26.Q1 Hobby Update

Despite being rather busy with work, the first few months of 2026 ended up being surprisingly fruitful on the hobby front.

Role-playing games

• I ran a very successful Ghastly Affair one-shot for three players. The story was set in and around a lighthouse. The party and the ship's crew took shelter there during a particularly severe storm. The mysteries uncovered included espionage (concerning the French involvement in the American War of Independence), an evil twin murdering and taking the place of his brother, and a first mate accelerating his ascent to captaincy during the storm (and then trying to kill the cabin boy who witnessed his crime). Nothing supernatural was going on (aside from the strange storm that relented only when the culprits were apprehended), which is a twist I always wanted to try.
• I played in Narmor's birthday dungeon crawl using Kard és Mágia 2nd edition. Of course, my character died because of a failed saving throw (I think it's become a pattern by now), but getting another one up and running is as quick as a toilet break.
• We finally continued our Lancer campaign (on hiatus since last June!) and already had four sessions this year—good stuff. The characters are level 5, so we've finally arrived at Tier 2. The campaign is concerned with a kind of civil war where one side is backed by the Union. Also, the opposing side is keeping up technologically, probably due to experimental technology the party uncovered at a SecCom-era black site close by.
• We also created characters and played through a "tutorial" mission in Mythic Space. The system is simple and straightforward, and the character variety is really good. I'm quite eager to continue, but so much has been going on in terms of family stuff and my day job that it's been really hard to schedule a session.

Board games

• Late last year's surprise hits were Poetry for Neanderthals and A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and we had a few more plays of both in January and February.
• Two new titles I tried were Onoda and Vantage. Onoda is a push-your-luck area movement game with a very unique (and controversial) theme. Vantage is an interesting card-based adventure game where you crash land on an alien planet. What I really love about it is that it's not a campaign game, and it's very easy to set up, play a game, and put it away. It's playable with up to six players, and I'm a little curious about how that works out, but I have a strong hunch it's actually best played solitaire.
• We played a few staples in our group, like Mysterium, Deception, and 6 nimmt!, too.

Gamebooks

• Adventuregame Comics #1 Leviathan is an interactive comic book resembling a point-and-click adventure game in print. It's not super deep as far as interactive fiction goes, and there are no real game mechanics either, but it's a pretty fun experience.
• It'll be a few more years until my niece is ready for gamebooks, but I wanted to assemble a collection in advance. Werewolf Wood is the first one I picked up. It's not super difficult and pulls its punches early on, but you can definitely lose it (and get eaten by a werewolf). I'm not entirely happy with all endings (some of them raising more questions than answering them), but it could be a decent first gamebook for an 8-year-old.
• I was also playtesting A Midwinter Journey. I wasn't as active as I wanted to be (thanks to increased demands from work and family life), but I'm eager to jump back in once it's released for good.

Wargames

• We played a game of Ruthless over Roll20. It's a solid, lightweight system, although I think I still prefer Dracula's America (even without the supernatural elements). I'm not really into the western genre, but there's something very appealing about western miniatures and MDF terrain. I can easily see myself building a small collection for it down the line.
• I've ordered a bunch of Stargrave boxes to play Five Parsecs from Home, Techno-Fantasy Adventure, and Shoot People in Space. I already have a small collection of 40k figures (orks, eldars, space marines, and imperial guardsmen), but I'm lacking more grounded, civilian-style figures.
• I've been reading the rules for Lock 'n Load Tactical: Day of Heroes. I can't wait to get it on the table. I also received my copy of Men of Iron Tri-Pack!

Video games

• I'm keeping a closer eye on my video game time this year as well. I have mostly been playing some new titles these last few months (well, new to me).
• Is This Seat Taken? is a cozy puzzle game in which you try to arrange the seating of a number of people in a space (such as a bus, a train, a wedding, a concert, etc.), while adhering to their constraints (e.g. Alice must sit next to Bob, but Bob doesn't like being close to the speakers, and so on). It's been good fun playing it before bed after a long day.
• The King Is Watching is a base-building auto-battler. I found the whole attention mechanic interesting at first (basically, only buildings under the king's eye are functioning at any given moment), but I got bored with it fairly quickly, to be honest.
• Metal Slug Tactics, unlike the previous Metal Slug titles, is a grid-based tactical game with roguelite elements. The central mechanic is Evade, which reduces incoming damage by a set amount, and you gain it by moving as far away from your starting position as you can. So even though it's a turn-based tactical game, it almost feels like a fast-playing FPS with all your guys whizzing about the map.
• Warriors of the Nile 2 surprised me in the best way possible. It's another grid-based tactical roguelite, this time with a vaguely Egyptian theme. Despite being fairly constrained, I found myself hooked longer than expected as I figured out some of the insane combos you can put together.

All in all, it's been a busy first quarter. Hopefully, I'll get to play at least as much in the next coming months as well. I'm particularly looking forward to our Lancer and Mythic Space campaigns and getting Day of Heroes and Men of Iron to the table.

What about you lot? What have you been playing lately?

WH40k-like RPGs

Disclaimer: Note that some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you or the publisher).

There have been a number of official Warhammer 40,000 RPGs over the years:

• The original Rogue Trader was halfway between a skirmish game and an RPG.
• Inquisitor was a skirmish game that zoomed in on the action. It required only a handful of models, and the combat mechanics were way more detailed than other wargames (and much closer to an RPG).
• Black Industries and later Fantasy Flight Games released a number of d100-based games with similar mechanics, each focusing on a different aspect of the setting:
• Dark Heresy and Dark Heresy 2nd edition (inquisitorial acolytes)
• Rogue Trader (rogue traders and their retinue)
• Deathwatch (space marines)
• Black Crusade (followers of Chaos)
• Only War (imperial guardsmen)
• Cubicle 7 publishes Wrath & Glory (originally by Ulisses Spiele), a d6 dice pool system that can handle various power levels, from lowly hive scum to mighty space marines.
• Imperium Maledictum is the latest offering by Cubicle 7. It's similar to Dark Heresy in the sense that characters are Imperial agents for a patron (although it doesn't have to be an Inquisitor). Mechanically, it uses a streamlined d100 system.

However, what if you don't want to use any of the official games? What if you're looking for pastiche?

The Kaos Rules adapt WFRP 1E to the 40k universe. It's entirely unofficial, of course, and you need to have access to the 1st edition rulebook. It comes with lots of detail regarding the sprawling 40k universe (and a bunch of useful stat blocks).

I feel like mechanically the BRP system is closest to the Warhammer RPG system, not just because of the d100-based resolution system, but also because of its grittiness. It's no wonder you can find an unofficial BRP conversion of 40k. You can find the PDF over at BRP Central (along with some extra creature stat blocks), or you can read the whole text on the author's blog.

There's also another game in development that began as a Mythras-based 40k adaptation (called Mythammer 40,000), but it's now become its own thing known as O MYTHODES AKMON. You can still find it on the Mythras Discord server.

There are two further d100-based free games I know of that are 40k-adjacent, both by the same designer, David Johansen. The first is Blood Red Future, which is a space opera game set in a setting otherwise reminiscent of 40k. The second is Darker and Grimmer, which describes itself as a futuristic medieval fantasy game. Both are excellent little games, if unfinished, illustrated by the author.

Outlaw Merchant is an add-on to Electric Bastionland to play in the 40k universe. It's written by Milton from The Last Redoubt, one of my favourites of the lesser known blogs. It uses a similar framework to Dark Heresy: the characters are acolytes of an inquisitor and conduct investigations into heresy, going for the more personal and human-scale aspects of 40k instead of big space marines.

RoosterEma shared a hack/mod of Blades in the Dark back in the G+ days called Blades of the Inquisition. It's not a complete game in and of itself but just a reworking of Dark Heresy's career types into the BitD framework.

Warp Cult, in contrast, allows you play cultists: heretics who fight against the Empire's oppression and injustice. It uses a detailed d6 dice pool system. It assumes (or the very least encourages) the use of miniatures unlike most other games on this list.

Warpstar! is a d20-based faux-40k game by Greg Saunders of Fire Ruby Designs. It's a sister game to Warlock! (which I reviewed here) and uses much of the same mechanics, but whereas Warlock! takes its inspiration from early WFRP, Warpstar! tries to reimagine the early days of 40k as an adventure game. It's even got a few supplements (although not as many as Warlock!).

3:16 Carnage Among the Stars is generally more like Starship Troopers, but it wouldn't be too hard to reimagine the player characters as members of the Imperial Guard and the enemies as the various alien threats to the Empire.

Necropolis 2350 (for Savage Worlds) is another game that hews a bit close to 40k; this time it's the religious crusade against demons in a dystopian world (although it lacks the interstellar grandiosity of "proper" 40k).

Of course, no list would be complete without Mutant Chronicles, which is another gothic dark space fantasy game (this time limited to our solar system). Sadly, neither the amazing 2nd edition nor the 2d20-powered 3rd edition are in print.

Last but not least, there's Renegade Scout, which is kind of a retro-clone of Rogue Trader by Ivan Sørensen. The game's implied setting is the same Unified Space as seen in some of Ivan's games (such as Five Parsecs from Home and Unity Field Agent), but it's very easy to substitute it with 40k as you can essentially take any RT stat block and match the values with those of RS one-to-one (except for point values).