Looking back at 2025
I wrote one of these back in 2023, after spending a year writing a bunch of blog posts. I did not write as much this year, and even less so back in 2024 (which is why I skipped that entirely), but I wanted to do a broad look back at the year, the hobby gaming I did and the blogging I did relating to it.
Bearblog
Let's start with the most obvious - this post is on bearblog, not on my Blogspot blog that I started in 2022. Why? To put it bluntly - I don't trust Blogspot and I don't trust Google.
With G+, with the old Google RSS reader and just a lot of stuff in general, they've shown themselves happy to simply kill shit when they don't feel like dealing with it anymore. And blogspot itself feels like abandonware at this point. Things break or feel janky or have just not been updated in who knows how long, and you can kind of tell. There are a handful of posts on my blog that I do think are worth preserving, so I have been wanting to migrate the blog since early 2024 in fact, but with life being busy it just kept not happening.
I finally sat down this year and moved everything I cared about on here, and I am quite happy with that. I like how this blog looks, I am happy with using it, I look forward to having the spare cash to use the paid upgrade version and get some better analytics as those are one of my favorite things to just look at.
I hope to stick on here for years to come, and I hope bearblog actually does in fact stick around for years to come. With the internet being what it is nowadays - who knows?
Devil's World Heroes
This year I played in what has been my favorite RPG campaign I've ever played in the 20+ years I've been in this hobby. My most recent post goes over it in further detail.
Devil's World Heroes was a hasty and quickly put together affair, and while the referee has expressed dissatisfaction with some of the campaign's elements because of this, I will say this: The fact that this campaign slapped so much ass, that it was such a joyous gaming experience on a week to week basis and that it went for 30 sessions and could have likely gone for another 30 more if we chose to keep going? Yeah that speaks volumes to a fact a lot of people want to either ignore or pretend isn't really true.
Personal skill at the hobby does matter. A lot. It's easy to get lost in the platitudes of telling people not to worry about their game or their prep and just run, but here's the thing - you will have bad games. You will have bad campaigns. You will fuck up a lot of stuff and have a lot of bland or mediocre or disappointing gaming experiences. That is why people tell you to keep running anyway. Because like with any other craft and creative pursuit, you need to get the bad ones out of your system. I have had so many non-starter campaigns, games and settings I've done over the years (and we'll talk about one in a moment) and you get better with practice.
And Nathan very much showed that when your referee knows their shit, and when all the players in the campaign also know their shit and are invested in the campaign, in each other's enjoyment and in just playing well you can get amazing gaming experiences out of the simplest of tools and the most cobbled together things.
On Hobby Best Practices
I finally finished this series of posts by posting the 5th and currently final one this year. I waited so long because the post was about actually practicing your core hobby and not being sidetracked by peripheral or secondary ones. And in RPGs the core hobby is playing RPGs. And I had not done much of that until the tail end of 2024 and so it felt wrong to write this post.
This connects directly to what I wrote above - the more you practice your hobby, and the more you practice it with people who are good (or better) at it, the better your own experiences will be and the more techniques and tricks you will learn yourself.
I am very proud of the Hobby Best Practices blogposts. It seems people who've read them, especially the first one, have taken them to heart and tried to be more purposeful and reflective in their RPG hobby, and I think that's a wonderful thing.
Zandan Megadungeon
I wrote a retrospective on this campaign too. Probably a much more important one than me simply recounting how much fun I had in DWH. Zandan was my weekly in person game, after a year+ of not running a consistent one.
I did too much. I decided to run a megadungeon (already a departure from the types of campaigns I ran before), not only that I decided to write it from scratch, but not only that, I also decided to run it using Tunnels & Trolls so I can see if that would work for that type of play.
Not only that, but I also deviated from my usual open table game structure, instead having a much more select (and thus smaller) group of players. Not only that, but I went with some unorthodox setting decisions like having the game set entirely within the dungeon, having a debt and barter based economy and so on.
It became too much and did not work out. I was left dissatisfied with the dungeon and the campaign, even if the sessions themselves were mostly good. The energy I usually have in games was lost long LONG before I started, due to how long it took me to write even the material I did have (and I did not have that much. This is not Arden Vul. Shit this ain't even Anomalous Subsurface Environment!) and the smaller player numbers didn't help me by providing energy from the players to energize me in turn.
So the campaign I think was a failure. With the Greylands I had to stop both versions of it because of travel. With BSSS I was dissatisfied with the setting, AND also had to travel, but that campaign could have gone on if I changed some things. Zandan, however, just kind of deflated. Or more appropriately - never really got going.
Maybe I will revisit this some day. Maybe I will rewrite the dungeon for some version of D&D and try it that way. Or maybe I won't. Only time will tell.
Copperopolis
What is Copperpolis? It is the name for the family game my partners and I play with their kid, or I guess played - we've not had a session in months.
One of my partners started running it as the kid has wanted to "play some D&D", which in our case meant using Echoes of the Labyrinth since it's quite stripped down an easy to use. Hell this game was partially what made me settle on using T&T for Zandan! Initially I started playing in it, but also helped my partner with planning out the dungeon/mine we mostly explored, as well as acting as someone to brainstorm with.
Eventually she became overwhelmed with running it, so instead I took over doing that and she joined as a player.
The campaign's focus, such that it is, is around a group of talking animals (a spur of the moment decision we just leaned into) in a setting full of them mixed with regular humans, and leaning on some cowbody stuff for ideas. Copperopolis is the name of the mining camp/town near a copper mine down in the Labyrinth, a strange magical place where time acts weirdly.
The mine connected to deeper caves and primordial titan beasts and their ghosts.
I enjoy the game such that it is, but it's been a struggle to find enthusiasm in me to write more stuff for it and definitely to run it with any regularity, which I do feel bad about. At some point I might write a more extensive post about this game, with my thoughts and observations on it.
Videogames
I actually played some video games! That's quite rare for me, as it's been a while since I really spent dedicated time playing video games (last time was during the pandemic). For one reason or another they were all post-apocalyptic cRPG affairs, though all three quite different from each other.
Underrail
I enjoyed Underrail a lot. I enjoyed how fucking brutal the game was about showing you that your build sucks and doing so early enough that you can change it. I ended up just cheesing the thing with an assault rifles build (a.k.a. easy mode) and it still took a while, especially playing through the Expedition expansion.
It is a game that I would hesitate to recommend to people, unless I know for a fact they will not be put off by what the game is all about.
Wasteland 3
I quite liked Wasteland 3 too. Another emphasis on "Builds" with this one, but this time spread out over an entire party, not just 1 character. The snowy setting of Colorado also reminded me of wasting so many hours playing Icewind Dale 1 and 2, again games focused on building up a party and slamming it against the game.
The setting is goofy, absurd and silly, yet happy with presenting you with shockingly harsh political realities. I love the music and the use the game makes of it. This is one which I might end up playing through again some time down the line, especially as I did not actually interact with either of the expansion side-quests.
Atom RPG
Atom is interesting. It wants to be Fallout 1 or 2 except Soviet, and it....kind of succeeds at it, I guess? Mostly in that it copies the Fallout system almost directly and is also a buggy and janky mess. The game is not really good, not in any real sense, but after making the most absurdly broken build that effectively makes the shit combat trivial for 99% of the game, I did manage to finish playing through it.
Though even then - oh boy there's a lot of problems with this. I started up Trudograd, the sequel/expansion, but at that point had lost my interest in playing video games again, so it never went anywhere.
Art and Miniatures Painting
I got to do more art for myself this year than I've done in a while, and it felt good. It did not help with the fact that my attempt to keep working as a professional artist were all falling apart and resulted in me having to go look for regular employment for the first time in over a decade. But that is life.
A special shout out to Crow who's DCC session reports and especially monster faction re-imaginings were very inspirational for some of the drawings I did!
I also painted and converted a good chunk of miniatures, even getting to do some mini wargaming this year playing some One Page Rules. OPR can best be described as "serviceable" as a ruleset, which to be clear is all it seems to have ever tried to be. This side of my hobby interests has definitely not been as prominent, as my energy and stress levels permit me only so much attention to be dedicated to hobbies, and I choose to focus that on RPGs over miniatures, but it was good to get some stuff done.
Conclusion and looking forward to 2026
The last couple of years have been quite chaotic and disruptive to my personal life, though it's not all bad by any means. My hope is for things to stabilize enough in 2026 that I can return to trying to focus on hobby gaming.
My plan is to start up another weekly game in either January or February, work and life permitting, and this one I will consciously attempt to be as much more bare bones and requiring a lot less work on my end as previous ones, especially compared to Zandan. You can be certain I will post about it here when I do, as I find writing session reports really enjoyable as you can likely tell from the percentage they make up of all posts on my blog.
I also hope that my family game of Copperopolis either continues, or at least becomes something else. The kid has interest in RPGs, or at least in the idea of RPGs, so it's something I would like to encourage the best I can (which has not been a lot, but I did say "best" not "good".)
Beyond that, I do not know. I will likely keep miniature wargaming as a distant second hobby, something only to be practiced in spurts and when I have the energy to spare for it. Unfortunately tabletop wargaming has been something I've just straight up not done in 2 years and I don't forsee that changing in 2026.
I mostly just hope that life and the world does not keep accelerating the rate at which it grinds us all through the wheels of capitalist hell that we exist in (unlikely to happen), so that I can at least get enough force of will to start up my attempt at escapism through gaming. And I hope life treats any of you who may read this better next year too.