Monday Musings #152 🤬
The tables that made me
Good Monday, Gamer!
I write this newsletter every Monday, and a lot of weeks it feels like a solo act. Me, my notes, my opinions, and a deadline I made up. But none of it would exist without the rotating tables of friends, strangers, podcast guests, and one-shot drop-ins who have spent their evenings playing pretend with me since 2020.
The tables made the GM. The GM made the posts. The posts made the newsletter. And the newsletter is just me trying, every Monday, to be worth the time those people gave me at a table.
Straight outta Kalisz
If you’ve been here a while, you know about Kalisz. Twilight: 2000 — the Free League reboot — was the first campaign I really put on the page. Back in 2021 I was running sessions with the alpha rules, and I wrote So, you are on your own before session one even fired. Then GM’s Cut: Three from Kalisz. Then Return to Kalisz. Then SitRep 02 after three sessions of getting it on in the WW III that never was. What I didn’t write is how much I enjoyed those early Saturday mornings with Matt, Geoff, Neil, and Richard. 50+ sessions. I didn’t write about T2K for its mechanics or its grimdark Polish countryside — I wrote about it because of the sessions these guys made by showing up and bringing their A-game every week. Those online sessions are still my yardstick: for running sandboxes, for facilitating play online, for managing a long campaign without it collapsing under its own weight.
I just wanna shoot shit up in Twilight: 2000. — MadJay, never.
The Oracle of Scalu
I dug up from the depths of my cellars and ran Rolemaster II. The actual ICE crit-chart, percentile-system, fumble-table, “your-arm-falls-off-on-a-bad-roll” Rolemaster II.
The Scalu crew showed up week after week and what we got was nostalgia, sure — but also some understanding. That table — that specific group of people willing to sit and parse rules and read crit results out loud with me — that was the experience. Not a point of friction. Not a bug. Thank you Mark, Cam, Victor, and Dave. I would run RM again, for veteran and committed players only, and certainly for these folks.
My takeaway: the old games still work.
The Black Sword Hack(s)
Inspired by an Indie Game Reading Club thread about The Black Sword Hack, I ran two concurrent BSH campaigns. 100% Play to Find Out. Two tables of old and new gaming friends. Player buy-in FTW; BSH has this in spades baked in from session zero, players make picks that design the state of the world, and everyone is in on the ground floor of the setting’s lore.
FTW: Get your players’ buy-in.
The Bastionlands
The Pearl Knight Saga with Judd and Thomas was a ridunkulous amount of fun and drama. One GM, two players — it’s a great format. I’ve always enjoyed Judd’s flavor of the strange, and I loved the freedom to riff off Thomas across seven sessions of play. These sessions were full of trust, GM included. Judd runs a table where I can just dial in on being an unhinged player, and it feels good to just play.
Get yourself a GM you trust.
Maxwell and me
I’ve been running TTRPGs with Maxwell since he was 7 or 8 years old. One-on-one games across grades, family changes, and assorted hurdles of life. It’s our sacred space these days. Traveler and BX D&D were the early games — picked by me. Broken Worlds and CY_BORG are where we are today — picked by him. Games I would have skipped over, but I was happy to run them for him.
My pop’s love language is cooking for people. Mine is probably running games.
The Education of the One Shot.
I almost cut this part, then realized cons and one-shot tables are where I learned things fast — in real time, with folks I might not even know. A con table teaches you in four-hour sprints.
Does what you prepped deliver?
Is your tableside manner on point?
Can you play well with others?
How’s your ending?
GMs, IMHO, can’t hide behind worldbuilding or a running gag. You sit down with strangers, you put a thing on the table, and either it dances or it doesn’t. Every campaign I’ve run is better because of the one-shots that taught me what to cut — and what not to hold back.
One weird trick?!
The through line isn’t a system or a setting or a clever GM trick. It’s the people who keep showing up to roll dice with me. Saturday mornings in a ruined Poland. Wednesday nights parsing crit charts. Session zeros for games I’d never heard of two weeks earlier. Strangers at a con table giving me four hours of their weekend on faith.
You taught me everything I’ve put on these pages. The newsletter is our fingerprints, not just mine. The campaigns are our stories.
So — Geoff, Neil, Matt, Richard, the Scalu crew, both BSH crews, Judd, Aaron, Thomas, the Moria tables (especially that all Hobbit band), the CBR+PNK runners, Maxwell, every PAX walk-up, every Fearless Moot, the Occulted KC crew, every play-by-post weirdo, every podcast guest, every one-shot drop-in — thank you.
4 Mondays Left.