2025: A Year in Gaming

As the year draws to a close, I want to look back on what has been an incredible year in gaming.

The biggest undertaking from Lazy Wolf Studios was, of course, bringing Fury of the Forsaken and The Bense Trilogy to life. The first, a book length hardcover adventure co-written with Richard Pett, took over two years and was recently described by Jared Rascher of Gnome Stew and What Do I Know? as "What if you put Hamlet, Norse fantasy, Macbeth, and Seven Samurai into a blender and turn it into a 5e SRD adventure," which is so good a description I wish I'd had that for the Kickstarter! The latter is a compilation, expansion, and revision of the first three adventures written for the Tales of the Valiant roleplaying game, collected in a wonderful hardcover edition. I'm enormously proud of these two books and all the work everybody involved did to bring them about.

Almost as big is the jump hard into live play. My online group started streaming our games on the Lazy Wolf Studios YouTube Channel. We had a learning curve and had to iron out some bumps, but we seem to have the hang of it now. Along the way, our player Stephenson stepped aside and Kenzi joined us, stepping into the shoes of an NPC in Fury of the Forsaken. When we ran though all the Tales of the Valiant adventures in Norrøngard, we veered off the rails in a new series called "Norrøngard Unscripted." Most recently, our intrepid adventurers even left Norrøngard for the country of Talvedra far to the south, and then the country of Araland. In both of these new locales, we debuted new monsters, appropriate to the regions, that will appear in a forthcoming bestiary. Our audience is small but fateful, and deeply appreciated, and I'm proud of where the show has been and is going.

Lazy Wolf Studios also had our first official crossover, as the location and denizens of Aarvik, a major city in Norrøngard, featured in the adventure "In the Court of the Clockwork Queen." The adventure, written by Yours Truly, is part of the Labyrinth Adventures book from Kobold Press. (The monsters that appear in this adventure will also be in the aforementioned bestiary, mostly likely with some additional variants and more information about them.)

I also made my return to convention attendance this year, going to my first two conventions since the pandemic started, and playing my first ever convention games. I attended GenCon in Indianapolis and Gamehole Con in Madison. Across the two shows, I played in the Legends of Greyhawk organized play, the new Wardens of the Eastern Marches organized play, and played Tales of the Valiant games from Kobold Press and Dragonbane, Vaesen, and Pirate Borg from Free League. I feel very much in love with Dragonbane and Vaesen and am diving into home campaigns of both. Both conventions were exceptional, not just for the gaming, but for all the friends I connected with, many of whom I only knew online before these trips. It was a great time, and I expect to be at both shows next year.

2025 is also the year I started to (cough, cough) take social media seriously. In addition to the aforementioned streaming, I've launched a TikTok channel, where I'm talking about all things gaming. The new series, Dungeon Dialogues, seems to be striking a chord with folk. Please check it out if you haven't seen it.

Finally, I'm thrilled that I've met some more gamers here in Birmingham. I love, love, love my online group. They are dear friends, and I hope to game with them for decades to come. But I have a great, unused game room, and I am ovejoyed to have a new group that can get together here in town for in person gaming. I've even gotten to be a player recently (Aliens Evolved), which is really great.

So that's 2025's Year in Gaming. I'll be back with some glimpses of what I'll be up to in 2026, but I think this has been an amazing year for tossing math rocks around a table. I hope yours has been as great.

Happy holidays to everyone!