2024 Review

I always enjoy the opportunity to reflect on the past year in gaming, and as always I’m gobsmacked how quickly the year has flown past. So much has happened, both in my life, in gaming and in the wider world, and it’s just crazy. Anyway, that bit of navel gazing aside, let’s move on with the review.

I guess I can start by saying it’s been a great year, not quite as much gaming as 2023 (7 hours less), but still substantial and all highly enjoyable. The gaming community is great as always and I truly appreciate the amazing friends I’ve made through gaming, both those I’ve known for 35/40 years and those for a far shorter time (most from The Grognard Files podcast).

What happened to my 2024 Gaming Plan?

• I completed The Freeport Trilogy with my Tuesday night group in July, wrapping up what was an enjoyable romp through the pirate town of Freeport, even if the adventure was quite linear. My Monday group spent quite a bit of time in Helvéczia earlier in the year, so by the time Madness in Freeport came back in focus I was ready to move on to something else and we abandoned it there. I consider completing The Freeport Trilogy a partial success.

• Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (using Old School Essentials) kicked off in April with the Monday night group and is still ongoing. I reckon we have one session left to complete it in the new year, we just couldn’t fit it in before Christmas. It’s been a great adventure that suits my style of GMing, a sandbox that leads the party to a nice dungeon. I really like @josephrlewis.bsky.social‬’s material having picked up Carcassay: Titan Rat City and The Undying Sea as well as The Obsidian Keep published by @themerrymushmen.bsky.social‬. All top quality OSR material.

• When the Dolmenwood PDFs were delivered by Necrotic Gnome I was blown away. The setting, the perfect distillation of the OSE rules along with the comprehensive content has really grabbed me. I was pleased to start running it for my Tuesday group in September and we’re just getting started. There are a few published adventures for Dolmenwood and quite a few other OSR adventures that are a good fit; combined with the hex and setting content, adventure seeds and rumours in the campaign book, there’s enough to keep us going for years. I have to say it’s my favourite right now, I enjoy running it so much and I can’t wait to get the physical books which should be arriving earlier in 2025.

• Besides Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow I did run one more OSE adventure, @josephrlewis.bsky.social‬’s Desert Angel Fiasco. It’s a perfect con game set on a floating ship travelling across unexplored desert with a linear series of events which you can include or omit as suits the time you have available. The NPCs all have their own schemes and motives and the set pieces all work really well. I ran it three times and really enjoyed it.

• Mythic Bastionland also featured this year as a one shot at Virtual Grogmeet and UK Games Expo. While it’s based on Into the Odd (and by the same author) it has some nice mechanics that add a ton of flavour and make combat exciting. There are great tools for building your version of The Realm, a hex crawl with loads of interesting stuff in it. I’m hoping that once I get the physical book I’ll look at running some more; it’d be nice to do a season or two taking the knights from knight-errants to mature knights.

• Cairn and Barbarians of Lemuria didn’t make it to my table this year (although I did play in @sam0vail.bsky.social‬’s Musketeers BoL conversion), and while I played a ton of The One Ring 2e, I didn’t get to run it this year. Too many games, too little time!

• The cons and events happened pretty much as hoped: Grogten, The One Ring Roadtrip, Virtual Grogmeet (online), one MORPCon, UK Games Expo, Owlbear and Wizards’ Staff and Grogmeetish (online). Face to face Grogmeet has been postponed until January 2025, and unfortunately it clashes with Grogten; it was difficult deciding between the two events, but in the end I went for Grogten.

Stats

As with previous years, I continue to track the games I’ve played.

• 419.5 hours played compared to 427 in 2023 (454 in 2022 and 614.5 in 2021) - a clear downward trend, but it’s still lots of gaming!

• 181 sessions, up on 174 in 2023 (176 in 2022 and 224 in 2021).

• An average session length of 2 hours 21 minutes, compared to 2 hours 25 minutes in 2023 (2 hours 35 minutes in 2022 and 2 hours 45 minutes in 2021). I reckon this is because most sessions are online in the evening starting at 8pm and by 10-10:30 we’re all knackered. But I do love a longer session at a gaming weekend.

• Longest session: 7 hours playing @sam0vail.bsky.social‬’s Pendragon Mythic Greece at Grogten.

• Shortest session: 30 minutes playing Delta Green with TonyB online. This was a Sunday evening session where I play with some of my longer terms friends and we often spend half an hour or longer chatting before we play. On this instance I think we had a good catch-up after Christmas and only fitted in a short session.

• Number of systems played: 27 (29 in 2023, 33 in 2022 and 2021).

• Number of systems GMd: 6 (5 in 2023, 7 in 2022 and 6 in 2021).

• Most sessions as GM: 26 of Old School Essentials (compared to 27 of World's Without Number in 2023, 29 of Whitehack in 2022 and 41 of Old School Essentials in 2021).

• Most sessions as player: 24 of The One Ring 2e (compared to 23 of Call of Cthulhu in 2023, 30 of Call of Cthulhu in 2022 and 21 of RuneQuest in 2021). Call of Cthulhu is a notable runner up this year with 19 sessions.

• Game played the most (player and GM): Old School Essentials with 43 sessions, 17 of where @orlanth.bsky.social‬’s Dark Sun game. This is a significant increase over 2023’s most played game of World's Without Number with 27 sessions.

• GM I’ve played the most with: @orlanth.bsky.social‬ with 52 sessions which includes Forbidden Lands, Old School Essentials and The One Ring. Strangely in 2023 I also played 52 sessions with @orlanth.bsky.social‬ as GM!

The Games of 2024

Age of Arthur

This was a one shot at Owlbear and Wizards’s Staff con in September with GM @firstage.bsky.social‬. I wouldn’t usually pick a Fate based game but I know @firstage.bsky.social is a great GM and the setting and scenario blurb appealed to me.

It was a great choice as I really enjoyed the game and @firstage.bsky.social handled the boisterous six players like a pro. We were play testing the 2nd edition which is due for release and/or Kickstarter soon, I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Barbarians of Lemuria

@sam0vail.bsky.social‬ is the master of the “established RPG hack” and this time turned his eye towards a Musketeers game using the BoL rules. We played this as a one shot over two sessions and it worked really well, a testament both to the flexibility of the BoL ruleset and @sam0vail.bsky.social‬’s experience. I’d recommend joining the game if you ever get a chance.

Basic Roleplaying

At Virtual Grogmeet @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social‬ ran three sessions of his Raclash adventures from back in the day, using the Basic Roleplaying system. I joined two of the adventures as Blannis of the Narsi, a warrior exiled from his tribe. Like all of @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social’s games it was pacey and choc full of adventurous twists and turns. Another recommendation from me.

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures

Making an appearance at Grogten for the second time, @davepaters.bsky.social‬ ran this OSR classic. What makes Beyond the Wall stand out are the procedures for creating characters connected to each other and their starting village; PCs are immediately invested in the location and the threat to it. This time we took on and defeated a nasty goblin horde, great stuff!

Blades in the Dark

As a teenager I really enjoyed the Mean Arena strip from 2000AD. Not so long ago I’d grabbed a PDF of the first series and enjoyed it’s Roy of the Rovers style of storytelling, although it did show its age. When @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social proffered a Mean Arena game for Owlbear and Wizards’s Staff I knew I had to play it. @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social chose the Blades in the Dark rules as a framework to build on and it did the job admirably as we went through a series of set pieces with goals scored and injuries taken. It captured the spirit of the original story for sure!

Call of Cthulhu

I played a few different games of Call of Cthulhu in 2024:

• @davepaters.bsky.social’s Masks of Nyarlathotep, a campaign we started in August 2021 and is still going strong.

• @poutsma.bsky.social‬’s finished his Black Lancers campaign which had been started in August 2022, with an epic conclusion of mythos and nazi busting awesomeness!

• Blackwater Creek, a fantastic one-shot that felt like the best Cthulhu adventures from back in the day run by @davepaters.bsky.social at UK Games Expo.

• A Wee Dram o’ Danger, a atmospheric one-shot set in the Orkney Islands run by @elevatedpachyderm.bsky.social‬ at Grogmeetish.

• My Friday evening group started Order of the Stone in December and we’re due to continue into 2025.

Conan 2d20

Back in the shadow haunted past of November 2022 @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social started The Shadow of the Sorcerer campaign for our then monthly Monday evening group. The adventure came to an epic conclusion in March this year where we took on the might of an ancient line of Sorcerer kings and in the best Swords & Sorcery tradition were victorious, vanquishing our evil foes.

There were some real highlights with the campaign, but it was quite linear (choo-choo!), but once we bought into that there was much fun to be had. I was sad to see the end of this monthly Mondays group as it had been running for a good few years, but on a positive it has allowed me to get back to weekly GMing on Mondays.

Delta Green

In February 2023 my Sunday night group with two of my old mates from back in the day (the Sunday Scousers) started the Impossible Landscapes campaign GMd by TonyB which ran until September this year. Oh boy, is this an game that’ll scramble your noodle, with an ending that was both unexpected and terrifying in equal measure.

Some of the scenes were amazing and there is a big streak of clever ideas throughout, but also a highly linear plot that we followed. Still, that didn’t detract from the game at all, in fact I think some of our divergences from the plot cause Tony a few headaches!

Dolmenwood

This has been on my radar for ages, as I’ve watched the Dolmenwood setting and rules evolve. Once I’d finished The Freeport Trilogy with my Tuesday group it was straight into Dolmenwood. I harped on about it above so I won’t say any more here other than I can’t wait to continue this campaign and see where it goes.

Dragonbane

I’ve played Dragonbane at Virtual Grogmeet with @fenrisgames.com‬ and it was very enjoyable, in many ways a perfect fantasy game, so I decided to take the plunge and buy it. I offered to run it at Grogmeetish, but rather than pick one of the 11 scenarios from the adventures book I converted Dark Deeds in Last Hope, a scenario for Shadow of the Demon Lord. Both the practice run and the con session went really well; in fact so well that I plan to start the Secrets of the Dragon Emperor campaign in the new year.

As a cherry on the cake, at Grogmeetish I played in @fenrisgames.com’s The God Wurm adventure which was another flavour filled adventure.

Forbidden Lands

Continuing our adventures with GM @orlanth.bsky.social‬, we’ve become much better at navigating and managing the dangers of the Ravenlands. We’ll be playing this well into 2025 as we follow the various legends and explore the map.

Harn Master

This is a great game, way above my crunch tolerance levels but is made very playable with the amazing FoundryVTT system. It really does everything for you!

The Sunday Scousers started this back in November and will be continuing it into the new year. With GM SteveW we’re undertaking a job to guide a mage into the wilderness for an unknown reason. As the game has progressed the detailed world of Harn has really started to come alive. I look forward to playing more of this (I do have a boxed set of the rules, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never run it!)

Helvéczia

We started playing in the sandbox world of Helvéczia with GM @chrisesharp.bsky.social‬ in September 2023 and continued until April this year. It’s a glorious setting that feels both historical and fantastical at the same time.

Fingers crossed we’ll be back adventuring in here in January 2025.

Into the Odd

Although I’ve ran Cairn and Mythic Bastionland, both based on Into the Odd, I’d not played the vanilla game itself, so I was keen to jump on a one-shot at MORPCon in May, GMd by @blythygrog.bsky.social‬. It was a cracking one shot with us undertaking a mission under duress for a sea tribe, investigating the aquatic lair of a sorcerer.

Liminal

@jonac.bsky.social‬ offered to run a play test of his latest Liminal adventure, The Edge of Reality for the Monday group. I love how @jonac.bsky.social‬’s adventures have a local feel, making the liminal weirdness really pop. Great fun, highly recommended.

Middle Earth Roleplaying

It’s no surprise that GM @davepaters.bsky.social ran MERP, taking us through The Brigands of Mirkwood adventure at Grogten. MERP is always fun, and this didn’t disappoint with an investigation in a frontier town leading to an assault on an evil wizard’s tower and the heroic death of my PC. The adventure had the same vibe as some of the early AD&D adventures I played with a perfect mix of scene setting, investigation, NPCs, exploration, combat and peril.

Old School Essentials

The game I played and ran most in 2024. The year started with @orlanth.bsky.social‬ running an excellent Dark Sun series (discussed in the latest episode of the Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes podcast), it was everything an old school game should be: dark, deadly, procedural and a lot of fun.

I’d been wanting to run Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow for a while and had an opportunity with my Monday group. I love the presentation and artwork of the module, and it was easily set up in FoundryVTT. It’s a small sandbox setting of 3 hexes with loads of great locations to explore, interesting characters and a fantastic set up. We have one more session to complete the adventure, and I suspect we may lose one or more PCs before we get to the end.

Pendragon

An all day session of @sam0vail.bsky.social‬’s Mythic Greece Pendragon conversion at Grogten is now an annual event, an institution! I love playing my demi-god character Diomedes who is often over in over his head, and interacting with all the other bigger than life PCs. It’s only a couple of weeks until the next session and I’m really looking forward to it.

RuneQuest

I only played RuneQuest once this year, joining on the Friday evening at UK Games Expo, and while the game was well underway, GM @jimjimthegrim.bsky.social‬ slotted me in. The adventure was a lot of fun, exploring a ruined site long ago abandoned and fallen to ruin.

Savage Worlds

It seems I get to play Savage Worlds on average once a year. This time it was a bespoke Space 1889 adventure with GM SteveW with the Sunday Scousers. This three session adventure had quite a bit of mystery and excitement and demonstrated that Savage Worlds is a great fit for the Space 1889 setting. I was really impressed with the FoundryVTT system implementation, whoever made it has done a great job.

The One Ring 2e

Our ongoing game with @orlanth.bsky.social‬ as GM rebooted at The One Ring Roadtrip in March and continued throughout the year, covering much of Tales from the Lone Lands and reaching a natural break point just before the end of the year. I’m already looking forward to the next reboot at The One Ring Roadtrip 2025.

Traveller

My fortnightly Friday group is one of the longest I’ve been playing in; it’s the group which Grogten came from. But Friday’s have proven tricky for a few reasons, so sessions of the Skandersvik campaign GMd by @viscountjonkeer.bsky.social‬ has been intermittent. We started in May 2023 and have had 9 sessions so far. Still I’ve really enjoyed it and look forward to playing more in 2025.

True-D6

This little oddity of a system grabbed my attention earlier on in the year. It’s a light, D6 OSR system presented as an ASCII text file with no graphics that does some clever stuff with that D6. I ran it with the fantastic Temple of the Moon Priests one page dungeon and it worked perfectly. I’d like to run it again at some point.

The author Kickstarted a printed version with better layout and art this year, but I gave it a miss as it only used AI art. Such a shame.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

I played two sessions of this in January, the first completing the Hell Rides to Hallt adventure started in October 2023, and the second at the Grogten weekend. Both games were GMd by @jaje7406.bsky.social‬, both I really enjoyed.

Worlds Without Number

Continuing The Freeport Trilogy with the final part, Madness in Freeport in January, we played it across 13 sessions ending in July. Despite the railroady nature of the adventures, I enjoyed this final part which had two set pieces both of which played well.

The Worlds Without Number rules played well, but as I’ve said before I don’t think they’re for me (for example, the healing rules are overpowered IMHO).

Yokai Hunters Society

One of my Grogmeetish choices, this was described by GM @matthewbroome.bsky.social‬ as Vaesen set in late 19th century Japan. A fairly accurate description, the titular Yokai are folklore creatures causing problems that deal with through investigation and discovering their weaknesses rather than brute force.

I have to say I loved this game, the system is really lite and does just what it needs to. Characters come from all kinds of backgrounds and are regular folk. Highly recommended.

The Cons of 2024

Grogten (January)

The perfect way to start the year, an event I really look forward to. It’s not just about the games, but spending time with good friends, sharing food and drink and watching strange movies…

The One Ring Roadtrip (March)

Another annual staple, this time we had fantastic accommodation in the lovely village of Malvern with nice cafes and an amazing Indian restaurant nearby. GM @orlanth.bsky.social‬ rebooted our The One Ring campaign with Tales from the Lone Lands, an adventure that saw our new band of heroes tackle trolls and wizards and set up a whole series of adventures across Eriador that would run throughout the year.

Virtual Grogmeet

An online event I really look forward to, it’s great to have a full weekend of gaming from the comfort of your own home. This year I ran two games on the Saturday, which in hindsight although very enjoyable might have been a bit much as I was knackered by the Saturday night.

MORPCon

This runs every other month at Fanboy 3 in Manchester, I should really try to get along to more.

UK Games Expo

Expo has always been a solo event, sort out your own accommodation, book in some games then meet up with friends for walks around the trade hall, games and drinking. But this year a few of us grouped together and grabbed some shared accommodation outside of the venue so we could do gaming and still visit the site. There is a tale of how we didn’t get the accommodation we’d originally booked, but it all worked out in the end.

I wasn’t able to join the rest of the group until the Friday evening, but from that point onwards it was brilliant, loads of RPGs with great friends, a trip to the Hilton bar and a trawl of the trade hall on the Sunday.

Owlbear and Wizards’ Staff

What can I say about this lovely event that hasn’t been said elsewhere. I love this one so much, set in Royal Leamington Spa with a great combination of gaming and socialising, it’s a highlight of the year.

Grogmeetish

Face to face Grogmeet has been pushed back to January 2025 (curse you MTV Awards!), so @thegrognardfiles.bsky.social arranged a second virtual con which was great fun.

The VTTs of 2024

FoundryVTT has been the dominant VTT both as a player and GM (it’s the only VTT I use). It’s interesting seeing different GMs handle upgrading versions and moving towards the latest v12.

• v9 - 22 sessions

• v11 - 93 sessions

• v12 - 29 sessions

I expect most sessions to use v12 in the early part of 2025 and migrate to v13 as that is released later in the year.

Roll20 takes 2nd place with 17 sessions as a player. Honestly, I think Roll20 is a bag of spanners, after all these years they still can’t get image rendering right and for me any imagined ease of use vs FoundryVTT isn’t worth the tradeoff.

A notable 3rd place goes jointly to Role which is ok, but quite limited, and Discord only which worked surprisingly well, a mostly theatre of the mind experience with maps and images dropped into Discord chat.

Sixteen sessions were face to face for a total of 60 hours, I guess because these sessions tend to be longer than online.

The 2025 Gaming Plan

My 2024 plan was to simplify gaming and get back to basics with a big focus on Old School Essentials which I believe I did. This year I want to revisit some other classic systems and adventures, while exploring quite a bit more Dragonbane.

• Complete Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow for OSE It’s almost a certainty I’ll get this done as there should be only one more session to finish it.

• Continue my Dolmenwood campaign - I can see this running throughout the year as we explore new Dolmenwood content and adventures.

• Start the Secrets of the Dragon Emperor campaign for Dragonbane and maybe some other adventures beyond that. There’s tons of great material out there for it.

• Run the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. Even though it’s far from a perfect campaign, I’ve wanted to revisit it for a long time. It’s the first campaign I played over 40 years ago and I believe I ran it once previously in the late 80s/early 90s. I have considered running it with various systems, Cthulhu Hack, Eldritch Tales, Dagonbane (@fenrisgames.com’s Dragonbane hack) but I’m thinking it might just be easiest to use Call of Cthulhu 7e (which has a great FoundryVTT system).

• Run some more Mythic Bastionland, maybe just a season or two to explore the realm a little more.

• Run some WEG Star Wars 2e; I have a few adventures knocking about that I’d like to try out, or I may just run a handful of one shots.

Who knows if it’ll come off, but you’ve got to start somewhere and I’m a big fan of agile so I’ll adapt as I go along.

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To wrap up, I’d like to thank all of my GMs and players, and everyone in this great community whether it’s just been an occasional conversation on Bluesky or Discord or a chat over some beers at a gaming con. Keep up your enthusiasm for RPGs and keep on gaming!

Happy New Year folks, have a great 2025!