The Year Ahead: Thomas Manuel

Favorite Rascal article of the year

My favourite piece that I wrote was probably this one about a wave of new games from Italy that were winning awards all over the place. I got to speak to lots of different people for the article and they were all eager to share their stories and by the end, I had 7+ hours of interviews and many, many emails. The end result is totally worth it—a journey that touches on so many parts of Italy’s RPG scene: their conventions, the board game industry, their history, even their geography. I would love to do more pieces like this—sharing how the world of RPGs is always bigger than we imagine. 

I’ll also throw in a short piece called “Why we love playing the monster”, which is just 600 words straight from the heart about feeling like outsiders.

Favorite game I played in 2024

I've answered this question in a couple of places and each time, I’ve mentioned Hearts of Wulin, a wonderful game of wuxia and melodrama. It's been one of my favourite campaigns ever. But I’ll also shout out Pasion de la Pasiones, the telenovela which is really over the top and fun, as well as Last Fleet, a Battlestar Galactica-inspired game which I ran the hell out of in a short series. One of the best parts of Last Fleet is the Scorpio playbook, where the character is an unwitting infiltrator and saboteur. It’s not a secret among the players—everyone around the table is aware this is happening. But none of the characters know, not even the Scorpio themselves. The trick is that when the Scorpio goes to sleep, their secret infiltrator side wakes up and goes and does some sabotage. They learn about what they did from the GM, just like the other players. Great stuff.

Games I want to play in 2025

Like everyone else, it's more like, which games don't I want to play? I'm definitely going to try and run Impossible Landscapes, the Ennie award-winning adventure based on the King in Yellow stories, though probably without the default Delta Green system. I haven't run a published module in years and want to try it and see how it feels. 

I'm also keen to run Agon or Deathmatch Island or one of the other Paragon hacks because after how influential Blades in the Dark was on my brain, it’s ridiculous that I haven’t tried even one of these games—especially given how long they’ve been out.

I will also definitely be running Girl by Moonlight because that's one of my favourite games and I need more excuses to talk about it. I don’t know a lot about magical girls as a genre but I loved Madoka Magica and that’s been enough to deploy this game to great success. I love the focus on how the characters feel and relate to each other. Actually, if you think about it, Girl by Moonlight is Blades after it went through an elaborate costume change in a long anime transformation sequence.

Lessons learned

Kids, it's important to write your emails as if someone is going to read them out in a YouTube video. 

Looking ahead

I've been thinking a lot about the current power of Intellectual Property in games. We're in a moment (again, maybe) of licensed games, some that are legitimate labours of love, some that don't even tell one thing about the game before asking for your money. Just at Rascal, we wrote about the Cosmere RPG, the baffling Neopets one, Welcome to Night Vale, Tomb Raider and Fallen London but we didn’t get to talk about the Smurfs game (which definitely happened) or Discworld. As far as the larger publishers go, I feel this is coming from a sense of increased competition where original games feel harder to sell than something that people are already connected to. It’s the same conversation happening in Hollywood, just with astronomically larger sums of money. My sincere hope that these big licenses don't steal too much of the spotlight away from the exciting, new original designs and designers that will spring up next year. They could use all the attention they can get.