2024

Looking back on the previous year, there haven’t been any major changes to my gaming habits for 2024. Two or our RPG campaigns have continued, and we’ve started a third one. Wargaming has carried on much as it did last year, though I’ve probably done a little bit less than I did in 2023.

Wargaming

For wargaming, we’ve continued to go to the local wargames club. We haven’t been quite as regular as we had in the previous year, though we still got to play a number of different games. We started the year with some Dirtside 2, a game of 6mm SciFi tank combat, which I was modifying for near-future combat. However, other things got in the way and though I did get some more buildings for this game (it really needs lots of terrain I didn’t have for urban combat), I still haven’t got around to painting them.

As well as playing more of Saga: Age of Vikings, we also started on Saga: Age of Invasions. I now have a reasonably sizeable Roman army for this period (4th/5th century). I already have Britons, plus my Anglo-Saxons can double as Saxons. I still need to play more of this in order to get a feel of the different factions. I’m tempted to get a Pict army, then use them to do a mini-campaign of barbarians v Rome.

We also did a little bit of Saga: Age of Magic, and I have plans for factions for this as well. However, time has always been the limiting factor.

Other games included the *Rampant series, with Xenos Rampant probably being the most common. We even managed to try a 36pt game, which lasted a bit longer than the usual over-too-quickly 24pt games. I’d still like to give a 48pt game a try for any of the variants.

To help with Xenos Rampant, I now also have some 28mm buildings terrain suitable for SciFi from Battlesystems. This turned out to provide a much more interesting tabletop than the usual woods and badlands terrain, so I will probably get more SciFi themed material in the new year.

Personally, I think both SciFi and modern era stuff really needs an urban setting to feel right. This is the type of terrain that is very era specific (a tree is a tree regardless of the period, but a Roman, Dark Ages or 21st century house all look very different), so more expensive to collect.

I also have Battlesystem’s Northern Settlement set, which is similar but with a dark ages Nordic feel to it. This is going to be useful for Saga, but also smaller scale games such as Brethren. I do feel the need to play some games based in and around villages and fortifications rather than on open battlefields even for historical games.

I also now have their Fantasy Castle set, which should be good for fantasy or mid to late Medieval. I have started thinking about how to do fortification rules for Saga, in order to make use of these buildings a bit more actively.

For next year, I have too many plans:

• Saga: Age of Chivalry is meant to be coming out. This was meant to come out this year, but has been delayed. That hasn’t stopped me collecting suitable men-at-arms and archers to fill out English/French armies of the period. Once it comes out, I think there will be a number of games played for this.
• I’d like to do a mini-campaign using the Limes rules from Age of Invasions. This pitches a Roman fort against Barbarians. The full campaign lasts 6 games. There is also the Age of the Wolf campaign rules from 1st edition, though I don’t know how well that works with modern Saga.
• I also have some ideas for some smaller narrative campaigns (possibly each lasting games) using either Age of Vikings or Age of Invasions factions, though they could work with Lion Rampant as well.
• I’ve started playing Brethren, and would like to do more of that.
• I’ve also picked up The Baron’s War, another skirmish game, and would like to give this a go. This also has a campaign built into it.

So yes, I’m hoping to be able to convince some people to try out some small campaign games over the course of 2025.

This all completely ignores the SciFi side of things. I don’t have strong plans for this, but I’m happy to do more of it if others are willing.

Roleplaying

Our Ars Magica and Traveller campaigns continued throughout 2024. I was planning to finish Traveller this year, but obviously that didn’t happen. I think next year is likely to see the end of the Deepnight campaign though.

I would like to do more Traveller – sticking to a more typical campaign this time. Whether that is online, or face to face, I’m not sure. Traveller really has an advantage with being online, since it makes it a lot easier to share information such as star maps and world information.

We also started a Call of Cthulhu campaign, which is our first face to face game for years. It’s running monthly, and we’ve completed six sessions so far. It’s going well so far, and I’m definitely enjoying it as a player.

Traveller for Foundry

I’ve been working on, and using, my implementation of Mongoose Traveller for FoundryVTT. I finally got permission to make it public this year, and the feedback from the community has been mostly positive. There’s a lot of requests for features though – which isn’t at all surprising. I intend to continue working on it, even if Deepnight finishes. If I’m not running Traveller, then I might have more time to work on coding.

Publishing

I published very little on DrivethruRPG this year. I think maybe one supplement got published. I’ve been distracted by so many other things – mostly Foundry. I’ve got one publication (a 4,200t freighter design) which is ‘in review’, which I was hoping to publish this year but it never happened.

I also have a half finished collection of trader vessels I wanted to publish, though Mongoose sort of derailed things by publishing their own collection of trade ships. Mine are more detailed, and better suited to VTTs I think, so there may still be room for them. But I’ve lost the enthusiasm to get them finished. With a lot of my time working on VTT coding, I also haven’t had much time.

Other Media

I’ve read lots of gaming books, but I don’t count that as reading. So my total count of books read this year is a measly 6. I don’t have time, and to be honest reading The Annihilation Score really killed by enthusiasm. It blind sided me with super heroes, and I’m really not interested (understatement) in super heroes, so I spent months not reading it and never moving onto something else.

I did re-read Dune though (first read it in the early 80s), and Dune Messiah. So I now have a better memory of what happened in the books. I’m probably not going to read the rest of the series though, despite it being a good excuse to pick up some real dead tree books again that aren’t horribly over sized (I have a fondness for the mass market paper book format which seems to have mostly died a death).

2025

Going into next year, I’d like to get back to publishing some Traveller material (I have ideas, but no time), work more on my Foundry tools and systems, and continue with our current RPGs and wargames (with a little bit of campaign games slotted in).