The TTRPGs I played in 2025

2026 is just around the corner. It’s time to wrap up the year! Here are the TTRPGs I played in 2025. 

I have played more this year than I have ever before. In the first half of the year, I taught a role-playing games class twice a week and played with three groups. This winter, I haven’t been teaching any RPG classes, but I played with five different groups. Unfortunately, I had to trim down to three groups in December because I felt I couldn’t keep up or stay focused. At least I learned that you can play too many role-playing games.

I’ve tried a few games and systems, but the following stood out to me this year, in no particular order.

Dark Sun

I’ve been running a Dark Sun 5E game for almost 18 months. The narrative is a mix of homebrew and ideas stolen from different AD&D Dark Sun modules. The group has had to deal with the Black Sand Raiders, join the Merchant House of Amketch, and take part in a deal between Hamanu and the avangion Korgunard. The adventurers are at 10th level now and have just reached the Dragon’s Crown Mountains, in the hope of stopping the Order covering the whole of Athas in a psionic dampening field. Fevil and Zeburon of the Black Sand Raiders trail them, doing their best to antagonize the group.

Each part of the story is tied to the player characters’ backstories, and it has been such a pleasure to see how the players have driven the story forward. There have been moments when the players have cursed and felt overwhelmed by their adversaries, some of whom they fervently hate (especially Fevil, who hitherto has managed to escape every encounter with them), but also moments of epic and awesome victories.

Dark Sun is one of the most original and creative D&D settings of the AD&D era. The art is breathtaking, and the desolate deserts weigh heavily on the player characters, shaping their choices in profound ways. We are using a modified version of 5E that includes psionics, but certain races and classes are restricted.

Daggerheart

One of the greatest games published this year is Daggerheart. If your group loves getting deep into playing their characters, loves inter-character role-playing, and being in the spotlight, this game should be your first choice.

This fall, one of my groups decided to give this game a try. And what a blast it has been! I’ve been using a setting I created called Thulera, a world that suffered after a comet struck the moon more than three hundred years ago. It made the veil between the material plane and some far realm much thinner. Uncontrolled use of magic can tear the veil apart, leading to strange monsters called Night Horrors roaming the land. In the wake of this, a new empire rose and has been annexing more and more lands. The characters decided to join a small rebel band trying to free a small state and are seeking a relic from before the comet hit the moon to unite the people.

Although we’ve only been playing Daggerheart for a few months, it’s been absolutely great! The players have really gone the extra mile in portraying their characters, and there have been sessions when I have had the pleasure of watching some great voice acting and improvisation. The characters have already developed their relationships, and it is great to see how the players are evolving their characters. The main focus is the narrative, making it as fun and engaging as possible for everyone.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire

Star Wars by Fantasy Flight Games is my favorite version of Star Wars RPGs. It is fluid, fast, and has a high player agency. This year, I’ve been running a game with a group meeting once a month. The group consists mostly of RPG novices, but the game is easy to learn and quite cinematic; in other words, it is really easy to translate what the players see in their minds into game terms.

Last winter, the group needed to find a Separatist general and convince them to join the Rebel Alliance. The story was based on Tatooine Manhunt, the old Star Wars WEG module. The group had some serious setbacks and needed to navigate the Mos Eisley underworld and deal with nasty monsters in the Dune Sea before finding the general hiding in an abandoned old fort. Unfortunately, more people were looking for the general, and once the Empire got a sense of where to find them, they came full force, with AT-AT walkers, scout bikers, and star destroyers hovering above. Through luck and sacrifice, the group escaped with the general.

This fall, the group was summoned to Cloud City on Bespin and tasked with retrieving a statue from Malachor, in possession of the Crimson Dawn. After getting their hands on the statue, the group discovered that their contact had been murdered by someone wielding a lightsaber. To make matters worse, they were suspected of being the murderers. By breaking into the main computer console and hacking the city’s computer system, they erased all data linking them to the murder and took off from Bespin with the statue. However, they discovered that the statue hid a Sith holocron!

I love playing Star Wars. I am a massive fan of the franchise, and when playing with other people who know the films, even if they have never played TTRPGs before, playing comes easily. The system is also great, and I really like the dice mechanics, since it offers more variability than the binary success/failure of many other games.

The One Ring

I ran two very different One Ring games this year. One for my biweekly group and one for my 12-year-old son and his friends. In both cases, I started by running a few scenarios from the Starter Boxed Set, in which the players take on the roles of hobbits and embark on adventures in the Shire. My son and his friends love the game; they know the films and some of the lore, although none have read the novels.

However, the older and more experienced group didn’t hit it off. I ran a few sessions, using scenarios from the Tales from the Lone-Lands book. Although the scenarios are interesting, I didn’t quite connect with them in session. It was more my fault than anything else. I tried adding more flavor, for example, I expanded the scenes at the Prancing Pony, added more non-player characters, and so on. Much as I like the traveling mechanics, they somehow didn’t come alive, and I felt more hampered by them than anything else. After the group dealt with the trolls, they travelled to Lond Daer and, after spending two sessions on the road, we decided to call it quits.

The problem with playing games where a single narrative or storyline dominates the setting is that I sometimes find it hard to be completely free of it. Much as I love Dragonlance, I have to admit that to me it is just that one narrative, Chronicles or Classics if you prefer the novels. I feel the same applies to playing the One Ring. Love the idea, but somehow I just didn’t hit with the group of experienced players. The younger one, who does not possess the same kind of knowledge of Middle-Earth, finds it comes more naturally to them.

Age of Vikings

When I got my hands on Age of Vikings, I couldn’t wait to try the game out. This is a game that hits all my sweet spots. It is based on the Icelandic Sagas, it uses the BRP game engine by Chaosium, and is fun to play. I could go on and on, but let me just say this: if you are into the Viking era, you must try this game.

This fall, I ran a homebrew module in which the players embarked on a journey from the British Isles to the Westfjords of Iceland. After one of their friends was found murdered, they needed to investigate the murder and bring the culprits to trial in the Althing. However, the murderer escaped and fled to the British Isles. The heroes gave chase and found the murderer in the Orkney Islands, where they challenged them to a duel. Luckily, and through the use of some runes and seiðr magic, the heroes were victorious and avenged their murdered friend.

Age of Vikings is such a great game to play when running narratives set in the Viking Age. I had an awesome group of players who really loved their characters, and we had some really memorable moments, for example, when one of the group decided to help a goði at the Althing and take their place in a duel. Unfortunately, the hero was killed in one swift strike by a berserker, leaving the players stunned and speechless. This is not a D&D game, and BRP can be brutally deadly when the dice fall the wrong way.

Other games

I played a few other games as well. I ran a short three-session Call of Cthulhu campaign for a small group of friends, in which the investigators traveled to Greenland and discovered a tribe worshipping a strange idol. I ran many different D&D games, using the 2014 5e version. I have to admit, as I get more familiar with Daggerheart, 5E doesn’t seem to have the same appeal to me. I haven’t really gotten into the 2024 version, and truth be told, it feels a bit like a cash grab to me. Finally, I ran a few Warhammer Fantasy games for a group, which was fun. I used a module I made for the 2nd edition of the game, in which the heroes need to exterminate a few rats in the town’s sewers. The rats were a tad larger than expected, and some were even as large as goblins.

I also played a few one-session games, trying out different ones, but few stood out enough to convince me to use them in longer narratives. One game I would like to mention, though, is Outgunned. Although the game probably doesn’t really suit for longer narratives, this is a game that you can easily grab and run without reading every page of the book. If you like fast and easy to learn games, you should check out Outgunned.

Next Year

I guess that the Dark Sun game will come to an end early next year, but most of the other games I am running, I presume, will continue. I am hoping to get in some more time to try out different systems and games, but since I just finished writing a module to be published in 2026 and am working on a game that I hope will be successfully Kickstarted sometime next year, I don’t know how much time I will have.

But hopefully the new year will see many great new games, sourcebooks, and modules published. I feel that in a way, the RPG scene is at a crossroads; the surge of new gamers is declining, I am told, and there have been some drastic HR changes at major publishers. I think it will be really interesting to see how things will develop in the next couple of years.