The End and the Beginning

What's next for me

Before we get going, I’m not quitting the platform despite what the alarmist title might suggest. Although I haven’t been publishing as much as I would like, I’m still here working in the shadows. I figured now would be a good time to update everyone on the plans for this publication until the end of the year and the start of 2026, as well as just some life updates. I’m going to break it down into Current Items, Planned Items, and Canceled Items.

Current Items

Currently, I only have one actual play campaign going which is my WFRP 1E game. That’s not going anywhere, but I just haven’t had the time to get into it as much as I would like. When I play any of my games I put on thematic music and really try to get into a zone; this goes double for WFRP since it’s a setting and theme I’m deeply, deeply attached to. So when I don’t have time to go all in, I just don’t do it at all. While this does produce quality gaming sessions, it means that they just don’t happen very much. I’m hoping I can have the time soon for more regular sessions so I can post about it at least once a month.

Additionally, I’ve been trying to catch up on some of my miniature painting backlog and have been working on terrain pieces for my gaming table which has been taking up a lot of hobby time. Let me know if you’d like to see some of that in the future!

Planned Items

In addition to my current game, I’m working on getting one or two different actual plays started up either once WFRP hits a stopping point or concurrently with it if I can muster the time commitment. These actual plays are 5 Leagues From the Borderlands and Cryptworld. Let’s take a look at each briefly:

5 Leagues From the Borderlands (which I’ll be referring to as 5L) is a narrative, solo miniature skirmish game. It’s the sister game of 5 Parsecs From Home but is fantasy instead of sci fi. It’s a wonderful little system, and is an incentive for me to keep using my resin printer to print out Warhammer Quest and Heroquest miniatures so I can get triple duty out of them. However, I would like to have the models I’m going to use for that painted, so it may not be for a bit.

On the complete opposite set of the spectrum we have Cryptworld. This is a retroclone of Chill 1st edition, but with the wrinkle of being published by the original publisher as the aforementioned game. It’s a horror RPG which shares DNA with Call of Cthulhu and Marvel’s Superheroes/FASERIP. Mechanically, it works well and is elegant. Where it shines though is the theme. If CoC and Delta Green are horror in the vein of “prestige” horror films like Hereditary, Midsommar, and The Babadook, then Cryptworld evokes Tales From the Crypt, The Last Witch Hunter, and any number of 70’s Hammer horror flicks. It’s fun, campy, and has more of a focus on action and evoking the feel of watching something like Friday the 13th with good friends than it does making you have an existential crisis. This one may get started a bit sooner than later, since the rules are simple and I already have some ideas for where I want to go with it.

Canceled Items

This is my least favorite section of this article. It represents plans and hopes that I’ve sadly had to let go of. I’ll probably revisit some of these in the future, but for right now they are laid to rest.

First up we have Space Aces: The New Guidebook. I love this game. It’s fun, super lightweight, and gives me the feeling of watching Star Trek or Stargate every time I play. It also works amazingly for solo play with basically everything you need including oracles and random generators within the very lightweight rulebook. I even played enough sessions for you guys to have multiple drafts of those sessions sitting on my Substack dashboard. So why am I abandoning the idea? Honestly, it’s a question of time and the fact that there are other things I’d like to play. To get the most out of it it needs to be played like a season of television, and that would entail writing reports more than once a week to keep up the pace and before I ever published anything on it I could see the burnout coming. It’s possible I’ll come back to this since I really do love the game, but just not right now. Maybe when everything else is finished.

Next is Call of Cthulhu. Again, I love the system and have been playing it for almost as long as I’ve been playing RPGs in general. I started a campaign for the ‘stack and got a session in, before realizing that it just didn’t feel right. I tried a couple more times with different setups, and each time it didn’t feel great. Maybe it was the oracle I was using, maybe it was the system, maybe it was my mind just not working correctly, and probably a combo of all of those. I definitely will be coming back to this, but right now it’s just not worth the effort and brain burn to get it to a place that’s decent, and then it wouldn’t really be up to my standards anyway.

Stay Tuned

And here we are, back where I started this article. I hope you found it interesting, and do forgive me for not putting out content as frequently as I would like. I want to make sure everything I put out is high quality and worth the time to read, and for me that takes time. Keep an eye out for more play reports and possibly some shorter posts in the near future, and do let me know if you want to see any of my miniatures or terrain. I’m more than happy to share.

See you next time (most likely in a play report).