#RPGaDAY2025 - Days 17-31

 

So late! I know! 

You ever have that feeling clawing away at the back of your head that you haven't finished something? You just can't seem to rest until that task is done and dusted? Well, I have, and one of the many, MANY things that has been pickling in its own creative juices is the fact that I never finished #RPGaDAY2025. I mean, I created the darn initiative to do #RPGaDAY, and here was me setting the worst example by not finishing it.

So, nearly eight months late, here is the final half of #RPGaDAY2025. I posted Days 1-16 here on the blog, so let's continue that format. 

Day 17 - Renew

For day 17 I thought I'd draw the moment that my interest and excitement in tabletop roleplaying games was renewed, when I went off to University. I'd kinda given up on gaming, some of my group had gone off to Uni and moved away, and my mind was on other things, but when I went off to Uni to do graphic design and illustration, I was introduced to the wonders of Vampire: The Masquerade. First thing I did was blow most of my term's budget that first month on a load of Vampire books and a heap of d10s. 

Day 18 - Sign

I couldn't think of anything cool to do for SIGN, and part of me just immediately thought of the weird 'mark' that is etched on some stones dotted around the sleepy little town in New England in the game we were playtesting. And how that sign could keep the Risen at bay... 

Day 19 - Destiny

For Destiny, it's all about Tarot cards. A great tool for determining or divining your destiny, but also a great way to resolve tests in a tabletop RPG. The numbers can determine success or failure, but the images on the cards can add further meaning and description to the result, or even simply drawing upon which suit the card is for minor arcana. I used Tarot for task resolution in WILD, and I'm planning on using it again in my next personal game... (when I'm finally able to do it).

Day 20 - Enter

For Enter, I figured I'd do the entry way to a strange location. I had this idea of a doorway under the roots of a huge tree, the path lined with stones holding the earth back. I thought it would be a cool location for one of my games. I'm still pondering how to use it. 

Day 21 - Unexpected

Day Twenty-One is Unexpected, and I thought I'd go with the most unexpected moment I've had in a game recently, which was my human character taking a Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner, only to fail and be sent to holding as a suspected Replicant infiltrator. Really, really cool twist. 

Day 22 - Ally

For Ally, I had to go with one of the most memorable allies we've had in our games, and that is Daraka, a Rodian Slicer who was our 'go to' guy for any tech issues we had in our Star Wars: Force and Destiny game. He became such an integral part of the story, we even did a few side-story sessions with Daraka as a playable character. 

Day 23 - Recent

This was actually an easy one, as Recent simply meant to illustrate something from a recent game. At the time, we were early in our Mythic Bastionland game, so I thought I'd do a pic of my character, the Owl Knight, who was a bit bookish, but died in the most heroic way. He thought that going with the watery dryad who had taken a shine to him would mean the dryad wouldn't kill anyone else... well, it kinda worked. He thought he was going off to live with the dryad under the inland sea, and he did, for a minute or two... poor Ser Dorza... 

Day 24 - Reveal

For Day 24, the topic is Reveal. So, let's talk about the only big game reveal I was involved in, which was Dragonmeet in 2007, announcing the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game, with Chris Birch, Dominic McDowall, Angus Abranson, and Fred Hicks. You can see the photo here... but I doodled my version of it. 

Day 25 - Challenge

I challenge you, sir!! For Day 25, I thought I'd go with Mythic Bastionland again, as I seemed to be challenged to duels a few times. My replacement character (after the watery demise of Ser Dorza) was the Dusk Knight, but he was challenged by the previous Dusk Knight who had been lost. 

Day 26 - Nemesis

Day 26 is Nemesis, and while I could have drawn a particular horsefaced warlock, or something to do with Romulans, but instead I thought I'd keep it TTRPG related and mention one of the first sourcebooks I wrote which has never seen the light of day. When I was trying to get my break into roleplaying games (the second time, many years after my first attempt in the 80s), I was trying to prove to Eden Studios that I could write something and knew the Unisystem well enough to do it for them. So, I wrote a complete supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a slasher horror book, where the evil entity you're facing, the seemingly unkillable slasher, is called the Nemesis. 

Day 27 - Tactic

There's a whole part of tabletop gaming that is very tactical, and I'm afraid I'm not part of it. I really don't think tactically. I mean, I enjoyed playing X-Wing, and Shatterpoint, but I probably don't play tactically enough to really consider it 'tactical' at all. I kinda just shoot and hope for the best. I have fond memories of playing the old FASA Star Trek III ship combat game with the old gaming group, and I still have my Star Warriors ship combat game for the old West End Games Star Wars, which was fab. Cue TIE Fighter noises!! So, that's what I drew...

Day 28 - Suspense!

I dunno, having to wait 8 months for the final half of #RPGaDAY2025 seems pretty much like keeping you in suspense if you ask me. However, lots of suspense and tension in our game of Public Access, so I drew Joe, Debs' character, investigating the basement of the House on Escondido Street. Playing the game has been great and tense, but the actual way it works is taking a little to get used to. We had a long conversation about the mechanics and the lack of a definite solution, and how players could really break the game if they don't take it seriously. 

Day 29 - Connect

Day 29 has the prompt Connect, and I'm hoping that #RPGaDAY in general helps people to connect to each other. I drew me playing D&D with my old group of 40+ years, because the game helps to connect us even though we are spread all over the world. 

Day 30 - Experience

For Day 30, the prompt is Experience, and I guessed most people would describe something to do with how many experience points they've gained during a game, or what their most memorable experience of playing is. For me, I wanted to do the latter, and one of the most memorable moments I've experienced in gaming was GMing Kult back in the 1990s. My future-wife's character was upset about the demise of one of the NPCs, and decided to conduct the most epic and mind-melting series of rituals to bring them back, involving time travel and recovering a soul from hell...

Day 31 - Reward

The final day of #RPGaDAY2025 and it is Reward. I wanted to show what my reward was for doing this, and it's a complete sketchbook full of little doodles that relate to #RPGaDAY and it got me drawing again. Something I've been wanting to get back to for a long time. I've done some sketches for early versions of the WILD Tarot, but that was the first real drawing I've done since the old comic publishing days, so it's good to get back to it. I'd love to do all of the illustrations for my next personal project as well, but so far I've hated what I've done for them, and will probably attempt to redo them all. That's fine, I've rewritten the character creation chapter about a dozen times over the last six or seven years, so it's not going to get done for a very long time (and also, I can't really work on it at the moment for other reasons). 

So that's it, my reward is a complete sketchbook... hurrah!

Thank you to everyone who took part in #RPGaDAY2025, I know it was a long time ago now and we're actually closer to August 2026 than we are to the previous one... which is very scary...

To quote Twenty0ne Pil0ts:

"Days feel like a perfect length, I don't need them any longer, but for goodness sake do the years seem way too short for my soul..."

Will there be another #RPGaDAY for 2026? 

Who knows? I hope so... 

#RPGaDAY2025 - Days 1-16

 

We're halfway through August and halfway through #RPGaDAY2025. I've been a bit too busy to post daily, but I've been trying to keep up - especially more tricky with my foolish decision to draw a quick doodle for every day. 

I kinda wanted #RPGaDAY this year to be used any multiple ways – you could use it to design an adventure, using each day's prompt to lead you through a story. Or, you could even use it like Inktober and use them to prompt a piece of art... and I've been trying to draw more recently. Heck, I used to write and draw, and publish comics, and I really haven't drawn much for a while. I did some preliminary art designs for the WILD Tarot cards, but after a few sketches for the Major Arcana, I left Gareth Sleightholme to do the amazing art himself.

I wanted to get back into the habit of drawing, to get better, and improve. I'm really rusty, so it was good to get the pens and pencils out again. So here we go, the first 16 days of #RPGaDAY2025.

Day 1 - Patron

I wanted to do something that tied into the game I had mulling around in the back of my head. I wanted to do a cat person mage, but my art just wasn't what I had in my head, but I tried... It was a specific character I had in mind who was the 'patron' of the player characters, but... ho well...

Day 2 - Prompt

I wonder if anyone noticed that the black books are for the weekends? Day 2's prompt was 'Prompt', and when I'd put it on the list I saw it as a "what prompted you to start the adventure". I was still hung up on weird anthropomorphic people to populate the setting, and I thought of someone who made sure you were on time (or being 'prompt') and it made me think of a hall monitor. Once I had that in my head, I couldn't help but draw a hall monitor lizard... I know, awful pun.

Day 3 - Tavern

Again, I wanted to continue building the setting I had in my head, but I just came up with a crooked and weird pub called "The Tattered Scroll" but again, my art wasn't what I had in mind.

Day 4 - Message

Day 4's prompt is 'Message', and I really struggled to come up with a good idea for this one. And then, it hit me. Or rather, it hit this dude...

Day 5 - Ancient

Again, I couldn't think of anything to do for this one, so I thought of the most ancient thing I could think of. Not the actual Cthulhu himself, but an artefact almost as old. The fabled sculpture of the ancient one. 

Day 6 - Motive

The word 'motive' made me think of those detective shows I like watching, which made me think of the coolest detective gaming we've had for a long while. The Blade Runner RPG we played a while ago was brilliant, and had one of the coolest rug-pulls I've experienced as a player. Great stuff. So, I had to draw something inspired by the Blade Runner game.

Day 7 - Journey

The word 'journey' just made me think of our many games of The One Ring, where there was lots of travelling (usually to Bree and back). Lots of walking, lots of stumbling across orcs and so many 'total party kills' you wouldn't believe. We kept getting our butts kicked!!

Day 8 - Explore

We've done some dungeon delving in our time gaming, so for 'Explore' I had to go with something deeper, exploring into the depths of the earth. Felt a lot like Tomb Raider... Did not like how this one came out.

Day 9 - Inspire

For Day Nine, I wanted to mention two people who are a great inspiration. David Lynch and David Bowie. Neither of them compromised their artistic vision. They just did what they wanted, what drove them to create, and didn't worry about how commercial it was going to be, or whether people understood it. It was what they wanted to do, and it's what I aspire to. I drew when Bowie was in Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, as the legendarily weird Phillip Jeffries. Before he became a talking kettle.

Day 10 - Origin

For Origin, I thought I'd go back to that first RPG game I played. Back in 1983, when Crud (sorry) said we weren't going to spend the Saturday afternoon programming ZX Spectrums to play "lightcycles", and we went to JR's and I experienced Traveller for the first time. 

Day 11 - Flavour

For Flavour, I thought I'd show my preferred 'flavour' of game. I'll play just about anything, but I really love modern urban fantasy horror mysteries. Just my thing I guess. A holdover from my old World of Darkness / Kult / WitchCraft games. 

Day 12 - Path

The word 'Path', for some reason, made me think of being stuck on a path, and how sometimes you just want to do something different. I guess it didn't help that I was watching music videos at the time, and one always really resonates with me. 

Day 13 - Darkness

When it comes to 'Darkness' there's only one possible response to this and that's World of Darkness. When my regular gaming group had mostly gone off to University, and I'd kinda got out of the habit of gaming, the World of Darkness is what got me back into gaming. Vampire the Masquerade became an instant addiction, and I GM'd Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Wraith in a massive crossover campaign. 

It's how I met Debs, and we even joined the Camarilla. Debs became head of Clan Toreador for the UK, and I was second in command for Clan Tremere for a while. We left and turned away from it all when we started getting hassle out of character by grumpy and power-hungry players. So I drew us in our Camarilla days. Such goth. So long ago. Back in the 'hair days'.

Day 14 - Mystery

Day Fourteen was 'Mystery' and it made me think of a game I'm keen to try called Brindlewood Bay (or one of the games it powers). Brindlewood Bay sounds a lot like the Thursday Murder Club but they're investigating Cthulhu, and it made me think of Murder She Wrote. So I doodled, Jessica Fletcher and some tentacles. It wasn't very good. 

Day 15 - Deceive

There are a lot of times when the Gamemaster deceives the players - one that really sprung to mind was back in the 80s when Pete was GMing a game. He said he was doing a murder mystery game, modern day, and we all played regular people who won tickets on a cruise. Classic Agatha Christie style game. By the end of the first session, the ship had capsized, and we were washed up on the shore of an island... with superpowers. Inspired by the old 'Elementals' comics, we were actually in a superhero game. Surprise!

I struggled to get that on paper, and after a few attempts, I gave up and just drew the classic deceiver of fantasy gaming... the mimic.

Day 16 - Overcome

Day 16, and I tried to think of an instance when we've overcome something massive. And you couldn't get more massive than the Kaiju sized Owlbear we tackled in our D&D game. It was the size of Godzilla. Magic users fired spells while we climbed its legs to attack it. The combat lasted two sessions... 

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That's the first half of #RPGaDAY2025. I hope you're joining in! 

Stay tuned for the second half at the end of the month, and follow along on the Tabletop Industry Network Discord, the Facebook page, and on sites like Bluesky (lots of #RPGaDAY stuff going on there!).