Welcome to the sixth annual review on this blog. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.) Another year has come and gone, and my overall sense is that there were no major events on either the personal or professional side, and the gaming just sort of chugged along. Which, to be honest, I do not mind at all. Read on for more on what we played, what I homebrewed, media I consumed, the blogging I did, and some resolutions for the year to come.
What we played
This year, we continued to play a nominally monthly game of D&D, as well as having a monthly board game night. I’ve also managed to get my two seven-year-old boys increasingly interested in D&D.
Planet Karus
Planet Karus is my ongoing sword and planet campaign. We use Hackbut, my classic D&D homebrew ruleset, and all of the gameable content is made from scratch by me. We started playing in, gosh, September 2022, and the campaign continues to be alive and kicking (although I do plan to take a short break from it; in the new year I will be running a miniseries using the Call of Cthulhu adventure The Watcher in the Valley by Kevin A. Ross, which is in Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, and Graham Walmsley’s Cthulhu Dark rules system).
This year, the game focused on two major threats: the boogieman Tribe Glavrac and a tentacle-god cult hiding beneath the village. Both were violently resolved by year’s end, with the party claiming Chief Movog’s enchanted sword and burning his camp to ash.
I am running this as a full-on sandbox, so session to session, I have no idea where the players may take things, but some obvious loose ends they may follow up with in the next year further exploring the serpent-man citadel and the Balok’s lower levels, uncovering the purpose of the caves beneath the farmers’ guild, dealing with the ever-encroaching crystal forest (where all the local magic-users now share dreams of visiting and never leaving), and plenty more besides.
Sessions
We played eight sessions of Planet Karus, including one marathon session. That’s down one from the previous year, for no particular reason, other than the usual two-month break over summer, and some missed sessions in the fall due to scheduling issues. We are still playing in person only. Assuming this group of players and no major upsets in our private and or work lives, we should be able to sustain this for the foreseeable future.
Attendance
The number of players ranged from 2 to 6 (M = 3.3, SD = 1.3). This includes the marathon session. We had a slightly higher average attendance than last year. We did not add any players to our pool, though. So, a sign of a healthy campaign that continues to engage, I guess? The top player accounted for 30.8% of the attendance, the number two player for 19.2%, and the next two shared the number three spot, each with 15.4%.
Character deaths
This year, the campaign’s MilliWhack rating ranged from 63 to 81 (M = 71, SD = 6). No player character deaths this year. I got close a few times. For example, session 31’s assault on the farmers’ guild hall ended with both players at exactly one hit point remaining. But we have a level six magic-user running around who’s also a psionicist. Several level four or higher fighting men, and a multiclassed thief/fighter as well… So yeah, your regular low-level D&D doesn’t pose much of a threat to these anymore. I need to start incentivising more risk-taking, I guess.
Experience points
XP ranged from 0 to 9,179 (M = 3,124, SD = 2,869). The most lucrative sessions were #29 (9,179) and #34 (5,640). The former was a marathon session scouring through the significantly more dangerous serpent man citadel dungeon, and the latter was the most recent session in which the players used a very cunning plan to eliminate a 150+ humanoid monster lair. Well-deserved in both cases, I would say.
Seven of the current characters saw action this year. Their levels range from 2 to 6 (M = 3.9, SD = 1.6). These characters have now acquired between them 95,107 XP. That’s a 1.4× increase compared to last year. Last year’s increase was 3×. The accumulation of XP appears to have decelerated. I hope that this may incentivize a return to lower-level characters. Another notable event was the appearance of the very first multi-classed character on the scene. Gorakal is now a level 5 thief and a level 3 fighter. (I use an adapted version of Delta’s multiclassing rules.)
Boardgames
We had nine proper board game nights, of which I was absent myself at one. And we can add one marathon Diplomacy session. (Last year, we managed nine regular sessions as well.)
We played Diplomacy (1 marathon play session), Horrified (2 plays), Kemet: Blood and Sand (1 play, with myself absent), Long Shot: The Dice Game (2), Mission: Red Planet (1), Star Realms: Rise of Empire (2), and Thunder Road: Vendetta (3).
Thunder Road: Vendetta is probably the GOTY for us. With most, if not all, expansions added, it’s delightfully chaotic, has a deliciously trashy theme, and excellent production values. I acquired Horrified especially for the special Halloween edition of our monthly board game night, and it succeeds in evoking classic Universal monster movies in spades. I like Star Realms more than I should, I guess. Simple yet entertaining, a cool, trashy space theme, and piles and piles of cards to add to the game for variety.
New acquisitions: Outdoor Survival, Star Realms: Rise of Empire, Long Shot: The Dice Game, 5-Minute Dungeon, Magic Maze, Horrified, Waterfall Park.
I’ven’t played Outdoor Survival yet. That’s a goal for 2026. 5-Minute Dungeon and Magic Maze are both fantasy-themed cooperative games that I occasionally play with my two seven-year-old boys, which we greatly enjoy. Waterfall Park is a Christmas gift, I hope to get it to the table in the new year—it’s a reimplementation of China Town, a game that has long been on my wishlist. Apparently, its mechanics are somewhat streamlined, and the theme is more inclusive to boot.
Simple D&D with the boys
Early in the year, I believe it was through the Hexcrawl25 event that I came across JP Coovert’s “Making Maps”, “Making Maps More Fantastical”, and “Drawing Dungeons” booklets. I thought they looked cool, so I got them digitally and printed them off on a whim. My two seven-year-old boys were instantly delighted by them and started drawing wilderness and dungeon maps like mad, and have not stopped since. In the meantime, I acquired the booklets in print.
Then, one day, I suggested they collect some of their maps so that we could play through them using a simple set of D&D rules. We had been playing CoraQuest for some time already, and so I was pretty sure the basic concept was clear to them. We opted for Maze Rats, created some characters, and brainstormed a random encounter list, and then we were off. A couple of hours later, we had had our very first real D&D adventure. It was great, and I am sure we will do more of it in the year to come.
What I homebrewed
For the Planet Karus campaign, I continued to tinker with Hackbut, my OD&D-derived ruleset. I also created a fair amount of gameable content, because this campaign was intended to be, and continues to be, 100% homebrewed.
Rules work
On the rules front, I spent a good chunk of time on systems that support ongoing character activities. Players being players, they’ve started acquiring pets of various kinds. Of course, they want them to do useful things for them on adventures. So I’ve cobbled together rules for acquiring, training, and using familiars (for magic-users) and animal companions (for everyone else). I also put together a simple system for downtime projects—tasks that extend beyond a single downtime period, inspired by the more elaborate one in Downtime in Zyan. Players really like this one. They usually have a project going, ranging from magical research to training those aforementioned pets.
Another addition: rules for retiring characters. The game is capped at level six, so the question becomes how to encourage players to start up a new character without forcing them to retire their existing one. It’s a fine balance to strike. I settled on a mechanism for transforming a retired character into an NPC safe from harm and bestowing a minor bonus on the next character a player creates. So far, none of the players has made use of it. I guess I need to make the game more dangerous?
I also tackled some more mechanical odds and ends. I’ve been using Delta’s missile weapon rules for quite a while, but somehow players strongly dislike the way they penalize long-distance archery, so I interpolated some simpler range modifiers instead. I adapted the Thasan weather table to better fit Planet Karus’s theme. And I worked out a referee procedure for handling downtime updates of so-called “active situations”—I might write this up as a blog post, as I feel like I’ve finally struck the right balance between not too much overhead but sufficient liveness.
Core Hackbut itself received some smaller tweaks: rules for flight and pursuit in dungeons, rules for languages, and some adjustments to how retainer pools replenish following retainer deaths.
Bouncing around in my referee notes folder but not yet seeing much use are procedures for resolving attacks on a d6 using a table (for mass battles), Bledsawian level demographics scaled to a d100 covering levels 1–6, and a simple approach for deriving character renown from their level.
Gameable content
On the content creation side, the biggest achievement was completing “The Sunken Halls of S’sarthos”—a serpent man citadel dungeon with approximately 72 rooms across three levels, so mid-sized, I would say. This is the first time I’ve used Matt Finch’s map generation method from The Tome of Adventure Design. It worked quite well and produced very interesting map geometries. Players explored it once during our marathon session, and it posed the higher challenge I was hoping it would.
The wilderness also received considerable attention. I redid and scaled up my hex map, taking inspiration from Hexcrawl25 for the way major and minor hexes are structured as flowers, and their coordinate system—although my minor hexes are six miles across. My major ones are 36 miles across. I wrote new terrain generation guidelines for populating hexes that emulate the vast spaghetti western landscape I’m shooting for, and created new generic wilderness encounter tables based on terrain type. The hex map key’s encounter tables got redone using these. I also put together a table for settlement sizes that adds an intermediate small town between the OD&D village and town sizes, wrote up new and more detailed dinosaur statistics and descriptions, and stat-ed out derelict war machines (basically, streamlined and reskinned OD&D dragons).
For the home base town, I created an updated encounter table with day and night encounters, inspired by one Istvan Boldog-Bernad made for his Helvéczia town setting in Fight On! issue 15. Smaller bits and pieces include the farmers’ guild hall construction site at various stages of completion (culminating in a new adventuring site) and Dishtun Town, which I prepped for a quest that was never pursued.
Media consumption
I enjoy immersing myself in books, comics, and films related to my current gaming projects. So this year, because Planet Karus is a cocktail of sword and sorcery, planetary romance, and peplum, I mostly focused on content in those genres.
Books
I need to do a lot of reading for my day job, so I can’t read as much hobby-related stuff as I would probably like, and I tend to agonize over what to pick next.
Fiction: The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison, Kull: Exile of Atlantis and Almuric by Robert E. Howard, and Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore.
My favorite of the bunch is The Pastel City. It’s the kind of book I wish I could read dozens of. So exhilarating, so well-written, with powerful imagery, brutal action, moments of melancholy, and an interesting genre-bending mix of sci-fi and fantasy to boot. M. John Harrison. What a boss.
Comics: The Cimmerian, Vol. 1 by Jean-David Morvan and Régis Hautière, The Cimmerian, Vol. 2 by Sylvain Runberg, De Piraten van Pandarve by Martin Lodewijk and Don Lawrence.
The quality of the stories in those Conan comics varies quite a bit in terms of art and writing, but the best of them are pretty cool. I could have sworn I’d read more Storm this year, but apparently not. I finally made it to the first volume of the Pandarve storyline, which is supposed to be way more rip-roaring than the first one.
Non-fiction: A special mention goes out to the non-fiction D&D theory book Muster by Eero Tuovinen. Very fun to read someone’s thoughts on how to run classic D&D in a war game mode. I wish more experienced referees would write books like these.
Films
I’ve been tearing through quite a few sword and sorcery and science fantasy flicks to fuel my Planet Karus refereeing brain. These are all the films I saw this year: Amazons (1986), At the Earth’s Core (1976), Conquest (1983), Deathstalker (1983), Hercules (1983), Starcrash (1978), The Beastmaster (1982), The Spine of Night (2021), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Warlords of Atlantis (1978).
If I had to pick one favorite, it would probably be Conquest. A sword and sorcery story shot through haze and glare. It seems to be tapping into Clark Ashton Smith more than Robert E. Howard. Prehistoric, dreamlike, almost mythic, offset by that characteristic Italian genre gore. It dares to be imaginative and weird, rather than merely derivative. Yes, it’s occasionally janky, but also truly inspired.
Also, a special mention goes out to Cozzi’s Hercules, for getting probably closest to the vibe I am going for with Planet Karus: mythic, peplum-style fantasy mashed up with sci-fi robot monsters, all it lacked was one or two spaghetti-western-style vistas of vast wilderness.
Blogging
This year, I posted nine times. Eight of these were teasers for Planet Karus session reports posted on the campaign’s website. These typically contain a brief bit of meta commentary on happenings at and around the table, and conclude with a teaser text. I like cross-posting these here because I consider this website the home base for my hobby gaming. However, I can see how they may not be of much interest to people not directly involved in the game. The one remaining post was an addendum of sorts to my previous year-in-review, detailing some of the homebrewing I had done over the course of the year. This time around, I’ve integrated that into this post.
Views
The blog had 2,855 views and 1,350 visitors. That’s a decrease in views from last year of 882 (24%) but an increase in visitors of 79 (6%). Not sure how to make sense of that.
The top-performing posts this year were “Running Xyntillan: Downtime” (134), “Castle Xyntillan – Session #0 – A Halberd to the Back” (117), and “Castle Xyntillan – Session #1 – Off to the Races” (82). My Castle Xyntillan campaign posts continue to attract attention, for understandable reasons. By contrast, hardly any posts of the past year show up in the stats at all. I think the best performing one is “Homebrew Highlights: Planet Karus 2024,” with 36 views. The next one is (I think) “Planet Karus – Session 33” with 18 views. I can see why teasers for session reports posted elsewhere, which are about a fully homebrewed campaign to boot, don’t mean much to people outside those directly involved.
Referrers
Excluding search engines, Reddit, etc., the actual human-made websites sending traffic my way were beyondfomalhaut.blogspot.com (55), diyanddragons.blogspot.com (15), princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com (6), and glaive-guisarme.blogspot.com (5). Thanks to all, and a special note of thanks to Glaive-Guisarme for the mention in their extensive post on how they prep Castle Xyntillan.
Looking back and ahead
Finishing up, let’s have a look at what I resolved to do last year, and make some new resolutions for the year to come.
Last year’s resolutions
Last year, I made the following resolutions: to continue the monthly in-person Planet Karus game and the monthly board game nights. See if we can increase attendance and frequency, even if only slightly. Run another in-person marathon session of Planet Karus. And yes, see if we can have a modest increase in the number of blog posts.
We managed to keep playing D&D as well as board games, and really, that’s the most important thing. Everything else is secondary. The frequency of the sessions remained unchanged; however, attendance increased slightly. That’s nice. We also played another marathon session of Planet Karus. In terms of blog posts, I did not get even close to posting the six I had intended to. There are many reasons for this. But the main thing is that it is just not a priority. I can either make it one or resign myself to this blog basically being on indefinite hiatus, except for those session reports.
Upcoming year
Honestly, if gaming in 2026 is similar to 2025, I won’t have any complaints. Provided there are no unexpected events, I expect to host about 8 to 9 D&D sessions (plus one marathon session) and have a similar number of board game nights. More D&D and various forms of gaming with my two seven-year-old boys will likely happen naturally, so I don’t need to set any resolutions for that. I will continue to share session reports here, but I plan to ease up on my blogging commitments. Instead, I’ll post tidbits about my homebrewed rules, procedures, and content whenever I feel inspired.
That’s it for this year in review. Happy 2026.