Thanksgiving 2025

It’s not yet Thursday here, but tomorrow should be busy, so it was either today or Friday to post something.

Why is tomorrow busier than in previous years?  I’m around a lot more family than I was in California.

I have a Turkey Trot tomorrow for the first time ever because that’s something family out here does.  I’ve been out here for Thanksgiving before, but not that many times.

Before getting to gaming, because that’s what I’m supposed to blog about, let me go over a few things to be thankful for.

I have shelter, food, safety, transportation, entertainment, and the opportunity to spend time around family.  Things aren’t perfect, not even close.  But, I’ve been rather fortunate in life, where we can see the struggles so many go through.  There are levels of terribleness, and it’s not my intent to go into much more of this, but just consider how many people have lost homes who were leading relatively comfortable lives in recent years.  Just today, news of the Hong Kong fire, which reminds us of the SoCal fires and, especially for this former Californian, the NorCal fires.

I’m grateful for friends.  People who have provided various things with the most important being people to socialize with.

Gaming has been my predominant form of socializing since getting out of high school.

I’m struggling to spew geniusness about gaming.  Virtual True Dungeon in November was something I was going to post about, but I couldn’t generate enough fuego to even say, “It was a good dungeon, with great visuals.  The puzzles were more interesting than usual as two out of three were harder and not incomprehensible.”

I’m playing Dominions 6, Gloomhaven with two different groups, have the rare supers RPG session, have regular John Carter sessions, finally ended Spring in Naishou Province and begun Summer with a session that involved a mujina that wasn’t excruciating for me to run or for the players to play.

I tried to think of themes based off of various gaming sessions.  Themes that might be at least somewhat different.

I should probably try to gather my thoughts on mysteries as I’m exposed to a lot of mystery shows out here – Midsomer, Death in Paradise, etc.  I think Naishou Province should be mostly about mysteries as there aren’t clear antagonists and how do you discover things unless they are mysterious to begin with?

I could post about stat blocks as I do come up with some for Naishou Province.  PCs took out a Soultwister and two Ravagers, though those statblocks aren’t going to be as interesting as ones I come up with for NPCs.

I can’t say much about CCGs as I’m not playing anything, though I do plan on playing some VTES next month.

I haven’t tried to play any more mahjong.  I did get a deck of cards since I don’t know where my others are so that I could do some relaxing solitaire while having the TV on.  Haven’t created any new solitaire variants, just been doing the usual ones.

Finally started going through TD tokens for mulching and for posting for sale/trade, though hardly doing it as fast as one should.  Still can’t find a rather important bag.  Can only access stuff right inside door of my storage unit.  So, I can get at a lot of L5R 4e books, but I can’t really search for stuff as the many boxes of books crush each other.

Could try to speak to politics, game politics, and how I view it in D6.  But, I’m still a neophyte, where not much more to say than I view things seemingly more fluid than other players do.  I do keep learning details.  Like, I just paid attention to supply points for the first time recently, though there’s no reason for me to do so in current game as my commanders almost all give supply bonuses.  I suspect I’ll play some nation in another game and suddenly have units dying from lack of food because supply actually mattered in such games.

I’m not looking to get more RPGs or more campaigns going.  Have had a lot of scheduling issues with doing the ones I’m already in.

Should at some point speak more to how I do research for running RPG campaigns.  Been using AI to get info on things like Japanese swamp herbs and fish for verisimilitude that my players don’t need nor care much about even if one of them is a biologist.

Was going to have a gameday this Friday, but it got cancelled.  So much gaming getting cancelled due to scheduling conflicts or illness or whatever.  I was going to run Naishou Saturday and had two thirds of my players feel ill.

I should get around to ordering VTES cards.  In theory, could even get new stuff before I plan on playing next.  Have so little enthusiasm for building decks – makes such a difference when expect to play regularly.

I could complain about crossword puzzles as my father now prints the New York Times ones out for me in addition to sudoku.  Gaming adjacent where I’m sure there are tortured analogies around “you either know it or you don’t” or “logic in RPGs is not logic in life” or whatever.

Yeah, I’m rambling.  I’m grateful that I can get away with it as much as I do.  Oh, sure, not a ton of people read these, but I say similar things in conversations with players.

I suppose can’t think of a whole lot more to say – again, my level of concentration is very different than it used to be.  In theory, I’ll have something more substantial before the year ends.