I had a lot of fun writing that “Ensorcelled Beckets” piece, shooting some photos of my friend John’s inspiring rings, and getting my lifelong friend Aaron Archer to contribute some art. The handful of copies I printed for Gary Con were well-received, and I made the PDF available at Itch.io. It’s probably not the last you’ll see of this content, either.
I also did help proofread “The Twin Heads of Avarice” for my friend Alex. While that was nearly a 17,000 word project that I’m proud to have contributed to, my work as needed didn’t feel like it reached the level where I was comfortable counting it as writing/editing time. (It’s available in print and digital formats)
I’ll also add this, though: I did alotof paid writing in 2025 which came with no small amount of satisfaction for reasons I think I’ll at least briefly write about next week.
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 Cthulhuadventure 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 gaveShadowdarka 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 Pathfindercampaign 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.
Last year, I kept track of how far I ran (miles), how much I wrote for fun/free (words), how much time I spent playing RPGs with friends (hours), and how many books I read.
In order from last January. Asterisked listings are books I had read before – multiple times in some cases.
1. Every Day I Pray for Love – Yayoi Kusama 2. Catching the Big Fish – David Lynch 3. Medieval Wrestling – Jessica Finley 4. Runes of Engagement – Tobias Buckell & Dave Klecha 5. Moby-Dick in Pictures – Matt Kish 6. Spelljammer: Astral Adventurer’s Guide – Christopher Perkins, Jeremy Crawford, Ari Levitch 7. Spelljammer: Boo’s Astral Menagerie – Christopher Perkins 8. Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis – Justice Ramin Arman, Sadie Lowry, Jeffrey Ludwig 9. Anathem* – Neal Stephenson 10. The Women Who Changed Art Forever – Feminist Art: The Graphic Novel – Valentina Grande & Eva Rosetti 11. Red Mars* – Kim Stanley Robinson 12. The Midderlands – Glynn Seal, Edwin Nagy, Mark Nolan 13. The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu 14. Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg 15. The Martian Contingency – Mary Robinette Kowal 16. When the Moon Hits Your Eye – John Scalzi 17. A Trail Guide to Aihrde – Stephen Chenault 18. Fantasticland – Mike Bockoven 19. Leviathan Wakes – James S.A. Corey 20. Dandelion Wine* – Ray Bradbury 21. The Mountain of Smoke – Jeffrey Alan Love 22. Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins 23. The Human Division* – John Scalzi 24. The End of All Things* – John Scalzi 25. You Remind Me of Me – Dan Chaon 26. Nothing to See Here – Kevin Wilson 27. Open Throat – Henry Hoke 28. The Last Colony* – John Scalzi 29. Hail Mary – Andy Weir 30. The Shattering Peace – John Scalzi 31. Agent to the Stars* – John Scalzi 32. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking 33. Lord of the Rings appendices – J.R.R. Tolkien 34. The Ride of Our Lives – Mike Leonard 35. Here is New York – E.B. White
Scalzi is obviously a comfort read: I tend to grab his older books to revisit while I eat breakfast or in places where I’ll have some down time but maybe don’t have the brainwidth for digesting new material.
I’d never actually read the Lord of the Rings appendices, despite having read The Hobbit and the trilogy several times. Interesting to realize how much material in there has made its way to big-screen interpretations. And also, here’s a confession: This whole time, I thought “Eorlingas” was the name of Theoden’s horse.
As I did in in 2024, last year I tracked my running (in miles), my personal writing (by word count), how many hours I spent playing RPGs with friends, and how many books I read.
In 2025, I covered about 370.7 miles, which is significantly more than the year before (264 miles), and got me to an average of more than a mile a day. That said, the year was significantly front-loaded, since Jenn & Kelsey & I all ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon at the end of April. Training for that packed almost 251 of my miles into the first four months of the year.
I still managed to run pretty regularly the rest of spring and summer – Jenn and I also did a four-mile race in downtown Cleveland which culminated in lap of the field at the Cleveland Guardians’ ballpark, and that was really cool.
My fastest mile of the year was a 7:30 on the treadmill in February. So was my fastest 5k of 24:34. My fastest 10k of the year was a 55:27 in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in early April. I did a lot of Planet Fitness treadmill time in the winter months, and again the vast majority of my outdoor running was in the CVNP or Cleveland Metroparks. I managed a few now-traditional outdoor miles in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in March during Gary Con, and my also-now-traditional 5k during downtime at the Pittsburgh Dragon Boat Festival. And I put in a few more New York miles in and around Central Park in August.
On longer runs, I spent time listening to the audiobooks “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson and “Leviathan Wakes” by James S.A. Corey. But they’re for another post.
I’ve written before about my friend Matt Kish’s art, and now I’m incredibly proud to say he granted permission to use some of his fantastic “A Radiant Bestiary” works in a short, system-neutral tabletop role-playing game adventure, “The Legacy of Mo’Roh.”
His art is fully the inspiration behind me writing this adventure, which I then took to another amazingly talented friend, art designer Carmen Dotterer, who packaged everything in a classic zine-sized format and made it look spectacular. I ordered a small print run, took it to Gary Con in March, and got some encouraging feedback, so now we’re Kickstarting a larger print order!
It’s my first Kickstarter (sidenote: I support the efforts of Kickstarter United), so I opted to keep things super simple with a modest goal and two reward levels: PDF only, or PDF & print, shipping included. Thanks to my friend the awesome Phil Reed for answering my questions along the way and being yet another creative inspiration for this.
We’ve hit our goal, so the good news is that the new print run is happening, and the Kickstarter is running until November 26th, so there’s plenty of time to pledge and get a digital or physical copy.
If you are just meeting us for the first time: Hello! We are a new(ish) small theatre company based in NYC, founded by three alumni from the Stella Adler Professional Conservatory heading into our third production, second on a full production scale! Rally Point Productions seeks to bring together underrepresented and emerging artists to create projects that audiences can see themselves in, and we are continuing to work toward being a place where people feel that they are able to take risks, make change, and to learn something about themselves in a safe and secure setting. With a solid world premiere production of The Resurrectionist and our New Works Fest, under our belt we feel confident moving forward with our company, especially with such wonderful support from our community and beyond.
And here’s a picture of Ben (left) and Finn, because the internet loves cats.
Almost three years ago, I got back from Gary Con and wrote this post about role-playing games and a personal realization about recognizing them as creatively productive. Today I’m packing for this year’s Gary Con trip and smiling at these photos from my friend Alex at Forge of Ice, because Alex’s “The Twin Heads of Avarice” adventure includes my first published RPG credits. (Playtesting and proofreading.)
Thanks to Alex for inviting me to be a part of making this happen, and to our Monday night group for five years of adventures in Azor and other worlds beyond. Here’s to the stories we’ve told, the ones we’re telling, and those yet unwritten.
Matt Kish once owned the coolest suit jacket ever and he’s such an amazing human that he let me borrow it for a prom date. Most of two decades later, he created 552 artworks – one per day for a year and a half! – each inspired by a single page in a particular edition of his favorite book, Moby-Dick. (The suit jacket? Nothing to do with Matt’s art or Herman Melville at all. Just something I think about occasionally. It was a really cool jacket.)
Anyway, I finally finished a long, deliberate read of Matt’s resulting book – Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page – and look, it’s been out for almost 15 years now, and it got a ton of great reviews from people way more qualified than me to discuss art and literature. I just wanted to make sure I put into the world what an incredible thing this is that Matt did, and why I love it.
It turns out that Matt and I had the same Illustrated Classic Editions version of Moby Dick (no hyphen, for some reason) as kids. I read mine a lot and still have it.
But where Matt read Melville’s unabridged whale book in high school, I didn’t get around to it until the last 5 years or so. And while I knew the overall story well enough, I wasn’t ready for what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it was.
But that’s not what this is about – this is about Matt‘s book, and what a strange, complicated, beautiful, experimental, and compelling journey it is.
I’ve been a fan of Matt’s art and his approach to it since we got back in touch many years after college, so I had seen a fair amount of his Moby-Dick pieces online and in person before I finally got a copy of Moby-Dick in Pictures. I was still floored by seeing the whole project as it was intended, and I knew I wanted to read it thoroughly and not flip through it like a coffee table art book.
It took me a long time because I wanted it to. Even when there were only a dozen or so words in the passage Matt selected for a given page, I did my best to take them in repeatedly and with consideration. Same with the art, which is just an entirely different beast when considered as a whole as well as its individual pieces. Themes and patterns and character traits and outliers and hints and secrets all started peeking back at me and unfolding in ways that only happened because I was turning pages and pulling threads.
Matt’s work is so vast and varied that it’s pretty much impossible for me to pick a single representative page from the book as a favorite. (A few even weave in echoes of the black-and-white illustrations from the kids’ version, and those really struck some chords.) That said, here’s one of the many that I love for both Matt’s art and Melville’s words:
By the end, I was caught up in Ishmael’s tale and Matt’s pictures, just like when I was a kid churning through the final pages of the adventure. And it was awesome. Just a completely thrilling and new way to experience this incredibly familiar story.
One of the things I try to live by is the idea that when someone creates a thing that brings you joy or cracks your heart, you should let them know it and then tell other people about it. Matt’s a prolific artist and he sells originals and prints and zines that I can’t get enough of, and I hope you’ll check them out.
I had lived in Orlando for about eight months when I got a job at the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park in November of 1993. My official hire date was actually my twenty-third birthday.
Wanting to work at Walt Disney World was one of the reasons I moved to Florida in the first place (they weren’t great reasons), and while I’d had an interview about a month prior to relocating there, it went nowhere. I tried again in the fall, and happened to mention that I’d been on the radio in college. This caught the interviewer’s ear and nudged her off what had seemed like a familiar track heading to the destination of “Don’t-Call-Us-We’ll-Call-You-ville.”
“Oh! So if you were on the radio, you’re OK with talking in front of people?”
I pounced: “Indeed I did! I did theatre, too! How can I be of service to you and your mouse?” And that’s how I got my part-time job driving and spieling on the Backstage Studio Tour. (The “Catastrophe Canyon” ride.) I never worked more than “casual” status – a step below part-time – but that was enough back then to get myself into the parks anytime except July 4th and New Year’s Eve, along with enough regular free passes to get friends and relatives in whenever the opportunity arose.
My first paid shift as a Walt Disney World cast member was November 22, 1993, and after my “Traditions” course at Disney University and an introductory brief visit to the tunnels beneath the Magic Kingdom, I had my name tag and my ID – and the rest of the afternoon and evening ahead of me. I recall a sense of unease because I was literally brand new, in regular street clothes, walking through the tunnels with no idea at all where I should exit “onstage.” I popped out in the Penny Arcade on Main Street, U.S.A. and then just wandered. I boarded the Skyway and watched daylight’s last pink glow from above Tomorrowland. I went over to EPCOT and used my cast member ID at the entrance for the first time. I ate a banana and sat by Spaceship Earth and thought of Ray Bradbury.
Working at Disney was a bright moment during a difficult time – which I wrote about in the “Dark Times” chapter of Collect All 21! – when I was in an unhealthy and destructive relationship that had cost me close ties with dear friends and family members. I was also still dealing with my Dad’s death in May of that year, all while a thousand miles away from home and almost all of the people on the planet who mattered the most.
All of these things and more combine to make the Studios forever my favorite Disney park, because every time I visit, it’s full of new fun and old memories, good and bad and bittersweet. For instance, I was never offered full-time status, so I never felt like I got to fully enjoy the company of many of my fellow cast members. And the nature of my bad relationship and the fact that we shared my car meant I was largely unavailable to do things like hang out after work or on days off, when I might have gotten to know my co-workers better.
It’s easy to forget that when I worked there, the park was only about four-and-a-half years old, still showcasing the pop culture of the late 1980s – the dip machine from Who Framed Roger Rabbit; vehicles from “Hardcastle and McCormick”, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Star Tours, facades of the “Golden Girls” and “Empty Nest” houses – while also embracing the more recent present and expanding its future. The Rocketeer‘s Bulldog Cafe was there; I saw the Beauty and the Beast stage show grow from a small temporary home at one end of the park to a huge, permanent theatre on the then-newly-constructed Sunset Boulevard; and best of all, I got to see the Tower of Terror take shape and cast its wonderful shadow on the sky.
I’m still proud of the job I did. I enjoyed the performance aspect of giving the tours and entertaining guests, and I took pride in being able to drive those 120-foot-long shuttles. (Years later, the first time I got behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer semi, I was asked, “You ever driven anything this big?” That was a fun “Well, actually…”) I remember walking the Backstage Studio Tour route with my trainer, practicing the spiel, and learning to maneuver the shuttle around corners by using landmarks and lining them up with the cab windows. I think I spieled for guests on my second day on the job, which my trainer told our supervisor with a little bit of pride of his own. My hands still hold the muscle memory of pushing the buttons that opened and locked the big hydraulic boarding doors, and turning the knob that activated the headset microphone at the beginning of the tour.
I remember early mornings, pairing off with a coworker to pick trash off the shuttles and wipe down the seats if it had rained overnight, talking about anything and nothing. I remember the last tours of the day after dark, when the explosions of Catastrophe Canyon lit up the backlot. I remember the tour’s small office where cast members hung out at the beginning and end of shifts, and while they waited for their shuttle to come in so they could “bump” into the guide’s seat, sending that person into the cab to drive, and the driver to a position in the queue or on the dock guiding guests. (From that spot, you went to your break.)
Evenings when there were fireworks, we could watch them over the Chinese Theatre from the backlot, the smell of smoke settling afterward as we walked the tour route and cleaned up debris.
I worked there when the first trailer for The Lion King was released and was shown as part of the conclusion of our sister attraction (the special effects tour) and many of us used our breaks to go watch it over and over because it delivered goosebumps every time.
I really liked the people I worked with. They were fun and funny and smart and different and from all over the place, including Clyde, Ohio, which I learned one day when I made a joke about the place and the girl across from me said – no kidding – “That’s where I’m from.”
Occasionally I worked the Honey I Shrunk The Kids playground or the queue at Star Tours.
Because of the shared car situation, there were many days where I’d spend all my non-work hours flying solo all across the parks, until after my then-girlfriend wrapped up her shift an hour away on the north side of Orlando and came to pick me up. After a shift at the Studios, I might catch a ride on Star Tours (of course), and then ride a boat to the Yacht & Beach Clubs, followed by an easy stroll into EPCOT’s World Showcase. Or I’d take a bus to the Contemporary Resort and walk or ride the monorail to the Magic Kingdom. I seem to recall that EPCOT was often the last park to close, so I’d take the longer monorail ride from the MK over there. Last trek of the day was always a bus to what was then Downtown Disney (now Disney Springs), followed by the walk up Hotel Plaza Blvd. to a 24-hour Perkins where I’d order a pot of tea, reading and writing until sometimes one or two in the morning.
So here’s what else happened during the time I worked at Disney – something super important. A nice girl I worked with at McDonald’s loaned me her jacket on a chilly morning and got me super interested in getting out of the terrible relationship I was in, and then we went to see Jurassic Park together and of course I married her a few years later.
A few years back, Jenn and I went to Disney to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, along with Kelsey and her partner. We bought the souvenir picture taken on Splash Mountain because it captured the same spot where I’d proposed to Jenn a couple decades before. (Yes, on the ride. And yes, I had a death grip on that jewelry box.)
We spent two days at the Studios, which were as wonderful and melancholy as ever, because they’ve changed so much and are so different, but there’s a lot that still felt exactly like it did when I’d finish my shift and put on shorts and a T-shirt and walk around a bit before catching a ride on the Tower at sunset for that amazing view just before you drop and scream and laugh into the darkness.
John Booth Writes 