Playing Quest Calendar 2026: The Souls of Saraku
Posted on January 29, 2026 by Aywren
I’ve been playing the solo, DM-less, RPG quest calendars created by Sundial Games since 2022. This is a D20 tabletop game that comes in desk calendar format. Every day, the quest story progresses a little and you have tasks and choices to make, just like a tabletop RPG – but, you can play it completely by yourself.
Last year, Sundial games didn’t publish a quest calendar. Part of me was a little sad, but I will admit that another part of me needed the break. In previous years, I’ve not only played each day but live-blogged my experiences with the calendars. I’ve built an archive of this in my microblog section (calendar year 2022 is still a WIP as of writing this, but should be complete in about a month).
Back in 2024, I was feeling so burned out from the daily blogging of the calendar that I wasn’t sure I was going to commit to a calendar in 2025. But then, Sundial skipped a year, so that gave me an excuse not to be tempted to play.
The 2024 calendar theme was one I was excited for, but the overall quality of the story and fun of the experience was not quite there for me. They tried to do new things with the follower system, the bonus skills, and using a deck of cards – none of this worked for me and I had rolled back the system to use what was in previous years. Not to mention I still claim that the hero I chose wasn’t well-balanced for the story being told, which made fights frustrating.
While I was a bit iffy about the theme for this year – you’re playing the evil side instead of a hero of light – I still Kickstarted the project last year. It looks like they may have gotten feedback about the whole deck of cards thing since I don’t see anything in the ruleset talking about using that system again this year. Thank goodness!
There is some sort of minion system, however. I’m not quite sure how that comes into play, yet. Or if it’s more of a static number like the Karma system. That makes a return this time, but renamed to Notoriety.
Anyhow, during the Kickstarter, they put a villain design up to a vote, and I was quite happy that the rat-man plaguebringer won. You know where there’s a rat, I’m going to play them! Not so stoked about the name Grimrot Slinktail (I voted on a different name), but it’s somewhat grown on me.
I’ve been playing this calendar since January 1, though I told myself I would NOT give into the temptation to live-blog my progress every day. And you know what? As much as I DID enjoy blogging and interacting with other folks who were playing the calendar along with me, taking a break from the responsibility of daily blogging has been a good move.
I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed this new calendar. So far, it hasn’t been campy-evil like I was a little concerned it could be. In fact, it’s been interesting to see the heroes of light laying siege to the stronghold of the Overlord and playing the “evil” side against them. There’s already been the thread of thought that evil and good are just two sides of the coin – that the heroes aren’t that different from the villains in the end. We’ll see if that’s the truth!
If you’re interested in playing this calendar, there’s still plenty of time to pick it up from the Sundial website, speed-play the campaign up to this point and jump in. There’s even a slightly cheaper PDF version if you just want the digital version (though it’s shot up in price from the previous years, it seems).
I’ll post a bit about this experience through the year and let you know my thoughts on the quality and entertainment value of this newest calendar!