Monday Musings #129 🤬
Welcome to The Endies 2025
Good Monday, Gamer!
“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Lady Tabletop Says: The Endies 2025 Are Here!!…and I’ve got thoughts on the games that shaped my year.
The Endies 2025
High GM Reps: The One Ring — Moria Year One
The One Ring (Free League, 2E, 2022) is the definitive Middle-earth RPG, set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Moria: Through the Doors of Durin takes you deep into the legendary halls of Khazad-dûm. Running sessions within those endless, orc-filled halls has been one of my top GMing joys of 2025. The book nails the mood—dark grandeur, ancient echoes, the feeling of waking powers in the deep. It overflows with inspiration and possibilities!
I decided to run an open-table, West Marches–style game inspired by the first year of Balin’s Expedition to reclaim the ancient halls. Twelve episodic sessions later, I’ve touched just about every subsystem The One Ring offers, including another three solo sessions.
Suckerpunched!: Mythic Bastionland
We ran two Mythic Bastionland campaigns this year—a whole trilogy and a follow-up 4-5 session series set in the same kingdom. This game is the roguelike of TTRPGs: spin up a new knight, carry your player knowledge forward, and plunge back into the cycle of myth, duty, and doom. I loved the dice feats added onto Into The Odds’ combat mechanics; it made for some very tense conflicts!
I’m not an Arthurian-genre guy, but Mythic Bastionland packs the weird into knightly tales, and I had a blast across three doomed, flawed, glorious knights. Would absolutely play again.
Coziest TPK: Jiangshi — Blood in the Banquet Hall
Jiangshi is a collaborative, generational story about a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant in the 1920s—while fending off hopping vampires and everyday prejudice.
Easily the coziest one-shot TPK I have ever played.
We played as three generations of Chinese women just trying to keep our famous restaurant afloat and mind our own business. We didn’t even make it through the first night before becoming hopping vampire food! I’d love to experience a full cycle of this game in 2026.
4Nostalgia Game: The Clay That Woke
Paul Czege’s The Clay That Woke casts players as minotaurs navigating silence, society, and myth in a lush, enigmatic world. Its token-based resolution system is unlike anything else.
This one hit me right in the nostalgia bone. I’d played a couple of one-shots years ago, but this session felt like everything finally clicked—the mechanics, the tone, the minotaur way. The whole table was dialed in, making it one of the standout sessions of playing in the One Shot Monthly group.
Loneliest Fun: Return to Dark Tower (Solo)
Return to Dark Tower blends a physical electronic tower, app integration, quests, threats, and escalating dread. It is my meditative solo game for quiet evenings—tension without stress, engagement without prep, episodic. Perfect.
Missed Ops
Games I wanted to give time to in 2025 but didn’t quite make happen:
Invisible Sun — The surreal fantasy RPG of vislae returning to the shadowed city of Satyrine. Deep, daring, intricate. The legendary Black Cube stares at me from the shelf, waiting for the right group and the right season of life.
Burning Wheel + UVG — I’ve been digging into Dark Tower lore for a Burning Wheel campaign, and the idea of stitching it to Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands keeps glowing in my brain. BW’s belief-driven character engine + UVG’s strange-world caravan odyssey?
Feels like something mythic could happen. Maybe 2026.
2026: Looking Forward To
Apocalypse World: Burned Over 3e — A refinement of the game that started it all. Curious what Vincent and Meg are honing and what the third edition feels like at the table.
Electric State (Free League) — A road-trip RPG through Simon Stålenhag’s haunting Americana-scifi landscapes. This one is absolutely calling me to run a campaign.
Here’s to another year of fearless play, unexpected moments, and games that suckerpunch us in the best possible ways.
As always, thanks for reading, sharing, and building strange worlds with me.