Statosfiend campaign begins!

I recently began running a Stratosfiend campaign, something very different from the usual fantasy horror-ish stuff that I've been running for the past five or so years at this point.
Except that maybe it isn't that different after all.

Join us on this play report of the two session long funnel that I ran based off of  Cycle of the Snake-Wolf 2: Return to the Shattered Woods, in which a group of internet cryptid hunters and other supernatural enthusiasts get together to follow rumours they'd heard of a cult up in Shattered Woods that were worshiping an ogre of some kind.

I didn't show the players the cover art, but nobody reads blogposts without pictures 

 The party consists of five players with four lvl.0 PCs each. As such, with such large number of PCs running about the place I as the GM had no hopes of even attempting to learn the names of the characters which is why they are largely omitted here.

The first session refers to four groups of four due to one of the players being unable to attend the first session, but with another player unable to attend the second session the amount of PCs available pre session stayed the same.

Session 1 (funnel)

First session of the funnel ran, I'll drop bit of a report here since I imagine one must love seeing how others play their material.

Four groups of four arrive in their own cars in the sleepy little village around a one lane bridge. After the long drive they decide to drop by the diner before they continue on with the real purpose of their group, finding a cult community in the Shattered Woods and prove the existence of an ogre the cult are claimed to worship.

In the diner a man is getting chewed out on his phone by whoever is on the other end of it as he sheepishly assures that he'll "get it done".
One of the party members manages to eavesdrop on the call, further ending up feeding the interest of the players in this person and their phone.

Plan is hatched to steal the phone, but executed poorly after couple of failed checks. They manage to steal the phone even if it costs the dignity of one of their own.
Number of PCs hurry back to their retired intelligence officer's van to check out the phone, finding it completely devoid of any call history or messages. A small leather flap-badge they nicked along with the phone has no ID inside it either, but does have a strange holographic emblem inside.
Hour of google searches turns not much on the emblem other than a suggestion it might be linked to some conspiracy theory bureau/agency thing.

The group ventures into the Shattered Woods behind the diner, following an easy footpath. Strange echoing knocking from inside some trees is heard.
On first watch after making camp they see trio of green dots moving in the darkness and manage to take a picture with the flash of a polaroid camera, identifying it as some sort of humanoid figure that runs off.

On the day after hike into woods continues. Large mud pit and several hoofprints are found in the middle of the footpath.
Avoiding the mud, they go around and back onto the path where little bit later they find deep gashes low on the sides of trees. Pictures are taken.

Some hours later, more strange knocking echoes from inside trees. It is heard coming from deeper in the woods along the trail a little after.
Group spends an hour ascertaining whether the trees are hollow or if they respond to morse code. Or if the knocking was in morse code. No results.

Continuing along the footpath, it is growing smaller and getting swallowed by the forest until at some point the group has lost their path.
It is late and they are lost, so group decides to set up camp. Setting trail cameras around the campsite, a pair of PCs find a strange mirror hanging from a tree branch and one of them gets mesmerised by it. The other one spots a strange man half standing behind a tree and staring the at two.
The more they look at the man, the more he looks like a woman. The leather coat starts to more look like a hide draped over her. The scraggly hair look more like a mane of black feathers.
Third PC comes running over with the polaroid as rest of the group setting up camp notices what is going on. Three more run over with guns.
She has antlers. She has fur covering the backs of her legs. She is just standing there, arms slack on her sides and staring.
Then she smiles, wide enough to reveal dirty fangs rather than teeth.

They open fire, killing the woman on the spot.

They inspect the body, guns wounds and animal features and all. It is real, and the antlers are real and part of her. Pictures get taken with the polaroid.
The body is buried after spending an hour digging for a shallow grave with nothing but bare hands.

End of session 1 of the funnel.

Session 2 (funnel, cont.)

Play picks up from the night after last session, the group now headed towards a wisp of smoke they saw in the distance.
The trail cams that were set up overnight showed a whole bunch of nothing. Birds flying low past them, twigs falling from trees, and a fox jogging past one of the cameras while making a constant and un-broken eyecontact with the camera. But this was all normal.

The strangeness only picked up again as the party got to the bottom of the hill and began the ascent up the side of another one.
Nobody could quite tell when it had started, but as soon as it was pointed out by one of them it became quite obvious that something was off.
A par of footsteps, belonging to some unseen hiker not part of the group was moving with them. When the group would stop, the sound of footsteps would continue past them. Some attempts were had with a polaroid and phone cameras to see if whoever these steps belonged to would show up in pictures, but to no luck.
The the humming began.

Whatever was walking in front of the group was now humming a slow tune.
Whatever was humming in front of the group was now singing a wordless melody. One that birds all around were joining in on.
It was leaving the group behind as they still stood there unmoving, but the way they could still hear the melody it must have been growing louder and louder as the source of it was distancing itself from them.
The singsong melody became a scream.
The scream became a screech.
Few of the PCs decided to break off running, trying to shout over the cacophony of bird screeches something that the others couldn't really make out.

Then was heard the cracking and shattering of wood.
Something burst out from a nearby pine, embedding sharp splinters in in one of the members of the group, incapacitating them on the spot as something that looked like an animated core of the burst-open tree creaked and popped on top of them.
Quick on the uptake whoever, and armed with both desperation and firearms the group forced the creature to flee before gunning it down as it was attempting to climb up and disappear into the treetops.
Pictures of the creature were taken, and the deceased member of the group was given an unceremonious burial under some twisted branches and patches of torn moss.

From there, they continued towards the heading where the wisp of smoke had been seen.

Reaching the top of yet another hill, in the distance they could see the roofs of buildings among trees.
A little bit closer, at the bottom of a gentle valley, a river snaking it's way through the landscape.
And almost stepped straight down into a 60ft drop down the side of a steep crater embedded into the top of the hill they were currently viewing all of this from.

As one of them cried out to warn the others from simply stumbling into their accidental demises after all they'd been through already, the blood pooled at the bottom of the crated formed into violent ripples.
What followed was more pictures, some amounts of experimenting and finding out that the blood seemed to resonate with human voices in some odd fashion, as well as what can only be described as a full mental breakdown as one of the members of the group took a running jump straight down into the bottom of the crater, braking their feet upon landing and dying from the sheer shock alone.
One of the group members would end up climbing down to fill two canteens with this strange sound-reactive blood and end up drinking one full canteen, describing the taste as thick and somewhat similar to gasoline.

From here the trek through the wilderness continued towards the sightings of potential buildings in the distance.
On the way, members of the group would routinely begin to forget where the were going and having problems focusing on the way ahead. A number of them would instead simply wish to go back.

Clearing the river crossing after only one unfortunate fall-in, they arrived at the edge of a meadow.
On the other side of it there was something unimportant.
More pressingly, by the treeline they were about to leave behind themselves they spotted a number of bodies. Burnt, hiding among the tall grass.
All looking like they had been attempting to crawl away from something.

After a brief inspection of the bodies and the nearby open field, the only thing out of place (aside from the bodies themselves) was the ever so faint sound reminiscent of an idling car. But even that disappeared almost as soon as it was noticed.
No apparent danger was observed, and thus the field was crossed.

About halfway across the field however, the sound of an idling truck became quite apparent once more as the group noticed that which their brains had been trying furiously to ignore.
Shacks of corrugated metal dotting the area.
An old pickup truck idling loudly at the edge of them.
Beyond that, a large barn with it's roof almost entirely caved in and walls covered in cuts from something the size of a bear if not larger.
And finally two age-old houses, almost completely overgrown, watching over the entire "village" from where the hillside began to be swallowed by a forest again.

Around the barn they found a large gathering of people who seemed like they had all just one day been picked from amidst their daily lives to now be here. Hikers, hippies, office drones, farmers, store clerks, and so on.
While a good number of them were sitting around in small groups or knelt down in what looked almost as if in prayer, the closer to the barn one would get the tighter these people would be packed. All the way to the side of the barn, where it was circled by a group that looked almost like some sort of cult members chanting their hymns.

While most of the party stayed behind to inspect the shacks and the pickup truck, few continued over to the barn.
Upon reaching the chanting figures, one from amongst them stepped forwards and welcomed the PCs to the Mercy of Angels and began to explain to them that they have now finally reached the place where they belong after following the call. That their initiation would now begin, as they must first grow accustomed to the presence of the Starchild.
While few PCs actually seemed interested in joining this strange forest commune cult, others tried pushing the man about letting them inside the barn. This unfortunately was met with only more evangelising and getting talked in circles.
As the ones who showed interest in this strange religious group stayed behind to become indoctrinated, the rest of the group reconvened by the pickup truck.

The shacks had contained mismatched sleeping mattresses, blankets, sleeping bags and so forth and seemed to be pretty much only used for sleeping in.
The pickup, conveniently enough, had had it's keys still in ignition. The engine had been making some pretty expensive noises and was currently being given a brief inspection by one of the PCs.
The plan they had eventually arrived was as such, they would take the pickup that had been left here and crash it straight into the barn in order to get a proper look inside. While waiting for said plan to be executed, one of them had managed to record a small interview with some recently initiated members of the cult and learned a little bit more about their workings.

As the sun began to disappear behind the treeline and the congregation around the barn began to disperse, the go-time was here.
The remaining party packed themselves inside and on the back of the pickup.
As the roaring and coughing engine carried them in the slight uphill towards the barn, petal to the metal, everything not nailed or taped down inside the truck was sent flying and clinking around while the vehicle barreled towards the barnhouse.
A few remaining cult members were still left there, presumably saying their prayers. Panicked, they helplessly flailed their arms trying to get the attention of the truck driver who was very aware of them but had elected to ignore their frantic attempts at diverting the pickup from mashing into the bard doors nose first.

Then it happened.
Crashing, creaking and splintering of wood.
A heavy thud as the front of the pickup rammed into something heavier than it's momentum would carry it through.
With another heavy thud something heavy fell down, almost smashing through the windshield of the now-stuck vehicle as the driver tried to frantically coax the dying engine onto reverse.

Behind, they could hear shouts and in the dying sunlight that painted everything orange, a large gathering of people was seen slowly gathering outside the barn.
Flashlights were sweeping the field, and a number of the silhouettes had rakes and pitchforks.
The party decided to bail, but not before snapping one final polaroid of whatever they had rammed the pickup truck into. In the brief glimpse of light that flashed inside the barnhouse, what they saw could only be described as some sort of partially mummified, rotting elephant now leaning heavy against the windshield of the truck.

The mob, as it was still only just forming, was thankfully still far enough that the PCs managed to outrun them. As they ran however, arriving in the treeline at the side of the field, they began to hear the bark of dogs.

What followed was a manhunt through the nightly woods.
The ones who had ran the pickup truck in through the barn doors dispersing all in different directions in hopes of increasing the chances of at least one of them making it back.
The ones who had stayed with the cult now finding themselves forcibly drafted into the manhunt themselves.

While the others ran, one of the PCs who arguably might have re-watched Rambo one times too many decided to fight back.
Armed with an uzi and few spare magazines, he would go on to wage guerilla warfare in the dark woods against the cult and eventually manage to get away after gunning down a total of eight of his hunters.

However not all were so lucky. A number of those fleeing ended up getting caught, eventually torn limb by limb within the dark woods.

Those who survived would eventually return to Washington, and from there presumably to what lives they had. Some trying to forget the events of those three days in the woods. Others riding out their niche internet fame from the pictures and footage captured from the trip.

(Two PCs ended up locked into becoming Clerics of Starry Eyes 3 upon graduating to lvl.1 at the end of the funnel, these were the ones who stayed with the cult.
One PC ended up locked into becoming a half-stratosfiend of some kind upon graduating to lvl.1 at the end of the funnel, due to drinking the strange blood-fuel from the crater.)

 

Afterthoughts

This once more reminds me why I stopped writing session reports for the very first campaign I ever ran, staying brief is something I struggle with so these end up taking way long to write.

The first session was really fun, starting of as very normal and the very very quickly beginning to take a nosedive first towards the comically bizarre as the players hyperfixated on stealing the phone of what was likely some kind of an agent (or just another nutjob like themselves).
From there it steadily moved towards creepy, with the session finishing on an actual combat encounter that got cut short by the presence of firearms much to the advantage of the players. Which I think actually did end up establishing the tone quite nicely.

The second session started much less fortunately with players constantly dropping in and out of being actually present and me or one of the players who was being present having to constantly re-iterate the current circumstances which did end up eating a good chunk of whatever mood was attempting to get established during the happenings of the disembodied footsteps.
Thankfully towards the latter half of the session the players did end up stabilising again and we managed to play through the village mostly without disruptions.

That final escape through the woods scene I actually had no idea how to run, so I resorted to telling the players to instead all secretly bid an amount of luck for each of the PCs taking part in attempting to escape the manhunt, with the lowest bid ending up as the ones getting caught which at least according to player feedback at the end ended up a good enough way to wrap up the funnel.

From here it is on to the meat of the campaign itself, onto the Terror of the Stratosfiend: Cycle of the Snake-Wolf 3: Return to the Shattered Woods 2: The Scales of the Hyper-Visor God or The Final Voyage of The Crab King!
The conspiracy die begins at d8 due to all that went down during the funnel, and I am sure shenanigans will follow.

Childhood Appendix N

There's a bandwagon going around of people thinking back on things from their childhood that ended up impacting their tastes, and I have extra free time today so I'll do the same and try to remember old games, books, movies and the likes that I feel like looking back on were informing the type of stuff I enjoy nowadays and that bleeds into the games I run.

This means this isn't a list of all the things I enjoyed in my childhood, but rather just me trying to think back on the media I have consumed while young and thinking which ones shape the type of games I run.
I have also attempted to stick to things media I'd have consumed up to the age of 18, but it is possible that some stuff from later years has snuck in without me realising it.

 

Movies/TV/Anime

•  Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
• A much more grounded take on the whole isekai "I woke up in a fantasy world" trope, and one that I still fondly look back on. Killing a single goblin is a big and dangerous deal for beginners.
• Madoka Magica
• I don't run magical girl stuff or really find myself in that genre too often, but how the series first establishes what is "normal" and only afterwards tears that down I feel can also be seen in how I like to set up my games 

I didn't want to add Lord of the Rings here even though it is like The fantasy adventure movie, and neither did I include it in the books section. I just don't think it's in the end left much of an influence, especially since I'd seen orcs and elves before that already.
I've also never been that big on watching movies, and only began watching horror during my university days so I can't add any of that stuff here either.

 

Videogames

• Stalker 
• I actually originally got the first game because I couldn't get Fallout 3, by the time I did get Fallout 3 I had already been swallowed up by Stalker and the wasteland of Fallout left me wanting for something more grueling
• Mount & Blade: Warband
• I think this was my first "true sandbox" game, in the sense that there was absolutely no plot or pre-set goal to win or complete the game 
• Demon's Souls & Dark Souls
•  Think this one is almost mandatory and should speak for itself
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• My friend had this on his xbox and I loved the premise and idea of the game. He didn't though, and so we never played through too much of it. The game did live in my head rent-free for a time before I finally as an adult got it on PC. I should finish it one of these days.
• Morrowind
• Back when walking into random caves was dangerous and scary because you'd see all these monsters on the loading screens and if something looked even remotely like one of them you'd bolt out of there 
• Planescape: Torment
• I got this from my uncle who told me that probably the entire game could be played by talking your way through things rather than having to do any proper fighting, which got me really curious. Another one that still sits in the shameful pile of "I really ought to play through it at least once". 

 

Books/Manga

• Almost everything fantasy by Ursula Le Guin, except Earthsea.
• I distinctly remember loaning a huge earthsea tome from the library and never getting further than the third(?) book.
• Berserk
• If Dark Souls gets on the list, then Berserk has to be here as well 
• Innocent and Innocent Rouge
• The art is beautiful, please go read it 

 There should likely be a bunch more young adult fantasy novels here, but I would need to take a walk through the library I used to frequent to remember even half of what those might have been.

 

Closing Thoughts

It's a rather sparse list, and I honestly did struggle putting even this much of it together. I am sure a bunch more books would belong here because when I was young I was much more into reading books than watching movies and did go through most of the more interesting sounding titles in the fantasy section of our local library.
If someone managed to pull a list of movies I have seen from my brain somehow I probably could point at it and go "hey that one could have been on the list", but while writing this post I couldn't for the life of me conjure up a single title let alone one(s) that I feel might've had any sort of influence in how I run elfgames or what type of elfgames I enjoy nowadays.

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: