My Personal 2025 Retrospective
Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #21📜 TTRPGs, Creativity, Music & Video Games
Welcome to Sleepdrifter’s newsletter, now coming to you every other Friday.
Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons.
I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
First of all: Happy New Year everyone, and may all of your wishes come true!
I wish you all good health, and peace of mind despite those very troubled times.
This year was my very first year on Substack. I started this adventure with a weekly newsletter at the end of March, and it slowly moved into an every other week posting. Sometimes it’s hard to follow, because I don’t have much to say or I don’t have the time or the energy, but I managed to keep it up for the whole year anyway.
This is a great moment to take some time to thank you all for reading what I wrote and to interact in such benevolent ways on this social network. This is always a pleasure!
Now that this new year has started, I will continue on that rhythm. Oh, for sure I will miss some deadlines, but at least I keep things going on.
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| My humble itch.io relesead |
In terms of personal TTRPG releases this year, I managed to keep it like 2024: 3 new projects on itch. That is not a lot, considering the tiny size of 2 of them, but it was fun to make, and I love to make new projects.
Here is what I released in 2025:
Lost In A Forest, on the 18th of January, almost a full year now! It’s a nano-TTRPG made for the 36 Words RPG Jam. It’s the size of a business card, and enough to play a full one-shot with it.
Breakless, on the 4th of July. My biggest project in terms of size, as it is a 30 pages zine. It’s an adventure made for the Breathless game by Fari RPG. You play prisoners in a zombie outbreak, trying to escape the prison. The whole prison is mapped and keyed with things for each room.
Weak, Lost & Alone, on the 16th of August. It’s kind of a board game rather than a TTRPG. It’s a solo game where you play a Homo Sapiens during the Pleistocene era. Your goal is to find your tribe, but you are chased by something. It was my first time trying to make such a game, with a prettier layout than my previous work (I suck at this).
This year is also the moment when one of my games hit the 10k+ downloads! I’m super happy about it! The game is GrimRogue, you can learn more about it here.
I have a lot of other projects that I’m (slowly) working on, such as my Gévaudan setting. I hope I’ll finish it this year! There’s also a one-shot on that setting, made for Cairn 1E, that I’m working on, to help me find the correct mood of the whole game.
I’m also envisioning a Mothership solo procedure, as I previously spoke about here.
I have played a lot of TTRPG this year.
The main one that I’m happy I started is OD&D with Chainmail (I already made a big post about it). This game is fun, and it is a real pleasure to dive into how the whole TTRPG hobby was created. I need to continue to play it, and I’m also looking forward to Castle Grief’s Lordes, which is a setting for OD&D.
My SO is currently working on properly binding the 3 LBBs (among all of my zines), as she learned professional book binding at school, and as she bought all the stuff needed for that last week!
At the very beginning of 2025 (the 1st of January exactly), I started Mothership as a GM for my players, it was a ton of fun! And, at the very end of 2025, I started playing it solo, which is different but awesome with an unmatched vibe.
I’ve also solo played Rogueland, a very simple to learn OSR, along with Hexroll and also Barbarian Prince. I’ve been part of a The One Ring campaign, as a player. I have learned but not played D&D BECMI (the 1983 edition). I have tried Four Against Darkness, and I just started to learn Cairn 1E and Cairn 2E that I got for Christmas.
So, there are a ton of great games to continue to play, and more to start.
In 2026, I will receive Shadowdark, Castle Grief’s Arathi Sector, maybe Patrick Buechner (The Soloist)’s Solo Borg and I want to start a new Kal-Arath solo campaign while using all of the new zines that the community created for this amazing game.
I also wished to come back to GMing, but my players have moved far away and I prefer playing around a real table.
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| A Roguelite Zombie Shooter game I started a while ago (ultra mega alpha prototype) |
In terms of games, there’s another hobby I am into: video games. I speak a lot about it, I watch tons of game design videos, and play a huge amount of games a year (from very very old games, to the last ones).
This year, I will try to note every game I play for more than an hour or two (sometimes I quickly try games and move on). I just modded my 3DS, to be able to play any 3DS game (even if I already own a physical version of the biggest hits of the console) and DS games. I also got an Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini for Christmas. This is a handheld console made for emulation and retrogaming. So now, I can play even more games! We’re only 2 weeks into 2026 and I already played 6 games, and tried many more.
If you read my newsletter, you also know that I love game programming, mostly on Godot. I still continue my project(s), but as usual, slowly. I’ve learned a ton on Godot this year, and I’m feeling quite confident with this engine now. I’ve also learned Pico 8, even if I need way more practising with it. I would love to release a game this year, even a tiny one.
This year was also special because I almost didn’t compose any music. Since I was a teen, composing music and playing in bands was the most important thing for me. But as I grow older, the whole “music community” feels pretty awkward to me. There is no real benevolent interaction, only interested sharing, greedy people or people that only want to work or share the scene with their close friends. For sure, there’s some worse scenes than others, but even the better ones are filled with pretentious people thinking their music is better than others.
That’s why, when you release albums, you felt like no one listened to it, and that no one wanted to listen to it. You put all of your effort and soul into something that no one cares about.
When I stumbled upon the TTRPG niche, and the solo one to be precise, it was the total opposite. Benevolent people sharing cool stuff with you, encouraging you to create, make and release projects, without any pretentious things such as “No, only OD&D matters” (oh wait, they exist… but they are a minority). It was a true breath of fresh air.
I haven’t quit music though: I joined a Surf Rock band as the bass player, and we played some shows. It was awesome, playing shows is one of the things I prefer in the whole world.
Otherwise, I still play a lot of music. In recent years, I was into playing piano, synths and electric guitars, 2025 was more around bass and folk/acoustic guitars. I’ve spent a lot of time improving my fingerpicking style, playing what we call the American Primitive folk genre, like amazing guitarists such as Robbie Basho or John Fahey played. I would love to release something with that kind of sound, but I’m stuck in a “recording paralysis” loop…
I’ve also seen some concerts, despite being a “small” year of shows for me, I’ve been to 8 events and 6 music festivals, for a total of 51 bands (including some I’ve seen twice or more in the year). All of my favorite shows of the year were Shoegaze bands: A Place To Bury Strangers, Opinion and Slowdive.
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| Me playing WhiteBox FMAG + Sandbox Generator in the VAN “Living room” (also turbo mega work in progress). We were around 2000m high (6561 feet). |
2025 was also the year when I realized one of my dreams: getting a converted van. It was a goal of mine for more than 10 years now, that has grown even stronger the last couple of years. I had the opportunity to buy one, so I did it.
Some work was already done in it (A part of the thermal insulation, the whole wood paneling, some storages, the whole electricity system (with solar panels) and the water system). A good start!
With my SO, we crafted the bed, the kitchen with a sink, brought chemical toilets and added more thermal insulation. We then left for a 2 and a half weeks road trip into the French Alps and spent some weekend cruising around.
2026 will have a lot more to do and we have a lot of ideas to improve it. I can’t wait to make it more functional and cozier!
This was a busy year and 2026 already looks busier than ever.
I hope great things will come from all of those hobbies.
Once again: thanks to all of you! ❤️
That’s it for the week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned here 😀See you!
Cheers !
Sleepdrifter
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