This was overall kind of a weird year - I had a lot going on in the non-TTRPG world in the first half, which caused me to entirely throw myself into games in the second half. Looking back, I did do a lot - it’s just that everything that’s sort of conventionally publishable stalled a bit.

Non-Commercial Projects

My big project this year was putting together a collection of images from public domain images. There’s so much public domain art out there, but it’s so hard to sort through, meaning we end up seeing the same 50 images over and over. In the process I discovered a sort of early graphic novel called Gods’ Man, which I’d recommend checking out.

In the new year I want to look into hosting these images somewhere a bit more convenient than a series of zip files on itch.

I wrote an actual adventure for the first time in a while. I have a free ashcan up. I need to playtest it again, polish it a bit, and maybe if I'm incredibly ambitious that will all happen before zine month and I’ll try publishing it for real. I didn't enjoy doing zine month a few years ago, so it would be a mistake to do it again, but maybe I won’t let that stop me.

I finished off the year by publishing something for the Onegeon jam, about a tiny little hole in the ground which may or may not be worth exploring.

Megagames, Cataphracts and Over/Under

For me, this was the year of megagames (defined broadly). I played Watch the Skies, my first megagame; I played 5 games of cataphracts, and of course Over/Under, which I've blogged about at great length and will probably blog about a lot more.

These games were all both extremely cool and also very precarious. Most of my games of Cataphracts ended early from GM burnout. My local megagame society is struggling with organizer burnout and a lack of affordable venues. I don’t know that Over/Under could ever happen again. All of these require not just running a game, which is difficult on its own, but also large-scale community-building.

I don’t personally have the capacity to solve this problem, so instead, I'm going to run Miniphracts, a hack of Cataphracts whose main design goal is to be more sustainable for me, personally. It'll generally last a month or less, have fewer than 20 people by the end of the month, and also hopefully be a good way to introduce new people to the hobby. If you’re interested, get in touch - I have the initial starting players already but more will probably be added once the game starts.

Other Games

I had a goal of actually playing my solo games and I didn't totally fail. I only wrote one of them up this time though - Tollund Man.

Otherwise, I've been playing a series of ItO-likes - most recently Glowburn and Radscars - about once a week at a drop-in table. I’ve also been playing in a long-running low-combat game of Uncharted Worlds where we’re running it more like a sitcom than a space adventure game. I’ve played with this group for well over 5 years now and I feel very lucky to have a group that meshes so well.

I ran a bunch of games during NSR camp (which I wrote about here and here,) and got over my fear of running anything in the general PbtA/FitD style. I need to get back into regularly GMing, but with two weekly games it’s hard to commit to a third thing.

Other Blog Posts

My blog post on grounded fantasy was probably my best received.

Other ones I particularly like:

What if the Ennies reviewed games from two years ago?

On religion: things I don’t like about religion in RPGs and how I’d fix it

In the Pipeline

I’m working on a Javascript version of Procedures to Discover the Path Ahead.

Also, with my growing frustration with perchance’s AI emphasis, I’m thinking of moving all my random generators to my website and writing them in Javascript.

I want to get the train adventure published this year. However, I'm putting my solo adventure for Cairn on the backburner. It's too ambitious for me right now. I also need to decide if I’ll reprint any of my old work, much of which is down to the last few copies, and maybe more generally if I’ll commit to being a person who publishes physical things or if instead I’ll stick to lower time commitment projects.

I want to get better at art in general. I’ll also try and continue the public domain art project, but it did become quite time consuming so I may do less of it this year.