Gamer Goals 2025 – Playing New TTRPGs

Goal – Play at least two TTRPGs that are new to me
Success! I managed to run two new ones to me, play in a new one, and play a different edition of a game I hadn’t played for decades.

Pirate Borg

I backed the kickstarter plus a bunch of other materials. Like Mothership, a fair amount of the content comes in trifold pamphlets. Quick, contained, and plenty of room for improvised detail, in short a very Old School Renaissance format. Buried in Bermuda was a good open sandbox to start with, with a couple of locations and encounters laid out. We managed to get a few sessions in before assorted commitments benched the game for a time. I’m hoping to return to some Western Marshes style games in the New Year.

Mausritter

This was not the one I expected to get to the table, but it happened and we all merrily cut out the tokens for the equipment, had some serious talk about pouches, and explored a hex map. The bits economy was less important to us so we largely ignored it, but I’m inspired to try to home brew / improvise some simple scrounging and crafting house rules. We consulted a few things in Cairn for reference as to how some thing might work, but overall it went well even with some making it up as we went along. The hex map was randomly generated and a couple of single page encounters / dungeons were at hand.
I am certainly interested in bringing this out in future, with some of the things I learned along the way, like having environmental damage inflict more conditions than hit damage. In combat, everything hits so damage to hits goes fast!

Warhammer FRP 2E

This one a buddy ran so I got to be the player for a change. Despite how long ago it was that I last played WFRP 1E, I had reread it recently with thoughts I might try to run for a quick one shot. The changes between 1E and 2E are small but I did like that they added a ‘blessing’ for a really low stat or one that ran counter to your plan for a character, reducing the capricious randomness many TTRPGs of the time. Another resource was added for improving your odds at rolling a success, as success was usually less than 50% in most ability scores.

The gruesome and wild critical damage tables remain, truly one of the hallmarks of WHFRP (not as intense as Rolemaster or Twilight2000, but still brutal in detail). The other thing I adore about WHFRP is the career system, where character improvements come from what career you exit into. For when I do run a session, I’d like to just throw out a bunch of experience at the beginning so players have the opportunity to at least sample the mechanic and build a multi career character.

Traveller

Another classic TTRPG of the past, still going strong through continued publication under a number of different companies. There are plenty of discussions on what each edition has had to offer, but the core mechanics of 2d6+skill+stat vs target number still remains. Likewise, the life path generation for character creation remains with small tweaks from the original, making it far less likely for a character to be killed off even before play started. Some games have copied this idea but Traveller is very much the iconic life path.

Again, I read up on the game with plans for trying to get it to the table this year but a buddy having picked up the collection decided to run it so I got to be a player. I got to watch my character start off with a semi promising future quickly fall, scraping by on failures until he spent his final years of pregame as a vagabond. I’m looking forward to watching how my burnout tweaker of a scout plays out over the campaign.