Goodbye 2025!

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

We skipped last week (unplanned) and we’re going to skip next week (planned) so this is officially the last newsletter for 2025 and since it’s the end of the year, let’s talk about my plans for 2026.

While I’ve been a journalist off and on since 2015, I’ve never actually done it full-time at a news organization. I was one of the world’s permanent freelancers. This newsletter, and the podcast, fit very well with that lifestyle. But being full-time at Rascal this year, I was reintroduced to the predominant anxiety of journalism: of not working faster, of not covering everything, not reading enough, not being enough. Either too much is happening or too little — it’s a life of dissatisfaction. You set an impossible goal — everything — and then when you don’t meet that goal, you sharpen knives of self-recrimination against the whetstone of your confidence.

Feeling overloaded is a near universal feeling, of course. Even as readers, there’s this flood of information. Wave after wave of new thing, and newer thing. It’s not new. This newsletter exists because of that feeling. It’s an act of curation in a sea of information, boiling it down into a swimming pool.

When I started in 2020, I called this the “indie rpg newsletter” because it was going to be a catch-all for everything that wasn’t well-covered. The biggest games and most active communities quickly develop little information ecosystems of their own. And if you want the dam the flood into a trickle, there are enough places to follow that only document the biggest releases. But what about everything else? Nobody’s replaced this newsletter yet. Nobody has saved me from my Sisyphean labor.

So the bottom-line is that this newsletter continues, focusing on curation. My criteria will be the same: either it’s well-written, useful, surprising, or under-discussed. It’ll be wide rather than focused on specific scenes. While it’ll remain weekly, it’ll be less consistent. And there will continue to be a bias towards games about character drama because that remains My Thing.

See you in 2026!

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

  • It’s the Yes Indie’d end of the year episode: As per annual tradition, I’m once again joined by Quinns from Quinns Quest to talk about the year and forge our friendship in the fire of podcasting. It’s a good episode. It’s a fun episode. Enjoy!
  • In the same spirit, three game designers, Aaron Lim, Aaron Voigt, and Aaron King got together to start a tradition of their own and record a podcast called Aaron on Aaron on Aaron, where they talk about games, novels, and 2025.

III. Links of the Week

Reviews and Retrospectives

  • This is why I’m still on reddit: someone wrote a smart retrospective on runningThe Glass Maker’s Dragon, a campaign for Chuubo’s Marvelous Wishgranting Engine. This is probably of niche interest, like all of Jenna Moran’s work, but I’ve regularly seen references to this specific campaign as someone’s favourite adventure. And this review says it is “a work of immense scope, and the fact that it’s far too complicated can, I think, be forgiven, in the face of its sheer ambition.”
  • Talking about campaign retrospectives, Whale Roads is a free PDF that documents a 30 person, 3 GM campaign of The Wolves Upon The Coast by Luke Gearing. It’s got art, house rules, stories, so much. I’ve only read a little bit of it but it’s truly wonderful that not only games like this are happening but we get a peek into them through these artifacts.
  • Valeria has a nice review of Menagerie of Unbearable Things, “a heartbreaking 132-page full-art storybook that Tania Herrero insists is a bestiary”.
    • Herrero is one of this year’s revelations to me — an extremely talented artist and writer that started out in the Mork Borg community and won an Ennie this year for Crown of Salt.
  • Indie Game Reading Club blazes through more than a dozen reviews / impressions of games that Paul couldn’t do full deep dives into. There’s a real breadth of games from Perilous Void and Ashes without Number to Exiles and Rapscallion.
  • Seyed Razavi reviews Dolmenwood with usual flair: “It arrives in a cultural moment full of 5E-adjacent fantasy and neon-OSR curiosity; Dolmenwood plants a hedgerow and says “back to the woods, then,” with standing stones, saints’ bones, and a wicked sense of whimsy.”
  • Idle Cartulary is doing Critique Navidad where she reviews something every day of the week in December and it’s an impressive achievement.
  • Not tabletop but: In the light of censorship from VISA and Mastercard, I enjoyed this review of Horses, a video game that was taken down from Steam and elsewhere. It’s called “I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human Being“.

Articles

RPG Theory

  • Aaron Marks uses the onion framework from Vincent Baker’s PbtA post that was applied to the OSR and then extends it to Burning Wheel and DIE RPG. Marks highlights that by this model, you might “character” as the core of the onion for Burning Wheel which is an interesting claim that I don’t know if I agree with. The important thing is that onions remain fruitful which is good because vegetables don’t exist.
  • On tumblr, Snow (Songsbirds 3e) writes insightfully about how time — the time it takes to roleplay — is a resource: “If you think of time as a currency which can be spent with your attention, then the weight of roleplaying is equal to the weight of a dice roll, or any traditional mechanic. When you decide to stop and talk, you are engaging in the game… A clock, then, is just a representation of that real world time.”

News and Misc

  • Backerkit has announced April as Megadungeon Month. While it looks like it’s primarily a Goodman Games show (I’m still unhappy with how they handled their ongoing relationship with the bigots over at the Judges Guild), there’s a couple other projects. The one that seems made for me personally is a “metadungeon” for DIE written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan where each level corresponds to a decade in RPG history. I don’t know if the ghost of Gygax is showing up (for libel reasons) but I love the idea. I’m sure it will be a good read if nothing else.
  • RPG Major are doing a musical theater actual play show. They’re playing Genesys but also making up songs on the spot? Wild.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • Creators with Native American heritage (and allies) are building a fantasy setting based on pre-colonial North America. Rules light and indie system friendly! Coming soon to Kickstarter.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

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One response to “Goodbye 2025!”

  1. Daniel Avatar
    Daniel

    That pod with Quinns was a delight. I do hate laughter (yes that’s on me), and I still enjoyed it immensely.

    Also, the Menagerie of Unbearable Things? Wow. That looks amazing. Thanks for covering this stuff, Thomas. I’m down in Australia and if it wasn’t for you and this blog I would never hear about so much.

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