January 2026 in Gaming
I’m going to start doing monthly roundups on my game playing/reading/etc. This will focus on TTRPGs and tabletop war games but will also discuss related books and video games that I feel fall under this remit. Let’s get started.
What I Ran
Sailors on the Starless Sea interior illustration - Doug Kovacs
Sailors on the Starless Sea (DCC)
This month I ran Sailors on the Starless Sea across two sessions. This is a very well known level 0 “funnel” adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Sailors is a classic for a reason. A small band of peasants must storm a crumbling keep. I’m going to write a review of this because I think there is a lot to say even or maybe especially for such a well known module.
Level 0 funnels are great, they’re no longer unique to DCC and I really encourage everyone to give them a shot, I know there are rules out there for level 0 5E characters and Shadowdark also supports this, and it’s a great way to play. Each player is given a clutch of randomly generated level 0 PCs, typically simple townsfolk.
It feels really good as a GM to be able to kill a lot of PCs. And I say that not as an adversarial GM, but as a TTRPG player who wishes death happens more often. However, that’s not actually my favorite part of funnels. My favorite part is emergent character building. The town alchemist developed an unhealthy interested in Chaos, the down singer got a kazoo stuck in his throat when tumbling down a slope, these little stories make a party of bakers and woodcutters far more interesting than it might seam.
One issue that I realized running a funnel this time is I think a persistent problem with them. Player’s favorite PCs are far less likely to survive a funnel. If a player has 3 PCs and one have become more interesting than the others they’ll do more with that PC, and that will likely get that PC killed. This is hard to avoid, but as a GM I think I’m going to be more careful to have monsters attack the “boring” PCs in the future.
I believe we’ll run Doom of the Savage Kings in a few months as a follow up and I’m excited for that, despite the fact that most players will need a new PC.
What I Played
Cyberpunk 2020 illustration by Paolo Parente
Cyberpunk 2020 - Session Report
The only session I played in this month was a game of Cyberpunk 2020. I may at some point do a write up on a 3-year Cyberpunk Fate campaign I played in, and this was the last scheduled session. This was a prequel, showing two of the campaign’s core PCs meeting for the first time. My PCs had not entered the picture at this point so I was playing a character made for this session.
The setup for the mission is the three of us had been contacted by different parties to retrieve a package. This involved some PvP, while my PC was attempting to open a door another PC kicked her in the back. With Cyberpunk 2020’s rules I was Shocked and unable to move for several rounds while my body was looted.
This is as good a place as any to talk about competing player goals and PvP. The kick… wasn’t great. Having your PC knocked out and stripped of their gear outside of imitative order by a PC they didn’t see isn’t the best in terms of game play or player agency. And I don’t think the other player is at fault here, what he did made sense for his characters, it’s just an awkward situation as we all had strict “no witnesses” orders.
After I recovered we agreed to team up when we discovered the package had already been moved to a nightclub We fought our way in and found the package, empty. It was a large trunk full of tubes. Our GM asked us to make an awareness roll and I was the only one to succeed. I found the actual package hiding behind a speaker, a small, human test subject. The GM had made clear that my character was a scumbag corpo with no morals to speak of. Made a persuasion roll to put my finger to my lips and keep the package silent. That was a success. I went back to the other PCs and made a fast talk roll to convince them the package was gone and we needed to go back to the dinner to regroup. They agreed and as soon as they pulled out on their motorcycle (in the blizzard) I went back inside and grabbed the package. Fade to black
As a player I always feel bad when I ruin the GM’s plans (and credit to him for taking this in stride). Clearly the mission intended for the two other PCs to gang up on me when what the package was became clear. I die in a hail of gunfire, they become friends, the rest is history.
Due to a series of fortuitous die rolls my character that didn’t happen. I think some of my weird feelings about this come back to how PvP situations in RPGs are fraught. They’re a collaborative exercise, so when you take away other player’s agency or change the story that’s happening to other players weird feels can become involved. I’d have felt better if I was just breaking the GM’s story, not feeling like I was intruding on the other two PCs stories.
All that said, I enjoyed this session a lot, the campaign had upwards of 15 people in it and it felt good to have this final session with a few of the core players, and to revisit two beloved dead PCs, and to try the system where this world started.
Cyberpunk 2020 - The System
Crop of Cyberpunk 2020 art, page 32, unclear on credit for “R”
Disclaimer: we probably got some rules wrong
Our GM wanted to run a game of Cyberpunk 2020 for our campaign because it felt right, despite playing in Fate this was set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. While Cyberpunk 2013 is the origin of the setting and system, 2020 makes more sense as it’s a revision of the rules and was well supported for a decade. I was all for this, I love RPG history so a good excuse to lightly dip a toe into an older game is exciting.
Cyberpunk 2020 has some things I like, some things I don’t, and some pretty serious balance issues. First off, it’s a very crunchy game. That’s not what I look for now, and it’s certainly a relic of the times. But I don’t think crunch is all bad. I want crunch to drive the narrative, and one thing we all agreed on is having a hit location chart felt good. Someone being hit in the arm or having their head blown open gives you a lot more narrative direction than someone taking 5 damage.
Which is about about where my positive comments on the combat system end. It has a lot of issues. Without going into details the action system is a mess, movement is unclear, and there was a lot of thought put into how guns should work, without a lot of thought for balance. I kinda appreciate trying to model various automatic forms of gunfire, but I also think the result is a mess. Likewise being able to aim at body parts is nice, but the game’s fairly flat math really pushes you toward taking head shots. You’re likely to miss but I had the choice of 80% to hit and likely to do very little damage, or 40% to hit and likely to be a one-shot kill.
So while the game has some interesting simulation of various aspects of a fire fight, it kinda devolves into head shots from across the room and katanas slicing heads off. And that’s cool! I enjoyed that! But it also didn’t feel like the simulation of a fight the system was aiming for.
I’m glad we played this, and it made me a little more interested in Cyberpunk Red (some cleanup would help), but I’m happy to leave this system in 1990, when it was released.
What I Read
Fight Magic Items cover, I listened on audible so not sure who illustrated it :(
Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West - by Aidan Moher - This was great. Moher does three things with the book that I think really help it work well. First, it’s a history of JRPGs in the west. This both narrows the scope and focuses the target. The author doesn’t need to discuss the Japanese market much and can focus on things that made a big impact in the west. A valid criticism is that “the west” often refers to America, but I think that is to some degree inevitable with how fractured the European market for much of the JRPG’s history. The second thing that helps the book succeed is that within that scope he’s not trying to cover every game but highlight ones that he feels are interesting, worth discussing, and had an impact on the west. The last and I think most important factor is this story is told through Moher’s personal history, these are mostly games he connected with and having that offers a very strong through line. The book functions as a pop history book because of the author’s personal touch, not in spite of it. I highlight this because of the next title:
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier - I like Jason’s work quite a bit. He’s without a doubt one of the most important video games journalists working today, and while not a regular listener, I enjoy his podcast. With that context I was deeply disappointed by this book and thought it was pretty bad. I have a lot of issues with this book and I’m not going to cover them all here. What I want to say is how it contracts with Moher’s book above. There is no through-line here. This book is a collection of stories on the development of games that feel totally unconnected. Each chapter feels like it could have, and should have been an article published after a game launched. Schreier has published a number of these, and I typically enjoy them. But stringing 15 articles together does not a book make. This book has a lot of words but says so little because all of the stories are so disconnected.
Mythic Bastionland - This book has seen a level of indie RPG hype I’ve rarely experienced. And having read it, I totally get why. It presents an epic fantasy framework for players, while feeling grounded by the players being Knights in a world that is fanastical but also feels more connected to medieval myths than anything this side of Pendragon. I want to call out how good the example of play is. While reading this book I had a really hard time invisioning how some stuff would work in play. However near the back is a detailed, well-written, and extremely helpful example of play clearly showing how you can take the game’s somewhat unusual structure and put it into practice.
Mothership module: DECAGONE - I love the premise of this module. The players going to an under-sea research station there they are [REDACTED]. I think the module is well set up and well written, but I do have a lot of nitpicks with it. I plan to run it so I’ll write more on this later, but there are going to be a lot of tweaks I make before I run it. I do want to call out here that the module handles the endings very very well. There are a handful of canon endings based on the game goes, and one branches quite a bit with a nice little flow chart which is very cool.
(Dropped) A Short History of Role-Playing Games by Jamin Warren for The Great Courses - I listened to this series of lectures, well I started to. It’s quite short but I only made it half way. For someone less-versed in the history of TTRPGs and RPG video games it may have had more value but it tries to cover too much ground in too little time.
What I Hobbied
Warriors of Chaos on the workbench
I’ve been in a bit of a hobby slump the past few months. This month I did finally get started on painting Warriors of Chaos for The Old World but didn’t get any models finished. This is going to be a long project. I’ve got a ton assembled and really need to try and focus on getting 2-3k points painted for some lists I’d like to run, rather than trying to get everything painted.
More of my time went to planning and starting to build Imperial Fists for Warhammer 30k. I have a bunch of unfinished 30k armies but wanted to start a new one and as a hobby butterfly who am I to say no to my whims. For the fists I did need to pick some new stuff up, but I’ve made a 3000 point list that I’m going to work toward getting tabletop ready.
For the fists I’m going to go with the pink basecoat, highlight white via airbrush or drybrush, paint with contrast method. I’ve not done a test but people’s results online look great so I’m pretty confident in it.
I’ve also decided that most of my 30k armies will have urban bases. I love them for my Word Bearers and having them repeat will make taking allies more appealing, and I think will just make the collection very visually cohesive.
What I Bought
Decagone cover, credit Bodie H.
Mothership modules -
Physical: Dead Weight, What Reflects Within, DECAGONE, Year of the Rat, And Blanche Will Be Burning
Digital: Xiao! Long! Bao!, Icarus
I don’t play Mothership enough (have yet to touch 1.0) but buying adventures for it is kinda addictive, they’re fun and cheap and look great. I’m most excited for DECAGONE and may try and run that soon. Tuesday Knight Games keeping all these third party modules in their online shop is great for the game and the community, very easy to add another $5 adventure to your cart when you’re already buying a couple.
Imperium Maledictum - Starter Set: I have a complicated but deep love for the 40k setting and IM has been getting good buzz for some of its source material so I’m excited to check out the system and maybe run something in it. I also love starter boxes (though not the shelf space they take up) so this was a no-brainer.
Legend of the Five Rings - Imperial Archives 2: Credit to Aki at Cannibal Halfling Gaming for talking about these books. I don’t have a history with Legend of the Five Rings but I have recently started picking up and reading 5E (not that one) supplements. Imperial Archives 1&2 are supplements for 4th edition. Reading the review above I was struck by a couple of the settings: Age of Exploration - Lot5R as an age of sail setting; and Empire of Emerald Stars a space opera setting. Currently reading Lot5R the two themes that really strike me are duty and hierarchy. Both are quite rare in TTRPGs and seeing them applied to other settings sounds very cool.
Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game (Special Edition): This game has been on deep clearance for a while on the Greater Than Games store, which to me says it’s going out of print. This game gets a lot of positive buzz on Reddit and I would like to explore more super hero RPGs so I figured it was worth it. Paid $5 to upgrade to the special edition, which is pretty nice but not necessary. This is the kind of RPG purchase I feel a little bad about as it’s coming more from FOMO than plans to read/run it in the near-term, but here we are.
Shin Megami Tensei - Tokyo Conception: I’m on a JRPG kick and didn’t know this had come out. Saw a cheap copy on Walmart’s site (?) so picked it up. I’m most interested to see how it handles the summon-based game play of SMT.
Humble Bundle - Bob’s Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG Megabundle: I mostly avoid RPG PDF bundles these days because I already have 73 gigs of them. In this case I also probably own 1/4 of these PDFs already. However it’s just such a good deal and I love DCC being able to fill in my adventure collection for $18 was too good to pass up.
Humble Bundle - So You Want to Try Out Call of Cuthulu: Same bundle comments as above but I don’t have many CoC PDFs. However I’m quite interested in their recently published The Sutra of Pale Leaves adventures, set in 80s Japan, a fantastic setting for CoC. This seemed worth picking up to get a good baseline of CoC PDFs if I need to reference any.
What I Played on My Computer
Screenshot from The Hundred Line
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - I’m kind of obsessed with this game. I started last month and got distracted but I’ve now returned to the game and it’s really something special. I’ll probably talk about it more in the future but there are two things I’m sure of - first, it’s a game that is very hard to talk about without spoilers, and second, it’s a game that most people will bounce off of hard. If you like visual novels AND JRPGs I strongly recommend playing it without reading anything about it or looking at any guides or anything. If you like JRPGs and don’t like VNs it’s a lot harder to say if you’ll like it but check out the demo I guess.
Final Fantasy X HD Remaster - I’ve played FFX before but never finished it. For some reason seeing that the remaster turns 10 this year prompted me to download it again. Playing it for the third time (hopefully to completion this time) has been interesting. It does some things quite well, the character models in the remaster hold up very well 10 years on, and I think the core combat system is mostly fine. Overall however it shows the age of its design, the game certainly starts to drag and I’m not sure if I can finish it.
Coming Up Next Month
Next month I’m going to be running my first Cuhtulu-verse game, Trail of Cuhtulu with The Black Drop adventure. I’m looking forward to that, really like some of the stuff it does and I’m interested in GUMSHOE. I also have a Land of Og one-shot I’ll be playing in, seems like a very goofy game.
On the digital front I’m hoping to finish up FFX and make good progress on Hundred Line. I’m tempted to start or go back to a few others but trying to keep myself to two in-flight RPGs at a time.
Also have an intro game to Legions Imperialis with a friend, looking forward to playing that for the first time in a while and introducing someone new to it, he’s been painting up some lovely looking Sons of Horus. On the painting front I’m hoping to get some good progress on my Imperial Fists for 30k.
