New Games for 2025

When it comes to roleplaying games, for the past 5 years I've "only" played Dungeons & Dragons. Now the biggest reason for this was because I was in two long running D&D campaigns, one where I DM'd and one where I was a player. 

I used to be part of an RPG club that featured quarterly game cycles, though I left that for my own reasons. Sometimes I miss getting to play semi-long (read: 3 month) campaigns, getting to experiment with new games, systems and settings.

Last year my four and a bit year D&D campaign came to an end, and whilst I took some time to mess around with Star Trek Adventures & a few other things, I eventually launched into my new "long-term" 2024 D&D campaign in October.

The campaign where I'm a player will soon come to an end too, freeing up some time in my calendar.

Whilst there's a few things I want to dabble in, in terms of one-shots, I really want to pick a couple of games and commit to truly running (short) campaigns for them in 2025. As such I've picked the following two games to focus on.

Vaesen (Free League) and Fabula Ultima (Need Games).

First up we have Vaesen from Free League Publishing. This has been on my radar for a while as I both love Free League games and their Year Zero Engine. I've wanted a system to run a "Cthulhu-esque" mystery/horror, but ironically Call of Cthulhu didn't do it for me (sanity mechanics - *shrugs*). I have a pretty strong idea what sort of Vaesen campaign I'm going to run, which I already know is slightly counter to some of the principles of Vaesen's Nordic folk horror setting, but I think it'll work well.

Next is Fabula Ultima from Need Games. I came to TTRPGs via the JRPG route; when I first played D&D in 2018, I used Final Fantasy as the framework I was familiar with to understand and relate to the game with its level advancement and turn-based combat etc. Since then, I've wanted to bring it full circle and play a "TTJRPG". There have been a few contenders over the years, and hell Square-Enix is publishing an actual Final Fantasy TTRPG this year (based on the MMO FFXIV Online), but the mutli-ENNIE award winning Fabula Ultima really caught my eye. There was something about its style (and art) that felt appropriately generic-JRPG, capable of bringing the tone of games like Final Fantasy, Dragonquest, Bravely Default etc. From what I've seen from the mechanics, it seems pretty easy to run/play too.

So with both of these games in my collection, I plan on testing them out via quickstarts and solo-play, before writing short campaigns.

All the while still running D&D of course.