Campaign 2026: Crow's Keep and Boasting with the Boys
This year, I'm doing Campaign 2026 by NBateman woo hoo letβs GO. The past few years I've become a huge proponent of Just Getting To The God Damn Table. It's exciting to have one of these yearly challenges focus on exactly that.
I'm planning on running at least 2 campaigns this year.
Crow's Keep
This one's cheating a bit as I've actually been running it since July of 2025, as the half dozen of you who read this blog already know. This is my DCC open table where I mash up the Goodman Games OAR #1 versions of Into the Unknown and The Keep on the Borderlands; The Village of Hommlet and ideas from The Temple of Elemental Evil; and DC #100 The Music of the Spheres is Chaosβplunking them down into a hexcrawlified Mike's World with some of d4caltrops's Wilderness Hexes for good measure.
This has been a very fulfilling campaign so far, with most of the party between levels 1-3 and a dramatic campaign sea-change looming. I've already written much about this campaign, but I have a few things I want to focus on going into 2026: Organize my existing play reports for Crow's Keep in a new page on bearblog Finish my downtime activities system, previously described in part in my post on advancement Finish the remainder of my factions and fill them out with some deadly bosses Finish converting Mike's World to 1mi hexes and populate it with a variety of gonzo modules
So much of running a game is follow through, and I look forward to keeping this fire stoked. I am a little in arrears on play reports, howeverβ¦
Boasting with the Boys, a Wolves Upon the Coast open table
I have often waxed poetic about how Wolves Upon the Coast is a game about how cool it is to hang out with your boys, talk some shit, and end up in life-threatening but ultimately hilarious predicaments. Of course, being a dude-adjacent entity of a certain age, I've done all these things with the guys I grew up with in rural New Hampshire. We're all scattered to the winds now, and I'm not half as good at staying in touch as I would like, so what better way to recapture the glory days of our youthful foolishness than to toss a couple 1HD shitheads into a pool teeming with one million fishmen? A few things about a Wolves open table would be well suited to this conundrum, I think. I've already been planting the seeds of Viking D&D with the fellas to gauge interest.
Some things I need to do: Get at least 6 of my boys RSVPed for the occasional game night Establish a usual time and a flex time for my west coast homies Study Ruislip
I plan to carry some practices from Crow's Keep into this open table, as some prior games with buds online have failed in the past. Whatβs helped me most is running so long as I have at least one person show up, and keeping strict time records of course. I also plan to grab some lessons from Reavers and plug in the Isle and maybe work on my own megadungeon to place somewhere beyond the Pillars of Herculesβ¦
Another thing that's been helpful in my recent RPG career is not biting off more than I can chew. In the past, running a weekly game always became taxing, probably due to contemporary expectations of the GM as auteur. I feel comfortable with the effort and overhead that goes into Crow's Keep, which is a very welcome change from past weekly games I have run.
I also hope to run Wolves with a more beer and pretzels vibe than I feel is suggested by the admittedly austere materials or the play culture. To do so I'll want to place an emphasis on the act of boasting, the ring-giving, the reputation, etc. We are Boasting with the Boys, after all.
If Boasting with the Boys doesn't work out, I have been very inspired by Skerples's recent false exegesis of OD&D lately, and I would love to run something riffing on that, perhaps in the gay communist Brazilian OSR Discord server. I have long wanted to flex my OD&D muscles, and even longer to do a Silk Road inflected game.
Over the past year, I feel I've come a long way in both OSR-style games and the hobby more broadly. It's easy to complain about the games you're playing and to pine for the ones you wish you were, and I spent a lot of time stuck in that trap. What really matters is playing the game, and I look forward to another year reminding myself why I love RPGs.