I didn't blog at all in 2025 because I was too busy gaming. I was playing in two weekly 5e (2014) campaigns and running a weekly Imperium Maledictum campaign.
The first 5e campaign started off as a 3.5 campaign in 2018, ended up with a TPK in 2020, restarted in 2021 as a 5e campaign, and just finished up in November 2025, with a brief epilogue coming in the new year, a break, and then the third iteration of the campaign starting up sometime later in 2026 using a heavily house-ruled version of Forbidden Lands. I played a Battlemaster Fighter from 5th level to 12th level (post-TPK), and had a lot of fun along the way. Part of this campaign was an exploration of playing a "de-aspirational" character in a campaign that was otherwise a blended style of OSR and OC / neo-trad values.
I've been meaning to write about the concept of "de-aspirational characters" for a few years now and a long post sure to launch a thousand argument on Reddit will come out sometime this year, but the basic idea is that many of the complaints people have about neo-trad styles of play derive from how often they're used as opportunities for wish-fulfillment or power fantasies where the character represents some set of aspirations or ideals that the player holds themselves. A de-aspirational character is kind of the opposite, an experience in which Brechtian distancing is used to play a character you do not generally admire (which is not to say they are awful assholes, that's too simplistic). Anyhow, my Battlemaster fighter was a murderhobo loser with social anxiety prone to conspiracy theories and threats who was also kind of a sympathetic clod, and portraying such a character as something other than a caricature has been a fun test of roleplaying skill for the past few years.
The second 5e campaign is basically low-magic late antiquity / early medieval Arthuriana mainly taking place in the Hen Ogledd in 481 AD. It's been running since 2023, starting with a playtest with pregens, a number of prelude adventures for the main characters run with round-robin referees so that each PC ran a prelude for another PC, and then the campaign proper starting in early 2024. We're somewhere around session 84 now, and I had my second character die in November, and just introduced my new character about two sessions ago.
It's 2014 5e with a ton of house rules including homebrew classes and subclasses that, combined with the lack of most magic, make it very crunchy and tactical but also challenging to describe any component of without a lot of context-setting. My new guy is a Barb 2 / Fighter 7 using a custom subclass called the "Brawler" that lets him get bonus and free action unarmed attacks when he wins opposed Athletics rolls like shoving and grappling (and pinning, which does not require a feat and only restraints the target of the pin, not the pinner in our house rules). Because we play with both stacking advantage and a critical hit / miss system, the goal is to be rolling 3+ d20s on every hit I can to fish for critical hits. We'll see how long this guy lasts. Evidently I'm going through characters every forty-sessions and change so far in the campaign.
The Imperium Maledictum campaign will enter its third year in February. IM is the latest edition of the d100 Warhammer 40K RPGs. I think as a game it's a fairly flexible framework, but the official support isn't really there. Books are slow to come out, often go through multiple extended "errata" revisions that extensively change the text after the release of the pdf versions, and I'm not convinced most of the people writing for it actually understand the system all that well. However, there's a ton of great homebrew gear and enemies for it online, and it's relatively easy to come up with your own stuff as well, which is something I could not say for most of the FFG games like Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader (or especially, Deathwatch).
The current adventure began as "Look into why someone is trying to kill a Ecclesiarchical deacon who runs one of the megacorps on this agriworld," and now the PCs are trying to prevent him from getting ahold of mind control technology to work 40% of the planetary population to death in order to crash the price of promethium futures to reduce the cost of a megastructure project that involves stapling a quarter of a million unsanctioned psykers into a big resonating chamber so they can catch the light of the Astronomican and beam it into Imperium Nihilus. They're also trying to rig a comet auction; encourage one of the space Mongols auctioning off the comets to marry the guy who runs the water rights brokerage the megacorps use to water their crops in order to undermine the entire comet auction; destroy a concentration camp that transforms indentured servants into mind-controlled slaves; and cover up that they assassinated the deacon's COO. There's a ton of moving pieces and dangling threads as they're coming up to the conclusion of the adventure, and it should be exciting as they push into the next one.
I run a mildly heterodox version of the 40K setting, but I think the focus on the economic and exploitative elements of the Imperium that I bring to the presentation has worked well so far. One of the PCs described the experience as "maximalist worldbuilding" at one point, which I'm quite proud of. In 2026, I'll be putting up more material about the Tellian sector and the game's setting, the agri-world of Kangyur in the Bhadran system, just so that it's available as reference material for the PCs.
All three games will be continuing into 2026, so I'm not actively planning to launch anything this year because three weekly games is about what my schedule can take without being overloaded. BUT, I am working on a little side project, without a ton of urgency, that is basically a set of house rules, and a setting and megadungeon for Hack100, which is an ultralite version of BRP.
The working title is "To Walk the White Ash Way" and it's an alt-history / fantastical setting where the Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands in the 15th century leads to awakening a monster under Mt. Teide in the early 16th century. This sprays Europe and North Africa with a potent magical mutagenic ash that transforms them into cannibal mutants. Twenty years after this happens, the PCs are a group of survivors who journey to Tenerife, delve into Mt. Teide, and go through a megadungeon adventure with the eventual goal of defeating the evil forces underneath it. I wanted to use Hack100 to capture the BRP spirit while still allowing for super-fast character generation because my vision for this is as a deadly megadungeon game. I don't think I'll be running this until sometime in 2027 or 2028, so I'm taking it pretty easy and just chipping away at it slowly.
Happy new year! May your 2026 be full of gaming!
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