Looking back at 2023 and a year of blogging

 Since it seems to be the thing to do on this last day of 2023, I am jumping on the bandwagon and writing a post about the year in review, specifically focusing on this blog.

So, what did I do this year?  Well, I blogged! A lot! 60 posts (not counting this one) in 2023, and several more lined up and waiting for me to get around to writing them.

Between the Serpents of Smoke and Steel - an OD&D Campaign

While I technically prepped and started this campaign in 2022, most of it was run in the first few months of 2023, so it counts.

I had gotten very interested in what OD&D presented mechanically for your standard dungeon crawling adventure, and wanted to explore some of the implications of that. I went with a magical Mesopotamia sort of setting (which in retrospect I did not do enough with, due to not feeling that emotionally invested in it), slapped a few house rules on top of Delving Deeper and off we go! The campaign ran only for 14 sessions total, a rather short thing, but an eventful one. I really liked how having only 2 classes properly focused players on what they wanted to do, I enjoyed running huge masses of people fighting between each other without needing to do much in the way system changing, and the thing peaked with a tabletop wargame that I designed, drew and then assembled myself. That one is a definitely a highlight for me for this year! 

But the campaign had to come to an end, as I was getting done with the setting, the campaign had reached a nice pause point and soon after I was going to be spending 5 months outside the country (and that can be a bit of a problem for an in-person game, let me tell ya!)

The Greylands House Campaign - Returning to the familiar

While I was in the US with my partners, I wanted to run a weekly game for them. Earlier in the year I figured I'd just keep going with BSSS, but instead I decided to go back to the setting and system (a slightly tweaked B/X) from my first OSR campaign - The Greylands. The Greylands, if you haven't checked the blog or heard me talk about it on Discord, is my knock-off Hill Cantons setting that I am hoping to eventually make a bit more of its own thing. 

In this case I literally packed all the dungeons and other materials from the previous campaign, reset the main tentpole dungeon of the region (Dyson's Delve, reinterpreted as a dungeon under the old manor of the Boyar that used to rule the area) and just run my two players through it again.

The game ended up focusing almost entirely on the main dungeon itself, and it actually lead to some interesting comparisons between how these players and the previous ones had handled the dungeon and how the dungeon had responded to them in turn. These are observations I hope to post about at some point soon in a retrospective on the house campaign.

Outside of that, the game was enjoyable for all involved, produced some fun and interesting characters like Rusty, the  runty hobgoblin talasum (who truly lived up to the expectations of his bullies by just generally being deeply ineffectual throughout the entire game), Baba Tonka the tamed grizzly bear and others.

It also helped cement my decision to stick with this setting and explore other parts of it in the future, which I hope to do in the coming year. Check in here for more of that, I guess.

Legacy of the Bieth - I get to actually play for once! 

So yeah, as the subheading says, I also actually got to be a player, not just referee this year! I had the honor and pleasure to participate in Humza's Legacy of the Bieth campaign. I had played in it in 2022 as well, during another prolonged visit to the US. However my character, despite all the misadventures and brushes with the Death and Dismemberment table, was at the end of it only level 1. This year though I got to be a lot more involved and participate in a lot more lucrative ventures, getting poor old Rustam to level 4, with friends in the world of the djinn and allies and connections in the mortal world as well.

I always enjoy opportunities to actually be a player in a game, so this was very special for me. Besides this campaign, a couple of sessions in a bizarro version of the Hill Cantons and a few con games were all the play I got to do. Here is hoping I actually get the chance to play in more OSR games next year!

Blogging a bunch

So yeah, like I said above - 60 posts! I have been enjoying posting session reports and I find I get a lot out of them as a referee being able to look back on events in the campaign(s) and more importantly on my observations on what worked, what didn't and what stood out in a given session.

I also posted a bunch of classes and little rule-things relating to my Greylands setting and system that I hope to implement in the next installment of the campaign. 

Plus there was also the stuff not directly relating to a game I am currently running or plan on running. Stuff like my post on running play-by-post games, or a few reviews of books, or my current series of posts on hobby best practices, which seems to resonated with people and that makes me happy and glad that I decided to write it. 

I am not much on coming up with and writing theory, so it was nice to get at least some of that done. 

Hobby goals for 2024

Finally, looking forward to 2024 what am I hoping to do? Well there's a few blog posts that I want to write - two more posts in the hobby best practices series, a retrospective on my house campaign as I said above and a post about the importance aesthetics play in miniature wargaming.

I also hope to start up a megadungeon campaign in a different, more Slavic part of the Greylands world and get to post regular session reports from that as well! If all goes well and life doesn't completely kick me in the balls I am even hoping to actually get two different groups going in the same dungeon, just to see what kind of interesting experiences that produces because I haven't done that before!

In non-RPG hobbying I hope to make a significant dent in a long-term modeling project that I will hopefully post about here at some point once I feel I have enough worth showing, and I am really hopeful I can get back into miniatures wargaming. I had kind of stopped playing those entirely for a few years, and I am hoping to get more involved in these again. And since I'm doing wargaming I also plan on doing more board wargaming in the upcoming year, which is what had helped scratch that itch until now. 

So that's it. Goodbye 2023!