Year End 2019

Hello world.

This has gone badly, huh? Here I started the year (or ended last year) talking about how I hoped to use this blog - and here I am, a year later and 3 posts later - what can I say? Life has, this time, complicated matters. Work has created odd scheduling issues that have made playing harder and more sporadic - which has spilled over into writing about playing, etc. Though last year we played plenty and I barely wrote anything, so I can't blame that. I can blame it for this:

Reviewing what we played last year I find:

• The Tomb of Annihilation game - mibght well be right where we left it. A couple more sessions - that has been very much neglected.
• The Waterdeep campaign - is right where we left it. We have a tavern, which we have cleaned out of its ghosts and squatters! what next?
• The Jungle Island game is right where we left it too.
• The Desert game, on the other hand, did go very well. A full on tomb raiding dungeon crawl, which ended with a wild fight with mummies and the like, then a rival gang of adventurers. The party is rich, though they have to move their ill-gotten gains to civilization. En route, they fought a gorgon, with dire results to the cleric.... This is the most likely of these campaigns to recover. It's got a great hook, it's got good characters and I even have a good idea how to proceed. This one should move ahead.

• Meanwhile, we have been playing in a Princes of the Apocalypse game at a game store for the last year and a half, still going strong, though sometimes going in circles. But it has been a success.

And this year, we have picked up a couple new ideas, though they have been marred by the reduced game time.

• The home brew city campaign - Waynesburg - generated a couple nice one off adventures ("The Bard's Pants"!), and now an ongoing mystery/adventure. That's worked all right, though it has been hard to maintain momentum, especially around the holidays. It has been interesting, a much more skill and talking based adventure, that I hope to maintain through the coming months.
• We started a campaign int he Saltmarsh area, out of that book - it was going all right, but ran out of steam, missing a month or so of playing... Scheduling has been a problem this year. Playing every other week instead of every week (unless something interrupts the weeks we would play) means it is very hard to have more than one thing going at a time. We could switch back and forth in previous years, and did. Now? we're stuck with one, really.

That is what it is. The only way to fic it is to find a better job.

In the meanwhile - once again, I do want to start using this blog. Writing something here. We talk enough about D&D; you'd think we could write something.

I also want to work on the World Anvil site: use it to build out the history and lore of our campaign world. Which, I confess, is a pretty generic world, but I made up the core sometime in the spring of 1982, so I am not going to apologize for it. What use it has, I don't know, but building it should help put the whole of it together in my head. Let's hope.

Otherwise? Another year - for all the gripes, we did play a lot this year, talked about playing a lot, continued to pump money into Wizard's fo the Coast and Wiz Kids and Paiso and whoever else is willing to sell me D&D related toys and gear. (Not to mention Papermate and Pilot and MMM and all the companies providing pencils, pens, paper, note cards... yeah.) So: the gaming vibe is still good, chez moi. I shall try, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the public, to post more here - we'll see.

Have a good new year anyway, gamers. May all your rolls be crits...