Forget the Ennies, it’s time for the Endies! What RPGs did I play this year? What did I think about them? What intentions am I setting for next year? Let’s play to find out!
Go check out Lady Tabletop’s blog for the origins of the Endies and maybe to find more links to other Endies blog posts.
Edit: apparently my blog’s template doesn’t play nice with how I wrote this post, so please forgive some of the formatting!
The Stats
| Game | Sessions |
|---|---|
| Triangle Agency | 14 |
| Frontier Scum | 11 |
| Liminal Horror | 7 |
| Brindlewood Bay | 7 |
| Cairn | 3 |
| Yazeba’s | 2 |
| Trophy Dark | 1 |
| Troika | 1 |
| The Zone | 1 |
| The Vessel | 1 |
| Tarot Heist | 1 |
| Stay Frosty | 1 |
| Shadowdark | 1 |
| Pathfinder 2E | 1 |
| Patchwork World | 1 |
| Paranoia | 1 |
| OVER/UNDER | 1* |
| Oddfolk | 1 |
| Legend in the Mist | 1 |
| Himbos of Myth and Mettle | 1 |
| Hearts of Wulin | 1 |
| Dolmenwood | 1 |
| Dating.Sim | 1 |
| Daggerheart | 1 |
*I was only lightly engaged in OVER/UNDER, so I’m calling it one session. You could easily also call it 30 sessions.
| Role | Sessions |
|---|---|
| Player | 36 |
| GM | 18 |
| GMless | 5 |
| Solo | 3 |
The Superlatives
Inspired the biggest thoughts about my life: OVER/UNDER
If you’re at all on RPG social media, I’m sure you heard about this. If not, it was a month-long, real-time megagame run on Discord by Sam Sorensen as part of Mothership Month. It was intended to be mostly a wargame/political megagame, and quickly transformed into a freewheeling larp. It was very weird and very cool and a very big time commitment to engage with fully. I only lightly participated, but the tension between how much I wanted to participate and how much I decided to participate inspired this post about “shoulds” and “wants”. I want to stop holding myself back from the things I want! OVER/UNDER put this into sharp focus for me, and for that, it gets an Endie!
Most resonant character: Triangle Agency
Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Liv Butkiss, Clown, Romantic, Gun. Forever in my heart. I hope your romance with the White Whale anomaly gives you the thrill of the hunt, of longing, of flirting, of being right on the edge of a big breakthrough that changes mathematics forever, forever.
Triangle Agency is real good. It sounds like a lot to GM and I want to say thank you so much to Kona for GMing it! It was an RPG highlight of my year!
Most frequently recommended: Patchwork World
Whether you’re a hardcore PbtA-gead, just PbtA-curious, or don’t even know what PbtA is, I think you would get something out of playing or reading Patchwork World. Aaron King turns Moves into Poetry. It is a delight in play, and it is a delight to just read the moves and imagine the characters and worlds and play they suggest.
Intentions
A few intentions for 2026:
Continue to explore solo RPGs! Inspired by an episode of Between Two Cairns where Benjamin Marra and Sam Mameli talk about solo playing RPGs that aren’t designed to be solo RPGs. I’ve now played a few sessions of Cairn solo, and it’s been a fascinating experience. I started off using Flint as an oracle to support solo play, but have found myself relying on it less and less and simply using the core Cairn mechanics of Wilderness Travel procedures, reaction rolls, and the die of fate to inject some external input into my imagination.
Transform GM prep into something I enjoy as a form of play in and of itself. I’m curious if solo RPGs will be a way to work on this. I’ve been working on reducing the amount of stress GM prep gives me, but I still have a complicated relationship with it, and it triggers a lot of baggage I carry regarding procrastination. I want GM prep to be something I want to do, not something that I am always wrestling with in the pile of things that I should do. The way playing Cairn solo has felt like it straddles the line between playing an RPG and prepping for a session of play feels fruitful. I’m also curious if I can use solo play as a form of writing to work on Kate and my next project in the FOLK series, The Sunset School for Girls.
Cultivate intrinsic motivation for my RPG projects. Kate and I decided to pull out of doing Zine Month this upcoming February, and I’m excited and nervous about tackling The Sunset School for Girls without the external pressure of “the backers are depending on us.” This is a move towards the intrinsically motivated way I want to approach my art, but it is very different than the model of school assignments and clients that my education and professional life have revolved around.
Thanks for reading! And if you have an end-of-year writeup, I’d love to read it! Shoot me an email at brendan@brendanalbano.com with the link!