2025 – Page 4 – PopCult Reviews

31 Days of Character Creation #26 – Spire, The City Must Fall

I saw the compelling review of this game on the YouTube Channel Quinn’s Quest and it made me want to play it at some point. If you haven’t seen Quinn’s Quest it is one of the best produced tabletop RPG review channels I’ve ever seen. Watching his videos introduced me to this and The Wildsea and also helped me know a game like Lancer wasn’t for my particular tastes. Spire is a game where the characters are Drow in a vertical city ruled by tyrants. The player characters are intent on bring this power structure down.

31 Days of Character Creation #25 – Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds is a game I’ve known about for over a decade, but just have never sat down to play. In solo tabletop RPG circles, I see it being written about often and decided to go through character creation to get a feel for the system. Savage Worlds doesn’t have an official setting, but many creators have made settings that add elements to character creation.

31 Days of Character Creation #24 – G.I. Joe

Ironically, I was a huge G.I. Joe fan as a kid. Jump to 43 and I think the U.S. military is one of the most evil institutions on the planet. Life is funny that way. I decided to make a character for the G.I. Joe, but with my take. I wanted this to be G.I. Joe as if it was continuing on in 2025 after being started in the 1960s. In this political climate things are not so black & white.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Everspark Part Two

Read the first part of this actual play here.

I decided there were a lot of pieces generated in my last session, so I needed to sit down and flesh them out a little more to have a sense of what has happened so far and the kind of immediate situation I would be dropped into.

For our adventure I had generated this sentence:
Qazid Icebreath wants to conquer the Crown of Titans, located in the Whispering Mountains. I must explore The Goblin Kingdom of Murkspire for a solution, otherwise Icebreath will assume control of all the colossal beasts in the land.

PopCult Podcast – The End/Queer

A group of post-apocalyptic survivors live underground and sing about their feelings. A heroin addicted writer hanging out in 1950s Mexico develops intense feelings for a handsome younger man.

31 Days of Character Creation #19 – Death in Space

So I had a different ttrpg in mind for this day, but when I sat down and started working through it I found the character creation rules to be very poorly laid out and communicated. I think being a primary school teacher for over ten years has left me always looking for streamlined, visual, easy to comprehend tabletop systems. There are a lot of people who play and ttrpgs in the sciences or other technical fields and they often make their games in a way that makes sense to them, but not to someone new. As a teacher, my brain is always thinking about how that new person can be caught up easily.

Farewell, David

On 16 Jan, 2025 we lost one of the greatest artists of my lifetime, David Lynch. I have said a lot about this man before on my blog. You know I admire him immensely. I can safely say no other artist on this planet has had a greater impact on shaping my personal tastes & sensibilities as David did. In reading & watching his thoughts on creativity I learned a lot about the work it takes to shape that initial idea.

31 Days of Character Creation #17 – Black Sword Hack

The dark fantasy world is one I haven’t really explored in any medium, but have always been curious about. Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Robert E. Howard are names I’ve known since I was a kid thumbing through genre-related magazines like Wizard, Starlog, and Fangoria. But I’ve never read a word of their work. In 2025, I’m hoping to sample at least one of those writers. They certainly have fans as evidenced by Black Sword Hack, an OSR game that seeks to recreate the tone of these stories.

31 Days of Character Creation #16 – Vaesen

Today’s game is a Norwegian tabletop RPG and I don’t think many people know that Norway has a quite robust ttrpg and larping community. Years I ago I remember reading an article about Norwegian roleplay and learning about a complex Mad Men-inspired LARP someone there designed. So they are doing things a little differently than the most popular games in the States.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Everspark Part One

You can purchase Everspark here.

I was planning on playing a different game. I had read through it. Then I sat down to play. I quickly became overwhelmed by how many resources and other things needed to be tracked. What made it worse was that the game did not have a single page that outlined the game loop. Rules were spread across 140 pages in a PDF that had not been bookmarked or indexed fully. After trying for an hour, I realized I wasn’t having fun, which defeats the purpose of playing any tabletop RPG, solo or with a group. I tossed it away. I pivoted to one of my favorite creators, Cezar Capacle, who authored two of my favorite RPG things from 2024: Random Realities and Against the Wind. That game is the one Capacle is currently raising funds for, Everspark.