2025 and 2026
Follows is a reflection on my 2025 in gaming and a look ahead to the games I'm running in 2026.
2025
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2025 was a quiet year for blogging (both writing and reading), but I was still running quite a few games. I ran a Cataphracts game and finished running my Pokemon hack. I started and ended a few other campaigns (including one that's still going into 2026), but those two were my highlights.
Cataphracts
My Cataphracts game was a flash in the pan experience that ate up the majority of my summer. I was struck with inspiration after reading Sam Sorensen's first few blogposts about it, and I know myself well enough to know that I had to run one of my own pronto. I gave myself a starting date of a week and a half in the future and wrote rules and set up logistics in almost a fever dream, both recruiting players and initiating them into the context of such a game. I had a great time running Cataphracts but cannot emphasize enough how much time it was eating up, it was several hours a day for me, every day.
As the idea of Cataphracts grew in popularity towards the beginning of the OVER/UNDER game/cultural moment/phenomena, I found myself still running off the high of my own game. I didn't join OVER/UNDER (regret that now) but I did end up playing in Phlox's Romance of the Hegemons game. Playing in that game was a great experience and ate up way less of my time than running one, enough that I was hungry to be more engaged in that game than I ended up being. As is often the case with highly social games like these, the post-game debriefing conversation was easily the highlight. I loved hearing about what everyone else was thinking and plotting, and deeply enjoyed learning just how fucked my faction was going to be over the coming months.
Big takeaway from my Cataphracts player experience is that I'd like to see way more player recaps from Cataphracts games! It's "easy" for the Referee to just explain the events at a high level and essentially just summarize their day-to-day notes, but you miss out on a lot of the emotion actually occurring in the game. Recaps written by players will naturally have more emotion in them, even if they are missing some of the juicy behind the scenes details that you can't get without input from the Ref or the other side. I also came to realize I prefer player-written session recaps for more traditional games as well, DM recaps (even and especially my own) come off feeling clinical and disconnected too much of the time.
I came out of the autumn Cataphracts craze still hungry for more, though maybe not for running another one. Some of my players were very interested in running their own but haven't yet started planning to make it happen. I might bite the bullet and get a game going in 2026 just to fight off the addiction but I'm waiting to see what my summer will look like.
PokeRPG
My Pokemon RPG campaign is both the longest campaign I've ever ran (2.6 years) and also the first campaign I've ran start to finish using rules I 100% wrote myself. It started when one of my players mentioned that a Pokemon campaign was one of their pie-in-the-sky dream games and it turned out that I didn't have any better ideas for a game at the time. I hacked out a draft for the rules in a couple of weeks and moved on immediately to playtesting in production. The system had to go through 1 major overhaul and ~3 minor overhauls during the campaign, with a projected 2nd major overhaul only forestalled by the looming end of the game.
It may shock literally no one who's thought about it at all, but Pokemon does not really translate to a multiplayer TTRPG setting very well. I threw out the majority of the battle system and wrote a new skirmish wargame system for it only loosely based on the source material. There were initially more fleshed out survival and exploration mechanics akin to a B/X hexcrawl for use between battles, but I ended up throwing them out during the first major overhaul due to lack of interest from my players. I actually ended up re-incorporating hexcrawling and overland travel at the very end of the game at my players' request to re-engage the travel part of the game and focus less on the battling.
The setting was a chore to translate into something that made sense to explore. It's still relatively unclear what exactly individual Pokemon and humans eat for example. For a setting filled with Hikers, Construction Workers, Cool Trainers, Fishermen and Police Officers, it's also pretty hard to figure out how anything gets built, grown, governed, or economics'd just using the show and games as primary sources. The majority of "canon" for my setting had to be mined out of individual Pokedex entries, and they actively contradict each other. I ended up just making up reasonable answers for most of these questions (which is what everyone should do!) but that also altered how the setting felt at the table, leading to some dissonance felt by the players.
Wrapping up my Pokemon game was bittersweet. One the one hand, I was fed up with tech-debt I had written into the system and setting for myself and was happy to see it go. On the other, my players and I had a blast playing the game and it was definitely the event I was looking forward to every week. I'm glad it's over but I'm also sad to see it go.
2025 misc and conclusion
The big pattern for 2025 for me was just jumping in and getting started. I've always been a proponent of giving myself a quick deadline and iterating on a project quickly before I can lose motivation, and this year was no exception. Outside of the two heavy hitters above, I ran 4 other short (6-8 session) games and 2 one-shots, primarily teaching one-shots. All of the games I started in 2025 were less than 2 weeks from ideation to start, and I want to continue that moving forward. Starting projects as soon as possible lets you iterate on something with experience using it and prevents you from bikeshedding forever until you eventually lose interest.
The downside for just jumping in and running so many games is that I didn't have much time for blogging. I wrote a lot in 2024 and completely burned myself out, to the point where I wasn't even reading my blogroll. I'm coming back around and documenting my hobby (Jenx :pray:) again, slowly getting back into the swing of things with big group bandwagons like Glogsmas. I want to try more experimental projects in 2026 and keep growing and expanding my home-style.
2026
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In 2026, I'm already running 3 weekly games. The first is a weekly sword-and-planet spacefaring survival game run in Ashes Without Number. The second is a Cities Without Number open table I spun up to "play catch" with some of my more distant satellite friends. The third is a relatively new campaign I spun up inspired by Campaign 2026 and run using a new Gloghack I've been working on, Tired and Hungry.
The Ashes Without Number game is a bit of a weird one, it's really just a melange of all the * Without Number games at this point. I set it in within a hollow asteroid and pitted the players as desperate survivors against a civilization of murderous robots, it's been good fun. I'm really falling out of love with the * Without Number systems at this point. I've been running them fairly consistently since the Stars Without Number revised edition came out and they're handy for converting folks from 5e, but I find I still have to do quite a bit of work to use them. 4 iterations in they're also starting to get a little derivative and formulaic. I can't really complain too much because they are hundreds of times more usable than other games I've ran in the past, but I do know that I'm looking elsewhere for my games in the future.
My Cities Without Number open table is a cyberpunk setting run by-the-book. I started the game so I could get to run games for some of my more reclusive friends that can only commit to one game a month or so. So far it's mostly the same faces week after week (a problem that happens without fail in every open table I've ever ran). I'm still running for my friends and I'm still enjoying running the game, but I'm definitely not putting in as much effort as I could be towards running this game. This is likely due to my above burnout with Crawford's games but I hope to reignite my motivation before the year is done. I will say that I've completely threw out the much-lauded Hacking system of CWN in favor of the more simplistic one from SWN, CWN's system reads much more interesting but doesn't actually play better (a huge disappointment).
The new Gloghack game I'm running is the one I'm looking forward to the most currently. The system is just a rough Glog chassis with some classless abilities tacked on with all my favorite subsystem hacks shoved in to fill out the corners. The setting is also not groundbreaking, I'm taking heavy influence from Scavenger's Reign, UVG and Frank Frazetta and using that to create a primal early-years Mortal Plane to run something approximating D&D in. The only real new tack for this game is that I said from the very beginning that I'm committing to running until next January (at least!). Giving myself a deadline is nothing new (see above) and committing to giving an ending to all my campaigns is nothing new (even if its a mediocre ending), but committing to still be running the same game at the same time for (hopefully) the same folks is something new. I learned from my Pokemon campaign that when I get "trapped" running a game for a long time I can produce something I truly love, even if it feels flawed. If a deadline can make me produce gold, I'm hoping a contracted run-time will at least help me produce silver.
Looking Ahead
This year, I want to run more games and I want to record them. I want to run more experimental games sure, but I also want to revisit campaigns and settings I ran in the past. I'm entering the part of my DMing journey where I've already had quite a few good ideas, the problem is I just didn't execute them very well. Going back and trying again and recording the whole thing for an even-later iteration of myself to review seems like something that could be very worthwhile.
I'm also going to try to bit more engaged with my community. I'm going to go to Between Two Cons this year and I'm hoping to help it be more of a tradition out here on the West Coast. I'm also going to spend a bit more time writing blog posts replying and responding to others, I always like reading back-and-forth article exchanges and want to put more of those out there in the world.