At the start of last year I made some notes about the tabletop RPGs I hoped to play in 2020. In spite of the whole pandemic thing, I managed to hit three of the four goals with a successful game of Zombie World, mixed success with Fate Accelerated, and a (thus far) successful Burning Wheel game.

This marks a shift for our group from more trad games like D&D and 13th Age to more indie fare.

The Zombie World game was going great, but suddenly, come march, a game about the aftermath of an apocalyptic outbreak wasn’t so fun for some reason. I definitely want to return to this game again though. I think it should be a good gateway game for new players too.

The Fate games were a more mixed bag. As a pickup game in 2019 I think we had some success. Attempting a longer form game last year it wasn’t as successful, and eventually the fizz went out of the game for everyone. While I’m still a fan of Fate, at this stage I don’t think I would revisit with my regular group, except as a pickup game

Burning Wheel was the big surprise for me. We got off the ground using Judd Karlman’s Tower Knight pre-fab situation and characters, and are now about ten sessions in. I think it’s been very successful so far, and I don’t believe we are seeing any signs of the game losing momentum yet. I might write more about this later.

With an increased focus on RPGs this last year, I’ve spent more of my time producing resources to support the games I’m playing. That’s resulted in less blog posts, but conversely I’ve been putting some of those things—which take longer to produce—up on this site. You can find them in the Tabletop section.

This year, my goals are more modest. I want to to sustain this game of Burning Wheel and see how far we can take it. If we wrap this game this year, at this stage I would like to begin a new Burning Wheel game from scratch, establishing our own situation and characters, and possibly using one of the other stocks. Burning Empires is still in the distance, but maybe more plausible than it was a year ago.