In the beginning, there was the Mythic Game Emulator. And it was good. (And can be found here!)
Since I had been playing independent Solo RPGs for a while, I decided in September of 2025 that I was going to use the Mythic GME to play Torg Eternity by Ulisses Spiele, a cinematic adventure about normal people being empowered to save humanity. September of 2025 was… not the best time to want to save Humanity.
I decided to try again, this time with something sarcastic and more reflective of the modern day, which is to say Paranoia by Mongoose Publishing. That started off strong, but… and I want to say that the nihilism got me down, but actually I felt like I had gone too far into writing a story and wasn’t actually playing a roleplaying game.
But, more than that, I needed to take a break from streaming for a bit because November and December are when the rapid pressure changes in the Pacific Northwest. Besides, my XCrawl game was going to go on hiatus because December meant two of my team are getting extra work hours on the weekend… So I stepped away from solo rpgs and my stream for a bit, to relax, reprocess, and, then in January, start fresh with a changed attitude.
Change is never guaranteed to be a good thing.
On New Years day, we found my wife’s dog sleeping near his water bowl, desperately panting. This was something we were prepared for but that didn’t mean we were ready. My Tyrion passed in July but we had lost him way back in December when he effectively had a stroke, and from there suffered from dementia… In a way, it was a relief.
On New Year’s eve, Chester had been bright eyed and healthy.
And when you combine our loss with the state of America in January 2026, I have not had more than a handful of days where I wasn’t experiencing grief.
When you have sadness in the now, nostalgia tends to take over.
In 2019, I finally found the perfect game for my best friend and my wife – Pugmire, by Onyx Path Publishing. This was perfect for them because instead of creating a character and trying to figure out how they’d react, they’d reference the origin on the character. My wife played Chester, a Companion breed Guardian (appropriate for a pomeranian) and our friend played Krypto, a Herder breed Hunter (note that in the Pathfinder game he joined me for, he ended up as a Halfling Ranger, and compared to the Corgi Hunter… not a huge change.) But 2019 wasn’t the best time to start an in-person game and it would be a year before I’d figure out that you can play games online.
Losing Chester made me remember Pugmire very fondly. So, this year, in addition to showing off brilliant games by independent creators, I’m going to give my surviving dog – Mister Coal Butler – an adventure set millenia after Mankind abandoned Earth, leaving it to the Uplifted animals. Maybe he’ll find an Artifact from the times of Man, and can restore his Family Name to the Nobility of Pugmire. Maybe he’ll find a plot from the cruel rats from the Cult of Labor’tor and prevent it. Maybe he’ll just stumble stupidly through the world and just deal with the randomness of the world.
We’ll just have to see.
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