Thus have we reached the 6th anniversary of A Distant Chime! On to the reflections.
Content
I wrote only 13 posts this year, the same as 2022 and a bit less than in 2023. Most of these posts were AD&D session reports or playtest notes for the House of Pestilence. Now that I'm running PF2e as my home game, I've fallen off the habit of making session reports, largely because I conceive of this blog as a space for discussing old school games first and foremost, and I just don't feel such a strong urge to blog and record games when they're not old school. Granted, I also just graduated and am in the process of getting a masters' degree, so I have considerably less free blogging time than I used to. Nevertheless, I do occasionally get a spark of creativity (or obsession) and write something that isn't a session report.
Highlights for the year:
The biggest without a doubt was Village on the Borderlands Review: C'mon Man!, in which I reacted to the fracas at that moment around Mark Taormino's module and its caustic critical reception. Sitting at some 11k words, I believe it is the single longest post on this blog by a considerable margin, and I wrote it all in a mad rush just as I was unexpectedly moving house. I stand by every word of it.
In World Without Fire, I elaborate a concept for a campaign based in a world where humanity is unable to create fire, driving dependence on sentient flames, like ancient pagan gods, in order to survive and thrive.
In AD&D Session 9: Return to Castle Xyntillan, I brought my then-current campaign and my old CX campaign crashing back together. It was very nostalgic for me, and I think the players also had fun.
In Draft: Simpler AD&D Psionics Rules, I put forth a basic rewrite of the mechanics and flavor of psionics, with plenty of gaps left to fill.
Diagnostics
Blogger tells me that the blog has seen 52k views, more than the year before despite lower density of overall posts. I've also seen 38 comments, mainly driven by the Village on the Borderlands review, which is by far my most popular new post. Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse remains my most viewed post of the year and overall. I really had no idea that would be what people found this blog through!
Presentation
I rarely advertise posts outside the blog anymore. I suppose it ain't broke, so I'm not fixing it.
Index
The blog's index is presently... 4 years out of date. I'll probably get around to fixing it up later.
Away From the Blog
As with last year, it's been a busy and eventful year for me, but I've managed to keep up a more-or-less weekly game for parts of the year. Though I didn't blog about it, I was quite happy this summer to have multiple games with my uncle and little cousins, playing PF2e. I came into this hobby on my own, so it's nice to introduce and teach the new generation. I expect my current PF2e game will last through spring, after which I will be moving and will need to find an entirely new group. I may also end up reviving Cascabel, the setting of my AD&D campaign, but running it in a old-school-ified hack of PF2e, as I outlined in The Pathfinder Megadungeon. That remains in the future, though.
I can't believe it's been a year already, but I'm also quite happy to note that my submission to the NAPIII contest came in 2nd, considerably better than I had hoped amid the stuff competition. Last year, I also teased that I was working on another module, Three Lives in the Crystal Pyramid of Xeen-Thoth. Development on that actually got quite far, but in the absence of a group I could use for playtesting (now that I'm running PF2e instead) and everything else keeping me busy, I'm afraid it's fallen by the wayside. I am, however, working on a short (unplaytested) AD&D module for another contest, which I'll need to finish up in the next week.
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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to Man of the Atom, D-Skelector, gyrovague, and Sully, I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful New Year!
