This post is brought to you thanks to Lady Tabletop, who prompted folks to write about their own gaming experiences of the year and give out their own fun awards. Like Seamus I thought this was a neat idea, and was also glad (and relieved) that ‘The Endies’ weren’t trying to be yet another award given out because someone disagrees with the ENnies. Thinking back on the year and giving your own awards is more useful (and more fun!), anyway.

I had a much more constrained gaming year than Seamus in part because I had a very busy year; in the middle of this year my partner and I moved, which involved buying a condo, selling two condos, moving one person once and another person (and a cat) twice. In a way I’m surprised I got as much gaming in as I did, and also surprised I was able to write anything from May to August. Still, the difference in absolute number hides the point that Seamus made to me that, due to the number of campaigns I’m in and how often I run, I probably ran and played more sessions by absolute count than Seamus did.

Total games played: 8

Of which I ran/facilitated: 4

Of which were solo: 0

Of which were one-shot/convention games: 5

• Apocalypse World: I started running this campaign at the beginning of the year and we were able to play 18 sessions, pretty good when you consider that perfect scheduling for a bimonthly game is 26. I was fully jazzed by many of the new mechanics in the latest playtest version of Burned Over, and endeavored to use, well, all of them. The campaign kicked off with a 5-session sequence using the ‘Forerunners’ playbook, where players make normal, pre-apocalypse characters and see them and their relationships change as the apocalypse occurs. Then, at session 18, one of the players triggered the ‘Game Changer’, another novel Burned Over mechanic which is going to see the campaign pivot going forward. Like many PbtA games the player input ensured that this game was not what I expected, but we had some great gaming even considering that we were playing with a sheaf of playtest handouts.
• Urban Shadows: This was also a campaign which I started this year; I have now fully embodied the old saw that “the real purpose of a polycule is to finally be able to schedule your D&D game”. The Urban Shadows group is two of my partners and their friends and partners, but what’s been really exciting is that at least two of them were new to RPGs and the rest had only played D&D or Pathfinder. Everyone has engaged with the game and I’m enjoying it as well; while there are weaknesses with Magpie’s text-forward layout, the rules work well and I’ve liked the updates like the new faction mechanics.
• Cyberpunk RED: As Seamus mentioned, this has been a two-plus year ongoing campaign in our main group, and Seamus has done a great job wrangling us towards an evolving role in the setting as we keep advancing and doing more. My own role in the game has changed as I retired one character and started another, and it’s highlighted some things about my experience with Cyberpunk broadly. While I still think that RED has done a much better job making non-combat, non-support characters (like the Media and Rockerboy) relevant, my experience playing a Rockerboy revealed the deficiencies of the game against something more narrative. Even so, I’m looking forward to continuing this campaign next year and seeing where it goes.
• Wildsea: I had the opportunity to play in a Wildsea one-shot back when I reviewed the game, but the one-shot I ran this year had a longer run-time and let me really let players loose on ship creation and character creation. In my review I mentioned that the game really only has a few mechanics, but when you step away from the pre-gens it’s easier to see just how broad the slate of options is. It doesn’t change my conclusion about how flavor-first the game is, it reinforces it.
• Wanderhome: Another game where my play experience back when I reviewed it was very different from the experience I had with my group. On one hand, I was really happy how well the group took to a diceless game, but on the other I think we took the game in a direction that was a little different than how I read the implied setting. Still a great experience.
• Rememorex: This was an interesting game, but I think it revealed some issues that a lot of small indie games have, especially when they don’t get quite enough editing or playtesting. Without writing an entire review, the game was somewhat dependent on you understanding the designer’s vision of what 80s nostalgia looked like, and there were few explicit guardrails in the mechanics to enforce what that vision was. The GM was running for the first time in our group, and while he did well with what he was given, I’d probably tell him to look at Kids on Bikes next time.
• DIE: DIE always goes up like a house on fire with our group, and this year’s game was no exception. As I wrote in my Adventure Log, I crafted a scenario that would take the bleed to new heights, and it succeeded in doing so. While we’re probably putting the day-long DIE games away after this one, my group does have some more DIE on the horizon, albeit in a different form.
• FATAL: Seamus didn’t mention it, I will. It was bad. The “best” part was that our GM made a 40 slide PowerPoint presentation explaining how gross the game was and how much work it took to boil it down to barely playable, which included automating character creation, highlighting only half a dozen mechanics which would take the number of rolls per action down by an order of magnitude, and abridging/censoring the most vile parts. Even the heavily engineered demonstration version took three hours to get through one combat and three skill challenges. We have been promised another educational adventure through the “Bad Games Cinematic Universe” and I am both intrigued and afraid.

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Now, announcing the winner(s) for the Aaron Marks Endies 2025 for…

Game I Wished I Ran But Didn’t Get The Chance To: Mothership

For the gaming weekend where I ran Wildsea, I had three different one-shot ideas; the final was selected by group vote and Wildsea won. My personal choice, though, was Mothership. While our schedule was a bit up in the air (the addition of DIE came late and at least one GM dropped out less than a month out), we had initially wanted to do a more different all-day or day-plus game as part of the weekend. My big idea was running Gradient Descent. I think the module is incredibly cool, and giving the group a chance to stretch their legs and really explore a lovingly crafted OSR dungeon would likely give some room to appreciate the OSR playstyle. I’m leaving this one on the docket for the future.

Game I’m Raising The Parting Glass To… For Now: Cyberpunk RED

I should be clear, I’m not dropping out of Seamus’s game or anything. That said, playing as much Cyberpunk RED as I have in the last five years (I ran a campaign before Seamus did) has given me a pretty well-developed perspective on how the game compares to Cyberpunk 2020 and also how much enthusiasm I have (or don’t) for both it and the genre at this moment. I’ve written before that Cyberpunk was much more engaging when it felt far enough away to be a cautionary tale rather than a warning of something that’s happening right now. In addition to that, I’ve now played many more games than I had when I started running Cyberpunk 2020 (for context, I started running it when I was 15), and discovered that some of the elements that engaged me the most, like the high danger level, are neither unique to that game nor the Cyberpunk genre.

One-Shot Game I’d Like To Make A Regular One: Mythic Bastionland

This is a little bit of a cheat, as I technically ran Mythic Bastionland around this time last year, but it was the first game in the OSR tradition that hit the right balance between presenting the sort of world that you can really sink your teeth into and base a game around while not completely taking away protagonist-adjacent characters from my players, who haven’t been jazzed with sparse mechanics or lack of advancement. I am writing an OSR-adjacent campaign for the future, though as is traditional it’s probably going to take elements from multiple different games and smoosh them together into my own fever dream of science fantasy nonsense.

One-Shot Game Most Likely To Be Re-Run: Wildsea

As Seamus also mentioned, there’s interest in the group to run a campaign of Wildsea, and it’s the most likely contender for my next campaign after I finish my current one. I’m excited to take what I learned from Burning Wheel and apply it to Drives and the other long-term mechanics we didn’t really engage with in the one-shot.

Game Most Likely To Make You Think About Your Life: DIE

I’d argue this one is wholly unsurprising, as I keep on writing self-inserts to put in my DIE games and then wonder why every game makes me rethink my life. It’s also a game, though, that I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and hacking, more than I thought considering its relatively bounded constraint. Between that and my engagement on the fantastic DIE Discord, DIE has also been the game that has gotten me thinking about my gaming life this year more than others.

Most Flexible Game: Cortex Prime

This was honestly a hard one: I have spent very little time this year thinking about flexibility. I think if I was going to judge flexibility like Seamus has, namely a game for any occasion, I’d more likely say something like Mothership given its lack of crunch and wealth of material. In terms of flexibility for game concepts, though, I have to give Cortex Prime the nod. In writing Colony Sim Cortex this year I’ve seen that, even though I’m really altering how an RPG is traditionally structured, the dice pool mechanics of Cortex Prime have always had a rule or procedure ready for me to adapt. The game is downright GURPSian in how much work it takes to get your game set up, but that setup can be used to get you literally anything. Thanks to the flexibility in its metacurrency economy, I’ve even come to mildly prefer it over Fate.

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As you may notice, I used the same superlatives that Seamus did in his article. While the original post encourages you to make up your own, I thought that comparing between the two authors here would make things more interesting. I do, however, have a couple superlatives of my own:

The White Whale Award: Legacy: Life Among the Ruins

2024 was special in that my long-time White Whale, Burning Wheel, actually came together for my main group. While I definitely overextended myself by running a Burning Wheel campaign about a magic school, the experience was just as challenging and rewarding as I thought it would be. After putting Burning Wheel down for 2025, I realized the next in line for my white whale would be Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. The multi-generational play and zoom-in, zoom-out mechanics are both elements that really excite me but also concern me in terms of how well I’d be able to GM them. And, just to really emphasize the ambition of it all, my white whale campaign of Legacy would start with Generation Ship and then shift right into Worldfall.

The game that surprised you the most: Mutant Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics has been on my radar for a while, given the marriage of OSR sensibilities and 3e (the edition of D&D I’ve played most) mechanics. I picked up Mutant Crawl Classics at PAX Unplugged and, whether it was the willingness to go all-out or the fact that Gamma World (on which the game is at least loosely based) is just that weird, I found that even reading through the game gave me so many wild ideas that I couldn’t put it down. Expect to see my nightmarish mash-up of DCC, MCC, and Electric Bastionland being used to run a campaign inspired by Caves of Qud.

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So, what do your Endie Awards look like? Like Lady Tabletop said, get out there and post about them, and tag/check out #Endies2025 to share and see for yourself!