

Kintsugi. When I find fridge logic in a game, or new rules I want to try out, repair or modify campaigns rather than rebooting them.

Play more. Play 100 sessions and 300 hours; reduce time spent on new games, session prep and writeups.

Read instead of doomscrolling. Read at least 50 books this year, 10 of them in Italian.

Videogaming. Complete the main storyline for at least two games from my backlog; don’t get hung up on side quests or collecting achievements.

That’ll do, pig; that’ll do. Let’s be about it, shall we?

“Don’t believe everything you think.” – Elizabeth Filips

When I started this incarnation of the blog in May, I had a complex plan calling for me to rotate settings, and games within settings, on a schedule which would have seen me change game roughly every quarter. I wanted to experiment with Old School Essentials, Shadowdark, Stars Without Number, and Mongoose Traveller; revisit 5150, All Things Zombie, and Classic Traveller; and avoid skills fade on Savage Worlds. Since then, I’ve been oscillating between doing all that, picking one game and dropping everything else, and giving up on RPGs altogether. Usually I change my mind about twice per day, but if that’s my worst problem things can’t be too bad, can they?

By the Numbers

My perception is that I’m playing gradually fewer games, less often, with fewer people; but what do the numbers say? I was able to reconstruct 2023 and 2024 from session logs and emails, and those numbers say my perception is wrong…

• I played more sessions this year than last – 89 vs 82.
• I also played more hours – 297 vs 266. I spent less time as a GM this year, but that was almost exactly balanced by an increase in solo play; that’s due to spending half the year in Italy. This tells me the extra hours are coming from playing in more games.
• I played with the same number of people – 12 different people in both years, with a steady core of 9 and some change over time among the others.
• I played the same number of game systems – 6 different RPGs in each year, mostly the same ones but with some churn among those played less frequently.
• The games I spent most time on were Genesys (about 150 hours in both years) and SWADE (about 120 hours), with Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition sneaking up on the inside this year (estimated 14 hours).

I shall keep on tracking in 2025, chiefly as a way of keeping my natural pessimism in check.

Working that out made me curious about my videogaming. If you’d asked me, I would’ve said I’d spent a lot of time in both Borderlands 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, but what I actually played over the last couple of years was about 80% Borderlands 3, 20% Black Mesa, and a smidgeon of Darkest Dungeon. No Tomb Raider at all since I ragequit the witch DLC for being [a] too hard and [b] extremely repetitive.

Meanwhile, this year I read 54 books, including 6 in Italian and one in French. Last year I read 55, of which 3 were in Italian.

I also managed to paint 20 figures when my wife left me unsupervised while she was visiting family in Italy. Since I discovered Army Painter Speedpaint and let go of my perfectionism – no more painting eyes, teeth, or buttons – painting figures is fun again. Previously, I’ve had problems with the varnish in cold damp weather, but not this time, possibly because I left everything in the garage for a few hours to come down to ambient temperature.

Lessons Learned

Solo gaming:

• It’s better to think of the setting as the main character; that way the game can survive the death of any protagonist.
• I can try out new games without changing either the PCs or the setting. However, whatever rules or setting I use, within six months I think it’s the wrong one and I should’ve done something different; much as I would love to pick one game in one setting and stick to it, that just doesn’t seem to be in my nature.
• I’d forgotten how much I enjoy playing solo with figures on a tabletop. Over the years, I’ve drifted away from that to a more narrative type of game; maybe it would be fun to drift back towards the border between RPGs and skirmish wargames, where the narrative is just an excuse for combat.

Group gaming:

• SF games are more popular with my players and more enjoyable for me, so maybe I should focus on those going forward.
• Most of my friends don’t want to play what I want to run, so perhaps I should focus less on being a GM and more on being a player.
• I miss playing face to face, so I should look for a local group, even if they do meet in places and at times which are inconvenient for me and only play D&D 5E.
• This year I’ve been playing SWADE as well as running it, and that has been very helpful in understanding the rules better.

General:

• My back-to-analogue experiment failed, for the third or fourth time. For better or worse, I instinctively reach for a keyboard rather than pen and paper; I can type much faster than I can write longhand, and it’s much easier to correct mistakes and keep backup copies.
• The episode indices for campaigns are actually quite useful, and I missed them when they were gone, so I’ve reinstated them. Check out CAMPAIGNS in the menu.

As usual, I’m taking a couple of weeks off to spoil my descendants and marinade in single malt. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you on the other side, if spared.

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

Time to head back to Blighty, and we creep like snails unwillingly up the east coast of Italy, which has more enjoyable roads than the west side, before dashing around Switzerland and through France as quickly as we can manage on the way back to the UK. (French roads are much better than Italian ones, and our Italian is much better than our French, so we linger in Italy and zip through France.)

Expectations vs Reality

Overall, there was less gaming than I anticipated this summer; the longer I’m in Italy, the less motivation I have to do anything beyond lying on the beach and overeating. If I stayed here more than six months I think I’d drop gaming altogether and focus entirely on la dolce vita.

Comparing my plan for the summer in Resting Beach Face with what actually happened:

Expectations:

• Solo play, veering towards zombies and dungeons. Dungeons – check. Zombies – nope. (Not unusual, I ignore zombies for years on end and then get obsessed with THW’s All Things Zombie for a few months.)
• Prep work for group campaigns. Check. Ready for Session Zero with the next one, and ideas for the two after that, which would take me up to 2030.
• Experiment with SWADE SF Companion. Check. You see that in the Dark Nebula section.

Portable gaming kit – what I took vs what I used:

• Laptop with games PDFs; phone with statblocks and gaming apps. Check, used almost every day; worth bringing next time.
• Ring binder and pens, character sheets, display book with quick reference sheets. Used rarely or not at all, probably not worth bringing next time.

Of the dozens of PDFs I took with me or downloaded while in Italy, I actually used SWADE, the Fantasy and SF Companions, the Dark Nebula and Demons boardgames, Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons, and the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller books 1-3, which has been everywhere with me since I got it and at this point is probably best thought of as a good luck charm. I did use the Mythic GM Emulator, but found an app was more convenient than the PDF itself. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll keep using any of those except the SWADE core rules long-term; I’ll certainly archive the boardgames in a few weeks, once I’ve finished stripping them for parts, and I’m not sure the Companions are worth keeping.

The Wave of the Future

Over the summer I’ve been oscillating between two extremes; paring down my active gaming library to the bare minimum (which would be the SWADE core rulebook and a solo oracle of some kind) and expanding it to a dozen or so games, dabbling in each periodically. It’s not clear where on that spectrum I’ll end up for 2025; the two games most likely to be added to the current stable are Shadowdark and Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition. However, my remaining lifespan is getting shorter, and my pool of players is shrinking; I have to ask myself if changing game system or setting is a good use of whatever I have left of either.

Probably best not to overthink it, and just go where inspiration leads me.

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” – Henry Van Dyke

The pace of life in the Belpaese is much slower, and for us at least revolves around my wife’s love of the sea and the beach, which we visit for some hours most days. Lying idly on the beach while my solar-powered wife recharges for the winter, I muse on the gaming year ahead, which is more productive and more cheerful than my brain’s default setting of brooding on my regrets.

The structure of the blog needs a little tweaking to focus it more on the reduced number of campaigns; first, even with fewer games, the Toolkit page will get too big and cumbersome for my liking, so I shall delete it and instead explain what’s in use for each game as part of that game’s posts. Second, there won’t be enough rules-only posts to justify a Rules category, so that can go as well; rules changes and options should each serve a specific campaign, and be mentioned as part of it. Third, I need to add the standard Traveller disclaimer as I expect to be referring to Traveller going forward.

The main topic, though, is what to do next. I don’t know how many more campaigns I’ll be able to play or run in this lifetime, so given that the next one might be my last, I’ve been thinking carefully about what it should be. Hopping from game to game as I’ve done this last half century is not inherently superior to picking one and sticking to it, and I’ve often wished I’d done that instead, like the GM I admire most, who has been running OD&D in the same setting since 1976; but we are where we are.

What to Run?

Experience teaches that my players prefer it when I run SF games rather than fantasy ones, possibly because I like the genre better myself.

I promised my usual players some Savage Worlds SF in the Official Traveller Universe, Charted Space, and that still seems like a good shout. I often think I’m not a proper GM because I don’t create my own richly detailed homebrew settings, but I don’t currently have the drive or creativity for it, and anyway it irritates me when the players burn them to the ground and run off laughing. Despite the best efforts of generations of publishers, the undetailed areas of Charted Space sprawl indolently across hundreds of parsecs and thousands of years; there’s a time and a place where you can fit in any kind of space opera you fancy playing and most sets of rules, especially if you’re prepared to overwrite official products. There’s even a rigidly-defined area of doubt and uncertainty; the Foreven Sector, a referee’s preserve where individual GMs can do what they like without worrying about conflict with future official material, because there isn’t going to be any.

I confess I liked Traveller best in what is sometimes called its proto-Traveller stage, roughly speaking anything published before 1980, when there was more room for the GM to manoeuvre and the focus was on individual bands of adventurers and their shenanigans rather than the grand sweep of interstellar war and politics. I dabbled in each successive iteration of the game, but generally only long enough to realise I prefer proto-Traveller to any edition published since. These days, I prefer SWADE‘s character creation and advancement, and I’m a big fan of both its fast prep and its ability to zoom in and out of the crunchy details as time and motivation dictate; but I’ve yet to find a SWADE SF setting I like better than Charted Space.

Finally, myself and all my players are already familiar with both SWADE and Charted Space, and it’s hard to see anything else being enough of an improvement to justify the effort of changing. I’ve dangled the various elements of the SF Companion in front of them, but no-one has risen to the bait.

What to Play?

On the solo front, I’d like to play another SF game, but I’m struggling to decide what; I have five possible PCs in mind, three who would work well in the Dark Nebula, one 5150 guy, and one best suited to the Foreven Sector. Probably best not to force it; I’ll look at mashing up SWADE  and the Dark Nebula first, and see if that helps make up my mind.

As a player, what I enjoy the most is still OD&D, although I think that’s more about the GM and the players than the rules or the setting. Isn’t it always?

Coda

If my worst problem is what game to play next, life must be pretty good, right?

“Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.” – Dr Strangelove

Since I retired, the annual mad dash to Sicily for a couple of weeks on the beach getting a really expensive sunburn has been replaced by something entirely more civilised; langourously meandering south over the course of a week or so, stopping off wherever we think the food will be best, followed by months relaxing at the beach and eating out with our Italian relatives.

This year, we plan on staying until it’s too cold to swim, which probably means October. That’s the thick end of six months, but I still want some gaming over that period. What to do?

Some solo play, obviously; that is likely to veer towards zombies and dungeons, as they have the least prep work. Some prep work for future group campaigns; I foresee these cycling around space opera, fantasy, and survival horror. Some experimentation with the features of the SWADE Science Fiction Companion, which I expect to be released shortly. Maybe some Shadowdark, although I’m not in the mood for that currently.

What should the future campaigns be? I don’t think I can improve on The Pirates of Drinax and The Dracula Dossier as richly-detailed story arc campaigns, so let’s try something more emergent and episodic this time. I tend to build the settings for these using maps that I steal from the boardgames of my misspent youth, and out of a dozen or so games I think would make good settings, for 2024 I’m inclined towards Dark Nebula (GDW, 1980), Demons (SPI, 1979), and GEV (MetaGaming, 1977). The intention is to have one setting per genre, with different solo PCs and groups in each, and possibly multiple game systems per setting.

The reason for thinking through all this is to decide what to take with me in my portable gaming kit, which comes in several flavours, depending on how much time and space I expect to have, and who else might be there.

Level 1: Bare minimum. This is what I take if I expect to be alone, with no internet access. Combat at this level uses either Dangerous Quick Encounters (SWADE) or battleboards scrawled in the notebook (THW).

• Tablet with various games PDFs.
• Phone with dice rollers, card draw app, Mythic GM emulator app, character statblocks.
• A5 notebook (possibly a ring binder, so I can swap out pages that become obsolete or ruined) and pens.

Level 2: Internet access. I expect to be alone, but with reliable internet access. Combat at this level uses Roll20 with tokens and battlemats.

• Tablet replaced by laptop, for better internet access.
• Character statblocks expanded to character sheets.
• Display book added with quick reference sheets.

Level 3: Travelling to friends’ house. This happens about twice a year, but could also be used for local gaming groups, if I can find one which plays at a convenient time and place. It’s also the level I use for VTT sessions. Combat at this level uses meeples and Ultimate Dungeon Terrain, of which more in a later post, or Roll20. As level 2, plus:

• Character statblocks expanded to include standard combat actions, for speed (which doesn’t matter so much in solo play).
• Dice. Four sets of the traditional polyhedrals, plus extra d6 for tracking Wounds, Bennies, combat turn, and whatnot.
• Cards. Ordinary playing cards for initiative draws and random encounters, plus the City Deck and Risks & Rewards Deck from All Things Zombie. I would like to take these at lower levels, but the City Deck in particular needs an area at least 45×60 cm which can be left undisturbed for the duration.
• Meeples in lieu of figures. Durable, lightweight, very clear in use (“I’m the blue one”), multipurpose, easily replaced so I don’t get upset if they get lost or broken. Also, inherently diverse; the meeples don’t care what gender, race, etc. the character is, and nor should we (“I’m the blue one, which is a non-binary but biologically female lion-person diplomat in a flying wheelchair”).

Level 4: Playing at home. This hasn’t happened since before COVID, and I’m not sure when it happen again, if ever; it’s level 3 with the addition of actual figures and physical battlemats.

For this trip, I’ll take level 2 or 3, depending on how much room there is in car. My wife suggested I take some figures and paints, which is thoughtful of her, but I paint figures to use them, not because I enjoy painting, and as I say, I don’t see that happening again.

Naturally, since agreeing with my players that the next campaign would be Savage Traveller in the Trojan Reach, I’ve been thinking about everything but that. I justify this by saying I want to look at the Science Fiction Companion before I finalise anything.

So let’s begin with a look at a generic fantasy setting that I’m calling Hayastan.

“Phase 4 clinical trial: A type of clinical trial that studies the side effects caused over time by a new treatment after it has been approved and is on the market.”

New year, new blog. A bit late maybe, but I wanted to let the current campaigns come to a natural close before shifting across. If this is your first visit to one of my blogs, welcome; this is where I blog about Table Top Role Playing Games. You probably know about the most popular one of those, Dungeons & Dragons, although I’m best known among players of SF games, Traveller in particular.

Periodically, I feel I have painted myself into a corner, usually because the list of categories on the blog gets too big for comfort. Then, like a hermit crab changing its shell, I discard the old blog, leaving it behind for whatever use it may be to others, and move into something more spacious, there to pursue whatever interests draw my attention for the next few years.

This time around, you’ll see posts in the following categories:

• Campaigns, although I haven’t decided which ones yet – after completing The Dracula Dossier, I’m taking a break from Game Mastering for a while to recuperate and plan my next game.
• Experiments. I play a lot of one-shot games and sketch out lots of campaigns, most of which never go anywhere. These will start out here, and those which thrive will be transplanted into their own category under Campaigns.
• Reflections. I seem unable to resist posting about my thoughts on gaming as a hobby and life in general, though I will try to keep the volume down to a dull roar.
• Reviews. I’ll keep buying new stuff, and I may as well tell you about it when I do. Historically these have been the most popular posts by a country mile.
• Rules. This section will cover house rules, ship designs, and musings on the implications if the rules of a game accurately reflect reality in that game’s world.

So, welcome to Phase IV of the Station. I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and watch out for the ants, they’re smarter than they look.