What have I been up to in 2025?

Or, some kind of a retrospective of things from 2025 where I attempt to recount games, plans and other things of note. 

Me, or at least the thing I use most often as my online avatar

Marmoris Carcerem - The Unfinished Kilodungeon 

I began this year by thinking to myself that by the end of it I'd have Marmoris all written up, maybe even offered to a publisher or two. During this full year, all that has been done to it is that Mr.Mann did an editing pass on the first level of it and I'd still need to tweak a few things so that I could upload that version on to Itch.

The second level is still missing almost two wings worth of room descriptions as well. But I did make a depthcrawl attached to Marmoris due to events in the campaign that Marmoris was originally getting written for.
Players have by now however pretty much abandoned both the Marble Cage and the aforementioned depthcrawl, which has been the biggest reason I've not had much of a drive or need to finish my writing of the location since it began as something I made for a game and to be used in a game and said game has moved past the need for the dungeon to be finished.

If anyone is interested in the raw version of the dungeon, feel free to reach out and I can toss something your way that is hopefully enough of a skeleton to run the rest of it off of. All I'd ask in return is some play report or small review or something of the kind as I find it interesting to see how other people think of the place.

It's a good dungeon, I promise. No deeds of great honour await within however.

Campaigns 

The aforementioned Marmoris Carcerem campaign, named after the original tentpole dungeon that the game has now moved beyond, is an open table game where we don't play through any of the downtime between delves at the table but rather at the beginning of each session we either jump straight into the party arriving at a new adventure location or pick up play from where it was left off last time at an active adventure location. The game has been ongoing for two-ish years by now, and although player numbers dwindle every now and then due to the drop-in/drop-out style of play the campaign is not showing too many signs of coming to and end as of yet.
This approach has allowed the game to touch on a good number of different adventure sites, but interestingly almost none of them have been "completed" by the players. Some parts of this phenomena I would in my mind attribute to the fact that most of the time when I'd end up foreshadowing the presence of a more dangerous monster, or even straight up having one inflicted upon the party, the players would have the first instinct to attempt to fight these things to the death. This, I feel like, would then in turn lead to the players assuming that every monster in the adventure location is equally tough to handle and cause them to largely avoid returning if they can think of anything else to do which is smart play but seeing smart play done based off of wrong assumptions that leads to players rarely engaging with any given adventure location for too long can be a little annoying as a GM if I've been really waiting to run some scenario or another.
Over the two years course of the campaign the players have dipped their toes into the following places, dungeons and scenarios: Stygian Garden of Abelia Prem, Barrowmaze, Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos and Beneath Harlowe House. In addition to this, they recently "completed" Abbey of Saint Wilk.

Old recap graphic from february 2025, I should get around to making new one

 

Fishy Business was a game that I began running near beginning of february, a simple enough campaign born out of wanting to test out Luke Gearing and David Hoskins' Swyvers. As of writing this, the game is headed towards what I hope is an ending point for the campaign, a tale about what became of a handful of thugs after their gang got busted and ended up scattering to the wind.
For the purposes of testing out the system the game has been a rather awfully bad example. We roll dice on maybe every fourth session, and the players have done no heisting of any kind after the initial "Blue Cheese, Left to Rot" scenario and the time they got wind of something strange going happening with the Foxlowe Manor (Death Love Doom) and got filthy rich after successfully escaping from there with a box of jewellry, having avoided running into any of the nastiness of the place. I did admittedly have one player in this game to whom I had on last halloween ran Death Love Doom as it's own standalone oneshot, whom I had told they were allowed to use the information you had based off of that halloween game as a premonition their character might've gotten about the heist. Surprisingly this didn't really end up affecting the Swyvers' heist that much, if at all.
Beyond those two heists however, we have moved the fiction forwards roughly two weeks over the course of a year of playing the game. Most of this time has been spent by players to ponder what to use all the wealth they had suddenly come into after the successful heist, as well as occasionally following one of the hooks I'd try to throw their way in hopes of getting the player characters into some form of more structured scenario. This honestly has gone almost as awfully bad as the testing of the system, as the one thing that has had the biggest interest from players was the one time I rolled their fence to be part of a revolution and the players have since, on the occasions that they remember to, been pursuing attempts to back this revolution that I've ended up having to improvise out of thin air.
Overall an enjoyable campaign but one that I am waiting to be able to bring to an end to free up the timeslot for something else in 2026.

With a campaign name like that, I had to use a banner like this

 

Hilt's Quest (or To Death, Frost & Doom as it was more formally known as), was a side campaign that sprouted off of a player character in the Marmoris Carcerem campaign pledging a promise to a Saint to journey to the top of a mountain to seal whatever ancient evil had spilled out from there to haunt the lands, and was a journey led by said PC with other players joining in with fresh 1st level characters.
I still to this day am not sure how the PCs could have completed their declared goal, but at the beginning of the campaign I had been thinking of some ideas of research they could perform on the subject and some other higher powers they potentially could have employed the aid of. Unfortunately for the player characters, the choice of action the players took was to march directly to the promised mountaintop and suffer through not only the perilous journey but also the curses still lingering at the ancient shrine at the end of their travel.
This game was a great contrast between the adventure location focused Marmoris campaign, since we could keep the play zoomed in on the party through the entirety of their travelling journey. In fact, at the beginning of this campaign I had asked the players how they would like to handle this campaign, offering to either really characterise the entirety of their journey or that we could simply cut to the end location and what happens in there. I am very glad the players wanted to go all in on playing out the journey as I think it definitely ended up as one of the better games I've had the pleasure of running.
What the PCs went through was absolutely miserable trek through snowy woods that included teetering on the brink of starvation, losing a good amount of their prepared gear and a number of their travelling companions, even getting lost in a snowstorm and coming close to suffering gravely due to frostbite.
Apart from the titular dungeon of Death Frost Doom that was the end goal of the party to reach and seal, all of the content of this short campaign was set up by myself instead of the usual case of me simply smoothing over the edges of several modules that I am stitching together. A number of the encounters, some of which they never saw, did include stuff like monsters that somebody else had written but I'll still count this particular journey of suffering to have been probably closer to 90% original content. Sometimes it's fun and a nice change of pace to run stuff that is fully your own, and the more I think back on this campaign as I write this the more I realise, or perhaps remember, how much fun I had with it.
More about this campaign can be read about on one of the players' blog over here.

Hilt, drawn by the ever lovely Niosis who played our doomed hero

 

I also began running another open table game, dubbed City of Delight, near the end of april. This one leans more towards arabian nights style fantasy in a desert setting and was initially built on top of Gazer Press's Hyena Child module, using the Adventure #1: Lamp of Al-Murmur as it's introductionary delve.
Due to running in a very different timeslot than Marmoris, this new open table also has a very different cast of players which I feel like is helping in keeping the game feeling fresh for me as the GM even though I am curious to see what the takeaway for players from one open table game might be after playing a session or two in the other one.
While the milieu near where the Marmoris campaign takes place at is riddled with lotfp and lotfp-style modules and scenarios with only a handful of more "traditional" dungeons mixed in, City of Delight has recently taken a turn towards the more traditional classic dnd modules of old as the party is currently getting involuntarily involved with Jacquays's Dark Tower after their fighter got stolen away into the depths of the dungeon underneath the village the party was taking their rest at after getting driven out of Caverns of Thracia.
Between the beginning of the campaign and where they currently are, the party also had a five-or-so sessions long delve into Palace of Unquiet Repose that they came back from alive and carrying an absurd amount of wealth in the shape of gilded skeletons. 
And who says grave robbing never pays off?

 

Near halloween I also began running Castle Drachenfels Must Fall, a mashup of Luka Rejec's Witchburner and the old WFRP 1E module Castle Drachenfels along with a handful of other smaller things mixed in for flavour, for just two players taking on the roles of church inquisitors that have come to rid the castle of evil and the lands surrounding it of it's influence.
In a very Warhammer fashion, the player characters have by the time of writing this recap of my 2025 spent more time cocking eyebrows at the suspicious villagers near the foot of the mountain that the aforementioned castle resides on. So far only two pushes have been made up it's rocky path, one at the very beginning of the campaign since we began play at the castle. This ended in the PCs getting ran out of the castle grounds by large group of gargoyles that pulled themselves free from a wall they were part of.
The second push to the castle was more successful even though the party never got to the castle itself, seeing the inquisitors along with handful of villagers they had recruited for their aid rid the mountainside of some kind of a harpy nest I had taken from Hollow Press's Ungodz.

This one I actually have no banner image as the game is being ran with only tldraw, discord and a dicebot or physical dice, whichever of the two options is more convenient for everyone at the moment  

I did find this banner for another Drachenfels game I tried running with Warlock! at one point though

As Hilt's Quest came to an end, another campaign was set up to fill the now vacant timeslot. Castle of the Silver Prince, a proper grand pre-written sandbox campaign about conquering Anthony Huso's re-imagination of the classic Palace of the Silver Princess.
This epic comes with a chunk of Huso's own campaign world ripped right into the book, whole whopping 900 combined pages between the main book, appendix & compendium, as well as a third book of tables & handouts.
As this is a full on proper campaign rather than another open table game that bounces from one adventure to another, the usual glacial pace of running my games has hit it head on as well. In the four months that the campaign has now been running with bi-weekly sessions, we have moved the fiction forwards by whopping eight days with the help of a two-day timeskip. The party has arrived at one of the two starting cities detailed in the written material and much like I had threatened the players that there is enough content in even the smaller of the two starting locations that they chose that we could easily spend eight if not more sessions in town, the play thus far has been entirely focused within the town as the player characters have gotten involved in an attempt to clear out a local mine of rats. The catch here being that the rats have turned out to be not your typical "clear my cellar of rats" beginner quest, but 3HD beasts that will delete a poor lvl.0 PC from existence on a single successful hit.
I am very excited to see where this campaign goes and how things evolve as I had tried to run it once before, but alas last time the game fell apart due to scheduling mismatches. This time however I am feeling confident as we have players who are making most of sessions. 

Again, this is from the failed CotSP campaign. The current one is being run in tldraw + discord so no dedicated banner image

 

All of this, apart from the Swyvers campaign of course, has been ran with Lamentations of the Flame Princess as it is the system that I am most familiar with to the point that I can comfortably handwave myself through a session, as well as being the first osr-style retroclone that I learned of back when I was having a falling out with the play culture and power level of 5e dnd. I have not since seen a need to buy another b/x-adjacent system just to have a more "publically accepted" system that five paragraphs of rules difference. Thankfully it also seems like the system has, over the five or so years that I have been running games, started to be less of a boogieman you're not supposed to mention or talk about, and despite some of the background attached to the system I've not had a single issue with problematic players over all these years despite openly recruiting players for my games from a large public discord server. 

 

What's in for 2026?

I recently got the 4th edition Kult: Divinity Lost bible version after spotting it at a games store I was visiting with a friend. While PbtA is not exactly my cup of tea, Kult is something that has interested me for a while now as I do find myself leaning towards horror themes in my games and enjoy running games of that nature. The base concept is something that I find very interesting, and am sure there'd be plenty of good playing around one could do based off of that premise.
And as with so many other ideas of campaigns, I do already have the frame of the beginning setup at least partially thought out for a potential campaign, so we'll have to see when I can hook some players in for it.

Recently I've also been thinking about giving the whole paid GMing thing a go, what with welfare getting cut once more in the coming year in Finland. The job market is dryer than a desert, especially on the entry-level IT-field, so some side income definitely would not hurt. Going to be interesting to see how well slowburn horror in the osr style ends up "selling", as I have quite comfortably duck myself into a very small niche of a niche.
On that note, if you find yourself in need of art or mediocre writing for one project or another please feel free to get in touch.

Apart from all that, LotFP has put out more books recently and I hope to inflict those on players in the coming year. 
I'm also waiting for the kickstarter of Blight Upon Sombreval to finish up.

Apart from all that, I simply hope the new year will be one of not too many and and too exciting developments. 

 

Naively simple downtime actions

I have now been running my open table Marmoris game for closer to a year and a half, a game that started out as me setting out to make a small dungeon to introduce a friend to osr-style dungeon crawling or at least the version of that that I have inside my own head.
Those who know what has been going on with Marmoris are likely already aware that the dungeon ended up as anything but small, and the scope of the game eventually left the dungeon and now extends to the players choosing which of the local points of interest they have learned of to launch a new delve into whenever an earlier delve comes to an end. The game has very much broken out of the dungeon and exists as this weird not-quite-west-marches open table arrangement.
What the people who have only heard of the game from the sidelines might not know however is what happens between those delves.

Due to "at-table" play being limited to the act of dungeon crawling or other such "active" activities, during that time we can't really go over all the non-delve things that players might want to set their PCs up to such as performing magical rituals, going into detail on selling the more interesting and potentially magical loot they might have recovered, getting involved in faction play and so on and so on. Doing so would only serve to make people dropping in to the game more difficult even with the open table nature of the game, as well as drag an already slow paced game to a crawling halt.

And then we get to the topic of the post itself, downtime and how it's been handled in that game.
Unlike with more "traditional" west marches style game, the party is not expected nor encouraged to leave their delve at the end of a session. Rather, if they are in the middle of something that requires active participation like delving a dungeon then time gets suspended between the end of the session and the beginning of a new one. As such a delve that lasts six hours within the fiction could very well last three sessions in irl time.
However when the players do decide to return from their delve, be it to recover from their wounds or to sell off found treasure or restock their gear or for any other reason, we enter downtime. From here things get handwaved and simplified but the game is still taking place in the time between the sessions. Here is the behind the curtains look at the whole downtime process in all of it's simplicity:

• If there has been downtime between sessions, everyone recovers to full hp by the time of the next session for the convenience of keeping the game moving.
•  We do not track expenditure for food and drink or lodgings, it is assumed that the PCs are able to provide for themselves in at least some manner between delves be it through odd jobs or whatever. This, again, is for the sake of keeping the game running easily due to it's drop-in/drop-out nature so that a player who hasn't joined in for several months doesn't come back to find their PC in severe debt from not being able to pay for their lodgings or starved to death from being unable to pay for meals in the time the PC has not been played.
•  During downtime, time within the fiction passes 1:1 with irl time. With our scheduling, it means there are two weeks to perform downtime actions between delves.
• During downtime, each player gets three downtime actions that they can spend as they wish. For my own sanity this is per player rather than per PC, as a single player may have several PCs they switch between depending on where the party is delving or even who are in the active party at a given moment.
• There is no exhaustive list of any kind for the type of accepted downtime actions one could choose to pursue. The classics of looking for rumours and quests, carousing, training etc are good, but even more specific ones are perfectly acceptable. In fact the more details a player gives me when they submit their list of downtime actions they wish to get up to, the better I can figure out how such actions end up resolving.
• If the outcome of a downtime action is not immediately obvious to me the GM as I go to resolve it I'll roll a d100 to figure out what the chances of it succeeding are, adding any potential modifiers from the circumstances and the details surrounding the action. Once I know the "difficulty rating" of the action, I'll roll another d100 to see if it succeeds.
• This is a very simple oracle that can not only inform how the action resolves, but also one that I can ask questions from if I need to figure out further details having to do with any given downtime action.
  E.g. "Okay so the PC is trying to find rumours, are the ones they find about the place they look to delve next?" I roll d100, adding +10 to the result because the player specified they're asking for rumours in one of the taverns frequented by other treasure hunters. Result of 34, +10 makes it a 44. Okay, now roll another d100 and let's see. Second roll comes up as 76, not managing to roll under the difficulty set by the earlier roll, no rumours regarding the place the players plan to delve next. And then I'll proceed to ask the oracle this type of questions until I either get an answer or figure out out myself. 
• Buying new gear or restocking on gear does not take up a downtime action, only money. This is specifically mentioned in order to allow people to spend their downtime actions in actually interesting things rather than having to appoint someone to get taxed on their actions to go buy new gear for the whole party, as well as to allow last minute purchases at the beginning of a new delve.

I hope the simplicity of the procedure comes across, seeing as as far as I'm aware this gets very close to the minimum viable downtime procedure.
Some may abhor and gasp at the absence of a predetermined list of available downtime actions but I am of the belief that having a list like that runs the risk of stifling player creativity if they have something they wish to get up to during the downtime. Yes, having a list might lower the threshold of participating in the downtime part of the game for the players that aren't as inventive or invested in the game but that is a tradeoff I am entirely willing to take here.

Here's the player-facing part of the downtime procedure:
 

Lastly, an example from the game. This is from the latest batch of downtime actions and I'm only including these here to better demonstrate how this ends up working out, so I'll not provide context or explanation for why certain actions are being taken 😅

The actions, as submitted by a player: 

And the resolution of said actions: