Campaign Retrospective: Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25 )

Finally ran the last session for the main-line of the Hexcrawl25 campaign, so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style since there were a lot of experimental practices running under the hood in this one.

Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)

What it was:

Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player

For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead

What worked:

Actual Play: The Hole In The Oak

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon, menace telegraphed by the corpses of adventurers, bigger than it seems with lots of secrets that can get missed even when players pry into things.

Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.

As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.

Session Report: The Hole In The Oak

Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger

At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.

[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]

Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.

They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.

[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]

They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.

The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.

Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.

[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]

The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.

They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.

The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.

[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]

Session Report Ends

It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."

This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.

Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.

Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1

I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.

I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.

Running through them in order encountered by the players:

Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.

On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.

The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.

The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.

My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.

The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.

They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.

My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.

Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.

The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.

The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.

I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.

In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.

The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.

The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.

This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.

From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.

I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.

In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.

Actual Play: converting work colleagues to the cause

I was geas'ed to run D&D for one of my colleagues. They ambushed me at the office Christmas party and asked could I do it. This was a fair bit into the party so I filed it away as 'reconfirm later' - and when I was heading back to London I did check and lo, they were actually interested. I rounded up a few of the folk I *had* actually previously discussed D&D with, the geas-er roping in one of their pals too for a table of four.

I was honestly shocked at this level of interest among... ordinary folk? I mean, never mind the fact that I cosplay high corporate every day, I am still surprised that people have heard of it and are interested enough to try. These are folk who had not played Baldurs Gate 3, not seen the D&D movie, nor Stranger Things. The closest they had as a reference was some episode of Community (which I had never seen).

So with a certain sense of responsibility, I decided to book the Arcanists Tavern for some initial wow factor. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" near Hoxton, I have been in and run games there before but this was the first time I went full hog, booked a booth etc.

Facilities in general were great, booth big enough for the table, benches for the players and a seat for me all closed off with a curtain. We could tell the other tables were there but noise levels were better than a busy night at my usual Friday night venue. The tables were cool with baize pits in the center for all the dice rolling which kept things from getting lost. We got food and drink there, tasty toasties and a few beers - fairly abstemious compared to a typical work night out truth be told, practically a visit to the gym. Cost is value for what you get, I will be using it again.

Setup for the session

I generated a set of character from Fast Character - mostly because it is quick and easy button mashing and gets you most of what you need. Very good for martials or partial casters, not great for casters because it just names the spells, no info or stats, but it was good enough to get started.

I decided I was going to run a 'Splinters of Hope' session - planar scavenger hunt for wood from a now-dead world to save dying elves - and start in medias-re to really get things going.

I cooked up the session up as a classic 'quest' - sneak into a place, get a thing. Recycled setting by having the objective be set on the edge of my Hexcrawl25 map, so I knew all the factions, background activity and just used that. Decided to drop in 'thinky' challenges more than raw combat crunch. Threw in some good old Goblinpunch non-Euclidean weirdness. Decide it would be full of skeletons on 'automated rotas' so they could potentially sneak through them all if they figured that out.

Talked through all this to a transcription app while doing laundry then grabbed an envelope and blocked out the session linearly which became my session sheet.

Session Report: The Templars Villa

Four encounters for a caravan mini-campaign

One of my original 90s gaming group graciously hosted a get together for that old table over a weekend and one of the things we did was a round-robin D&D mini-campaign.

The concept for all of this was caravan guards taking a wagon from one point to another. It proved pretty robust as a vehicle for random encounters - we had something we were supposed to be looking after. There were NPCs when we needed them for rescues. They did not interfere when we did not need them because they were just wagon drivers. It gave a rationale for why the scenery was changing and how come we were dealing with completely different things from one encounter to the next. It was a nice model for getting straight to the gaming with minimum preamble.

On Fast Party Coherency

The characters we cooked up in a hurry ended up gelling really, really well conceptually. There was an orc monk who was basically a WWE wrestler. I was an orc fighter, dump stat intelligence, just like hit things with my sword. We had a Goliath archer who was effectively the brains of the outfit, to his chagrin and horror, and a halfling sorcerer who was a very kinetic, act-on-sight fellow. For him the plan is do the next step and then see where we are and then do the next thing after that and see where we are, repeat until problem solved or enemy defeated. As a group, they meshed together ridiculously well. Group cohesion was almost instant because everyone was team "scream and charge" - even the halfling (especially the halfling). It worked unexpectedly well.

For short haul campaigns or con games, I think the phrase that sometimes kicked around is "drive it like you stole it" and this was a good example of that. For short haul stuff just stick in someone who is going to burn the candle at both ends and the middle for the duration of this game and then if they survive, bonus, if they do not they have entirely served their purpose.

The Encounters

The set of four encounters started with the first 5e that one of my pals had ever run (typically a WHFRP GM of late). He blended Tuckers Kobolds with a splash from MCDM's Flee Mortals. Very amusingly there was a setup bit where the kobolds were supposed to threaten us as we entered their territory which was supposed to be five minutes of dialogue that turned into a two-hour tower raid because we guessed they had some kind of signal flags on the roof. We attempted to get the drop on them and there was a whole bunch of gaming completely unanticipated and ahead of the actual planned encounter.

The intended encounter was a pop-in pop-out ambush in eight foot Pampas grass where velociraptor riding kobold lancers came at us out of the grass and then we lost sight of them again. There was also Kobold Trapsman from Flee Mortals - together they gave us a fairly serious run for our money. Very good value concept and time-wise - we got something like six hours gaming out of what was supposed to be a one or two hour thing.

The second encounter was a mystery where we found someone beat up on the road, then came to a cottage where it looked like grandma had been attacked by someone - allegedly a hunter. We found a bunch of grisly remains, the worlds most confusing murder scene. We followed tracks into the forest and came upon grandma, in very bad shape - when then turned into a werebear and pummelled us. Turned out that all the confusing remnants were reverted dead lycanthrope bits and the werebear had been assaulted in their home by werewolves. We did not figure this out until the werebear had roundly kicked our butts for a bit before we finally KO them and were able to get the story from them afterwards. Collectively, our PCs were thick as mince, the wrong team for any kind of investigations but that did not stop it being fun.

The next encounter was an ambush in a trapped canyon with an ogre mage and harpies. Our wagons were levitated, everything was topsy turvy and the harpies were literally in their airy element. We had a lot of trouble trying to get footing to fight properly and intercept harpies as they snatched away wagoneers and generally fend off the tootling ogre mage who was causing all this chaos. We lost two wagons, three wagoneers and most of our cargo in that first ambush so we resolved to track them down to their lair. There we had part two, a raid on the camp of the harpies and rescue of our fellows. This time we had tactical initiative and could make use of terrain and surprise on our side - things like cutting tent ropes, setting things on fire and generally steamrolling the foe in a satisfyingly vengeful way.

I ran the closeout which was recycled from a hex from Hexcrawl25 which was bog mummies and crawling claws where the bog mummy flings his hands at you and then closes. I used a peat mummy which just had a slightly different variation of Mummy Rot and difficult terrain (the bog) around the wagons. The minor threat of the crawling claws were great because they distracted and also served to put flanking on PCs for the Bog Mummies to then hit like trucks.

The caravan set up worked really well for just a knock-about game which was just a string of unconnected encounters. It was a good little lesson for why caravan guarding campaigns are great because you can just nail in absolutely anything and there you go, a campaign. It also worked pretty well for the roster switching as we rotated GMs because we can say whoever was not there at the moment was scouting, foraging, down with food poisoning or whatever and it is still perfectly reasonable they turn back up for the next encounter.

Actual Play: Old Man Katan and the Incredible Edible Dancing Mushroom Band

tl;dr: tried out a top-recommended Dungeon magazine adventure; good times with some interesting stylistic change revealed.

An adventure to "provide comic relief in an otherwise serious campaign" it is a nice little swamp sandbox. As an experiment, I had a go at running it straight from the book but the players went off track fairly rapidly leading to some reshuffling on the fly. I think best used as a source of good ideas and then rewire what happens when into some manner that fits with how your table likes to do things.

Art by Terry Dykstra

We get 13 pages, some very nice art and the text in triple columns. These are blocked out by 'encounter' organised around the ramp in to getting the players exploring the swamp essentially with a pair of big boxes that are then 'Glitchegumee Swamp Encounters' (ten of them) and 'Exploring the Glitchegumee Swamp' which is five locations. All the components of a neat little hexcrawl are here, just a bit scrambled.

The intro as written is you come upon a recluse, Old Man Katan, being pestered by tiny mushroom folk and decide to investigate what has gone wrong in the swamp around them. There are quite a few 'off ramps' where players could just not pick up the thread of the adventure without a very heavy hand on the steering wheel if you just leave it as is. The 'something is wrong in the swamp' set up is perfectly adequate as a hook to have brought them there to stumble over Old Man Katan - and if you take the time to set that up then people are already somewhat motivated to go onward by the time they meet Old Man Katan and you can just lean into him being him with his troubles and concerns and it will emphasise your existing hook.

There are a fair few parts in here - a good lot of useable things - but worth you working through how you use them - either retune their sequence or make them encounters, as you think most coherent to you. There are a couple of the encounters that are overpowered for the envisaged low level adventurers but I like that 'not everything is here to be fought' ethos.

I ran this for a table of strangers recently, running 1st level 5e characters. We had:
Elf Fighter
Dragonborn Ranger
Elf Rogue
Triton Paladin
Goliath Cleric

It went pretty well, a good time was had, with a bit of a lull at a point where they were unclear on how to progress but on balance I think it was better to have the freedom to act and some brief confusion than be railroaded all the way.

Session Report - beyond here, spoilers abound.

Year in Review 2025 - Endies Edition

Since the Endies were kicked off by Lady Tabletop, I am going to include those bits in my usual end of year. I am stealing Luck Roll's format as it speaks to me most.

This year in stats:
Live sessions ran as a GM: 56
Live sessions as a player in a group: 14
Games read: 13 close read enough to review, est. double that again skimmed
Number of systems played: 5 (3.5e, 5e, Salvage Union, Fabula Ultima, Levity)
Hours played: 328 hours
Number of groups played with: 8
Number of games purchased: Not tracked for sanity's sake. Est. I filled 1 meter additional shelving.

All told a top-3 year, mostly driven by running the Hexcrawl on Friday nights, underpinned by running Ducal House and a bit of Lizard Kings 2d20, and playing the completion of Rime of the Frostmaiden and homebrew Nirealis campaign. Fewer little opportunistic bits than last year, driven by a huge amount of energy in the early year going into implementing code of conduct for RPGVienna and all the cat-herding involved there.

Most played / least surprising inclusion: D&D 5e .
Funniest game: Hexcrawl25 game - the flying lizard session.
Best personal achievement: Getting the Hexcrawling mechanisms down, seeing the players working with the map without my input.
Most memorable ending: Finishing Rime of the Frostmaiden - squeaky fight to the finish, big feels choice at the end, our DM pulled together a great epilogue.
Most satisfying crunch: Starting to get the hang of the Conan 2d20 system.

On running games

Ducal House - slowed this year, 21 sessions, ~3/4 the time we have spent on it post-pandemic, which was effectively a strong start through to summer and then it has slowed dramatically since - pratically becoming a monthly game. A big 'arc' got resolved in June, tracking down an artefact and slaying the last emissary of a dead god. There was some good old fashioned wilderness bashing, stirring and avoiding entanglements in a whole cats-cradle of fighting factions, and a big aerial fight. An adversary encountered in session three in 2020 was finally slain. Things calmed after that, with some self-contained sessions and an impromptu trip to the moon. We shall continue into year seven, see which big threads get reeled in next.

The Dukes Last Stand, by the Bard

Hexcrawl Dual Mode - a standout success - 30 sessions, 136 hours in the Friday night slot - what I switched from open tables to. The Hexcrawl25 challenge serendipitously crossed my radar just at the point I was looking for something new, I pulled in a roster of vibe-matched regulars and got to kill three birds with one stone - motivating myself to build the hexcrawl, running a back-to-basics sandbox campaign and giving myself an easy way to run stand-alone adventures for 'off-cycle' weeks. Overall, solid success, have to work out some squeak where players split up and then do not proactively regroup but 30 sessions says the formula is generally working.

Lizard Kings 2d20 - an attempt to spin up a second 'online after-hours' campaign, modelled off the successful Southern Reaches game. A lumpy start so far, very high drop-out and cancellations, much, much higher than predicted. Paused in Nov with a view to rebuilding the roster and restarting in 2026. Those sessions that ran were not bad and it did succeed in one primary aim to bring some great commissioned art into play. Ran with Conan 2d20 but one has to ask - all the D&D games go ok, the one non-D&D game I've got, the wheels fall off. To be pondered.

On games played during the year

Rime of the Frostmaiden - we wrapped our campaign - this our monthly online game, the core group I started D&D with in the 90s + the in-house test team + one of our college gaming comrades. We took ~169 hours over 28 sessions to save the Ten Towns and Icewind Dale, our second 5e official campaign to get done in cover-to-cover. Great times, always a treat saving overcoming obstacles with such seasoned, goal-focussed adventurers. I liked Rime quite a lot - we did a lot of thundering around the tundra, uncovered a couple of big mysteries, some of which were tied masterfully into randomly rolled character backstories by our DM, and then rushed about saving the Ten Towns from threats. I played a budding megalomaniac evoker, a danger-close fire-ball slinger who was a Reghed tribesman by background - and being a wizard faithful of Tempus - "never back down from a fight" led to me getting downed 22 times in 28 sessions, including one dead-dead and wish resurrection. Good times, good times.

Niraelis - a new campaign - homebrew from a local DM, play in person with some luxurious pre-game rituals like pot-luck meals beforehand. More character-led and world-exploration driven, we are still in the early phase of unravelling mysteries in this one.

Fabula Ultima - a con-game at the Indie RPG Con organised by the Vienna DM Supergroup. Bufo Bufo, one of the veteran GM's from the Friday night sessions ran Fabula Ultima. It was fun to play the system, rolling with the archetypes, and it was a nice change to do a one-shot of a new system at a con, it has been a while.

Levity - a playtest session with the Vienna GM Supergroup, fun, sort of reminiscent of Royal Blood but a more universal-ised system.

Review of gaming goals

Decent gaming - top 3 year by session count and hours - though I definitely felt the drag of scheduling static more this year than previous - Ducal House, Lizard Kings and Niraelis both suffering from slow patches.

From about April you can see my playcount dropping below what might be expected from previous years as my energy got sapped away by all the nonsense that drove us to stand up the code of conduct for RPGVienna and then dealing with the pushback from it. It seems to have had the desired scarecrow effect as there has been not so much trouble since it was instituted.

Looking back at the goals I set last year to see how things went, it looks pretty good.
"Continue Ducal House - year six!" - that big arc got closed out, things slowed but continued so success.
"Continue Spelljammer Academy at the Friday night drop in games - or pull the plug and try something else by end first quarter." - The answer to this was "pull the plug and do the Hexcrawl" - pulling in a roster of vibe-matched regulars.
"If a new Friday night drop in game is required, maybe something using Ultraviolet Grasslands?" - see above.
"Run more DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game." - only got in one at the start of the year.
"Play more Rime" - done, to great success.
"Try and organise more DM Supergroup" - less done than I might have like but not bad - there was a burst of energy leading up to the Indie RPG con, with a pulse inspired by a false-alarm of Quinns possibly visiting Vienna. After the con, folk relaxed a bit and we did not really pick back up from there.

Blogging has also been more entertaining this year than others - catalysed by Elmcats big project; I think it gave us all a bit more of a sense that there are multiple communities out there, we are not just screaming into the void.

Gaming goals for 2026
Weather the coming of another small householder and return to gaming within the year
Running up to that, conclude Hexcrawl campaign, dismount from Niraelis cleanly
Decide whether to pause Ducal House on a cliff-hanger or some manner of resolution
Try to run more 2d20 Lizard Kings in the New Year, decide if worth maintaining
Do more GM Supergroup, where possible
Hack Your Sector, Your Problem into some form to test at table

Actual Play - Hexcrawl25 - The Swooping Lizard Affair

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere I ran session #20 of my hexcrawl recently and it provided a nice illustration of pure map based play over an in-game day and a bit. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

The short version; with a few days to kill until the party needs to pick up something and eager to test out a magical item that was alleged to make their draught-lizard faster, they set out to hike back up to a landmark they had seen. They sensibly navigate around hazards then spot something interesting, "Squirrel!" off the plan and end up wrestling with a wild-magic surged flying reptile mount in a session heavily driven by the wild-magic surge table.

Characters

Herb - Firbolg "Alchemist" (artificer)
Eggie - Goliath "Wizard" (wild-magic sorcerer)
Cortez - Dwarven Fighter

Plus minions
Clarabelle - tabaxi, small, servant
Fabricator Technician #207 - insectfolk, small, observer
Cedric - big lizard beast of burden

Session Recap

Actual Play: Waking of Willoughby Hall

tl;dr: lessons learned from bringing a good adventure to a bad open table.

I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.

I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.

System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.

Session Recap

I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)

I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.

The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.

After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.

Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.

Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.

DM notes

The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.

I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.

The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.

As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.

I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.

I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.

Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.

Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.

Review + Actual Play: Winters Daughter

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon with a romance-story core, solid recommend.

Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classics - completely forgetting I had a copy of Winters Daughter on the way as part of my Dolmenwood order. All to the good, I will probably pass on my extra copy as a raffle prize or the like.

I thought I would run it against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - in short pretty darn well, would solidly recommend.

So what do you actually get in the book?

Installing Rulers

Of campaigns I have run these past few years, two were open sandboxes and in both of them, after a little poking around dungeons, the partys decided to lock in on some currently non-descript local dweller and get them elevated to a position of power. As the meme says, odd that it happened twice.

Is there something in here about the domain game of D&D being emergent in a convergent-evolution style? Left to their own devices, a party of PCs naturally seeks to instil order, even if it is not to put a crown on their own heads?

Is this just a reaction against whatever the DM is throwing against them - if what they get is a structure plot or obvious hooks, then they will focus on hijinks and chaos creation along the way. If what they get is a pure open sandbox and they can do anything at all, is the reaction to try and impose order and dominion?

These were two completely unrelated groups of players - the first campaign was Southern Reaches where a mix of UK, Ireland and Austria based players playing remotely eventually decided that their goal was going to be getting one of their number elected as mayor of the local big city. The player of that PC had needed to quit so they were effectively a known NPC at that point - no power would have accrued to an active player.

The second time was for my current sandbox, which as running under the name of Realm of the Reluctant King since this effort to crowbar a kingdom in under an NPC is now the main focus. The NPC in question has even told them not to, disavowed any will to be responsible for the locality and fled the region. The current main effort of the campaign is to pry him out of the hands of slavers and bring him back to install at the head of the realm they have hammered together.

Actual Play - Yaksha's Hexfill Method (Part 2)

Closing out a table test a Brian Yaksha's Hexfill method on a 'fill as you go' basis on a previously un-explored part of the map. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

This second session had things work more smoothly, I was happy with how it played out. As before, I was working off a single page print-off of all the tables, double column, minimal borders and using that with an overloaded encounter die.

I used an overloaded encounter die so there were both 'encounter, positive' and 'encounter, negative' possibilities plus 'locality' and 'percept' options. Fatigue and expiry results did not require anything from these tables.
1. Setback
2. Fatigue/delay
3. Expiration
4. Locality
5. Percept
6. Advantage

Setup

The party was continuing to try and evacuate a large column of freed prisoners through a swamp. Play picked up with the party catching up with the column of refugees they had let be escorted on ahead by some other adventurers they hired. Approx 175 people in the column, rested but with no food, with four hours left until sundown.

Actual Play - Yaksha's Hexfill Method (Part 1)

I got the chance to table test a Brian Yaksha's Hexfill method on a 'fill as you go' basis on a previously un-explored part of the map, trying this out at table it worked pretty well with a little squeak because of unusual circumstances. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

Setup - where the adventure came from

The party was trying to evacuate a large column of freed prisoners through a swamp. The below is very much the 'DM-screen view' version of a session report.

I printed the sites, encounters and flavour elements I had worked up previously on a single page, double column, minimal borders, switching around the order of the tables so they broke cleanly at the bottom of the page. This gave me everything at a single glance.

I used an overloaded encounter die so there were both 'encounter, positive' and 'encounter, negative' possibilities plus 'locality' and 'percept' options. Fatigue and expiry results did not require anything from these tables.
1. Setback
2. Fatigue/delay
3. Expiration
4. Locality
5. Percept
6. Advantage

Session Report: Yaksha's Hexfill Method for the Marsh That Remembers

Actual Play - Hexcrawl25 + Home Reforged

I tested simply dropping a location into my hexcrawl sandbox as a one-shot, with the intention that the journey through the hex-map would be most of the session and the location fairly simple at the end. Written up to follow Jenx first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" while continuing the DM commentary addition to the session notes.

Setup - where the adventure came from

This was an open-table on an off-week to my hexcrawl campaign; using the same map and prep. This session was the first open table which was not a formal adventure, this was just a location

Our heroes were
lthmar - Elf Rogue (woodland ranger)
Hilas - Halfling Fighter (local hero discus thrower)
Thorgrimm Embershield - Dwarf Barbarian (WHFRP trollslayer)
Erin - Elf Paladin (oath of ancients ex-soldier)
Martha - Human Barbarian (buff old lady)
Happy - Tiefling Rogue (sneaky)

An interesting bit cropped up at the start - one person was very mechanics focused - wanted specific classes, etc from everyone - another - the tiefling player, told me stuff about tieflings in my campaign world (closer to old archetype of shunned stranger vs fairly well mixed in for menagerie world).

Session was run under an adventurers league style ruleset so everyone would get a level up if they survived and treasure and gold rewards were capped as this was a Tier One (level 1-4) adventure.

Running a beach episode

Home campaign players recently pulled off a substantial win - wanted a vacation episode - effectively a 'played through do-nothing downtime'. Writing it up as per Gorgon Bones Record your hobby experience.

The sorcerer and bard were adamant they deserved a day on the beach. Even the somewhat workaholic cleric of Kord went along as they had been pounded by a clay golem and had a bunch of cursed wounds to deal with.

The practical challenge for me was to set up for this downtime session while being flexible over where they could end up as the wonders of teleport were now theirs to command so which beach they went to could vary for the whole coast. Their intention was to go for a day and be back to sleep. As a DM that meant how to prep enough to support this chill-out downtime session without over-preparing some place that was unlikely to be returned to.

Powerpoint-filter-fuzzed beach photo

Prepping the beach session

So I figured my approach was to prepare an overlay of activities that could then be dropped on top of wherever they went to.

Thus
1. plan out the session in broad strokes that could be tailored to location
2. sweep up known aspects and differences in the southern cities they could go to

Actual Test: Yaksha's Hexfill Method

I saw this on Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's bluesky feed - and have been looking for an opportunity to test it. Interestingly, on a first attempt it flared out and did not work for me where I already had too many ideas, it worked really well for a different region where I only had some vague ones.

The framework that Yaksha pulled together has the following:
- 1 Unique Encounter
- 2 Tools/Gimmicks for the region
- d10+d4 Local Encounters
- d10 Small Jobs
- d6 Big Jobs
- d20 Scene-setting sights/stage design
- d6 bounties/location implications
- d6 ways to expand/change-up the area set to tone.
- 3d10 names for places (locales/nature sights/crossings.)

The area where it worked (red circle below), I had just a few facts. I had previously attempted to run it for the hex below, the yellow-boxes and it just bogged down for me. I will do a post-mortem at the end on the failure.

For context, the party had just made their way from the bold outlined hex on a rescue, climbing up onto the plateau region (yellow boxes) effecting a rescue at the south-eastern-most yellow box and then dashing for the nearest edge of the escarpment with a large caravan of rescued prisoners. Their theory was that the plateau rainforests were unknown, terrain, home to the people they had just raided while the swamps below were more familiar terrain for most party members and they prefered that, even if it were an unknown part of the swamps.

Working the process

Actual test: hexcrawl mechanics (launch session)

Launched a new campaign, trying to bring hex-crawling to my open tables; I thought I would write it up from a deployment of actual hexcrawling mechanics to see how/if this type of play mechanically differed from 'standard 5e with a map'.

Session log with a mechanics focus

Ducal House Year 6 - DM Challenges

We just kicked off the 6th year of our home campaign, Ducal House, and the players asked me how I was finding it, how it compared to previous campaigns I've done and so on. I needed to check and confirm that it is indeed the longest campaign by sessions, hours and years I have run - and later this year will be longer than the next two campaign I ran stacked together. Two questions came up at the end of the session:
1. What (if anything) am I seeing as an issue?
2. What would I change if I could?

Year in Review 2024

2024 was a great year for gaming - down from last years banner year but I do not feel in any way short-changed.

On running games

Ducal House (3.5e) - got in another 22 sessions, tailing off toward the end of year. This fifth year began with nailing down the altered ducal succession that had nominally been the campaign goal since session zero, a considerable amount of politics after a lot of time saving the realm and then further venturing forth to thwart a foe/potential allies plot. A venture onto the astral finally levelled everyone up to 11. The bard became heir apparent to the realm, unsought. The sorcerer has become fascinated with the potential of lichdom and the cleric continues to restrain them, in person or as the voice of conscience.

Campaign Retrospective: Brancalonia - Bay of Princes

Since a campaign finished, let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style as is now traditional.

What it was:

* "Welcome wagon" for friday night open table D&D - catch the newbies with a T1 table.
* Opportunity to bring books I had kickstarted to table - I backed the second one and got the books from the first as add-on

Stats for 27/30 games are here - a year of open table gaming - the last three games did not change the stats - average remained similar at 5.4 players for 4.6 hours on a Friday night. Final total was 77 individual players for 161 slots.

The roster of adventures was 19 games from the Brancalonia books (8 games out of Jinx's Almanac, 6 out of the Macaronicon, 5 out of the Brancalonia core book), 6 from my 'adventure generator' tests, 2 OSR zines (Het Thamsya, Goblin Mail), 2 adventures from Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and a Dungeon23 snippet (Apocalypse Archive).