These past few years I’ve been catching up on a lot of classic roleplaying games that I’ve never played before, despite having several decades of play behind me. One of those was Traveller, so I was happy to finally run that with my Friday game! We ran about 15 sessions, across four scenarios, plus the usual extra shenanigans in between.

I liked the game and would like to play more of it, but my players didn’t! Oh noes! They sent Traveller all the way down their list of games! I’m a bit sad but as we’ll see, some of the blame was on me as the gamemaster. Hopefully, these “Notes on Traveller” will be useful for someone introducing Traveller to their group!

Mausritter is a TTRPG in which you play little adventuring mice trying to survive in a world of big dangers. If you’re a fan of the excellent comicbook Mouse Guard, you should already be hooked! The system is as minimalist as its protagonists, with low-prep two-hours adventures, so we played this a dozen times as an “interlude game”: the sort of game you play when a key player is missing, or in between campaign arcs. I also played this several times with TTRPG newbies, with up to 8 players! Here are my notes on Mausritter!

Numenera is a science-fantasy game set in the far, far, far distant future, with some lightweight and somewhat original system, all written by Monte Cook.

On paper, it ticked a lot of boxes for stuff I’m interested in, so I brought it to my Friday group a few years ago. We played a dozen sessions or so and… well, we weren’t much into it and dropped it for something else. Still, there are a few cool things to take away from Numenera! Here are my notes!

Disclaimer: we played Numenera several years ago, using the game’s first edition. Since then Monte Cook published a new edition, called Numenera Discovery and Destiny. I have no idea what changed in that second edition.

In this second “Notes on…” article, we’ll look at another game my Friday group played for a few months on a weekly basis: Free League’s Mutant Year Zero (from now on referred to as MYZ).

Last year my Friday-evening group played a short campaign of Blades in the Dark (BitD), so I figured I’d share some notes about it — mostly the bits that we did wrong or that I didn’t like, with some actionable recommendations that will hopefully improve your experience should you play BitD yourself.

We played weekly for about six months, going through many adventures. For once in a long while, I was actually simply a player, instead of being the gamemaster! I had wanted to play BitD for a while, and when one of the players said he had the rulebook, I jumped on the occasion to make him run it. So unlike many other TTRPG posts here, this one is exceptionally from my perspective as a player.

Overall the campaign was quite good. Our gamemaster portrayed a few memorable NPCs, and we got into a lot of fun trouble. My main problem with the game was a slightly-too-crunchy system, and our messing up character progression. I doubt that we’ll get back to BitD, not necessarily because we didn’t like it, but mostly because we’ve got so many other games to play and so little time.