Come one, come all, to the strangest time of the year! Join me here in the dead zone before Christmas and New Year’s, and let’s talk about how 2025 went. 2025 was a rough year, to be honest, mostly having to do with a lot of not-RPG things. Some of that did bleed over into the RPG world as well. Tariffs have made physical games more expensive to produce and buy, and generative AI continues to drag down the quality of games being produced.

I've organized five itch.io bundles. Four of them have already happened, and one of them is still live for a few more hours. Here are links to all of them1:

“Something very bad happened to you a very long time ago: you died and it hurt. You’re cursed. You’re still here and you couldn’t just stay dead. You’re definitely not in heaven, but there’s a pretty good chance this could be hell. Your heart has basically stopped. You don’t need to eat. Your skin is clammy. Your touch is cold as ice. You have to remember to breathe, to blink, to smile. Those are things people do? Right? It’ll be alright. Everything will be okay. You can get it together. You just have to find the right place and the right people and it will all work out. There are other dead people just like you. They’re suffering in just the same way you are. The quickest way to forget is blood: someone else’s blood. Your touch won’t be as cold as ice after you drink another person dry. You’ll feel a little more human. Your heart will beat like it’s meant to. Take a sip. Cut loose. It’ll be alright. When you’re in the moment, you can almost remember what it meant to feel alive.” - The introduction to Paint The Town Red