Tabletop Scotland 2026

Our third year at Tabletop Scotland! In previous years we've attended all three days, this year we went for the Saturday only and wow: There's a lot to see when you only have a day to get round everything! Plus I was actually running a game this year so, really, we only had about half a day to find our favourite new games. So it was a very different vibe to previous years where we've taken our time to try and see everything, not been too fussed about a long wait for food or a queue for the toilets, etc. But we still managed to find some cool stuff!

Lo! Thy Dread Empire, by Tanya Floaker is a narrative wargame and tactical RPG with a killer tagline: "The Skeleton War against The Death Cult of Capitalism". The grimdark artwork by Julia Nevalainen is incredible and the text of the game is uncompromising, angry, and funny. When I picked up the book Tanya briefly explained to me that the game contains a ruleset that allows you to run large-scale pitched battle combats in your RPGs. It does contain this. It does a great job of this. But that's burying the lead. For me the juice of this book is the second half, detailing the Factions of the game's assumed setting in which Capitalism has progressed to its natural conclusion and literally destroyed every living thing, leaving only the dead to fight back. These are just excellent, and I love this book!

I also picked up the extremely cursed book Spine by Backwards Tabletop, which I've not delved into yet but really looking forward to. I honestly can't remember where I first heard about this game, it could have been the Yes Indie'd podcast, maybe Dice Exploder, maybe Bastionland, who knows? Maybe I've always known about it...

Natalie and I went in together on Elements of Power by Heartborn Studios. We bought Escape from Tibbles Tower from them last year, which was great fun, and had since picked up their Flippin' Dinosaurs game. Elements of Power is a skirmish game where each side takes control of 3 or 4 unique 'hero' type minis and battle it out. You can use any minis for it, but the starter box comes with its own, so I'm looking forward to painting them up and playing this with Natalie.

Also: I ran a game! This was my first time running a convention game, so I was a bit nervous in the couple of hours before. But I'd done plenty of prep, including subjecting my regular gaming group to a practice game (thank you so much again if any of you are reading this!), and I was really excited for the chance to run Mythic Bastionland again. 

About the game itself, there's some great advice on the Bastionland blog for running Mythic Bastionland one-shots but the myth I was most keen to run for this game was The Tournament: Which sees a Tinkerer turning up to challenge the Knights of the Realm against a company of clockwork Knights of his own creation. As written, the myth would see the knights being called back from their questing every so often to compete in the next round of The Tournament, which would work great in a longer game with several sessions, less so for the one-shot. So I decided to compress it down into a three-day event, add some more activities inspired by Old Man Lucy's Tournaments for Mythic Bastionland, add a bit of intrigue between the other competitors, and set the whole thing within the Tournament festival grounds. I was a little bit concerned that my players might be disappointed at being denied the full hex-crawling experience, and I would've argued that drama within Holdings is just as big a part of the game as wandering round the wilderness bumping into myths, but I didn't have to. They had a blast squaring off against the Clockwork Knights, sabotaging their shifty creator, and digging into the courtly drama. My players were great as well (thanks to any of you that might be reading!), none of them had played before so they were all excited to get into the role of their knights, and they engaged with the material generously. 

So overall the game went well and I was glad I gave running a convention game a go! I'd say something I'd encountered before when running Mythic Bastionland that I ran into again for this game is that I definitely struggle with the arithmetic of dealing damage between Guard and Vigour and subtracting Armour. It sounds simple but at the table I find it fiddly. I think my brain just prefers adding things than subtracting them, haha!

That's all for now, till next time!

Some Intentions for 2026

I'm not really one for New Year's Resolutions but I am one for the practise of goal setting. I try to set up my life so that time is spent doing the things I want to do. I've got a few streams of hobby activities on the go and balancing them all is a big challenge that I constantly struggle with (second only to the far greater challenge of finding and/or making time for hobbies at all). So in this post I'm just going to lay out some things I want to do:

Tabletop/RPGs

• Keep the local groups going
• Schedule more ad-hoc tabletop games
• Learn a new game
• Keep developing Legends of Alba
• Put something on itch.io (for free/pay what you want)
• Run a game at Tabletop Scotland

Writing

• Get back into The Writing Habit
• Blog weekly
• Submit a portfolio to Uni of Glasgow

Mini-Painting

• Clear WIP
• Paint a Frostgrave warband
• Paint my Rascaltown Goblin
• Paint Krethusa

So that's step one: Intentions set. As with most things in life any plan is better than no plan and this is a sort of a plan. While I'm writing these here in part for some accountability - it'll be interesting (hopefully!) to look back on this post at the end of year and see how things have held up - I'm also very much just laying out my thoughts as they sit in my head just now. There's a good chance I've forgotten something important. There's a good chance one or more of the things above won't seem important a few weeks from now. So another intention is that I don't want to give myself too hard a time if things don't work out or my intentions change. We'll see how we go and try to have fun because that's what hobbies are for.

Till next time!

Tabletop Scotland 2025

Our second year attending Tabletop Scotland and a fantastic time was had!

I got a sneaky peak at a preview copy of Carved in Stone, the upcoming Pictish source book from Stout Stoat. I've been following this project since 2021 so to see it this close to it's release in November was really exciting as it's been a big inspiration for Legends of Alba! 

My wife got a full colour drawing of her Legends of Alba character, Mitha Seawolf, done by Tanya Roberts at Blue Bottle Ink. Tanya was there all weekend doing drawn to order commissions! Lovely person to have met and her work is awesome!

Between us we came away with a bunch of new games and books, here are my highlights: 

Doomsong by Caesar Ink - God is dead, the apocalypse looms! This one drew me in with it's grim line art, Mordew vibes and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style character creation system. I've had a chance to try out the character creator and can confirm it's great fun! The book actually includes sheet music for the Doomsong, or you can sing the other doom song.

 

Goblin Country by Biscuit Fund Games - GM-less, diceless RPG where you play as the Goblin camp plotting against the human settlements for a change! Character Creation is a playbook style, with representing a goblin archetype characterised by a set of Weak Moves (unhelpful action
s you can perform to gain 'tokens') and Strong Moves (helpful actions you can perform which require and use 'tokens'). Really like this as a design space to explore!

Rising Star Championship Edition 2025 by Dog Petrol - this was a bit of a gamble to try out something a bit different! It's a co-operative RPG where players help a rising sports star achieve their goals. So you might play as the star, or their coach, or their number one fan. The catch is that you each take turns playing as the Heel - their rival trying to mess everything up! It's a small book but it's got some really helpful examples, and great random tables for prompts, including some for making up your own weird sport! A great candidate for a one-shot if ever I saw one! 

Tabletop Scotland is such a great event that we'll definitely be back next year. I said it last year and missed the boat but I'm also going to try and be more organised this time round as well to get myself signed up for running something! We'll see how that goes!

Till next time!

Tabletop Scotland 2024

I went to Tabletop Scotland at the weekend and it was awesome! This was my first time attending and I was blown away by how much there was to see, and the positive atmosphere and enthusiasm that seemed to energise the whole event. I felt like I could have happily drifted around the makers’ stalls talking to the artists, writers, designers and crafters there about their cool stuff indefinitely.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the abundance of indie RPGs on show. It was hard not to have ideas sparking off in my head about games I JUST CAN’T WAIT to run, harder still not to just spend ALL OF THE MONEY on weird little books and new games. I did spend more than I planned but have zero regrets and wanted to highlight a few standout faves:

"Odd Jobs" by Macguffin & Company

Macguffin & Co. was the first stall I stopped at and although I didn’t realise it at the time I’m 90% sure the person I spoke to was Jonathan Sims, whose voice I’ve listened to for hours on the excellent audio drama The Magnus Archives. He made a great pitch for their book Odd Jobs, which is a collection of RPG Micro Settings. These are intended for running short campaigns and are system agnostic, which is not something I’ve seen much of. I was really impressed by the diversity and imagination in the settings themselves, and looking forward to running one of these as a break from my regular games.

"For Small Creatures Such as We" by Blackwell Games

I was keen to check out Blackwell Games after seeing Anna Blackwell speaking about Fantasy & Folklore in games at one of the panel discussions. When I got to their stall there was a copy of For Small Creatures Such as We, open at this page:

One does not simply walk away from space otter.

Sold! This is a solo/co-op sci-fi game where you play the Captain of a spaceship and travel around the galaxy doing jobs to get paid and have adventures. There’s a big emphasis on customising your ship and hiring your alien crew as well, so my partner and I are really excited to play this one together and see where it leads us.

"Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland" by Handiwork Games

My favourite discovery from the convention. I’d not even heard of Handiwork Games and it turns out they are based in Falkirk, which is actually where we were staying over the Tabletop weekend! I was hooked by the mixed media cover-art (which reminded me a bit of Dave Mckean’s Dust Covers), and reeled in by the title. This is a game in which you play witches in the mesolithic era, travelling through true wilderness between primitive settlements, helping the communities there and banishing dark spirits. It’s a rules-lite, story-focussed game and the vibe is very much in the same wheelhouse as my version of Hags in Legends of Alba. It’s exactly what I want to see in a game about witches: Exploring a vision of the witch as a healer, a sage, a wise woman with a strong voice in the community. I couldn’t wait to get this one home to start reading, and cracked it open on the tram back into Edinburgh from the venue. Aside from the game itself there are also really interesting stories about its artwork, and the inspiration for its setting. This book really is something special.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list of the games I fell in love with at Tabletop Scotland, and not even close to a list about everything I enjoyed at the convention, but it is all I have time to say with this post. I’m already excited for next year’s event and who knows? Maybe I’ll have something to run or show off for Legends of Alba by then! 

Till next time!