On running things, got in 26 sessions, over half of them on the Ducal House (3.5e) campaign, the rest 50/50 between the Planescape Splinters (5e) one-shots and the Spelljammer (5e) campaign.
Ducal House (3.5e) - home campaign slowed way down due to scheduling but still ground through some high heroism, got in hex-crawling and labyrinth bashing, old school dealings with petty gods and giants and it is about to enter year 4 with momentum which is nice. Players are still keen as evidenced by the below piece of character art gifted by the bard to the cleric.
Planescape: Splinters (5e) was a series of one-shots on different plans (Mechanus, theBeastlands, Acheron) - usually got 2 sessions with different groups for each plane, much hilarity in how differently things go for the different tables, great to get back on the planes, lessons learned for me in session control time and setting up one-shots
I have to give a grudging star to Spelljammer 5e here because despite my serious gripes about the set, it is also the only WotC release that got a bunch of the old warriors to pull down their swords off the wall and commit to a campaign even before the book dropped - and we managed to follow through *and* after a 2-shot mini-game we've sustained that into running the campaign that came in the box. I've put in a bunch of elbow grease to throw a world I'm happy with around the set pieces from the campaign but the combo seems to be working well.
I wrote up more thoughts on lessons learned from those campaigns I ran here.
On games I played during the year:
Under the Dark (5e) aka Out of the Abyss - epic campaign also the first one I completed... ever? First I can recall getting a character denouement that wasn't an obituary in any case. The group has decided to keep up our game-a-month slot and proceed on into the frozen north for Rime of the Frostmaiden!
Empyrean Dynasty (FKR) play-on-discord by Mike Raston (Lizardman Diaries) - long-time lurkers would recognise this as The League with a skin of FKR action economy and turns that start at 100,000 years and shorten down until we're in decades now. It has stalled out due to the overhead all the complex actions put on the poor DM which has been a noted issue with giant stellar-political freeform games. I am cautiously hopeful we may see this complete in '23 - there are just two turn left after all.
Scarlet Heroes - OSR duet dungeon diving, one hero with a few henchfolk delving the depths of dungeons. This was a great return to the roots; very little NPC interaction, pure cunning and sinew against the traps and fiendish monsters lurking in the depths of Zenopus Tower.
Tyranny of Dragons (5e) - campaign in progress, somewhat hampered by health issues in these times of plague but still trucking along and has been good fun to trek along with an actual 'do-good' paladin and looking forward to this continuing.
Adventurers League - always fun when I can make it because the RPG Vienna crew is great. I DM'ed more than I played this year, nothing as epic as the Ravnica sequence last year but had a notable good time in a Candlekeep adventure. I got to run some Spelljammer Academy, episode two of which is a great time.
Besides TTRPGs, my timesink was Battletech with Extended 3025 mod - start running into lots of mystery mechs, learn wtf they are in the firefight, scrape the wrecks off the battlefield, marvel at how shit their heat-sinking is before going back again - good times.
On blogging content - Since 2021 total posts are down since I ditched 3 post a week and went to 2/week in April (plus the weekly links) and looking at ratios of total posts the data-posts have halved and reviews, actual tests and inspiration/random-tables are up in their place. I have noted that there seem to be a lot less surveys around this year - though I did get some really interesting data off the Obsidian Portal campaigns histories.
I had a definite feel of 'low inspiration', burnout-esque through the back half of the year and the depths of my slush pile was scraped for posts on a few occassions. This is one I am keeping an eye on - if this stops being fun, I'll step down the post frequency again and focus on playing for a while. Having said that, I have gotten good post fodder from campaign set up and world-building so maybe playing more will generate posts and kill two birds with one stone?
Having said that, I did get a couple of blog-o-sphere challenges and projects done; Gygax 75 being the big signature one, followed by GLoGtober; d8 Moving Dungeons, d6 Sites of the Long Wars, d8 Prehistoric Epochs, d12 alchemical reagents to harvest from the dead, d12 post-apocalyptic worlds, d14 small gods of the animal-lings and d10 Esoterica of the Menagerie world. I thematically hit Reviewvember with 'Better Labyrinths' on Graphite Primes 'Mazes & Monotony' piece - but not intentionally.
Popular blogposts from the year by views were:
Scale and Hexes, a round-up of posts (glatisant) - 1.64K
Smaller slices of a bigger pie - older D&D editions on Roll20 - 945
Player Stats for AideDD Character Builder 2020-2021 - 385
Review: Downtime in Zyan (glatisant) - 341
Review: Strongholds & Followers (glatisant) - 338
Review: Petty Gods (glatisant) - 332
NPC personality creation workflow - 302
Geography as destiny - emergent world-building from maps - 239
With the big indicator of a smash being whether they get picked up by the Glatisant newsletter, always a nice little burnish to the ego. If I wanted to really crank my numbers, this should be an OSR review site apparently.
On how people get here - as before, most people get here through search engines or from reddit or twitter but I also see a few persistent other blogs as those who seem to bring readers here - Lizardman Diaries, DIY & Dragons, Chaudron Chromatique, Weaver.skepti.ch, Nothics Eye, Retired Adventurer as well as a few new appearances - Weird Wonderful Worlds, Mindstorm, A Continent of Banalities and Advanced Mystery and Manners. Thanks again for having me on your feeds, evidently your readers like what they read here too.
Book goblinism continues with some notable new arrivals being Petty Gods, the Deck of Worlds, Rackham Vale Paintbox Edition, Knock #3, Brancalonia, Ruins of Symbaroum and Swords of the Serpentine. A number of ludicrously good bundles on Humble Bundle or Bundle of Holding also supplied a ton of interesting pdfs, the surface of which I have barely scratched. The 'capsule reviews' series is pretty much my attempt to claw my way to some sort of awareness of what is in the depths of my digital vault - light a candle against the darkness and all that.
Goals for the year ahead. Looking back on goals this time last year, all got done except revamping this blog - restart gaming after smallest householder arrived (check), run Planescape (see above), do more reviews (check), continue to publish r/osr blogroll (check) - this is acceptable.
Since mid-year I took on some blogging challenges (check), wrote up more in-game stuff (check) but slipped on data-posts and I wanted to be more interactive with other blogs - this has been a technical success in that very little is greater than nothing but still not what I want it to be.
If the objective of the blog is to facilitate gaming, it is not helping me game more and getting more gaming hours in has to be the primary goal. Time at table, as long as it is good gaming, is the priority. With that being said, I have gotten great inspiration from the blogs of others so this is me writing up my thoughts and experiences in the hope that someone out there will get the same use out of my posts as I have had from others.
For the coming year I want to:
- be more interactive on blogs, esp. since the bird site may be going away
- continue to push reviews, build on this good trend
- play more and document what is working well
Thanks for reading along I hope you will find more here to interest and amuse in 2023. If you want to connect on suggestions or requests, drop them in a comment below or ping me on twitter (while it lasts) or on mastodon or this same username at gmail.com. Happy New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment