by Jason Campbell
Welcome to 2026 and best wishes to all.
Every year we set goals for the coming year for Shadomain and look back at our progress on the goals we set for the previous year. This time we also asked a bunch of creators, designers and game masters for their goals for 2026.
Shadomain’s Resolutions
For 2025 we set the goal of publishing a TTRPG book. We achieved that goal in the Spring of 2025 when we published Hint, the one shot open mystery adventure for Brindlewood Bay and Cypher System. We then had a successful Backerkit campaign for our upcoming TTRPG game, Six-Gun Doomsday. That book is in layout now and will be released in the Spring of 2026. That’s a pretty successful year when measured against our stated goal.
For 2026 (once Six-Gun Doomsday is completed) I’d like to step back a bit from writing games. This isn’t a life change, I’ll get back to writing games soon, but writing so much the past two+ years, I realized I didn’t have as much time to run and play games. I’m running a weekly TTRPG, but that’s been the totality of my games most months. I want to run more short and long term games this year because it will make me a better designer, and because that’s how I got into this in the first place.
As a secondary goal, I’m going to get our YouTube channel posting regular videos. We’re looking at shorter videos focusing on a single RPG topic, with help from folks in the industry.
And of course we’re keeping the weekly interviews, articles and reviews coming on Shadomain.com
What About You?
We asked others in the TTRPG space for their goals in 2026. Here’s what they told us.
My 2026 gaming resolution is to finally do offset printing for one of my games. I’d like to also release a new game for my Threshold System!
Al Spader,The Yellow Hand
I don’t really do resolutions, but I’m definitely going to be pouring a lot of my game design energy into a new game I’m working on, The Lands Remaining. this year. From a business standpoint, I want to wrap up The Between fulfillment and then get Public Access up on Kickstarter. Also looking forward to doing more conventions this year, including BreakoutCon in Toronto!
Jason Cordova, The Gauntlet
Richard green posted Ten TTRPG Goals for 2026 on his site, including “Do an excellent job on the exciting new Kobold Press project I’m working on…” (link below)
Richard Green | Game Designer
My goals are to improve my DM skills, play more games, and most challenging of all, forming a women’s in-person TTRPG group. This will help a lot for the first two goals.
Elise Paxson, @elisepax
For 2025, our team launched Crazy Weasel Gaming on Drivethru. My personal goal was to publish products as they came to me. I didn’t want publishing to be a chore that I had to do, but something I did out of love for the community. I think overall that it went pretty well with successes like Matriarch Lost, and a few learning opportunities. I learned some new skills as part of the publishing process, which was cool. As a team, we wanted to try and get our setting book, Antediluvian Awakening, written and ready for editing. This was probably a bit ambitious for a three person team who all have day jobs. While we may have fallen short of our goal, we have made significant progress this year. As we head into 2026, the team at CWG and I are looking to finish what we set out to do in 2025 and hopefully move into the editing and layout stages. For me personally, I want to spend some time this year getting familiar with Affinity and becoming better at layout and design.
Devon, Crazy Weasel Gaming
I will do something.
KR King, D&D Homebrew
I don’t believe in New Year resolutions. If something wasn’t a goal I was actively working towards in 2025, why would it magically become one for 2026? Here are two quotes I think of almost every day. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” – Benjamin Franklin.
Luke Hart, The DM Lair
“Discipline equals freedom.” – Jocko Willink
High achievers don’t make resolutions for NEXT YEAR; they already got it done LAST YEAR. All that said, my plans for 2026 are the same a they were 6+ months ago when they were set: run our Lairs & Legends 3 Kickstarter in April 2026 and roll out the alpha of our new TTRPG No Quarter. What comes after that will depend on the success of those two projects.
Conclusion
The idea of New Year’s Resolutions is sort of silly. There’s nothing more magical about January 1st than any other day. The point for me is to set a goal(s), and develop a plan to get there. (NOTE: in my day job I’m a project manager, so setting up, monitoring and modifying a plan is more important that the goal). That means that I set a long term goal for the year, but then I developed a plan by breaking it into smaller chunks that I’ve estimated the time to complete. I look back and measure my progress against my goals every week, and sometimes even more often. While it’s fun to look back at the past year (for me), if you’ve set an achievable goal you’ll need to buils a plan so you can schedule the steps to achieve your goal.
The most important thing is that you don’t judge your entire year as a success or failure. This is the most common issue for people setting goals such as “I’ll go to the gym every morning.” After a few weeks you might see that you’ve only been to the gym half of the days, judge yourself a failure, and abandon your goal. Don’t look back to judge yourself, look back to learn what’s working, what isn’t, and modify your plan to fix what isn’t working. This is the most important part of planning; modifying the plan. It’s what drives the ability to “Just Keep Swimming”.
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