MicroBloggies & Year in Review

 So! End of another year. The Bloggies are coming back, and I am shamefully going to plug my own better posts of the year under the guise of a review of what I've been up to. After all, last year's winner/this year's host Clayton Notestine recommends 'a social media account to pester people with links' as part of his winning strategy, so I can't be on tooooo bad of a footing.

BUT! Because self-promotion is obviously evil, I'm going to morally counterbalance and make the post a bit more interesting than that, by following on from what a few people did last year and listing out the blog posts from other people I'd be nominating for each category with some short commentary. Then I'll go over some of my better posts, so people have a chance to look back over them before the Bloggies submission deadline. Finally, I'll talk a bit about what my 'gaming year' has looked like. 

If you're interested in the previous (first) year of the blog, check out the post I made after getting nominated for last year's 'best new blog' category.

My Bloggies Nominations 

My criterion for eligibility here is whether I've bookmarked a thing. To my mind, the mark of a good piece of TTRPG writing is whether I want to use it or share it with others, so I always bookmark things I like. Unless I forget. Fate is cruel. 

I've sifted the list of bookmarked things into the categories. Then I've cut the smallest list down to 3, ranked gold-bronze in accordance with the awards system. To avoid penalizing people who wrote in larger categories, cutting them out from the massive signal boost I represent, I've expanded those categories proportionally to the difference in the original list. 

Theory

1. Fail Forward, '2500 HP dragons' - This article speaks to my love of both the vast and the non-special in games. To quote the article: '2500 HP Dragons are the "blorb" approach to boss monsters ... you can feel how ineffective mortal weapons are against titanic foes.' Also, it allows for that occasional ridiculous luck/brilliant plan/army to bring them down. Also also, it makes the dodger-types more interesting. 
2. Roll to Doubt, 'Secular Wizardry and its Discontents' - We should treat wizards more like real academics, i.e. a backbiting crowd of territorial bastards with cultural capital out the ears, complicit in the period our games tend to be about in 'the cabinet of curiosities, the freak show, the theatrical surgery, the degradation of the environment, the modern slave trade, the massacre of those who were here before'. Magic might be mysterious, but systematizers are happy to make the mysterious knowable through violence if needs be.
3. Throne of Salt, 'What Do People Know About the Mythos'? - Just a list of detailed tidbits of lore you could find by doing a wikipedia search in a Call of Cthulhu Game. This is precisely the sort of tool that's incredibly useful and just a bit annoying to produce myself, so I really want to encourage anybody doing this. 
4. Taskerland, 'Strahd on the Moors' - 'every game world deserves to have its foundations sunk into the psychic landscape of whoever builds it'. The OSR is grounded in a very specific vision of landscape, full of forests, whereas English authors might feel more drawn to the moor as a space of ominous, otherworldly potence. Can confirm. Short, good read. 
5. Elf Maids & Octopi, 'Enough Hats in your Game Settings?' Fun article highlighting how modern hatlessness bleeds over into our fantasy settings, which transcends mere sloganeering to offer several tables of hooks & magic hats.

Gameable

1. PinkSpace, 'Speaking with my Body' - Systematized rules for sex that actually, maybe capture some of the vibe of the activity rather than just making you make a check about it. A piece of design I would love the chance to playtest and am unlikely to get in the near future, but clearly covering something a lot of people want in their game settings and struggle to frame well. So yay!
2. Coins and Scrolls, 'Pulp: Adventure Location: Trindade & Martim Vaz' - Basically just a historical overview with occasional game observations, but that doesn't do justice to Skerples' eye for a good idea seed. I saved this island history less because I want to run a game there - though some of the descriptions did inspire me - than because I think it's a great example of how to pick out such interesting tidbits of a fairly minor history and turn them into a story.
3. The Nothic's Eye, 'Dungeon Rations' - List of 55 different things you might eat in a dungeon. They're very cool things. I don't normally go for dungeon stocking content but I have to admit this sparked a lot of ideas. 

Advice 

1. Jay Dragon, 'The Palette Grid (a safety tool)' - Replacing lines and veils with a graph of 'ignore/explore' and 'risky/comfortable'. So good I immediately used it and always would in future above the checklist. 'Risky explore (be careful)' is my favourite quadrant :) Clearly not the end of the story, and has prompted varying responses, (notably) but if anything that makes it better. Inflection point in our conversations about safety.
2. Darling Demon Eclipse, 'Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning' - several other posts I wanted to nominate as well are responding to this one, but I'm boiling it down to this as the origin point. Can't believe this was only this year. It's lived in my head. TL;DR: Things are getting worse for a lot of us queer* people, but they've always been quite bad for a lot of us. Get louder in response! Fuck acceptability politics! Make messy and beautiful and sexy art. DDE is sadly down rn but I hope that won't prevent the nomination. 
3. Fail Forward, 'On Casting' - When planning a campaign, consider your players as 'actors' and consider the ways they like to engage with a campaign, building it around their strengths to ensure good engagement 
4. I Cast Light!, 'INVESTIGATING SARAH CONNOR: My Ideal CoC Game & The Terminator' - framework (rules & tools) for running a call of cthulhu style campaign where the PCs aren't crazy at all... but good luck convincing anybody else of that. Something that's been brewing for a while in the hobby's turn on sanity mechanics, I think, and seems fun. 

*IDK if the use of 'faggot' in the strapline is in response to the 'faggot-subaltern' category in the gender ternary schema coined by The Sizhen System in late 2024? Regardless they work well together. This is not the post to talk about transfeminist theory, but you really ought to read it, perhaps followed by some Talia Bhatt. 

Critique

1. Taskerland, 'ITO: I Struggle to Find OSR adventures that I Want to Run' - a critique of certain tendencies in the OSR - its 'closed-shop' nature, its whimsical anti-materialism - and of why this doesn't produce interesting adventures for a 'Gygaxian materialist' - an idea it also coins. Very very interesting. 
2. Taskerland, 'I am Embarrassed' - the OSR is full of reactionaries and we ought to do something about that... but haven't. 'To put it bluntly:' says Moreau Vazh, 'I am starting to feel as though engaging with the OSR publicly is functionally indistinguishable from feeding transbians to chuds.' Yeahhhh.
3. Taskerland, 'The Resistance Table that Became a World' - On Nephilim's adventure Souffle du Dragon and how its resistance mechanics formed a dynamic faction engine that then didn't get used again. History, review and gameable material in one. 

Why yes, I am nominating three reviews by the same person! Because this is my blog, and if somebody's a great reviewer I can do that. Their decision to largely stop reviewing games is also worth reading for a consideration of some of the limitations of the TTRPG form. 

Best Debut Blog

Darling Demon Eclipse - see above. But also worthy within its own category.
Best Series

Three things might plausibly fit in here. As there's only 1 winner for this category (or was last year) I won't rank them.

• Dungeon Scrawler, 'Dungeon Room index'  - just a fantastic list of, atp, scores of examples of rooms for 18 different dungeon room types. All this year! I don't tend to run dungeon; this makes me regret that and think that maybe I should. I think it can be hard to reward legwork rather than Big Important Statements, but given In Praise of Legwork's success last year perhaps we should. 
• A Knight at the Opera, 'Seven-Part Pact' - I couldn't pick a favourite of these if I tried. Careful attention to both the experiential qualities of playing this exciting new game and the design decisions that make it work. I imagine it'll be getting a lot of nominations. 
• Throne of Salt, '60 Years in Space: The Return' - detailed playthrough and commentary of what by all accounts is a very complex game.

Musing

There's a lot of big established blogs in this list. This is somewhat inevitable, I think. I am not seeking out small blogs. Generally, the aim of my reading list is to concentrate good thinking about games, and one of the main ways I find new stuff rather than just filtering out the old is, well, the Bloggies. I think the amount of effort that'd go into seeking out the emerging hotness is just not in my wheelhouse or that of this blog. Still, I hope the above has been somewhat interesting.

Speaking of this blog's wheelhouse... 

AEHElm year in review 

If you graph my posts/month for this blog, it makes a pattern that I see in quite a few others: an initial surge of productivity is followed by a long tail-off. 

I don't tend to look at my analytics much, but the below is interesting. It's appear that either A) the blog has some readership despite my low output (most posts pretty consistently settle at 40-50ish views after a couple of months) or B) the bot situation is worse than I'd thought. 

If you are the mythical returning reader, you'll be pleased to know that you will continue not to be catered to. Having tried being consistent, it just doesn't work for my brain. I need to randomly spin off posts out of the blue, or come back to an ongoing project once per four months to write 500 words. Anything else is a recipe for turning that downward trend into the final stage of the archetypal blog: quiet disappearance. 

A lot of my best thoughts here, anyhow, continue to be the dashed-off ones - quick pieces of creativity that can be inspiring people once I leave and put them down. Notable examples are my definition and calculation of 'The Minimal Megadungeon', discussion of 'My Childhood Vampires', explaining 'Why I, an anarchist, don't like No Dice No Masters', and 'We don't know where these systems are taking us yet'. I think the latter two form something of a manifesto for this blog, as a place focussed on exploring some of the potentials and weird corners of simmier, GMful trad RPGs over more tailored design experiences 

They sit well alongside the autoanalysis of 'What's the Point of TTRPGs?'. It's the negative to their positive, asking some fairly vulnerable questions of my own relationship to this hobby as a counterpoint to its pretentious elevation in the other posts. To be clear, I think pretension about your creative endeavours is good and important, but it's also important to stay clear-headed when thinking about what's ultimately a hobby through a political lens about what such superstructural manoeuvrings can accomplish. It was very nearly counterpointed with a short piece entitled 'becoming deranged: TTRPGs should physically harm you', but that's biding its time for now :)

Even if it was creatively draining, the book-blog project, where I made something gameable from whatever book I'd focussed on reading that month, did have some good outcomes: loads of plot hooks for any story with maritime imperialism in Underground Asia, random troll generation in The Troll Inside You, and some originally book-blog based rules for Beseeching the Gods for Aid. Less successful, but I think interesting, were my Troubles wargame design Unrest: A Tragedy of Errors (Does Terrorism Work?), which playtesting has since revealed not to work at all; and an ambitious, interesting, but not, to my mind, very successful attempt to mechanize cycles of capital as campaign-spanning Lovecraftian deities in The Long 20th Century. It also transpired that Mage: The Ascension is a really good game to make gameable material for due to its breadth of themes, and so Technic and Magic, The Magus and How to Think Impossibly all feature character options and/or NPCs for that. The loose unifying theme of the mage content is a consideration of how academia and culture might be a battleground for the subtler side of the Ascension War, which is a topic I'd like to explore more in future games.

Speaking of Mage, the year's biggest project was undoubtedly 'Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl Part 1: The Magician, or, Sites Both Strange and Powerful' - an assessment of every major Node in the North West of England for my hypothetical mage hexcrawl. This is currently averaging one post per year, but is very much a live project that I am still thinking about. More to come! Other big non-book-blog things included 'More Mud Please!', my plea for TTRPGs to embrace mundane terrain and ruler-based movement to add more depth and interest to maps; and  'The Humble Motivation Hierarchy', a thoroughly playtested mechanic for designing PC personalities alongside some commentary from my players.

To fill in a few gaps in the posting record, I also put up some old bits of material - 'The Square Campaign', which is an extensively playtested way to run a 2-directional ladder campaign in wargaming, and 'Everything Usable I ever Made for 5th Edition D&D', which is part one of a series that may some day have a part 2, if I can be bothered to compile various bits and pieces that weren't in convenient homebrew docs (mostly magic items and prestige classes). The former of these is quite good and the latter has a few interesting ideas with a high dreck ratio. 

Finally, I wrote rules for H.G. Well's tripods in Warhammer: the Old World. There are also miniatures in this post. But like. The reason to look at it if you don't care about my mediocre painting is rules for Martians Verdrans.

If I've not had a massive output this year, my satisfaction with the average piece has gone up a lot, as evidenced by the fact that I think about 90% of it is worth reading with hindsight. I got a bit high-level and manifesto-focussed in the last few months, though, and I'm looking forward to going back to talking about games from a reasonably grounded perspective, particularly producing more gameable material. 

I'm pretty confident that the year to come will feature:

• Play reports on my recent Mage campaign, because there aren't enough of those out there [/gen] - this'll probably be the flagship of the blog for a bit, not least because they're almost all written already
• Rules for a couple of games I wrote when I was a child that I think are quite fun, nearly fully edited now
• An Old World Army of Infamy for Vampire Counts made up entirely of ghosts
• The next Mageckrawl instalment. At least the next. Can we crack 2 per year????

Beyond that, who knows? I'll do what brings me joy and/or motivation, and hopefully at least some people will find it interesting and/or inspirational.

Personal Hobby Year

I've done a fair bit of TTRPGs and not much else this year. Up to about August, I was running my Tales of Theon heartbreaker for about 3.5 hrs fortnightly, which will be restarting in Feb. Things got very sad around Feb with the death of a beloved character, and though it took us a few months to wind it down we went into a bit of a hiatus over summer. Everyone was still having fun, and indeed it's one of most of our favourite campaigns, but I thought it was time to take some time off to creatively refresh myself and give everyone else some time to vent the emotional bleed. 

I used this to run one of the grimmer and more miserable campaigns I've ever run, The Brezhnev Probe, a 15-session Mage 20 cosmic/philosophic horror game based around the complete collapse of global time. We ended up running for a little bit longer than expected, even at 4.5 hrs weekly, due to some scheduling difficulties, but it was definitely a good time overall. I think it's a good example of how wild a mage game can get - spanning three continents and from the ocean to space and strange dimensions beyond the earth; in conversation with Islamic mysticism, accelerationism, Russian cosmism and post-Soviet queer culture amongst other themes. Hence I'll be blogging about it, as mentioned above, posting expanded versions of the session summaries along with some of my GM notes. I originally wanted to turn it into a full adventure, but it became quickly obvious that this exceeds my current timeenergetic capacity. It ended in late November, just barely on the upper end of the planned schedule, in a tragic mess ... but more on that anon. 

My normal TTRPG time in December was mostly spent on writing up the full rules for Tales of Theon, translating them from a scattering of notes across dozens of notebooks with a consistency and coherence worthy of a late-stage Lovecraft protagonist into something that I can give to players. 

I've also played a couple of sessions of VtM 5th edition, specifically the Birmingham by Night adventure 'Open Your Eyes' that was released, I believe, alongside 'Fall of London'. My character, fashion-conscious high femme Ministry anarchist (not anarch. Anarchist.) Finch has been mucking around with the Camarilla hierarchy in the city, doing jobs for the Seneschal whilst trying her damnedest to get everyone around her to join in mortal and immortal revolutionary struggles. It was fun to be a player for a bit, but my tendency to be rather cautious and do a lot of research before acting meant it took longer than expected and the GM, who was playing in The Brezhnev Probe, paused the game until the latter had finished. Hopefully we'll pick it up at some point. I was starting to warm to V5.

I played in a one-shot of This House is F***ING HAUNTED, which I'm not terribly impressed with as a system though I had fun; I also ran an OSR drinking game runthrough of Tomb of Horrors where you could recharge character abilities or not die by taking a shot or playing a game of Truth or Dare. This ended with me (as Acererak) sitting in a pond (as me) after a player destroyed them (Acererak's gender rapidly became unclear) with a casting of that well-known spell, Baboon Hurricane. This was a system I'd designed in 15 minutes, and which we began to play at ~10 pm. Strongly recommend this activity.

Austrian sappers close in on a Vampire in The Silver Bayonet

In wargames, obviously there was the playtesting of Unrest (see above): a quick 2-player runthrough before the rules were up, and a bigger 4-player affair which never really got off the ground. Turns out I've packed wayyyy too many dice rolls into setup - I think a card game might serve the intended level of mishap better. Then I've played about three games of Warhammer: the Old World, two Ogres vs Warrior of Chaos playtesting my magic rules (W1 L1, the rules work fine but miscasting needs to be easier) and another Vampire Counts vs Cathay. The latter was one of my more interesting games to date - essentially, I brought a mostly-ethereal list and then lost because I hadn't pushed forward aggressively enough, giving my opponent a chance to cast a 'make your attacks magic' spell and blow my general up with a cannon, Crumbling almost my whole list by turn 3. I definitely know how I could have played this better though, and there was some fascinating mind-chess involved. I played one game of Napoleonic supernatural skirmish game The Silver Bayonet, which I found disappointingly generic-feeling. Cool minis, but I can't see myself seeking out the chance to play again. I also got in one huge multi-player game of Horus Heresy 2e, against some lovely new opponents and one lovely old opponent, which was fun even if my borrowed Night Lords spent the entire game getting horrendously massacred. I really like the rules, and it's a shame that the 3rd edition seems to have moved away from  denser mechanics that give the game its old-GW charm and tactical depth. 

Raven Guard snipers pin down Night Lords and Iron Warriors in a wide open killzone in The Horus Heresy, before a murderous deep strike by Deathwing rolls them up

Speaking of getting butchered, I've still yet to win a game of Magic the Gathering: Commander, probably because about half of my games so far have been with my custom tarot Esika deck (ace of swords must feature 1 sword, 2 of swords must feature 2 swords etc...) which despite some big and wild swings it can pull out is basically completely unsynergized. Having gotten a couple of games in with this and other decks and watched a lot of Magic youtube, I'm ready to proxy up a white/red/blue stax deck with the very reasonable goal that my opponents should never get to play cards, at least not without it hurting, and then go make some friends :3

I've not played many board games at all apart from last night, and I don't remember any of those very well... nor, to be quite honest, do I feel any strong urge to do more unless somebody else pulls me along. Most bord games just don't have the level of deep narrative I want out of precious gameplay time, and I'm more likely to walk away with ideas for wargames or TTRPGs than a desire to play again. I would like to dust off Spirit Island or Inis though, they're the rare exceptions.

I've painted 2 miniatures in full this year, and not assembled many more. I do however seem to have the makings of some kind of Vampire Counts army now, (some zombies bought for a workplace 5e game that hasn't manifested yet, lots of old tomb kings bits, some vampires) so given their compellingly average competitive performance (46.9% winrate! Do Not Ask About List Diversity) it might be time to buckle down and make something. At least once the next few months are done, they'll be pretty packed with non-hobby stuff.

Overall, I've never been without a hobby project, but I've also not completed a lot. That's fine though. I'm more than happy to potter along with most stuff whilst focussing on my big projects: Sad Grey TTRPGS.

And just for fun... fave non-game media I've first encountered this year. I'm not cutting-edge enough for my 'X that was released this year' to mean much.

Non-fiction Book of the Year: Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic (2024) Cute Accelerationism 
Fiction Book of the Year: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990) The Difference Engine
TTRPG Book of the Year: FASA (1993) Corporate Shadowfiles 

Film of the Year: James Gunn (2025) Superman
Academic Article of the Year: Eric Schwitzgebel (2013) 'If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious' ties with Alexandre Baril (2020) 'Suicidism: A new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective'

Song of the Year: Lowkey (2010) 'Terrorist?' (parts 1 and 2 in succession for optimal experience) 

Album of the Year: Katatonia (2025) Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State

Podcast Episode of the Year: Cracked Ivory (2025) 'Spotlight: Interview with Jude Doyle, Author of "Did I Leave Feminism?"' [I feel the need to clarify that the answer is 'no']

Artwork of the Year: Pavel Filonov (1920-2) 'Formula of the Universe'

Alright, I think that's it from me for now. May 2026 bring you beautiful things, terrible-but-necessary things, and interesting things in measures appropriate to your temperament and situation.

Jago