Blogwagon: Jay's Rule of Three

Sam Seer dropped an interesting challenge a few weeks back: Talk about three games that are important to you. 

Here are mine.

The New Mutants: An X-men based forum RPG I played in from the years 2004-2011 or 12. I legitimately couldn't tell you a thing about the mechanics (I think it was based on GURPs?) but it was incredibly fun. I have a lot of strong memories of that period because this was essentially the internet community I ever became deeply embedded in. 

There are two people from that game I'm still friends with after all these years. Sometimes we still text about memories from that period of our lives.

I won't say who, but recently I saw the name of someone who played on that forum in the solicits page for a mainstream comic book. It made me so happy to see that they had made it! Like damn, they really did that they set out to do all those years ago.

And there have been many times where a player in a game I'm running or playing in creates a character that just vividly reminds me of a wacky mutant someone rolled on that forum. 

Last year I ran my regulars through at least three X-men themed sessions and I can't pretend it was for any reason other than trying to recapture that old feeling.

The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening: There are a couple of games that could fight for this spot; the Gen 1 or 2 Pokemon, Ocarina of Time, Skyrim, Perfect Dark; but I have to give it to the first game I truly fell madly in love with and still adore to this day. 

I'll never forget the time I spent in the back seat of my dad's car, on the couch at my cousin's house, huddled up against a rack while my mom was shopping, face in my Gameboy trying to collect those instruments and free the Wind Fish.

Now that I'm old enough to have seen (most of) Twin Peaks, I just have a completely different appreciation for Koholint Island and its wacky inhabitants. 

I've also been lucky enough to re-experience the game a lot in the last few years. First in the form of a much improved GBC experience thanks to some great quality of life patches made over the years. And then watching my wife play through the fantastic Switch remake during the pandemic. Something about seeing all those puzzles and dungeons through her eyes just made fall in love with the game all over again. 

I've failed more than succeeded but whenever I try to create a setting for a tabletop game, Koholint Island is what I'm striving for. 

The Black Hack: 2016 was a weird year, wasn't it? It was essentially the end of politics as we knew it as we were dragged into a fully post-truth reality. And The Black Hack hit the Google+ streets like a ton of bricks. 

This was the game that introduced me to the world of ttrpgs outside of 5th Edition. It was the game that made me feel comfortable being a GM. And it's the game that inspired me to create my own content and throw it out there to the world. It still really tickles me when I get Google Drive requests for some class or hack I created back in the day. 

I kinda cringe at a lot of what I wrote now. The idea of playtesting it never really crossed my mind, but it was so fun just being in community with people who were inspired to use this game as a jump off point to create their own stuff.

Maybe one day I'll turn The Hero Hack into the fully fledged game it was meant to be. But I'll never forget a friend of mine introducing to me their friend who played in a campaign as a Batman pastiche whose parents were killed by a car (so they were an anti-car instead of anti-gun vigilante.) Knowing that someone was out there having fun with something I wrote to disassociate out of grad school still makes me happy. 

Sometimes I even forget that my regular weekly-ish game started with a TBH session on Twitter Spaces in...2020 or 2021. The Black Hack has been a stalwart companion for years. It's not flashy, it's not perfect, but it does exactly what you need it to do.

And don't get me wrong, I fully mean 1st edition.

Running the 2nd edition has truly never appealed to me (and I don't understand how it has an even worse armor system) but this is really my favorite way to run some quick and dirty dungeon crawling adventures. 

But I'm not sure I'll be able to say anything about The Black Hack that isn't covered in this fantastic post.

And I quote:

"When later games like Knave, Cairn, and Bastards emerged, they all owed something, whether consciously or not, to that little black booklet that proved you could reinvent the old school without betraying it. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Black Hack laid the groundwork for the NuSR movement, those games that embrace OSR principles but dare to experiment with tone, mechanics, and format. It’s the missing evolutionary link between Moldvay and Mörk Borg." 

Damn. 

My 2026 Gaming Wishlist

Welcome back, gang!

For today's post I would like to lay out my humble desire for 2026: I want to run 12 new games. 

For a lot of you that's probably a cakewalk - but I'm not sure I've ever cracked 6 different games in one year. You'd think a game a month would be pretty doable...but I envy you if you know a bunch of adults whose schedules remain consistent and open without any weird dramatic happenings in between.

Without further ado, my wishlist for the year:

1. Star Borg - We got off to a good start running this game the same day it was purchased. See my first blog post for more information. One of the players in that game wants to run a few sessions so I expect to commit some war crimes in the name of the Rebellion.

2. CAIN - I've wanted to run this since 2024 but life got in the way pretty hard. I know some rules updates have been dropped but I like of enjoyed the jank of the first version. We'll see how it goes.

3. Slugblaster - This game seems so rad but I absolutely do not understand the rules. We might just vibe it out.

4. Aether Nexus - I'm a big fan of Matt Click. My regular group loves The Mecha Hack and I backed the kickstarter for this game (something I never do.) It's been collecting dust in my office and I plan to fix that. I really am. I've even been watching Escaflowne!

5. His Majesty the Worm - Just a beautiful beast of a game. I want to run it for my regulars (a virtual group) so I need to figure out the best way to handle the tarot cards. 

6. Mythic Bastionland - My copy arrived the other day and I'm truly blown away by it. The book is beautiful and truly gives you everything you need to run a session or campaign, including detailed, well arranged examples of play. I also just love the idea of a game where you're actually noble knights instead of feckless murder hoboes. 

Especially these days.

7. The Whispering Vault - Someone on Reddit last year described this as "Clive Barker's Superfriends" and I hit eBay for a copy immediately. It is missing somewhere in my house but I swear I'm going to find it before Halloween.

8. Feng Shui - I think I love the concept of this game more than the execution but I truly want to give it the old college try.

9. Jukebox - My white whale. I have exactly one friend down to play a karaoke game but I really will make this happen 

10. GRIM - I just think the concept sounds neat 

11. Ride or Die - The minute this game drops I'm going to run it. I love those Fast and the Furious movies so much it hurts.

12. ???? 

The final spot on my list is wide open. Will that Godzilla game everyone fell in love with PAX drop before the end of the year? Not a clue. I hope it does. 

I'm not a big fan of Invincible but I'm pretty curious about the game. Mostly I think it would just be cool to get a bit superhero game released that was actually playable. 

If there's a game you're looking forward to sound off in the comments.

I definitely plan to revisit some old favorites: Mausritter, The Black Hack, Stay Frosty & EXTINCTION which might be my favorite game from the last few years. I've inflicted several flavors of it on my players, from murderous sexbots to a gnarly riff on Exiles

Poor Cap. He didn't deserve what my players did to him and his reality. 

That's all for this week, folks! Keep your eyes open, your head on a swivel and watch out for each other. 

2026 Game 1: Star Borg

 

Star Borg by Kyle Latino & JP Coovert

 

Some time around breakfast I decided the first game I ran in 2026 had to be a Star War. Don't ask me why. I'm not the biggest fan and I've tended to do a hard bounce off the rules for most tabletop editions - and yet I wanted to run a Star War. I think there's just something about the setting that fundamentally appeals: an evil authority to rebel against, faceless goons you don't need to negotiate with, crime bosses who keep monsters for pets, etc.  

I've always kept Hack Wars in my back pocket in case of this specific emergency but I'll be real with you: the more time goes on the lazier I become as a game master. I want short rule books, and I want to do as little work possible to get a game running for my friends. Without a random table to generate an adventure or some enemy examples, Hack Wars was not going to do the trick. One quick Youtube search later and I stumbled across a great video by JP Coovert about his game, Star Borg.

This felt like algorithmic synchronicity. Far too often videos about tabletop games are either "reviews" by someone who hasn't even run the game or multipart, multihour actual plays I'm absolutely not going to watch. So to find a creator showcasing their game and how it can be used to get a session running? *Chefs Kiss*

That video was all I needed to see to be convinced to purchase and run a session of Star Borg using its starter adventure The Legion's Foil. 

It's a simple system: 1d20 + ability score to beat a Difficulty Rating (DR) for most skill and combat tests. 12 is Normal difficulty. I didn't use a single DR over 15 for the session and that felt fine, my players failed enough to keep things dangerous and interesting. 

The quick and dirty of this adventure: The Not-Empire has been mucking about with planet scale teleportation. Our Rebel heroes must infiltrate their lab that been zapped across the galaxy into a binary star system. 

My players came through with a fun group of Rebels: Aster! Jaded smuggler, searching for lost Rebel twin brother. Snarl! Grizzled not-Wookie who just wants to retire to a moisture farm. And KN! The amoral trash compactor bot that somehow ended up being the party face.

Things were pretty urgent for our group from the start. Aster learned from their info-broker, Boomer, that her twin brother Sammie had been sent on a recon mission to the Legion base on Nemus 4 they were attempting to infiltrate before he was declared MIA. But a recent signal from that same base - somehow 10 parsecs from where it should be - gave them hope he might still be alive. 

Thanks to some very bad rolls, our hero's and their ship, The Aluminum Hawk, had a hard time making it through the debris field surrounding Nemus 4. It was full of corpses and buildings that had become dislodged from the planet. One ship disabling crash-landing later, they were infiltrating the Legion base. 

Here is where Legion's Foil really shines as a starter adventure: there are some great NPCs and enemies to encounter in the ruined base. My players pistol-whipped and data jacked a maintenance bot, played rodeo with a big space rhino and ended up in a Mexican standoff with a crew of space pirates who'd arrived to loot the base before they did. 

This all lead to a pretty fun negotiation between the party and the adventure's villain, Legion scientist Ado Thorsh. She needed the data they'd stolen on her quantum teleportation experiments. And the party wanted to secure the rescue of Aster's brother, Thorsh's prisoner and test subject. 

In a pretty heroic compromise, KN stuffs himself with explosives and agrees to be traded for Aster's brother as the rest of the party waits in the hangar bay. Sammie, all Jeff-Goldblum-in-The Fly'd, after being used as a teleportation test subject begs for a mercy kill. KN delivers it without a second thought before detonating himself in Ado Thorsh's lab. Aster and Snarl escape the base believing Thorsh killed her brother. 

Our mission ends with Snarl retiring to that moisture farm, Aster taking up her brother's mantle as a committed rebel, and the Rebel alliance getting a sterling recommendation to continue repurposing trash compactor bots for field missions. Also a post-credit tease of the sole surviving space pirate plotting revenge on Aster and Snarl. 

Overall Thoughts: As someone who is not really a fan of Mork Borg, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed running Star Borg. It's a breezy, readable package that gives you everything needed to generate some Star Wars style adventures. Light enough to use for a quick pick-up again, with enough options to run a campaign. 

I really love that every Rebel archetype gets a thing they are working towards when they are done fighting - if they make it to the end of the war that is. RIP KN5B.

This game pretty much checks all of my boxes: the mechanics were easy for me to learn, it was easy to run, my players were able to make their characters quickly. And most importantly, we got a ton of laughs out of the session. Not only was this a great first time run, but I think I would gladly add it to the table rotation.