Lady Tabletop Says: The Endies 2025 Are Here!!…and I’ve got thoughts on the games that shaped my year.

The One Ring (Free League, 2E, 2022) is the definitive Middle-earth RPG, set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Moria: Through the Doors of Durin takes you deep into the legendary halls of Khazad-dûm. Running sessions within those endless, orc-filled halls has been one of my top GMing joys of 2025. The book nails the mood—dark grandeur, ancient echoes, the feeling of waking powers in the deep. It overflows with inspiration and possibilities!

I decided to run an open-table, West Marches–style game inspired by the first year of Balin’s Expedition to reclaim the ancient halls. Twelve episodic sessions later, I’ve touched just about every subsystem The One Ring offers, including another three solo sessions.

We ran two Mythic Bastionland campaigns this year—a whole trilogy and a follow-up 4-5 session series set in the same kingdom. This game is the roguelike of TTRPGs: spin up a new knight, carry your player knowledge forward, and plunge back into the cycle of myth, duty, and doom. I loved the dice feats added onto Into The Odds’ combat mechanics; it made for some very tense conflicts!

I’m not an Arthurian-genre guy, but Mythic Bastionland packs the weird into knightly tales, and I had a blast across three doomed, flawed, glorious knights. Would absolutely play again.

Jiangshi is a collaborative, generational story about a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant in the 1920s—while fending off hopping vampires and everyday prejudice.

Easily the coziest one-shot TPK I have ever played.

We played as three generations of Chinese women just trying to keep our famous restaurant afloat and mind our own business. We didn’t even make it through the first night before becoming hopping vampire food! I’d love to experience a full cycle of this game in 2026.

Paul Czege’s The Clay That Woke casts players as minotaurs navigating silence, society, and myth in a lush, enigmatic world. Its token-based resolution system is unlike anything else.

This one hit me right in the nostalgia bone. I’d played a couple of one-shots years ago, but this session felt like everything finally clicked—the mechanics, the tone, the minotaur way. The whole table was dialed in, making it one of the standout sessions of playing in the One Shot Monthly group.

Return to Dark Tower blends a physical electronic tower, app integration, quests, threats, and escalating dread. It is my meditative solo game for quiet evenings—tension without stress, engagement without prep, episodic. Perfect.

Games I wanted to give time to in 2025 but didn’t quite make happen:

Here’s to another year of fearless play, unexpected moments, and games that suckerpunch us in the best possible ways.

As always, thanks for reading, sharing, and building strange worlds with me.