Week 18 of 2026: five RPGs

On Monday, it was Kingsday, but I don’t really appreciate that. As long as the majority of Dutch people want a king I have nothing against it, and this seems to still be the case, so that part is fine enough, but to me it really comes across as straight pride, so I rather stay inside. I didn’t: I visited my dad, who for health reasons doesn’t come outside, and went for a run after.

The rest of the week I played lots of RPGs.

Read

• continued in Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of ADD by Gabor Maté
• finished in Game Changer by Rachel Reid

I’m not sure if Game Changer is a book you are supposed to cry over, and I cried over parts that were certainly meant to be romantic, but hey, here we are. Cute book, would recommend.

Played

The title already says it: I played five RPGs this week. To put it differently: there were two days this week where I did not play an RPG, and one of them was Kingsday. Maybe I am overdoing it.

On Tuesday I played Mausritter again. This was the tenth episode and I’ve been writing a follow-up blog about how I run this campaign, so stay tuned for that. I am happy to report I found my groove in this one again. It was a nice balance between building out the lore of the world and some old school adventure in a fox den.

On Wednesday, I had proposed The King is Dead, but cancelled my session due to lack of sign-ups, and also because The Quiet Year got posted, a map-making story game that I’ve been wanting to play for a while now. It was a bit chaotic with the 5+1 players that signed up, but we got an interesting map and story out of it, full of electric eels, ancient coins and poisonous swamp gasses.

On Friday, we played our first real session of Pasión de las Pasiones. Last week I tried playing this game with another group of people, but we just made it into a social evening. This group, however, is more serious about the game, so we did play. The game itself was not at all serious, as expected. Our beauty confronted the plastic surgeon of our hotel with the fact that they signed a five-year contract, but she wanted out of it now that she also declined his prior marriage proposal, and this all resulted in quite a scene. We had a lot of fun.

On Saturday, I played in the open table Under Hallow Hills for the third time. This was the fourth session and I was the only returning character, but I am also the most returning character, having deliberately missed the previous session to not be there every episode. I love the structure and the vibes of the game, which is about changing the lives and being of the characters in it.

On Sunday, I played By Endurance, We Conquer at the Side Quest Bar, formerly known as The Armoury. We were three GMs, and one player had shown up to play, and they picked my game to run. It was a bit rough, as this is a dark game that in hindsight wasn’t really suited for the noisy environment of an open bar. Some of us were also a bit tired (this could include me) which hindered the improvisational nature of the game, but in the end I was happy with the ending we came up with.

Ran

On Monday I went for a run, and since I had time I thought: let’s schedule the long run of this week for today. It was 16km in increasing intervals: 6km at 5:00/km, 5km at 4:50/km, 4km at 4:35/km and then one more kilometer conversational.

The other thing I planned was to run to the border with Utrecht (about 4km) and then follow a specific 10.5km segment that I had just discovered. I would easily run a top 10 time on Strava, given the aforementioned structure of my run.

Unfortunately – and I was aware when I started – the run took me through an area where wild grazers are living. “Keep 25m distance!” say the signs when you enter the area. I didn’t see them for the first half of that segment, but then they were there: part of the group on one side of the path, part of the group on the other. There was no way I could keep the required distance, the horns were really big on some of them, and I really didn’t want to run in the middle of their group. I took a detour and now I have to try the segment again.

Also, this long run was a big too much. I felt my calf again, and decided not to do any runs nor volleyball for the rest of the week.