2024 and 2025 - Games I'm running

Yeah we're talking TTRPGs here now too. Because why not, they're cool and I'm having fun and I will probably code stuff around them someday, and I just need to practice writing more regularly.

2024

I looked for another hobby than coding in Elixir at some point in time, and figured I could play TTRPG seriously like the nerd I was.

I had mostly 2/3 tables:

• a permanent and stable table to run one and only one campaign for quite some time, playing Invisible Sun by Monte Cook Games, a game about wizards and sorcerers and magic and multiple dimensions and self-exploration, playing monthly
• an open table, meaning players are free to come, play and go whenever they want, playing at first every other week Triangle Agency, a SCP Foundation meets Men in Black meets Control the video game
• another open table later on, the other week, of Wilderfeast, a Monster Hunter and Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi game, where characters hunt big monsters and eat them for power and mutations

And it was great! We're on our 13-something session of Invisible Sun. My players are motivated to pursue their character interests, it goes in unexpected directions every single time, thanks in part to the tarot deck-like feature of the Sooth Deck. The card and randomness decided our small group would get teleported in another realm, pretty much a forest dimension where trees are the size of skyscrapers, and I took the opportunity to use stuff ideas from another game, The Wildsea, where the world has been replaced by a sea of trees and now people travel using ships across the treetops. Great time!

Triangle Agency has been another hit. I was expecting something with a bit more horror, but one of my player is not an agent of chaos but chaos personified. If you ever wondered why your company couldn't get any work done, I just got a very good example of how it happens. Everything was super fun, the book being very meta and self aware, the character progression, everything was 💯.
My biggest issue lies more with the pre-written missions, which were less clear and didn't really help with the corporate vibe that made our game fun.
Sadly the open table part of it kinda fell apart after 7 sessions, and we decided to put an end to it because by the end I only had two players left.

Wilderfeast ended even more quickly. There are a lot more "procedures" in the game, and the players wanted more freedom in the tactical combat (and more chaos in general), which wasn't really a great fit. I didn't know the game enough to be able to tweak and "fix" that for us, so between that and the general lack of motivation we ended Wilderfeast after 2 sessions. I played another one at the local university for 2 players though, and I had a blast! I will definitively try to run it again but with the right group!
I do have some issues with the game itself though. The book is a very big book and it's not the best organized one. It lacks some random tables and prompts to guide and help the GM run the game too. I wish we had more examples for how to pick Ingredients and how to Traverse areas and stuff like that. Still great, but probably the game where I would need more prep to run it correctly.

2025

Turning tables

With the surviving duo from Triangle Agency, and one player from Invisible Sun that joined right at the end, we decided to start another table, this time exchanging the GM seat. We then played:

• the quickstart of Heart: The City Beneath (that I GM'ed), in 3 sessions
• some scenario of Vampire the Masquerade in 4 sessions
• a one shot of City of Mist
• a... two-shot? of Channel Fear
• a one shot of Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast

Heart was a blast, probably one of my best experience in TTRPG. Lots of fun, great ideas and descriptions from everyone, we were able to get an epilogue for the characters. Really great. I wish there was a bit more explanations around some stuff like magic spells, and maybe more item examples, but still a super great game, and I hope I can run the Dagger in the Heart campaign for it some day.

Vampire the Masquerade was... okay. Maybe due in parts to my lack of knowledge of the game (and maybe interest?), and the GM style. I had a lot of trouble focusing on the session and it felt very slow.
Until a few weeks later I definitively felt like I wasn't ready to be a player in any table if it was in French :P

City of Mist was super interesting and fun! Really liked the way the dice mechanic worked here (basically 2D6 + positive tags - negative tags), and with the different theme cards it really gives great character ideas. Definitively a game I would play again, and I'm really excited to try Otherscape (the cyberpunk version) and Legend in the Mist (the fantasy version)!

Channel Fear is pretty cool too. You play a documentary crew that is shooting a horror/paranormal documentary, but the horror is more real than they thought. I think it's going in a too-much-horror/gore/disgusting direction for me, but we're still having fun being a silly and mostly useless crew (my character has a GoPro attached to his hat, he is mostly recording feet at this point). Definitively appreciate trying the game out, but I'm pretty sure I won't play again because the horror is too much :D

I'm obsessed with Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast premise and universe and everything the game implies. I like how everyone plays the same characters session after session, changing them little by little, leaving quirks and ideas and eccentricities to the next player, or sometimes dropping them like a character in a saturday morning cartoon episode can. I love the queer aspects of the game, the general cuteness cut with some crushing emotional chapters. It's a game I think about playing almost as soon as I can play anything, which means not that much with my lack of players in that side of the ocean.

IRL gaming

So of course I started going to the local university board games & TTRPG club. I moved to Québec "recently" and I felt the need to meet new people and get outside my house and play Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast.

Due to some shyness I got enrolled in short Dungeons & Dragons campaign, mixing 5e and 2024 when the rules were in the players favor. It was kinda cool. It kinda became the basic fantasy setting you're expecting at this point so I liked that, characters were great, I liked the tactical combat aspect too, it's relatively video-gamy.
What I disliked more was on the randomness in combat part. You're missing turns because you can't touch the monsters (and if you do you can still do so little damage it's as if), in the other hand you can get downed in one action and pass two third of the combat looking at the others playing.
There was a lot of mix-maxing ideology too in our group and I came here pretty fresh, not even preparing another kind of weapon to avoid some monster damage resistances. I was totally okay with that, but I think it made the encounters either easy for the min-maxing crew or difficult to me.
I'm very glad I finally tried D&D, but apart from playing in interesting settings I do not think I would play again very soon.

I was almost planning a short campaign to play, thinking about a pirate game like Rapscallion or Pirate Borg, but finally decided I would maybe start with one shots first to get a feel of different players and find the right group for the right game. So we will probably start with a one shot of Land of Eem, my newest obsession and I want that game core set in physical now.