As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m participating in New Gamemaster Month. The homework for the first class was to choose a game system to learn and run. I chose Tales of the Valiant because I like it and I will be running a huge ToV campaign for my kids in the coming months.

The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.

Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).

Session 1

Meadowfen

Player Character backstories

Minla

Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.

Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.

Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.

Trends

Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.