Note - I will get back to posting the rest of the Temple campaign soon - it takes a while to sort those out and edit them and with a week off for the holidays I wasn't going to burn all of that time doing it. At one point I had a plan to get it all posted up by the end of the year but that will probably shift to "End of January" now.
2025 was a good year here. I wrapped up a great campaign, worked in some other game time here and there, got some mini's painted along the way, read some good books, and watched some decent shows. What more can you ask for? I also spent real time with the wife, the kids, and the grandkids, along with most of my friends.
Most of my gaming hobby time was spent on the ToEE in ToV campaign which was a lot of fun all the way through. There is always another game though, so I'm happy to be prepping for the next thing. More on that later. I think the only other game I ran this year was a Cyberpunk Red try-out game and that's unusual for me - I usually manage to work in multiple one-shots or some short side treks into something but this year was all about completing the temple so it was pretty focused. I need to think about that when planning the new year's objectives.
I will end the year having read about 60 books this year, about the same as last year, but only ten of them were RPG rulebooks which is low for me and roughly half of what I did in '24. Maybe it matters less when you have a set campaign going the whole year.
Over the course of the year various Kickstarters came in so I added Adventurer-Conqueror-King 2E, Dolmenwood, and 13th Age 2E to the "need-to-read" shelf - which is a pretty huge pile of D&D-ish fantasy RPG stuff, probably more than I needed to have coming in all at once. I do pick up smaller games on DTRPG pretty regularly and I did get Lancer, though I have yet to read it. I should probably talk about those more here but my preference has always been that I'd rather talk about a game after I have run it, at least for a session, as herding some players through character creation and then through an introductory scenario of some kind will tell you a thousand times more about a game than just reading it. Sometimes that takes a while though so maybe I should at least write something up about the read through and then refer back to it when I do run the thing. Sounds like a good policy for '26!
There were other RPG acquisitions - more for the 40K RPG, more Marvel, I'm catching up on Pathfinder 2E rulebooks, and I should probably fill in the rest of the 2024 D&D 5.5 books though my enthusiasm for it is at an all-time low. Not RPGs in general - just D&D. I liked Tales of the Valliant's take on an updated 5E so I'm not really feeling the need for another version of it which is why I haven't felt the need to dive into the other alternate takes on "updated 5th". If I run anything fantasy next year I'd say the odds are it will be 13th Age's new edition or the aforementioned PF2E, or possibly The Old World RPG. Odds are better though that I won't be running anything fantasy, at least as the main campaign. More about that later.
So so-long to 2025! I'll have some thoughts about the year in miniatures here tomorrow and then a look at plans for the year ahead as well.
