2025: My Year in TTRPG Gaming

I’ve had another busy year of game design and playing and running RPGs. Here are my 2025 highlights:

I spent the first couple of months of the year working on the Northlands campaign setting, writing a mixture of heroic and villainous factions for the Worldbook.  Northlands launched on Kickstarter, and reached $239k with 2,251 backers.

Next, I returned to D&D Adventurers League module writing for the first time in several years, designing a Tier 1 Murghôm adventure, Trouble at Kobold Crown, as part of the Polyhedral Adventures design team. I ran the adventure at UK Games Expo and it went on to run in quite a few slots at both Expo and Tabletop Scotland. Hopefully it will be available to purchase on the DMs Guild in the near future.

I spent the summer working on another project for Kobold Press with a fantastic team of freelance designers. This project is yet to be announced, but I have a feeling fans of the Labyrinth setting will really enjoy it. Recently I’ve been working on some monsters for Scoundrel Game Labs which has been fun, and I have another Kobold project starting at the end of the year. I’ll share more news on all of these when they have been revealed.

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Several projects that I worked on in 2024 were released. It’s always cool to see my work turned into a finished book!

My last three adventures for D&D Adventurer magazine came out: Our Lady of Thay (issue 71), Gateway to the Plaguestone (issue 76) and Scourge of the Plaguestone (issue 79), all part of the campaign’s final arc. I loved writing for the magazine and it was brilliant to have my name in an official D&D product. 

Weapons of Lore from Jeff Stevens Games was also released. I contributed the Cthulhu-themed Trident of R’lyeh to the book, alongside many other cool magic weapons from different designers.

The Labyrinth Worldbook, one of the biggest projects I’ve done for Kobold Press, came out in July, and I’m very proud of the finished book. I was thrilled to see Parsantium, my own self-published campaign setting, included as one of the core worlds in the Labyrinth, and wrote new material on several previously unexplored locations in the Lands of Parsantium on this blog.

Monster Vault 2 was released in September. I wrote ten monsters for the book and was delighted with how they turned out – Kobold Press’ monster art just gets better and better!

Lastly, two of the Pathfinder books I wrote for Raging Swan Press way back in 2012 have been revised and reissued as Treasure Dressing: Armour and Treasure Dressing: Weapons for 5e. It’s nice to see these older projects get a new lease of life. 

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As well as designing professionally, it’s been a good year of running and playing games for fun too. This year, I played 9 different RPGs.

My Monday night Pirate Borg game was originally intended to run long enough to play through Buried in the Bahamas and The Curse of Skeleton Point (the adventure in the core rulebook), but we’ve been having so much fun, I’ve gone on to run several other scenarios and it’s turned into a full campaign. I’ve enjoyed the light OSR rules and the challenge of improvising game sessions around the brilliant random tables and the crazy stuff my players have got up to. I think we’ve got two more adventures to go and then we’ll give Shadow of the Weird Wizard a try. I also have the new 13th Age 2nd Edition books arriving soon with Neon City Outlaws to follow, so I’m spoilt for choice. There are so many cool games coming out at the moment! 

My regular monthly D&D campaign, Tomb of Annihilation, is also still going strong. We’re 27 sessions into the campaign and the PCs are on track to finally reach Omu next session. We’re using the 2014 rules along with Kobold Press/ToV material and bits of D&D 2024 for this game which is working well. 

The monthly Cthulhu group I play in continued with The Borellus Connection for The Fall of Delta Green, and the other Monday night GM switched his game over from Troika to Tales of the Valiant. I’m enjoying playing a mechanist with Iron Man style vibes in this campaign.

Kate and I had a great time at UK Games Expo as always.  As well as running Trouble at Kobold Crown, I played a wandering NPC in The Sands of Talos, the Murghôm epic, while Kate played at one of the tables. We also played excellent games of Vaesen, Alien, and Dragonbane. The Vaesen scenario came from Seasons of Mystery, so Kate and I played the next adventure at home using the same characters in a 1-on-1 game. It worked really well so hopefully we’ll play again soon. 

At end of last month we went to Dragonmeet in its new home at Excel and played Daggerheart for the first time. I enjoyed the game, particularly the hope & fear mechanics, and would like to play it again in the future. 

Finally, I got to run some D&D for my 14 year old nephew and my sister when they were over from the US. We played the first two adventures from D&D Adventurer and all had a great time. 

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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.

Let me know your gaming highlights in the comments!