A bunch of running a forum game of Hexplore It: Sands of Shurax as well as some as yet unfinished games of that and Valley of the Dead King (the first Hexplore It game) via personal-use TTS mods. I won’t get into them too much because I think it’s basically “my D&D character, let me tell you about them” level of nobody else is likely to care series of events and powering up. But although there’s no good substitute for dry-erase functionality (which both games use heavily) in TTS, I remain really enthralled with the sandboxy decision space and unique characters and heavy theme the series offers. Sands of Shurax in particular is really knocking my socks off.
Also been playtesting No Dawn (from Kolossal Games). Won’t get too into detail on that either since it’s playtest mode and there’s a bunch of placeholder stuff (including in our last session, that vital, easily referenced keyword “PLACEHOLDER”), but it’s an interesting combination of legacy game (true legacy, with new rules, stickering cards and character sheets, removing things from the campaign, etc), deckbuilding (sorta, it’s a group of followers you can play for their effects whenever the game allows but you then exhaust them until something lets you recover them), bagbuilding (bad guys are spawned by tokens from an Invasion Bag but things can put other stuff in there too, including little storybook decision things), and running around fending off invaders and (literally) putting out fires. It’s still fairly rough but I think it has potential. We’ll see how it goes.
Tonight, around a week after my physical copy (which I won’t be able to get to table for a while still) arrived, we broke out Middara: Act 1 via the intense official TTS mod, which has all of the Act 1 content (I don’t think any of the resin kits/addon stuff, but, 
it only recently added the fifth chapter of act 1 so maybe that’s coming if it isn’t in already). This is, easily, one of the most impressive mods I’ve seen on TTS and it’s 100% okay with and actively supported by the game designers. I’d be half in love from that alone. I don’t think it’s quite to the point of the Gloomhaven mod, but let’s face it, that game’s an order of magnitude better known and loved. One click setup for every single encounter and hidden “diagram” board (and it’s a huge game). Auto teardown. Almost entirely automated management for all the various decks in the market, skill offer, and combatant loot. A movable map. All the AI cards have on-card figure spawning, health tracking, and dice macros. Setup to load the professional audio narration for every chapter into the TTS music player and sync-play with everyone in the game. It’ll find and spawn any hidden campaign content for you with a simple search of the key the campaign gives you, and that stuff will then auto-clear and auto-spawn in the same way all the starting content does. It automates initiative handling. It automatically makes the dice face you, even!
But, uh, yeah, Middara. Well, one encounter in I’m pretty impressed. Not the easiest game to start up - the rulebook’s like 75 pages and it’s just page after page of exhaustively laid out rules from point A to point Z, not, e.g. “here’s what you need to jump in, then here’s the stuff you’re going to need to reference first, then…”. But a) if you’ve played dungeon crawlers, most of the concepts are going to be familiar, and b) it is, I think, generally fairly easy to reference. You will have to reference it fairly regularly for a bit, and there are a few things that work noticeably different than other dungeon crawlers that take a bit of adjustment, but I’m mostly not sitting there going “wait, so how does this work?” or “this interaction just doesn’t seem covered”. A few things that might trip you up: one Move action or Ability that is equivalent (one of the characters can fly, for example) per turn, if you need to move more it costs more to use that action and you get very little additional movement for that additional cost (but there are effects that can move you without being a Move action, generally just a little bit); you cannot pause during an action to use another action (so no move-attack-move, for example); the amount you beat a target’s defense by is your baseline damage - you don’t make a separate roll or have a damage value on your weapons, etc.
But mostly…it’s really fun. The writing’s not top of the line but it’s been decent so far (and the narration is pretty good). The enemies are flavorful and have a logical, easily processed turn structure. But most importantly? Your characters feel powerful, distinct, and have a bunch of interesting tactical options from the very beginning, and the way gear interacts makes for some really cool build potential. So, y’know. One encounter’s worth of play, too early to make any final judgments. But I feel like I made a good choice so far.
