I. Spotlight
It’s a new year and so welcome to the new format for the newsletter! Like I said in my previous post, I’m taking the pressure of having a whole post every week ready to go and focusing on curation. The main change is this new section at the top, which I’m calling the spotlight. It is going to be the place for highlighting either the most interesting thing of the week or a collection of links that together make up what I think the previous week was “about”.
In that vein, lot of the writing I saw over the last couple weeks were retrospectives about the year that just ended. So here are some I found interesting:
- First, the most thorough round-up of the ups and downs of the last year for TTRPGs is probably Shannon Applecline’s post about 2025. It covers tariffs, AI, censorship, crowdfunding, and more — not exactly the happiest list for obvious reasons.
- Geek Native has some very cool tidbits of the business side of game publishing. They’ve published a manually-collated list of DriveThruRPG’s best-selling products (Daggerheart and Fabula Ultima) as well as a less labor-intensive list of the same for Exalted Funeral (Old School Essentials and boxed sets).
- They’ve also got this slightly bleak look into how many products used genAI.
- Interested in crowdfunding? Skalchemist’s Cloud has an analysis of 2025 in the context of the last decade. The most executive of summaries is that it was more projects than ever but less money going around.
- I saw a small handful of “Endies”, essentially talking about your favourite games as if you were giving them awards, and there was a fun trend on Bluesky of people posting 10 games they wanted to play in the new year that I found very enjoyable and inspiring. Too many to link but I enjoyed this list by Hendrik Biweekly of games they played.
II. Media of the Week
- Instead of recapping the year, what if we recapped the last 15? Aaron Voigt’s video explores the idea of the last decade and a half as a golden age for indie games. It’s a huge sweep of time and I love this attempt to summarize it through important milestones. I got jumpscared as I watched and my own name popped up, luckily it’s only for 5 seconds so this video remains blissfully me-free otherwise.
- One of the podcast episodes I always look forward to: the Open Hearth’s Game of the Year discussion where 30+ members (including me) share their favourite game that they played in 2025. It’s just a nice, fun, warm listen.
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
Essays
- The Weeping Stag blog takes on an interesting challenge: drafting a post-colonial approach to a very cool Traveller adventure with some problematic themes. This is something I’m regularly thinking about and I enjoyed watching someone think through the specifics of what they would change.
- This is a cool bit of RPG theorizing. It’s called “Books [Verb] Play” and it’s about all the things that RPG books do. They inspire play, but also align, incentivize, limit, and so on. It’s very common for people to theorize narrowly but I love this approach that tries to describe widely.
- Gus L writes about what he sees as the future of OSR: “I propose viewing the present crop of games and scenes derived from OSR designs and OSR spaces as new approaches to indie RPG design and play, loosely linked by the Post-OSR term. No one gets to wear the rotting crown of “THE” OSR – but we’re all its horrible little children.”
- With the caveat that I haven’t verified a word of this: Some solid sleuthing into those ads for huge bundles of D&D maps that you might see on instagram and similar. The content seems to be AI slop, which is unsurprising. But the companies themselves seem to be using AI to pose as family businesses, with fake photos of the founders and so on.
Reviews
- The Dicepool are blogging about their impressions of the new Call of Cthulhu campaign, Sutra of the Pale Leaves, which is a take on the King in Yellow set in Japan. I enjoyed the readthrough but the book isn’t for me, which is a very useful thing that a series like this can do!
- Ram S talks about Tania Herrero’s dark fantasy adventure Crown of Salt and got me excited about it again.
News and Misc
- The IGDN has opened nominations for its 2025 Indie Groundbreaker awards.
- The Bloggies are open for submissions and have already gotten more than 300 nominations. While it tends to be OSR-focused, this year’s organizer Clayton Notestine is pushing for more mixing.
- Yochai Gal talks about going full-time publishing Cairn and supporting supplements for it.
- On that note, Judd Karlman has been adapting Forgotten Realms into Cairn backgrounds and published it for free.
- Building off a thing that Gal did for Dungeon World and Into the Odd, here’s the Mythic Bastionland syllabus, which tries to collect all the most important links for people interested in that game. (and you can contact the author to add more.)
- A nice list of recommended GMless games.
IV. What am I playing?
With the new year, I have to get my games back up and running. I’ll be running Band of Blades which will be a return to that game I love. It might be my favourite game ever. Because it’s a campaign and ruleset combined, it’ll be much more of a “replay” than say playing Blades in the Dark again. And I think that’s a really rare and cool experience in TTRPGs, outside of classic D&D or Call of Cthulhu modules. I will be channeling Andor and my feelings about the state of the world into this in what will hopefully be a rewarding way.
I’m also going to be running Gradient Descent with either ARKYVR, the Mothership hack where you’re a investigative documentary crew, or with PsiRun, which is a classic storygame that is not at all meant to be used to run modules. If I do go with PsiRun, which has the incredibly satisfying Otherkind dice mechanic, I will have to do some hacking, which is its own kind of fun. I’m considering it because I’m want to add some velocity to the process of exploring the megadungeon, rather than going room-by-room. PsiRun‘s conceit of being chased by forces, gives us that. It also has the central mechanic of recovering your memories which interlocks neatly with the killer feature of Gradient Descent, which is the question of exploring whether you’re a human or an android.
V. 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.
- Nothing this week!
This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- DIE: The RPG, the game based on Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s comic series, alongside some really clever scenarios.
- Old Gods of Appalachia, the podcast-turned-Cypher system RPG, with all the source books and supplements.
- The Burning Wheel, the classic character-driven fantasy game that wasn’t sold in PDF for the longest time.
- Dread Thingonomicon, a massive collection of random tables and inspirational material for GMs running fantasy games.
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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