On a personal level, 2022 was an exciting year. I helped created 2 zines (Tangled & The Bureau), released a handful of smaller personal projects, won a Winners’ Circle Award for the 2022 One Page Dungeon Contest, helped organize Funeral Camp (the Exalted Funeral virtual convention), ran games at 2 additional online conventions, helped project manage the Tales from the Void Kickstarter campaign, GMed an actual play series for The Bureau, and moved from one side of the US to the other. Now, all that aside, I also did some gaming.
Over the course of 2022, I ran 56 sessions across 16 different systems, including my home game, conventions, and the AP series. There were some hiccups from moving and work/travel coincidentally falling on my regular game night, so this is a bit less than the previous couple of years, but I’m still incredibly happy with what I was able to get to the table this year and the experiences that resulted.
Out of everything I managed to get to the table, I wanted to share my personal favorite experiences over the course of the year, featuring the top five systems and adventures that stuck with me the most. Now, a good chunk of this list includes things that did not actually come out in 2022, these just happened to have an impact on me and are worth shouting out. Also included are some short reviews on why they made the list.
Honorable mention: Brindlewood Bay
Honorable Mention: The Bureau
Author(s): Sam Sleney & Zachary Cox
Publisher: SoulMuppet
Sessions: 5
Before I talk about the system itself, I want to tell a quick story. I run a weekly open table game. It began a couple years ago as a way to try out the shelf full of OSR systems I was accruing, but just turned into whatever I felt like running. One of my regular players had recently returned to RPGs right before joining the group, but had grown up playing B/X D&D. He’s the type of guy that likes to play characters that hit things to solve problems. Orbital Blues is the game that made him a storygamer.
Orbital Blues uses SoulMuppet’s house system as a basis, which was developed for Best Left Buried. The core is based on Ben Milton’s Maze Rats, which gives it a simple, 2d6 framework that’s probably going to be familiar to anyone that’s been paying attention to the OSR over the last few years. However, Orbital Blues mixes in some elements of storygames, in particular with a mechanic called Blues. Blues are a tangible representation of the player characters dealing with their emotional baggage. They’re also key to character progression in the system, so you quite literally improve your character by being a sad space cowboy. This often leads to what’s been coined as “Blues fishing”, where the players intentionally put their characters in emotionally compromising situations in a bid to gain Blues. It’s such a simple addition, but it puts narrative development of the character right in the forefront, which worked out very nicely with my group of players.
I’ve got another arc coming up around the time this is posted, which will help solidify my thoughts on the system, but Orbital Blues makes a strong case for a spot among my top five favorite systems of all time.
Author(s): Jesse Ross
Publisher: Gauntlet Publishing
Sessions: 10
I’ve been a fan of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast for a while now and a subscriber to the Gauntlet Magazine since at least 2021, but 2022 was the year I finally got to properly dig in and play the systems that Gauntlet publishes. Trophy blew me away. The base of the system itself is clever, taking the simplicity of Cthulhu: Dark and giving it just a bit more to grasp onto and immerse your characters into the dark forest. It’s a “conversational” game, where challenges warrant a back and forth between the GM and players, lending to a much more collaborative narrative than your standard affair.
However, what really sold me was the incursions. These are skeletal frameworks of locations, traps, and treasures given to the GM that become fully fleshed out during play. In Dark, this takes the form of “Rings” that serve as a five arc story structure as your characters make their way towards their inevitable demise. In Gold, these are based around “Sets”, which link together in something akin to a pointcrawl to form an explorable adventuring space. This format really lends itself nicely to how I like to run games. It’s so simple that I’ve quite literally picked up incursions and run them on the fly without reading any of the text ahead of time and still pulled together an incredible experience.
Trophy: Gold just might also have my favorite combat system. It’s worth picking up the text just to see how that’s done and I’d love to see Trophy influence some additional systems going forward.
Author(s): Goblin Archives
Publisher: Self-published, print through Exalted Funeral
Sessions: 23
At the time that this is posted, it will be right around the 1 year mark from where I joined Goblin Archives as a collaborative writer for Liminal Horror adventures. While Goblin Archives is responsible for putting out the system, I think it would be a bit self congratulatory to gush about it too much, so I’ll be brief. I mean, of course I like it.
However, Liminal Horror is on this list because it’s my highest played system of 2022. Well, and because it kicks ass. The system gives you just enough to grasp onto, but gets out of the way during play, so you can really focus on the characters and the locations they explore. The type of sessions I’ve had with this system are the ones I’ll remember for life.
Author(s): Gavriel Quiroga & Rodrigo Vega
Publisher: Self-published
Sessions: 1
Coincidentally enough, this is the second derivation of Cthulhu: Dark on this list, this time specifically for playing sci-fi horror like one would find in Mothership adventures. I only ran a single session of Darkship, so I don’t have too nuanced a take, just that it’s a delightful little system for quickly hopping into a horror scenario or playing MoSh without the baggage of a percentile system.
Author(s): John Harper
Publisher: Self-published
Sessions: 6
World of Dungeons is to Dungeon World what Into the Odd is to OD&D. That is to say, WoDu strips down Dungeon World and Powered by the Apocalypse games in general down to the barest essentials needed, while still being recognizable as a related system.
PbtA games are really great for playing their intended tone and structure, but tend to quickly fall apart when you want to branch outside of that scope. That’s significantly less of an issue here, as WoDu strips away all the genre emulation aspects, like Moves, Playbooks, etc., and gives you a few simple classes and the 2d6 chassis. You could conceivably be ready to play in all of 5 minutes after picking the system up.
However, I will say that WoDu shouldn’t be your first PbtA system. It is still very much rooted in the PbtA ideologies, so it saves space by relying on the players already being familiar with that style of games.
Author(s): Jason Cordova
Publisher: Gauntlet Publishing
Sessions: 1
Brindlewood Bay gets an honorable mention as it’s the only game I played in this past year that I was not the GM. The original plan was to run a nice arc of BB, but I decided to hold off until the physical copies made it into my hand. Regardless, I really love how the mystery structure is formatted, and there’s just something so fun about playing a retired old lady solving murder mysteries.
I hope to see a lot more of BB in 2023!
Author: Patrick Stuart
System Used: World of Dungeons
Sessions: 6
So I did the impossible: a complete run of Deep Carbon Observatory in six sessions. Now, when I say “complete run”, I am of course lying, but I’ll get to that shortly.
DCO is one of those releases that looms over the OSR movement. It’s widely considered to be one of the best adventures ever written for TTRPGs in general, and in my opinion, the reputation is absolutely deserved. There are so many moments where the tiniest detail described in a previous session will connect in a profound manner to something else later on. Everything has a purpose and everything has the potential to be impactful to the players, which is impressive for a book of that size (compared to the zines I usually run).
Now, DCO is not an easy book to parse. Patrick Stuart is often described as writing “purple prose”, and this module is no exception. I’m of the mind that Stuart desperately needs to find a layout artist who can tame his writing into something more friendly for GMs to use, but that may not even be possible, given that a layout artist was brought in for Stuart’s latest release, Demon Bone Sarcophagus, and that adventure is also a beast to try and read.
This is not an adventure you can run on the fly. It was looming at the end of my “I’m going to run this” list for over a year before finally sitting down over two days of a vacation and reading through the book fully. To come back to my earlier statement, I knew I needed to condense the text down a bit to fit with the format I usually run for my group. So here’s what I did:
So, quite simplified. A “true” run would probably take 15 sessions. But we had a blast. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a long time.
Author: William Olmesdahl (West End Games)
System Used: Orbital Blues
Sessions: 1
I’m a big fan of Star Wars, and while it pre-dated my birth by around half a decade, the West End Games Star Wars RPG is an important piece of history for the franchise, as it directly led to the emergence of the Expanded Universe.
Now, Orbital Blues is much more “Cowboy Bebop the RPG” than directly trying to imitate Star Wars, though there’s definitely some influence and a lot of thematic crossover. I love the system, but one of my secret weapons for adventures to run at my table has been to pull from the old WEG books and make some tweaks to make the settings mesh.
WEG released Politics of Contraband in 1992, featuring five adventures designed to be run in single sessions for smuggler-type characters. This would later get rereleased and updated for 2e in 1996 under Volume 1 of the Classic Adventures series. One of these adventures is called The Right Place, and involves a wanted man trying to get bounty hunters off his back by throwing the player characters under the bus. The premise is simple, but it fits so well with Orbital Blues that they were a match made in heaven. While I would go on to pilfer more WEG adventures for the arc I ran, this session is near the top of my list for all time favorites that I’ve ever ran.
Author: Multiple (Gauntlet Publishing)
System Used: Trophy: Gold
Sessions: 7
Roots of Old Kalduhr just might be one of the best dungeons ever written. It’s certainly one of my favorites, despite not being able to run it nearly as long as it deserved.
Roots is one of the included incursions in the Trophy: Gold corebook. Unlike how standard incursions are set up, this one is a “mega-incursion”. As it sounds, it blends together the incursion format with that of a mega-dungeon. It's made up of 6 levels, each containing a number of Sets, with two transitional Sets connecting the levels that you’ll regularly revisit. The key to this adventure is that each Set is written by a different author. Through your plunge into the city that was built down instead of up, you’ll visit bathhouses, giant pits, government chambers, deserted houses, and the villas of desperate women, just maybe getting rich and learning the secrets of what happened to the Kaldurhi people. The editing team here did a hell of a tremendous job, as nothing feels disjointed and every set reads in a cohesive manner.
A full run of the dungeon could take something like 25 sessions, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to see it all given how my play group is set up. Including an introductory session based on some of the content of the Trophy: Loom book, we never made it deeper than the second level, but we still had a nice arc with a fitting conclusion based on the character’s goals and what they were up to in that initial session. I do hope to return to Old Kalduhr one day, but we’ll see if that’s in the cards.
Author: Goblin Archives
System Used: Liminal Horror
Sessions: Two one-shots
I like to tell folks that I did “just enough dev work on The Mall to get a name credit”. What I really mean by that is Goblin Archives was putting the finishing touches on the module while we were writing The Bureau together, and I gave a bit of feedback on the draft and design. But it’s a lovely module. Goblin Archives set out to make “The Thing in a 90s shopping mall”, and man did he hit that nail on the head.
I ran The Mall as a showcase for an actual play stream during the 2022 Virtual Horror Con (which you can watch here). While the module is generally meant for a longer arc, I condensed some of the important elements down into a single session, showing off the primary antagonist, a bit of the setting, and two of the factions. What resulted was what is probably the closest I’ve ever come to a “perfect” one-shot. The only true “horror” moment happened right at the beginning, with that rest of the session just involving riffing off what the players had contributed to the setting, culminating in a splendid cliffhanger finale.
Author: Leo Hunt
System Used: Vaults of Vaarn
Sessions: 1
This adventure was a bit of a surprise. Not in a quality way, as I’ve run nearly all of Leo’s Vaarn adventures and they always kick ass, just in how it came about. During one of my weekly games, we needed to postpone the planned adventure at the last minute, and one of the players was dying to play Vaults of Vaarn. I ran an 8 session campaign of Vaarn last year, so I was already very familiar with the system. I knew this adventure was sitting in my collection, and vaguely what it involved, so I pulled it out and ran it on the fly.
Caeba in the Maw has you crawl into the belly of a dead sandworm in search of swallowed treasure. I don’t think I even need to say more than that, it’s fucking sick.
Author(s): Josh Domanski and Goblin Archives
System Used: Liminal Horror
Sessions: 20, across two full runs and some convention games.
The Bureau is the adventure I spent the most time with this year, but I co-wrote it, so it felt a little silly putting it in the list proper. I mean, of course I like it. One of these runs is available to watch (here), so I won’t spend too long talking about it.
Whenever someone asks me about running The Bureau, I tell them “I don’t even run it exactly as written in the module, and I helped write it”. Not that I think anything is wrong with what’s written, just that I almost always change up an adventure based on the players and their respective characters. There’s a Luka Rejec blogpost floating around out there called Never As Written that I recommend reading. These modules are frameworks, meant to assist the GM, but I’d always recommend trying to make something your own rather than trying to do it perfectly as it’s written on the page, even if I’m the one who wrote it.
However, both of my runs of this were incredible. It’s actually pretty rare that I get to run something like this twice, and each group took a different approach. My home group was focused on rooting out and exposing the corruption at the heart of the Bureau, while the streamed game focused much more heavily on the dimensional anomalies happening in the Monolith, as the characters were simply trying to escape. My default philosophy is “play to find out”, so it was an absolute delight to see how different players responded to the challenges put before them.
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.