2024 in Review
James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne in Black and Gold (detail). 1875. Oil on panel.
With less than 48 hours til the quarter century mark, I figure now is a good time to join the chorus of self-reflection rippling through the blogosphere. I thought about structuring this as an awards post, shouting out media I particularly appreciated, but figured I'd rather focus on digesting what I played and wrote in 2024.
Micro-Campaigns!
The biggest development for me this year was starting to run micro-campaigns. Inspired by Joel H at Silverarm Press, in the latter half of the year I started organizing smaller games with fixed durations - 4 to 6 sessions of a specific system or module. We embrace the drop-in, drop-out ensemble structure of West Marches style games I have co-GM'd in the past, but with a much smaller pool of players that I have directly invited.
So far, this has been a real breath of fresh air. I haven't felt the restlessness or burn-out I sometimes get when playing a longform campaign with no clear goal, where sessions might elapse without a significant character beat or event. With the short timeline, the micro-campaigns have fallen into a sort of season-like structure. We have a 2-3 session arc, then some downtime, investigation, and processing by the characters, then we close out with a climactic final arc. I'll want to avoid having this become rote, but I look forward to more games in this vein in the future.
So far we've mostly played in an old-school-ish hexcrawling mode. I'm excited to try out the micro-campaign format with other modes of play - a megadungeon or maybe a longer form campaign like The Enemy Within, broken into chewable bites, perhaps?
Marked by the Odd
My two favorite games this year were The Electrum Archive by Emiel Boven and Ava Islam and Mausritter by Isaac Williams. Both are successors of Into the Odd, but not actually direct products of Chris McDowall. That feels worth noting. There are mechanical ideas in Odd-likes that really work for me (no to-hit roll combat being the real killer), but I find that I really crave the setting frame and actual GM support TEA and Mausritter provide. TEA has set a new benchmark for me for how to relay a setting in a way that is relevant to the players every session; Mausritter, for what kind of tables and procedures the GM-facing portions of a rulebook can hold.
I still am looking for just the right amount of character differentiation in an Odd-like. TEA had a core class that really didn't work at our table and Mausritter characters felt same-y. The players did great work filling in the gaps with their own personas and willingness to get in harm's way, but I'd love a game that provides just a touch more to give each character their moments to shine. As I write my own hacks, this is my current area of inquiry.
The Long Shadow of Pathfinder
In a conversation with Abyssin the other day, they surprised me by describing The Goblin Laws of Gaming (by Arnold K and, in my recent experience, Hilander) as a descendent of Pathfinder. Particularly, they focused on the game's emphasis on class and feats, accumulating towards some extremely specific narrative. I had never thought of it that way and it totally makes sense.
This year, I started writing reviews of GLoG classes. I won't regurgitate all my theory here, but I really wanted to do some critical writing on how the rules text of these blog posts operate as micro-fiction and how that fiction manifests at the table. I've found writing those reviews significantly more engaging than actually playing or running GLoG in the past few months.
I also had a chance to play some Pathfinder 2E. The game was short-lived thanks to immediate and devastating schedule conflicts, but while we played I was really struck by two warring impulses: the first, a sense of ennui with actually building my character in that system's rigid mechanics and the second, a sense that I should really try compressing those polished class ideas into GLoG. I didn't want to actually build a character, but I did want to play with a distinct build.
All this to say, I think even more compression is warranted. Not twenty feats, not four templates, but one thing. What is the one thing that makes this character stand out from the rest? How does that one thing change over time as they change, rather than just accumulating for the sake of accumulation?
In any case, I think I want to pause on this style of games. I want to trust that a pattern is a message and just avoid character class forward games for a bit.
This Blog
I wrote 42 blogpost this year. 43 if you count this one. The ones that I'm most proud of are my session reports for the two micro-campaigns and the GLoG class reviews. It is heartening that those have occurred at the end of the year. It suggests that I'm finding some approaches that work for me.
Of the non-serialized posts, the one I use the most is "What Does the Bandit Have In Their Pack?", a simple loot table for low level encounters. I wince at the gendered pronoun there; I'll go back and change it soon. The one I think most about developing into a stand-alone work is "The Sky Giant's Bouquet", my first real stab at adventure writing. The art I did for that stands out to me.
I've thought about jumping to Substack. I like bearblog and don't have any particular desire to monetize or market myself. I just wish it were a little more searchable and had a comment section. I don't think the move to WordPress or the like would be worth the hassle.
Overall, I'm quite happy with where this body of work is going. I look forward to writing more in the new year and putting a little more pressure on myself to edit before posting. It's not like there is a huge rush.
Next Year
I anticipate January being a pretty hard month for my work/life balance, but there are a few things I would like to do with RPGs next year:
- Publish a game. It doesn't need to be big, but it does need to leverage all the damn art training I've received over the years. I've been working on a manuscript called Dungeon Mail that I want to get into actual circulation before summer. Playtesting, layout, the works.
- Dungeon 25. I missed the boat for the original challenge, but I'd like a low-stakes, persistent heartbeat of content creation that isn't directly theory or game mechanics. I'm going to try to build my own mega-dungeon and post monthly with updates on each floor I have created.
- Micro-Campaigns. I want to keep running micro-campaigns and keep growing my salon of players. I want to keep trying new things, even if sometimes that new thing is holding fast to an old one. I want to keep writing regular session posts. Those have been really satisfying to write and get feedback on.
- Regular Posts. This year, my writing has been alarmingly clumped. Some months I wrote nothing at all, others I wrote more than once per day. Consistency has been really healthy in other facets of my life, so I want to try posting twice per week and leave it at that. I figure between the above three projects I should have plenty to write about.
Anyhow thanks for reading and happy new year!