2023: My Year in TTRPG Gaming

It’s been another busy year of game design projects and running and playing TTRPGs. Here are my 2023 highlights.

Like lots of folk, I embarked on a #Dungeon23 project on 1st January, designing a new dungeon room each day. My dungeon is part of Parsantium’s vast Hidden Quarter, and gave me a great opportunity to design some new material for the setting.

After the first three months and 91 rooms, I took a lengthy break to concentrate on other projects, but returned to the dungeon in September and expanded some of the earlier maps. If I can keep it going for the remaining days of 2023, there will be 180+ rooms in total.

You can find all my Dungeon23 posts here. I’d love to turn it into a published project at some point. 

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Two of the big Kobold Press projects I’d worked on in 2022 were published – Campaign Builder: Cities & Towns, and Wastes of Chaos and its accompanying adventure collection, Tales from the Wastes. Working on these books was great fun, and I was really pleased with how they turned out. 

Kobold Press also released the final Warlock Grimoire, featuring the article I wrote with Midgard gurus Ben McFarland and Brian Suskind on the bandit town of Misto Cherno. Raging Swan Press also published a new 5e version of Picaroon Peninsula, the pirate mini-setting I’d worked on a few years ago.  

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In April, I turned over my work on the second Campaign Builder for Kobold Press, Castles and Crowns, over 40,000 words on building kingdoms and designing their rulers with five sample kingdoms. The Kickstarter did $259k, and showed off some of the gorgeous kingdom maps and cool art for the rulers I created. You can read my design diary here.

Kobold Press had an even bigger success with Tales of the Valiant, their 5e alternative, which raised nearly $1.2m on Kickstarter! I’ve written Hidden Tomb of Nargoth, one of the stretch goal adventures, which will be out in due course. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out. 

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Since May, I’ve been writing adventures and articles for D&D Adventurer, published in the UK by Hachette Partworks, and featuring work by Will Doyle, Stacey Allan, Aviad Tal, and other great writers. My material starts appearing from issue 14. It’s been great to work on an official D&D project and exciting to see the magazine on sale in WH Smith’s and Asda!

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We finished my long-running Empire of the Ghouls campaign back in May with our 40th session. We had a lot of fun playing the adventure over the past four years, and I am absolutely thrilled to hear that so many others, including Sly Flourish, have enjoyed the campaign. My Saturday night group has now headed to Chult to face the Tomb of Annihilation. We’re six sessions in and the game is going well so far.

My Monday night Scarlet Citadel campaign is still going strong – we played our 52nd session a couple of weeks ago. Now 8th -9th level, the characters are on the Black River, and have explored a few chambers of the Howling Halls, the deepest level, so I expect we’ll finish the dungeon in the first few months of 2024. 

We’ve got just one session to go of the Saturday night Trail of Cthulhu game I’m playing in, set in Berlin, the Wicked City. Next, we’re heading to the 60s, man, to (hopefully) prevent the Fall of Delta Green.

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This year has also been a fun one for convention games, trying out some games we’d not played before as well as playing some old favourites. Kate and I had a great time at UK Games Expo, playing Blade Runner, Tales from the Loop, Symbaroum, and Blades in the Dark. I also ran a few D&D demos for new (and experienced!) players on the D&D stand.

We are still thinking about attending GenCon next year, but if we don’t make it, I’m sure we’ll play some games at GenCon Online. This year, I played the excellent Swords of the Serpentine again, and tried out The One Ring, and we both played a fun game of Rivers of London.

Unfortunately we both had colds in the run up to Dragonmeet so we only paid a flying visit to the convention to do some shopping and say hello to friends. Hopefully we’ll get to play something next year!

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Lastly, I’m pleased that I’ve managed to keep this blog going for another year. Thanks to everyone who’s liked or commented on my posts here or on social media. 

If you’ve enjoyed reading my blog this year, please do join my mailing list. There’s a sign up form on the home page. I’ve written a short Parsantium supplement on the Golden Scimitars, one of the Old Quarter’s criminal gangs, that is available free to subscribers.

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I think that’s all my gaming highlights for 2023. Let me know what yours have been in the comments!