On running things
Ducal House (3.5e) - ran 24 sessions to take us up to 102 during the year, covering mostly the long road home from closing out a major quest and its fall out. I've written an in-flight retrospective from DM'ing it here. I have a dig into all the plot arcs, problems solved and in-world events to come. Below, behold the sorcerer, drawn by the bard.
Spelljammer - Light of Xaryxis Remix (5e) - 19 sessions running a sand-boxed Light of Xaryxis, smoothing out as we went through the year and settled onto a regular schedule. Ramped up from 4th to 8th level, closing in on the campaign finale. I have stayed a bit quiet about this since it is a big arc in progress but I have been having fun
Spelljammer Academy (5e) - 12 sessions of episodic campaign, mostly a vehicle for venue tests about the city. Ludicrous hi-jinks intercut with some dangerous fights and tours of much of Realmspace. Campaign retrospective here.
Southern Reaches (Brancalonia, 5e) - 22 sessions of open table, light-hearted west-marches type campaign. On hiatus since my evening playing slot has become a lot more tricky, perhaps to be resurrected at some point in the future. Campaign retrospective here.
Bay of Princes (Brancalonia, 5e) - 10 sessions to date of running through the published Brancalonia adventures at my local games society regular Friday night open tables. Using this as the vehicle also to hang newbie induction from Meetup. If judged by the fact that I'll get sign-ups from our regulars any time I run a table, then this is going well. I am enjoying the challenge of working through all the adventures.
On games played during the year
Rime of the Frostmaiden (5e) - continuing with the same crack group of adventurers as Out of the Abyss, 13 sessions saw us progress to level five, traversing Icewind Dale solving problems for every Tom, Dick and Harry and trying to piece together what the hells is going on.
Empyrean Dynasty (FKR) - final wrap up of the epic galactic politics game - bizarrely, my faction-group sort of won? We achieved our goals of becoming the universal religion at the cost of multiple worlds and bitter galactic war.
Scarlet Heroes - some old school open table dungeoneering - henchmen and a sparse handful of hitpoints all that stands between gold and glory or an early grave. Great fun creeping through corridors and then employing flaming oil and caltrops for any edge against a foe. I really liked the fray dice mechanic.
Tyranny of Dragons (5e) - 7 sessions to close out the first book, significant traipsing about the wilderness, an epic fight with a wizard and its minions, duplicates, clones and various other head-fakery, and slowly uncovering the contours of the conspiracy we faced.
Spire (Spire) - played a pair of sessions of this, one shots part of building up a drop in campaign - now four sessions in and the in-house testing team has been getting great fun out of it.
Grand Planar Adventures (5e) - newly joined planescape campaign; running through some 2e classics to level up and synchronise with an existing planar party.
As shown here, monthly sessions played this year was higher in each month than any month in the previous five years. Not sure this tempo will be sustained but a *lot* of gaming got done this year.
The other big thing has been trying to on-ramp some of the legions of D&D interested folk attracted first by Honor Among Thieves and then Baldurs Gate 3. I took on a Meetup group to try and catch those folk and they have been turning up at our tables. I ran a little survey to see what exactly people want and those results seem to have encouraged folk to kickstart some new campaigns and fish for players on the RPGVienna forum which is great.
On blogging content
Since 2022 (blue) total posts are stable at 2/week plus the weekly links. Interestingly for 2023 (orange), pick-up by the Glatisant is no longer my key driver for views - pick-up on the front-page of ENWorld turned out to be the planet-buster numbers spike - the seismographs are still twitching from that *four months* later. Upticks in day-to-day readership is driven by Lemmy and Sly Flourish's TTRPGs feed. Overall, chopping out an estimate of what was leakage from cyberwarfare and AI scraping, it looks like ~ 63% rise in views/year. Who knows how much of that is real people - you are, at least.
Blogging this last half year has seen a switch in focus - from frameworks and ideas to lessons learned and write ups as I have run more stuff and had less time to write creatively. In particular the logistics of wrangling folk for the Meetup group has sapped the exact same well of time to sit at the computer and write that would previously have turned into blogposts.
Blogging projects that got done nonetheless:
- Glass Candles GLoGtober '23 - contributed a list this year
- Campaign retrospectives - following the format from Against the Wicked City
- Monthly RPG Blog Carnival participation and one month hosted
Notable blogposts from the year by views were:
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets
Reach of the Roach God
Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent
Class / Race choices in Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e
d30 Things Above a Mindflayer World
Campaign Spin-Up VII - When One-Shots Sprawl
Review: Swords of the Serpentine
Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)
Goals for the coming year
- Continue Ducal House, run out Spelljammer LoX - see what to replace that with afterward (Planescape Turn of Fortunes Wheel?).
- Run more Brancalonia at the Friday night drop in games.
- Run an event, see about doing some DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game.
- Play more Rime, Planescape and perhaps Scarlet Heroes.
- Should things massively break my way timewise I have a notion of some sort of silk-roads campaign.
Overall a focus on gaming at table and trying to help the new folk sloshing into the hobby to get started.
Thanks for reading along, hope you find more to interest and amuse in the coming year. If you have any suggestions or requests, drop them in a comment below or ping me on twitter (while it lasts) or on mastodon or on bluesky - I even have a bunch of invites for that last if anyone else wants one.
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