The Year Ahead: Chase Carter

If you're just now shaking off the ashes (and hangovers) of 2024, then you may not know that the Rascal crew are on editorial leave until next week. But that doesn't mean the site has been silent. Every member has penned some prognostication, paired with hindsight, on what 2025 will bring to the tabletop industry.

Read Caelyn's thoughts and Thomas' insights before diving into my own reflections and hopes for the year ahead.

Favorite Rascal Article of the Year

For the record, I tried to earnestly engage with the premise. I did! But distilling myself down to a single article feels at once inadequate and impossible. To broadly quote Aftermath’s Gita Jackson, journalists are narcissistic creatures with an abiding need for external validation; I am a fraud, and yet ineffable. Thus, here are four pieces I’m fond of:

My (not quite) review of the Mothership 1E deluxe box set allowed me an opportunity to discuss RPGs as both product and art, which is something I’d love to do more in 2025. Exploring the concept of megadungeons as a blueprint for a better internet is the kind of broader cultural blogging that not many other outlets afford themselves, and it’s come to define Rascal’s voice. Related, my interrogation of our personal play spaces engaged with tabletop games as physical objects in a practical—but still personal—fashion. And while I hope we don’t need to flush alt-right provocateurs from our space with regularity, my essay on the limitations of ‘no politics’ in digital communities showed I can comfortably wear the watchdog hat outside of investor calls.

Favorite Tabletop Game I Played This Year

Does reading a game count as playing it? If not, my possibilities are slim—only Masks: A New Generation consistently hit the table throughout 2024, and the rest are a collection of one-off wargames and narrative dalliances. That is, until Rowan, Lin, and I ambled down to a hotel lobby in Indianapolis on the second day of Gen Con. Tucked under our arms was a copy of Home, a collaborative haunted house exploration game from Doug Levandowski and Yuensoo Julian Kim. 

Amidst the clamor of a dozen other nerd clusters and ambiance-annihilating lights, we built a dilapidated Northeastern Colonial one room at a time. Our characters fumbled at a mystery involving a witch, a murder, and plenty of unfinished business. We bickered, fell through traps, desecrated graves, skimmed forbidden tomes, and muttered dark omens to ourselves—normal shit. Home shouldn’t have been so effective at pulling at both our heartstrings and guts, yet its effective synthesis of card prompts and map drawing triumphed over our ridiculous locale to stick with me long after bigger, more popular RPGs have faded into memory.

The three G&Ts from the lobby bar no doubt helped.

Tabletop Games I Want to Play in 2025

I’ve forgotten more independent and small studio projects than I could possibly list here, so please take the following as a mea culpa: I am so damn pumped to devour any zine, pamphlet, and PDF sent my way. As the Rascal audience as my witness, 2025 will be my year to stay current.

That’s not to say my anticipation suffers no outlet. Top of the list is Life & Death, a pair of setting books for Cloud Empress that promise some delicious new directions for an RPG that already ticks too many of my boxes. Chris McDowall’s Mythic Bastionland will inevitably send me deep Into the Odd again, this time roleplaying as tragic knights on gallant (and melodramatic) quests. And because I’m curious about Son of Oak’s gauntlet thrown at this hobby’s reigning tyrant, Legend in the Mist remains a significant object of curiosity.

Lessons Learned

Starting a business is hard. Like, really fucking hard! I would not recommend it unless you and a few friends found yourselves jobless in an industry desiccated by corporate vampirism. And even then, find someone with a business degree who enjoys spreadsheets and the intricacies of state tax codes. 

My earnest answer is that our dream for a worker-owned, audience supported outlet isn’t as naive as my darkest insecurities expected. Y’all showed up in a fashion that will always humble me. Rascal doesn’t just live; it thrives. And though I’d love for our audience to double overnight and grant us truly livable wages, I have learned to trust gradual growth. Sustainability doesn’t happen overnight, and that’s okay.

2025 predictions

Is it a cheap answer to say “Hasbro will shit the bed”? Yeah, alright, fine.

Crowdfunding is due a massive industry-wide threat that will shake everyone’s faith in the infrastructure that currently buttresses a staggering amount of tabletop business. The Trump administration’s tariff threats have forced China and our contiguous neighbors (and most recently Europe) to consider loading their guns with retaliatory tariffs. Increased prices—and cost of living—will be passed directly to consumers via post-campaign requests. 2020’s distribution fiasco showed there’s only so much sympathy creators can wring out of a hat-in-hand plea; what happens when shrinking margins meet a withered demand? 

I look at Tuesday Knight Games’ colossal success with the self-proclaimed co-funding on Backerkit and wonder if necessity will once again rear invention—or, reinvention. Everyone forgot about Kickstarter’s AI development, growing international design scenes strain for access to Western markets, and every other platform is fighting over the silver and bronze medals. I smell a reckoning, and it won’t be pretty.