Last year, I kept track of how far I ran (miles), how many books I read, how much I wrote for fun/free (words), and how many hours I spent playing tabletop roleplaying games with friends.
The Monday night online crew 2025 kicked off with the highly satisfactory conclusion to a Pulp Cthulhu adventure in alternate-history 1930s New York City. (My Monday night game group will mark six years in March. Not everyone has played in every adventure, but overall, we’ve represented seven states spanning New York to Alaska and south to Texas. I’m making a note to write more about this in the spring.)
The Monday night crew also gave Shadowdark a try this year, with a run through an adapted Ravenloft adventure. Shadowdark’s a lean system that a lot of folks dig for its flexibility, quick startup process, and an old-school feel with basic mechanics that d20 system players can get from the start. It’s blown up the past couple years in part because it’s so easy to create adventures and supplemental materials for it.
I wrote in last year’s RPG lookback that I missed playing Numenera in 2024 and I wanted to get back to it, so I ran the Monday gang through two short, linked adventures early in 2025. They returned to the Ninth World in September for a longer quest based on the “Edge of the Sun” source book, which is where we are currently. I’m also currently GM’ing my Wedesday night in-person RPG group through a great Numenera introductory adventure, “The Nightmare Switch.”
The Wedesday night in-person group is also long-standing. We’ve been playing twice a month for more than four years, and started the final chapter of our Pathfinder campaign in June. Then we hit pause to celebrate one of us becoming a first-time dad. With that guy on parental leave for a bit, we’ve been playing board games or “The Nightmare Switch.”
I played 15.5 hours of classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons at Gary Con in March, and 12 of those represented a high point in my personal RPG narrative, because I spent a trio of four-hour sessions gaming under the Dungeon Mastering of Erol Otus. In addition to being a super genial guy at the table and away from it, Erol’s storytelling and style is very much in line with the type of art he’s known for: We played not as humanoids, but as a party of strange and diverse creatures; joining our incredibly detailed figurines on the table were an assortment of squishy little rubbery monsters like you get from gumball machines; and otherworld-evoking props salvaged from appliances. It was delightful and immersive and B-movie pulpy and I loved it.
Because he doesn’t like to run the same adventure repeatedly, Erol’s approach to his Gary Con sessions is to keep telling an ongoing story with a core group of characters, session-to-session and then year-to-year. So no matter who’s playing at the table, we’re all shaping this collective journey. Erol’s plans for the 2025 sessions were directly based on the character actions and outcomes from the 2024 player decisions and die rolls, and our stopping point last March is where this year’s adventurers will pick up the tale.
All in all, I played just over 98 hours of RPGs last year, which was down a significant chunk from the 130 I played in 2024. There are a couple reasons for this, one of which is just coming back to me: I used to run a D&D game at work, which then spawned a third regular gaming group outside of work hours. And then over time several of us in the group lost our jobs at the agency where we’d all met. So starting last February, that TTRPG group morphed into a regular tabletop gathering. It’s the same every-other-week schedule, but we do board or card games instead of roleplaying. A few of us are looking at trying to do a one-shot for an afternoon or evening because we miss rolling math rocks and telling stories, so hopefully that happens in 2026.
I also realize now that there are two TTRPG-related projects from 2025 I worked on but didn’t count towards my prepping or playing hours: 1) I playtested and helped proofread Reverse Ettin Games’ “The Twin Heads of Avarice;” and 2) I successfully Kickstarted “The Legacy of Mo’Roh,” which I now need to set up for sale.
John Booth Writes 