2019 will probably be remembered as the most consistent year in the blog’s history. But even though this year has turned out not to be incredibly productive for my hobby (I’ve turned a lot of my energy towards writing prose, poetry, and articles), there have been some victories that I’d like to go over. Additionally, some projects that I was planning on posting about here (another dungeon I worked on with Lexi) didn’t go through. In addition, the pandemic really killed my energy for writing (I was very depressed) and so wasn’t able to work through my backlog of half finished posts and rough ideas. As always, we will wrap up by looking towards the future.
This year
has been great for Beyond the Fence, Below the Grave! The wonderful Kai Poh ran my game, it’s now been downloaded over 600 times, and I published a new
scenario for it. I’m working on another scenario now, which will bring us up to
4, one for each season. After that I think I might revise the game and overhaul
the rules.
This year has also been good for actually running the game. I enjoyed my Avalon campaign and this summer I’ve been running another GLoG based campaign in a similar style, all dungeons published by other people. Both these campaigns have been really enjoyable to run. I’ve learned a lot about how you run an OSR style game. I’m starting to see the importance of the dungeon and its ever ticking turn timer, persistent encounter checks, and the balance between risk and reward that ties the whole space together into a compelling experience.
Evaluating a year where a lot didn’t get done is difficult. I know why it happened. Life is busy and I have lots of priorities outside my hobby and outside what I write for it, no matter how much I love writing. I think my desire to make a consistent 2 posts a month put a lot of pressure on me and made the experience of blogging less satisfying. Then I refocused my creative energy going into 2020. There’s a lot I want to do on the tabletop. We must go back to the Meager Country, for instance. I love the dungeon and want to write some of my own. Then there's the aforementioned backlog. Will I get around to it? Who can say. What I will do is keep you all updating about what I'm running and thinking about and maybe publish some of the essays I write on non-tabletop subjects. Here at Dreams and Fevers, we remain committed to Slow Blogging and we'll keep slogging on the pace which feels right for me. I look forward to another year here.
This post is dedicated to Stan Rogers, who I've adored since I was small
