RPG: 2025

Last night we convened in person to complete Stuart's West Country Vaesen campaign, and also eat festive treats.

According to my records -- yes, I'm that sort of nerd -- I have played the following role-playing games in 2025:

• Alien in February (Stuart's Space: 1999 hack), March (the "Chariots of the Gods" campaign; I don't recall this!), and Stuart's Expanse-style custom campaign in September. I've enjoyed Stuart's games more as, while I like the Alien system, the setting does nothing for me.
• Cthulhu Hack in October and November. I'm not sure about this game. It's fiiiiiiiiiiiine, but nothing about it convinced me to use it instead of Call of Cthulhu. Stuart is thinking of running it, but I'm not sure I will again. I'm glad I tried it though.
• Old School Essentials from May to June. I converted the Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign "The Chained Coffin", and it worked fine. It was enjoyable enough, but the pacing and setup of the campaign is a bit wonky; it's full of fun and evocative encounters, but the inbuilt time limit forces the players to rush straight to the climax, so they miss out on a lot of the fun. OSE is a solid system and very easy to run, and it was fun to play classic D&D again, for the first time since the 1990s.
• The Quiet Year in February. I'm not sure if this is an rpg or not, but it's close enough. Interesting to play, and I would like to have another go at it someday.
• Shadowdark in March and April. This was requested by Ben and I wrote about my thoughts here. I like Shadowdark but there's something that's not quite right about it for me.
• Star Wars d6 in June and August. This was the first time that I'd played SWD6 since about 1997 and it reminded me of how much I like the game. I'm planning on running it myself in early 2026.
• Vaesen from August until, well, yesterday. I very much enjoyed this campaign. This variant of the Free League Year Zero system is a bit loose and wonky -- I was rolling 15d6 for a lot of things towards the end -- and doesn't feel as robust as Alien, for example, but not so much that it ruined the game. We all enjoyed how it's a less despairing and nihilistic approach to investigative horror than other games, even my beloved Call of Cthulhu, and the emphasis on folk and local horror, rather than eldritch aliens from beyond space and time, is another nice change. Of everything we've played in 2025, I'm most keen to play Vaesen again; I have insidiously made Stuart aware of a Japanese campaign setting for the game, so we'll see what happens there...

In 2026 I'm hoping to run some Star Wars d6 -- as noted above -- and I would of course like to cross something else off my unplayed list. There are quite a few games I'd like to play, including Coriolis (the new one), Dragonbane, and Forbidden Lands. Stuart may have been bullied into convinced to run his long-promised Ars Magica campaign, and Ben should be running some Pendragon in the new year.

What was your favourite rpg played in 2025? What do you have planned for 2026?