Just going over the series and wishing everyone Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

First off, MERRY CHRISTMAS! Happy holidays.

And, since this will be my last post before 2026, happy New Year. Not exactly sure I will return. Probably in 2-3 weeks. Give or take a week. Most of my gaming will either be off-line or the type with video- appended to the front.

When I started Advent(ure) 2025 a few weeks ago, though at that time, the "(ure)" was missing, I had no real idea where anything was going. It seemed simple enough: draw some cards, generate some encounters, play them out. It was conceived of as 10-30 minute sessions.

I missed that goal on several. Some took an hour or more, especially the ones in the space ship. It was just a great excuse to bring Barston and Derron, still two of my favorite characters, back to the blog. Partially because they are not-precisely characters. Derron is lazy and sometimes a bit young. Barston is creative and a bit dour. Both simply do the things that I would do if I was sitting down at a table and play an RPG. They fight the good fight. They work together. Between the two of them we have my classic wizard/thief combo who is noble but prole. Only it is an anti-wizard and an anti-thief. For reasons.

Simply put, they are kind of characters that spark joy in me. Heroes, through and through, but also a bit silly.

I should likely have had a better foresight of what it entails to actually play out "one session per day" for a whole month, even smaller sessions. Of course, I didn't really do that. Sometimes I would play two or three in a day over a few sittings and schedule ahead. All that put aside, it is still an interesting mental scramble to try and tell a story across around 20-30 hours. Pretty much any other campaign would have had more downtime, more intermissions, and taken twice as long to post.

Of course, I am completely unsurprised that my "24 highlights, give or take" became essentially a connected story. It's how I play. A one-shot becomes a short campaign. A short campaign becomes a major lore-driving story arc. A tiny character becomes the hero of the realm. I solo play because I like these stupid little squires to gods' children type stories.

I have told the story of the broader campaign this came out of a few times so won't go into massive details. Here is the quick summary:

  • I had the plan to make a fairly complex Troika world. Each island/sphere the domain of a different ancient wizard type. Some were from official Troika products (there was an Acid Death Fantasy island/sphere, for instance) and others were just mood (kind of a gothic horror type place). For now, let's call this Gadswyld.
  • In Gadswyld, there was a minor island chain where the wizard in question liked to play games and so created a place with miniature people.
  • There was a Harper's Quest 2 set of sessions unrelated to this, initially, where I was just playing around with solo play. First character, Shellyton Bakersfield, died and the second character, Barston Bakersfield, was an odd duck.
  • Some strange rolls and ideas later, I realized that this could be part of my Gadswyld plans. This was the people on the mini-island.
  • As Barston and Derron and Astrid did their stuff, there were some weird things with multiple realities, a cult dedicated to art, and other oddities.
  • There was also an evil arch-warlock called Malakar Brite who might have also been a loving mayor and also a nobody. Shellyton sought to kill him and died in the process. Barston wanted to stop him but at the end there was no Brite to stop.

As I was playing over Advent(ure) 2025 I just put in a notion of an [OLD MAN] and a [BOX] along with [WIZARD] and [TOWER] and all that. Getting near the end, I realized I had to answer some questions: who was the old man, what was the box, how does this tie into Astrid's death?

I had played Chrono Trigger in the background during some of this and there's a scene about bringing an important character back to life and I realized that might be the clue. Is the old man some guru type?

The idea hit me. There would be a note from Malakar Brite. But why would Brite be completely different? It's exactly the sort of bullshit that makes speculative fiction sing, but how could I reconcile it in a non-bullshit way?

What if there are different Malakar Brites because he is the ultimate NPC? The GM insert. Me, in other words. He meant Barston to be a mage but Barston failed all those magic rolls. He meant Astrid to survive but more bad dice rolls killed her. He controls the warlocks because that's what the GM does: he controls the enemies. But he could not control the dice.

What does this mean for Sennas? If Malakar is the GM, what if Sennas was actually SENNAS [and no, I don't know what that stands for]....something like...the game engine.

The reason the world does not making sense is not because Doug Bolden used a bunch of random tables and considered everything canon, but because the GM has had multiple versions of his world as he plays out campaigns. But one character has somehow become attached to the mechanics of the campaign itself.

It's weird, right?

All this is to say that Barston and his now five companions will return as they go into Gadswyld itself and Malakar's other games. It should be weird and strange [AFF vs Troika, kind of]. Of course, they will not understand it. Hell, I won't understand it. By the way, the plan for the intended conclusion to Barston's story will be called...

Barston Bakersfield Goes to Hell

...but that's in the future. And might not ever happen. It likely will, but there's always a stack of a dozen campaigns in the wings.

By the way, everyone is getting 50xp for this. I'll probably spend it all in the background somewhere.