State of the Blog Year 5

This is the 5th anniversary of A Distant Chime! Another good year of gaming ends with another Christmas Eve, now on to the reflections!

Content

There were slightly more posts this year than 2022, in large part because I was back to regular play reports for my AD&D campaign. All the same trends continue from last year, except for the fact that I'm now living with my partner, and homemaking takes up extra time (though I no longer have to look for other spaces to run games, which is great). Highlights from this year: 

Thoughts on AD&D Currency thinks more deeply about the currency conversions in AD&D, and what we might conclude about the implied worldbuilding behind them. 

On Playing Raw: Nasty, Brutish, and Undercooked challenges the assertion that playing Rules as Written (RAW) is superior to homebrew

The GM Is Dead, and we, Murderers of All Murderers, Have Killed Him is a rather overwrought title for a post examining various perspectives on interpreting the rules and world of D&D, via a very strange forum discussion. 

And finally, my AD&D play reports document my current game, starting with AD&D Session 1: Violence Breeds Violence

Also, I wanted to point out a couple of posts outside the blog that just came to my attention.

Daniel from the Basic Red blog has just broken his silence after a few years of hiatus; I remember Basic Red fondly from my early days in the hobby, and I'm glad to see he's back, so show him some love!

Red_kangaroo from Library of Attnam (one of the first old-school blogs I read, come to think of it, this is a year for nostalgia!) has a post on GLOG class quests; it's a delightful little thing that reminds me of what I loved about the GLOG. Almost tempts me to go back to it. 

Diagnostics

Blogger tells me the blog has received 48k views in 2023, somewhat less than last year, once again mainly on the strength of my backlog. My most viewed post was Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse, which continues to have a much longer life than I ever expected. 

Presentation

I only sometimes share my posts outside the blogroll nowadays; still, I keep reaching people, so I suppose it ain't broke. 

Index

Whispered legend holds that this blog once had an index. Today, this is naught but a cruel joke. 

Away from the Blog

With how little I've been posting, you might think I've been sundowning this place, but I haven't. Rather, most of my RPG energies have been pointed in other directions. 

2023 was a busy year for me overall. I was studying, working, building a relationship with the love of my life. And I've been running games, both my (unfortunately undocumented) L5R campaign in the beginning of the year and my ongoing AD&D game at the end. However, my real attention was focused on two long-running projects. 

The first, which began late last year, was preparation for my current AD&D game. More than learning the rules, setting up a world, and making a bunch of supplementary material (maps, weather generators, and such), the biggest time sink there was rewriting the AD&D PHB. While I generally stick to the rules, my game was different enough (different species, new classes and spells, and the like) that handing my players a copy of the 1978 PHB plus a bunch of 'but in my game this instead of that' supplements would have been confusing and frustrating. 

I'm sure this project started with a smaller, scope, but it eventually turned into a full rewrite, plus my own campaign-specific details. I think most of the time wound up being spent on the spells: I managed to cut the word count by something like a third and make a lot of them easier to read. That and all the formatting, since I have a neurotic fixation on making everything fit in two-page spreads. 

I've hesitated to share this for a while, because some of the classes are from someone's else's paid supplement, but I wound up just pulling them out of the version I'll share. You can find the PHB for Bell and Candle here. 

That project was basically finished in late summer, with a few corrections made after players found typos and errors. The project occupying my time now, as I've recently blogged about, is The House of Pestilence, my entry in the NAPIII module contest. 

I've tried making things before: years ago I was supposed to make an adventure with Joseph Robert Lewis, but then the pandemic happened and everything got sidetracked. I've also made all sorts of promises on this blog, like an attempt at an underwater play supplement, which went nowhere. The times I have successfully made something it's because I had a deadline. My entry for Wavestone Keep was baseline. My entry for Out of the Sewers (still unpublished) was better. But I can safely say that House of Pestilence is the best thing I've made. 

It's not quite done yet; I have to consolidate feedback from the first playtest and hopefully do another one with my in-person group, plus I'm waiting on art and improved cartography. Still, this is the first time I've really been proud of an RPG thing I've written. With all luck, you'll be able to pick it up in the NAPIII anthology some time next year. If not, I'll release it myself. 

I hope to keep running AD&D for a long while to come, and keep you all updated with play reports (session 6 play report is in the works...). I also have plans for my next writing project after NAPIII is done. While I won't make any promises, since I'm not being driven by a deadline on this one, I hope to delight you all with Three Lives in the Crystal Pyramid of Xeen-Thoth one day soon. 

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So ends another year! Particular thanks to Melan and JB for their support, and I hope you all have an excellent holiday and new year!