Pint-Sized Play Reports
21 December 2025
Contents
- Contents
- Intro: My Year in Play
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July
- August
- October
- November
- December
- What's next?
Intro: My Year in Play
My life has been so full this year. I'm a firm believer that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and my days have been rife (almost exhaustingly so) with friends, community, art, new birth, joy, and love. This is what we're here for, I think.
Anyway, time to talk about tabletop role playing games.
I've played a lot of games over the past few years! In 2023 I even ran a new game each month just to work through my bookshelf. Unfortunately every time I sit down and write about them, my eyes glaze over and I fall asleep on my keyboard. Turns out: I think writing play reports is super boring!! In fact, I've mentioned this before. IMO everything about RPGs that matters happens in the moment of playing. I don't care about theory outside of like, basic GMing advice, and I don't care about describing my sessions to other people because it mostly just feels like telling someone about that super weird dream you had last night.
At the same time, I want to document my experiences as something to look back on at a glance. It's the same appeal as something like Goodreads or Storygraph - it's cool to look back and say "oh, yeah, I did that! That IS how I felt!" So in an effort to do this without covering my laptop in sleep drool, I'm gonna cover my sessions this year in as stripped-back a fashion as I can, focusing less what actually happened and more on my final thoughts + any collected ephemera. Enjoy!
January
Electric Bastionland
Length: Oneshot
Role: GM
NSR darling and one of my favs. This was the first meeting of an in-person group with friends that continued on through the year. Prior to this, I had played in maybe a single-digit number of in-person sessions total? Most of my shit is digital. I forgot how electric (pun intended) it feels to jam in person, especially with people you know.
I ran the first half of Colm Norrish's delirious Mountain Underground. This was most folks' first experience with lighter rulesets, and one person's first time playing period, but everyone got on the level quick and had a blast. Colm evokes a feeling here that I think I spent the rest of the year chasing - a sort of yearning or grasping at the fading edges of a dream. The numbness when that wash of color leaves your eyes and you wake back up in the real. Highly recommend running it yourself.
Microscope
Length: Two sessions
Role: Player (GMless)
Ben Robbins' fractal history-building game. Played digitally with my regular online group. The hardest part of this was finding a stupid whiteboard. We played our first session on roll20 but honestly that shit is poop from a butt and we hated using it. Thank God one player suggested using FigJam for session two - it was worlds easier!
The dynamic was interesting. We played very narrowly in session one and ended up too in the weeds. When reconvening later, we jumped around the timeline a lot more and generally played more loose with it, which improved the results dramatically. Still, we didn't enjoy the way Microscope handles scenes (the parts where you actually roleplay) - it kills the momentum and overall feels very organic. A couple of us had played i'm sorry did you say street magic? together and preferred its scene style, so we suggested it for a followup session.
Standouts:
February
Ten Candles
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player
A horror game that keeps momentum by forcing the game forward when one of ten lit candles flickers out. Played in-person (is this even doable digitally?). I prefer this to fellow horror RPG Dread, personally; it runs smoother and feels more collaborative. It almost felt similar to Microscope in the sense that when it was my turn to add details I got a competitive itch, like I wanted to make something so interesting that everyone else would want to play with that detail. I got to contribute to what the Evil Guys were, so I made them willowy sirens that compel you to put yourself in danger. The GM spun them into murky mud angels which was a great choice.
I like the game, and it was certainly worth the time spent, but I wouldn't play it again for a long while. This isn't a bad thing - it's laser focused on the feelings it wants to evoke and succeeds in bringing those feelings to life. The tension, the melancholy, the growing dread - it really works! It's just those feelings are so specific that running it back would quickly give diminishing returns, I imagine. More than anything I crave longform horror over oneshots these days. Playing this really made me want to get a mini-campaign of Trophy Gold onto the table.
Kids on Bikes Homebrew
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player
Played in-person. The GM was inspired by Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up and did her own spin on Kids on Bikes. I've never played normal KOB so I can't speak for how she expanded on it, but it felt light, quick, and great for a one-off. The premise was that we were henchmen unionizing against our evil overlord and ransacking his sick lich mansion. I played a beleaguered shift leader goblin. I'm not really drawn to standard fantasy settings, but I do love playing weird, shitty little guys, so: two thumbs up! 👍 👍
March
Marvel Multiverse RPG
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player
It's like superhero D&D? I uhhh don't give a shit about Marvel, but I agreed to play bc I'm always down to clown. The grift of this one is that you can play as actual characters from the comics and the book comes with one morbillion pregen character sheets for all your favs. The Marvel fans in the group naturally went for deep cuts; I picked Cyclops because he was level-appropriate and I recognized him.
This was the GM's first time running anything. What I appreciated was how much work he put into making this oneshot accessible - he printed off cheat sheets for the rules, went through our character sheets and printed descriptions of all our abilities, and even sourced meeples for the heroes we picked. The session played butter-smooth, too. I don't have much to say about the game itself other than that it's not my thing, but he crushed it as a GM.
The truth underneath all this is that, more than any cool settings or beautiful art, what captures my attention the most at the table is real, earnest passion.
April
Fiasco
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player (GMless)
The cinematic game of small crime gone wrong. I'd heard a lot of great things about this, but this was my first time playing. Tbh those great things were all earned! It's a lesson in both improv and NPC design - you get handed character flaws, desires, and relationships with other players, and then do basic dialogue scenes. At that point the game just plays itself. It lets you focus on the fun part (playing a freak) without sweating the hard part (making a freak).
It is VERY tropey but I guess it has to be because it gets everyone on the same wavelength very quickly. We picked a scenario set at a New York disco club and blasted the Bee Gees the whole time. I loved it! The worst I could say about it is that it's treading close to the line between Role Playing Game and Just An Improv Scene, but, frankly, that's not a distinction that I give much of a shit about.
i'm sorry did you say street magic?
Length: Two sessions
Role: Player (GMless)
Caro Asercion's dreamy city-builder. Run digitally with the same crew as the Microscope sessions. This game and Microscope play similarly but with different purposes - Microscope focuses on creating a timeline, this game produces a city and its inhabitants. Even on that baseline I vastly prefer street magic, but where it really shines is its character scenes.
In Microscope, when you run a scene, you ask a question that must be answered in order to end the scene, then everyone (everyone, every time) picks a character, then you run the scene. This song and dance not only grinds the game's momentum to a halt, but also, answering questions is hard and lame!!! Instead of giving you space to inhabit the world, the game kills the energy, turns you into writer and actor both, and inorganically tells you to Make A Plot Point Happen. How boring! It doesn't work for me at all.
Street magic, by comparison, has you create a resident of the city, start a scene with that resident in their element, and run it until you know their "true name" - who they are at their core. You paint broad strokes and everyone else can join in as they please. This setup isn't just easy, it's organic. You're not answering questions, you're not solving problems, you're not wearing too many hats; the game tells you to Make A Guy and your job is to Be That Guy. It feels like building a LEGO city and then walking around it in first-person. The world comes to life before your eyes.
...but I still like Microscope. It scratches a different itch. I want to make its scene structure work for me. Another time, maybe.
Anyway, standouts:
May
Wanderhome
Possum Creek's pastoral wanderland. Played on my friend's back porch right before a thunderstorm. Every time I've played this has felt divine, and this was no different. It was an interesting game to play at this point in the year coming off Microscope and street magic. Wanderhome also has a collaborative worldbuilding aspect, but you knock out the broad strokes fast so you can spend the rest of your session playing in it. It feels amazing! The game's ability to get everyone on the same page is something special. When everyone buys in, it feels like melding your brains together, or like every movement you make is an extension of someone else's body.
I feel drawn to games of travel and transition this year. Mythic Bastionland, the Wildsea, the upcoming UVG sequel (soon please God) - I'm fiending to not just inhabit a place but feel it change over time and blur at the edges. I have a dream of a year-long runthrough of Wanderhome to fully utilize its excellent seasonal mechanics. One day...
June
The Wildsea
Length: seven sessions (ending in November)
Role: GM
Felix Isaacs' bold, sprawling passion project. If you want a review, go watch Quinns, we're not getting better. At this point my new in-person group had done several one-shots and wanted a mini-campaign with some room to breathe. I suggested this because it hit those same feelings I was drawn to in Wanderhome - travel and transition.
This campaign was very fun overall with some weird out-of-game hiccups. One player is moving soon, so I had to keep the pace relatively high in order to wrap up, which made it feel more like a sightseeing tour than a real journey. I also had a player tell everyone he found some cool homebrew for his character only to reveal that ChatGPT filled out his entire sheet for him, complete with fully made-the-fuck-up moves and perks, something I will roast him about until the end of time.
I also made everything from scratch, for good and ill. Over on Carouse, Carouse I wrote about my frustrations with the game's random encounter system and how I experimented with some spark tables to replace it. That worked great! On the other hand, I focused so much on my classic kinda bullshit (derelict, abandoned megastructures mostly) that it left my players hungry for civilization, people to talk to, relationships to build, etc. I can't help but wish I'd tried out the book's prewritten settings instead, which do phenomenal jobs of setting up faction play inside each area.
Well, maybe it's less instead and more also - by the time we finished, the thing I most wanted was more time with the game! I mentioned this in my Carouse article, but I was and am still spellbound by the act of sailing in this game. I spent whole sessions whipping up random encounters on the waves and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. What a game.
July
Triangle Agency
Length: Twelve sessions (starting July 2024, ending now)
Role: GM (General Manager)
Haunted Table's corporate nightmare, run digitally for my online group. If you want a review, don't watch Quinns, we can do better. I had the perfect group for this, I think. My players naturally split down the three paths the game offers you (Career, Anomaly, Life) with all the natural conflict that entails. On top of that, they stayed super engaged the whole time, even when the game's tower of rules started to wobble and fall over on itself. Our game sprawled across discord channels, threads, DMs, whiteboards, excel sheets, and more. I loved it and couldn't have asked for better. Thanks, y'all!
We ran through the entire set of missions in the Vault, which was tight, because the advice the game gives you for making your own missions is basically not helpful at all. Actually it does something that really bothers me - it gives you advice that clearly isn't being taken in the official supplements. I understand wanting to put out a nice product, but it feels dishonest. Or unconfident, which is sad for such an otherwise overwhelmingly confident project!
The Vault was lively and super easy to run, although I wish they'd garnered more variety in topics from the writers. It's like 40% missions about nostalgia by volume. I can't believe it's a game where belief makes things real and there aren't any missions about religion, honestly.
It also doesn't mesh as nicely with the game's campaign structure as I'd like. I wish it had some guidance on how much downtime to allow between sessions. You're given the option to allow players between one and three units of Time between missions. I took a guess and went with two; my players ended up leveling their characters out of the game around missions 9 and 10, which left two missions with random new guys that were still fun but definitely dampened the energy a bit.
My favorite missions were:
- Murder at Gruntley Manor, a classic murder mystery where the players play both themselves and the suspects. Feels like the mission in here that most understands the game mechanically.
- Nosedive, an investigation into a pop-up rave taking the city by storm. We ran this first and it set the tone for the entire campaign. Feels like the mission that most understands the game emotionally.
Overall, it was irreplaceable. There were so many standouts it almost deserves its own post, but I'll post a few here.
Lastly, a screenshot from my PDF. A late game rule allows you to evaporate your character in return for the ability to modify the physical rulebook. I don't have the physical rulebook, so I had to make do. Spoilers for the playwall ahead!
August
World Ending Game
Everest Pipkin's dramatic campaign ender. We used this to cap off our game of Triangle Agency because we juked and dodged past all of that game's official endings. I suggested it partly because I itchfunded this thing ages ago and wanted an excuse to use it, partly because of that extra rule I posted up above. Since we played this game after our game of Triangle Agency ended, that rule came into effect!
I had to take some time to open myself up to this thing. It suggest a very cinematic framing - narrating camera angles, describing cuts and directions, etc. I was worried it would be a bit corny, but once we got into the swing of it I started to feel comfortable leaning into that style. It was a great time of reflection on a long, strange campaign, and I'm glad I spent the effort to play it earnestly.
October
the fifth edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player
it was a coworker game lol
Same deal as the Marvel game tbh. I'm bored of D&D... but I'm still down to clown. Also same deal as the Marvel game: the DM elevated this immensely. Several folks had never played before, so she took great steps to make the game accessible. She wrote pre-gen characters for everyone, made sure to bring enough dice that everyone could have a set and then some, and even had a bunch of spray-painted jenga blocks she'd done up to look like dungeon walls. That kind of energy is infectious!
I'm reminded (against my will) of the sheer passion cultivated by 5e culture. So many people are pouring so much love and effort into this game, and, like... I wish they'd direct that love somewhere else, but it's impressive (even inspiring) nonetheless. I'm endeared to it in the same way I'd be endeared to someone making unironic McDonald's fan edits. Like, hell yeah, shoot your shit.
Actually though the real best part is that the guy hosting made a discord server to organize it and now routinely posts pictures of his enormous cat, Big John.
November
Lacuna
Length: One session (at the time of writing)
Role: Player
Jared Sorensen's game of subconscious espionage. Played digitally with my online group. This game has ominous vibes and is not entirely dissimilar to Triangle Agency. You play agents diving into the city inside our collective unconscious to remove the parts of us that make us evil. This is a morally good thing 🙂
I'm glad I'm not running it though. It'd be a bitch to nail down. IMO the absolute core of what makes something feel "dreamlike" is a lack of control. Things just happen to you in a dream and your ability to change that, let alone react coherently at all, is extremely limited. How do you take those feelings and transport them to a medium where controlled interaction is the game? How can you give players the information required to make meaningful choices when that information often shifts and falsifies itself? How can you change the world around the players or even the players themselves without turning your hard-scheduled game session into one long cutscene?
I don't know the answers to these questions, and I struggled with answering them during the session. Our GM did a phenomenal job portraying the imagery and feeling of the dreamscape, but I also had such a hard time feeling like anything I said or did produced a coherent result that I ended up taking a backseat for most of the session. None of this is helped by the fact that the book takes a very smarmy 2010s attitude towards talking about itself.
I dunno, man. Is this game really that inscrutable? If Triangle Agency can have examples of play and sample scenarios, I'm a lot less inclined to give grace to something like this.
Still, the feelings I felt have stuck with me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my experience with it. I'm looking forward to trying the game out some more, if for nothing else than to see where the dream takes me.
December
A Land Once Magic
Length: Oneshot
Role: Player (GMless)
Viditya Voleti's post-fantasy worldbuilding experience. Played digitally with the same crew that played Microscope and street magic. I didn't know anything about this last month, I just saw it on bluesky and had to do it to em.
We were especially drawn to this after playing those similar games as a group. I organized everything into a figjam board again although this game uses playing cards which was a pain in the ass. We ended up using figjam as a big whiteboard and playingcards.io just to draw cards, which... wasn't elegant, but it worked.
Play involves drawing cards and answering prompts about your world and how it works. Things start off broad (magic, legends), then zoom into civilization and eventually specific inhabitants. The world we ended up building was one where magic gone wrong caused time to fracture. Overlapping histories made the past unstable, and our city created stability with the power of belief, for better or worse. This was a particularly interesting concept because I don't think it would've worked in either other game we tried this year. Microscope outright rejects time travel from the get because otherwise the whole conceit crumbles; street magic, by largely ignoring history, wouldn't have led us to this particular concept or really encouraged us to explore its cultural effects. It was also a tough concept to wrap our heads around, but worth the effort - I think we mined some really cool stuff out of this.
In some ways though we chafed against the system. It felt more constrained than the raw creativity of Microscope while simultaneously never giving us the time to build minutiae as with street magic. The forward momentum of the system means we kept moving on right when it felt like we were getting into the meat of something good. I couldn't help but wonder if we were missing something - Viditya puts a lot of emphasis on the conversation in play, which is natural, but it's emphasized so heavily that I think we might have played too fast? Should we have spent more time as the post-fantasy intelligentsia, figuring out our culture over long, winding talks? I dunno 🤷
If I played it again, I think I'd muck around with incorporating the exploratory tables into the game more. As-is, they're extra-specific prompts used as backup options for rolling a repeat on broader tables, which happens rarely. But we took the (optional) suggestion of describing scenes from the Vignettes table after we were done and there was a collective feeling of "oh, nice, the good part!" Our previous games letting us zoom into scenework mid-game allowed for tunneling in on an idea you find compelling; here, the river of play flowed too quickly for us to enjoy the finer details.
That's not to say it was a bad time by any means. Just an interesting one that's worth putting a bit of extra thought into. Anyway, standouts:
What's next?
Stuff on the agenda in no particular order:
- Mythic Bastionland, probably with my in-person group if I can swing it.
- Fomoria, Tannia Herrero's folk horror dungeon crawler. The art goes craaaazy on this one
- The Quiet Year for another round with the GMless gang. None of us have played it despite its influence! I wonder if the tighter scope will make it appeal more than Land Once Magic.
- Twilight Song, another Quiet Year-like. Idk I just like the vibes.
All this and there's still unplayed games on my bookshelf. I wish I had more week per week. But if I'm stuck with the time I have, I'm happy at least to spend it in community.
Take care, and have a good new year! 👋