2024: My Year in TTRPG Gaming

2024 has been another busy and enjoyable year of game design and playing RPGs. Here’s what I’ve been up to….

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For the first half of the year, I worked on the Labyrinth Worldbook for Kobold Press, alongside Wolfgang Baur and Celeste Conowitch. The Labyrinth is the multiverse of Kobold Press’s Tales of the Valiant RPG and I got to write over 50,000 words of the Worldbook, describing new worlds and factions, and creating some fun player options. Excitingly, my own world of Parsantium, is now one of the core worlds of the Labyrinth and is featured in the book. 

The project launched on Kickstarter in the Autumn and I did a late night Discord AMA with Wolfgang and Celeste, video interviews, and a worldbuilding seminar for backers with Wolfgang and Zeb Cook to promote the setting. The Labyrinth ended on $352k with over 3,200 backers, meeting all its stretch goals, which included some extra monsters that I wrote. I love the setting and can’t wait for the final book to be released!

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My other big game design project was my ongoing work for Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer. This year I wrote another six adventures for the magazine. Three of these – Tall Tales by Firelight (issue 38), The Darklake Regatta (issue 47), and The Frazzled Flumphs (issue 51) – have already appeared. The other three will be published during the final adventure arc in issues 71, 76, and 79 (the penultimate issue) in the new year. 

Altogether I’ve written 14 adventures and 13 articles for D&D Adventurer and have loved working with Matt McAllister, Aviad Tal, James Haeck, Sarah Madsen, Stacey Allan, and Will Doyle on the magazine. It’s presented D&D in a fresh, fun way and has hopefully reached a lot of new players.

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I’ve also managed to squeeze in several other projects. One was a magic weapon for Jeff Stevens Games’ upcoming Kickstarter, Weapons of Lore, which was a a lot of fun to write. I also drafted an outline for a trilogy of Adventurers League adventures set in Murghǒm in the Forgotten Realms, which will premiere at UK Games Expo and Tabletop Scotland in 2025. I’m working with Dave Wright and Ian Hawthorne on this project and am going to be writing the first of these adventures.

Finally, I’ve just finished writing 10 monsters for Monster Vault 2 for Kobold Press which is launching on Kickstarter soon, and have a very exciting project lined up for early 2025 which will make a lot of Midgard fans very happy.

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Several projects I worked on in 2023 or earlier were published in 2024. The biggest was Campaign Builder: Castles and Crowns from Kobold Press. I wrote the chapter on creating rulers and kingdoms and was very pleased with how it turned out. 

My ToV adventure, Hidden Tomb of Nargoth, was released and it’s been great to hear from GMs and groups who have played the adventure at conventions and at home. Also, The Temple of Sekolah, the trilogy of sahuagin adventures I wrote for D&D Adventurer, was published in issues 31 – 33. I’ve always liked underwater adventuring and really enjoyed working on this one.

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As well as designing professionally, I’ve had a great year of running and playing games, and am very pleased to have played 11 different RPGs during 2024.

My Monday night Scarlet Citadel campaign ended in June after 66 sessions, with the final defeat of Gellert the Gruesome. This campaign has been tremendous fun to run!

Since September, I’ve been running Pirate Borg on Monday nights. We’re six sessions into the adventure Buried in the Bahamas, and I plan to run Curse of Skeleton Point from the core rulebook next. I’d like to try running Shadow of the Weird Wizard after that. Our other Monday night GM has been running Troika! which is completely bonkers and very entertaining.

My regular monthly D&D campaign, Tomb of Annihilation, is still going strong. We’ve played 10 sessions so far this year and are sticking with the 2014 rules (with a few things stolen from 2024 and Tales of the Valiant). I’ve been expanding the campaign with adventures from the DMs Guild and other material, and finally introduced the death curse after 16 sessions last month.

The Cthulhu group I play in survived Reign of Terror, a prequel to Horror on the Orient Express set during the French Revolution, and we’ve just started The Borellus Connection, a big campaign for The Fall of Delta Green.

Kate and I had a great time at UK Games Expo as always, playing Root (a lot easier to play than the board game!), Tales from the Loop, a 5e game set in Cubicle 7’s Broken Weave setting, and Chronicles of Future Earth.

At Dragonmeet, we played The Lost Bay, a 90s suburban horror game, which was really fun. I’ve also enjoyed playing Alice is Missing and Spectaculars this year.

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I think that’s everything! I’ve been lucky to have been involved in so many cool projects and to get to play so many fun games this year. What have been your gaming highlights?

Thanks to everyone who’s liked or commented on my posts here or on social media this year.

If you’ve enjoyed reading my blog, 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.