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Year in Review – 2024 – Settling in for the Long Haul

Welcome to the fifth annual review on this blog. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.)

This felt like a year where we settled into a mode of hobby gaming that can be maintained indefinitely. Barring exogenous shocks, of course. I also managed to complete my PhD, which has taken the pressure off things a little bit but did not lead to as much slack to really expand my hobby activity on this site as I had hoped. There is always more work to do.

As has become customary, here’s a review of what we played, some statistics, games, and game-related paraphernalia I acquired, D&D-related fiction I read, and, finally, some resolutions for the new year. Happy 2025, everyone.

Addendum: I also blogged an overview of content and rules I homebrewed throughout 2024.

What We Played

Planet Karus

I described Planet Karus, our current D&D campaign, at some length in last year’s review. The game is still going from strength to strength, and I continue to expand the map with new adventuring sites. We also have the occasional almost fully improvised session of shenanigans. Running a fully homebrewed game continues to be an incredibly freeing experience, if at times slightly daunting. I look forward to many more sessions in the years to come.

Board Games

We had nine board game nights this year. Across those, we played Cyclades (2 plays), Galaxy Trucker (6), Kemet: Blood and Sand (2), Lunch Money (2), Modern Art (2), Quantum (1), and Sidereal Confluence (1).

Galaxy Trucker is a quick game, which explains the high count. We typically manage to play two rounds in a night. I am happy we managed to give Sidereal Confluence a go. It’s a beast of a game but also quite the experience. I wouldn’t mind giving it another go at a future occasion, if we all feel up to it. Lunch Money we played on a lark for nostalgia’s sake. That game is so incredibly nineties it hurts. Cyclades is a new acquisition. I would say it is on par with the other Matagot dudes-on-a-map games we like. It is most similar to Kemet, and I think out of the two, I prefer Cyclades because it is less sprawling and more tightly wound.

A game of Cyclades in progress.

Tabletop Role-Playing Game Play Statistics

I once again crunched the numbers on our RPG sessions. Read on for the dirty details.

Sessions

We played nine sessions of Planet Karus, one of which was an eight-hour marathon session. We’ve made the transition to only playing in person with success. I don’t feel it has affected overall attendance too much. If it has, I would say it’s an acceptable trade-off against a much more convivial and engaging play experience.

Attendance

The number of players ranged from 2 to 6 (M = 2.9, SD = 1.3). The six-player marathon session skews these numbers somewhat. If we take that one out, we get a range of 2 to 3 (M = 2.4, SD = 0.5). Almost exactly the same as last year.

The top player was good for 29.6% of the attendance, the number two for 18,5%, and the two shared number three players for 14,8% each. It looks like we had a slightly broader base of participation this year, which is nice and healthy, I would say.

Chart of player attendance.

Character Deaths

We had a total of two player-character deaths and eleven retainer deaths over those nine sessions. Total deaths ranged from 0 to 4 (M = 1.6, SD = 1.2). Both those PC deaths occurred in session 21, which happened on my birthday, and the same player lost both characters. They really do know how to please their referee.

The MilliWhack rating for this year’s sessions ranged from 73 to 103 (M = 89, SD = 9). That’s a decline compared to last year, which I feel reflects the players’ increased savviness and stronger characters. I guess I need to up the ante and start introducing some deadlier environments.

Chart of MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign to date.

Experience Points

XP per session ranged from 0 to 13,200 (M = 5,710, SD = 4,703). The most lucrative sessions were #23 (13,200) and #26 (11,273). Both were hauls acquired from the second level of the tentpole dungeon, with levels of danger to match the sizeable rewards. I won’t share spoilers here about if there is much more to acquire on this level, but players might need to start exploring the third level if they want to push more of their characters into the upper-level range.

Seven of the current characters saw action this year. Their levels range from 1 to 6 (M = 3.0, SD = 1.5). These characters have now acquired between them 69,994 XP. (Do note that players can get XP from burning treasure, so in effect, each piece of mundane treasure they acquire has the potential of netting them XP twice.) That’s a 3× increase compared to last year. Very well done. Our most active player has managed to get their magic-user character to level six, which is the highest level attainable in Hackbut. A notable achievement!

Game Acquisitions

I believe I did not buy as much hobby-related stuff this year as I did previously. My wallet thanks me.

PDF game books: No ArtPunk, Vol. 1, Yoon-Suin 2nd Edition, Fight On! #15.

Yoon-Suin was a backer reward (I think?) NAP I got to read a few of the winning entries for models to emulate (chiefly Melonath Falls and Caught in the Web of Past and Present). Haven’t gotten around to that yet. Fight On recently relaunched. I had a browse, and it looks fun.

Physical game books: Knock! Issue Four.

Just one physical game book as far as I can recall. This was a backer reward. Knock is always fun to flip through.

Board games: CoraQuest, Captain Sonar, Dragon Quest, Cyclades.

CoraQuest was a birthday present, and it ended up being a big hit with my two six-year-old boys. It’s an extremely well-done, kid-friendly dungeon crawler. Captain Sonar was a gift from my player group, which has yet to find its way onto my table. Dragon Quest was also a gift from a longtime friend and occasional player. A great collectible I am not sure I will ever play, but I am very pleased to own. Cyclades I acquired myself to sort of complete my Matagot dudes-on-a-map holy trinity (alongside Kemet and Inis). We’ve played this a few times, and gosh, is it fun.

Kit: Some more Gamescience dice (d4, d6, d10, d100, d12). I am still on the hunt for a nice d8 and d20. After the previous year’s splurge on some kit for in-person games, I am pretty much set, though, and I don’t feel I need much more.

Books Read

This year, I read a tad more widely than the last, so I did not cover as much D&D-related speculative fiction as I did in the previous year. But still managed to get a few good ones under my belt. In order of reading, these were A Voyage to Arcturus, Carmilla, Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons, and Hyperborea.

The final one, CAS’s Hyperborea, is an absolute must for any old-school D&D head, of course, but the single volume I’d recommend the most is Bebergal’s delightful anthology. It’s a near-perfect collection of sword and sorcery, the kind I’d like all of my players to read. I like it so much that I acquired the second, expanded edition in hardback later in the year.

Peter Bebergal’s Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons (revised and expanded edition).

Blogging

Ah, blogging. The thing I enjoy doing but can’t seem to make the time for. In the hierarchy of hobby-related things, it does come last. I mean, if the choice is between doing some prep on the Planet Karus campaign or drafting a post, the former takes precedence. And that’s fine, I guess.

I did start cross-posting session reports here, which is better than nothing. But what I’d really like to do is wrap up that series of posts on things I learned about running Castle Xyntillan, continue the series on my homebrew rules, and also start posting some things I have created for the Planet Karus campaign. Now, to make the time for it. Ah well.

Views

The blog had 3,720 views and 1,257 visitors. Surprisingly, that’s an increase from last year of 341 (10%) and 309 (33%), respectively.

The top-performing posts were Running Xyntillan: Downtime (198 views), 1d100 Planetary Romance Tropes (118), and Running Xyntillan: Magic Swords (87). The Xyntillan posts continue to perform very well for understandable reasons. It’s kind of surprising that an AI-generated list of tropes did so well. Clickbait? The next two posts from 2024 that did well were Hackbut – Time and Movement (63), and 1d100 Sword, Sandal and Planet Tropes (46).

Referrers

We had 498 views through search engines, 93 through Beyond Fomalhaut, and 85 through Reddit. Melan beat Reddit. Amazing. (I don’t really post to Reddit anymore. Maybe that’s part of it.) I also continue to receive traffic through The Byzantine (21), Anne (17), and Xaosseed (10). My thanks, as always.

Looking Back and Ahead

Let’s conclude this post by reflecting on last year’s resolutions and making some new ones for the year ahead.

Last Year’s Resolutions

The goals for 2024 included restarting the Planet Karus campaign on a monthly basis, continuing monthly board game nights, running an in-person marathon session, and maintaining a monthly blog schedule.

We played nine Planet Karus sessions which isn’t exactly monthly, but close enough if we factor in the usual breaks over summer and Christmas. If we manage to maintain this level of play over the coming year, I would be perfectly satisfied. But maybe we can bump that number up by one or two.

It also looks like we managed to have nine board game nights. Similarly, I hope we can keep that up and maybe squeeze in one or two more.

The big achievement in 2024, gaming-wise, was, without a doubt, the in-person marathon session we had on March 2. It was an absolute blast to play for eight hours straight. I can’t remember the last time we did that. It may have been back in high school decades ago. We had so much fun that we have set a date for a new marathon session in the new year.

The only goal I feel like I did not achieve was the monthly blog schedule. Aside from the play reports, I only posted three things, two of which were AI-generated lists. For a variety of reasons already discussed, a monthly schedule is just asking too much. But more than three should be doable. I mean, that’s one post every 17 weeks. So, let’s cut the original goal in half and shoot for a proper blog post every other month, for a grand total of six this year.

Upcoming Year

In closing, here are some resolutions for the new year.

Continue the monthly in-person Planet Karus games, as well as the monthly board game nights. Obviously. See if we can increase the attendance and the frequency, if only slightly. Run another in-person marathon session of Planet Karus. And yes, see if we can have a modest increase in the number of blog posts.

That’s it for this year in review. Happy 2025.

Categories
Notes

Year in Review – 2022 – Having a Normal One

Another year, another annual review. This marks the third full year of publishing on this website. Let’s hope there are many more yet to come. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021.)

The previous two years were marked by the global pandemic. This year was characterized by our collective emergence from that strange and challenging time and the resumption of what I guess can be called normalcy.

Most COVID measures in this country were lifted by the end of February. I was worried that increasing competing activities would end our weekly roleplaying game. This was luckily not the case, as will become clear. We settled into what I think is a “new new normal” or the old normal, one with fewer plays but still enough to sustain a satisfying campaign.

Table of contents:

What we played

Castle Xyntillan

We played a fourth and final season of Castle Xyntillan from mid-January to mid-April numbering seven sessions in total. These are all written up here on the blog. (See the index.) It was a very satisfying conclusion to a very memorable campaign, one that taught me a lot about how to run classic D&D and also gave me the insight and the confidence to start creating my own material. This brings me to the next thing we played.

Planet Karus

We went on a bit of a hiatus as I finalized preparations for a new campaign named Planet Karus. Its setting is homebrew sword and planet inspired by other planets, including Eternia, Skaith, and Pandarve. For the rules, we continue to use Hackbut, with some setting-specific tweaks sprinkled on top. My ambition is for this to be the campaign world where I can run classic D&D games until the end of my days. So one goal was to keep it compatible with baseline classic D&D, to make it easy to develop things using stock tools out there (like the original book’s treasure tables). But to use a setting that resonates with my younger self’s first encounters with fantasy, which is not EDO, but decidedly more science-fantasy, horrific and weird. (This approach was inspired, among other things, by this great now-gone blog post by Robert Parker.) The idea is to just reskin classic D&D where necessary. To basically reinterpret classic D&D’s implied setting through a sword and planet lens. (More on Planet Karus can be found on the campaign’s site.)

Anyway, we played seven sessions of Planet Karus from early September to early December. Let’s call it Season 1. I have not written those up on the blog here, contrary to my stated intentions in the previous annual review. Writing up CX was fun and useful but also quite a bit of work. The posts found an audience because they were about a published module. The same does not apply to my homebrew campaign even if I at some point publish the materials here (as was previously suggested by commenter DC.) I am keeping notes, of course, if only for my own reflection and analysis. But those are too rough for public consumption. It will probably stay that way. It makes running the game more sustainable, and I can focus my blogging energies on other types of posts.

MOTHERSHIP: Bloom

We concluded the year’s roleplaying with frequent player HB taking over the game-mastering reigns from me for another MOTHERSHIP miniseries. This time we used the latest preview versions of the first edition rules and the module BLOOM by Daniel Hallinan. I’ve enjoyed playing through this so far. The module gave me some good underwater sci-fi vibes in the vein of The Abyss (and, I am told, also Underwater) as well as bio horror along the lines of Annihilation (novel, film).

We played two sessions in December and will pick it up again in January to finish up in another session or two.

MOTHERSHIP as a system is fine. The changes made to the classes for the new edition are definitely improvements over the original version. But I continue to feel like the skill-tree design is a poor fit for a game that purports to be “old school” in its sensibilities. I notice players tend to look at their character sheet when they are faced with a problem, looking for something they can roll against to solve it rather than engaging with the fiction directly. Also, at character creation, choosing skills is still a significant speed bump, as it invites planning ahead and offers a large number of choices at the outset. Better to randomize them, like we do with magic-user spells in classic D&D.

Boardgames

We sat down eight times this year for face-to-face board games on the last Friday of the month. BoardGameGeek tells me these were the games we played in order of the number of plays.

  1. Galaxy Trucker (8 plays)
  2. Quantum (4)
  3. Inis with Seasons of Inis (3)
  4. 7 Wonders (2)
  5. King of Tokyo (2)
  6. Skull (2)
  7. Dragomino (1)

King of Tokyo and Skull are quick games that we like to break out at the end of an evening when we are too tired for the big stuff, but we do not want to go home just yet. “Tokyo” is always a riot, and Skull is a great shortcut to some of the bluffing kicks one also gets from games like poker.

Dragomino is a kids’ game I acquired for my boys (who are now getting into tabletop gaming themselves, an exciting development.) It is surprisingly appealing even for adults as well.

7 Wonders mainly sees table time when we have a big turnout, and some of the other meatier games’ player limits are exceeded. I have a love-hate relationship with this one, I find the engine-building aspect of it kind of tedious, but I have yet to find a satisfying replacement.

This brings us to the top three.

Quantum I acquired second hand late 2021. I have been looking to add it to my collection ever since my game design consultancy days when I was acquainted with its designer. It is quite good and strikes a nice balance between quick-to-play and crunchy. The way it uses chunky six-sided dice is elegant and satisfying.

Galaxy Trucker I received for my birthday in spring. Another one that had been sitting on the list for a long time already. Ever since playing Space Alert, I have been a Vlaada Chvátil fan. Galaxy Trucker has recently had a revamp, and the components are all very nice. I also love how, as is usually the case with Chvátil games, the how-to-play is integrated with the rulebook. This game was an instant hit with the group. It is very funny and plays really fast, but it still has a satisfying amount of crunch. It feels like riding a rodeo on a chaos-generating engine that is quickly tearing itself apart.

And finally, my personal favorite, Inis, which we now play with the Seasons of Inis expansion so that it allows for five players. I adore this game. It looks gorgeous, plays really quick, scratches that “dudes on a map” itch in a way that is not obvious, and does not lead to analysis paralysis like its close contender Kemet does. Highly recommended.

Play statistics

Moving on to some data and analysis of how often we played, what the attendance was like, and the two most important data points in the D&D resource economy: character deaths and experience points. What follows is limited to our classic D&D roleplaying sessions, which continue to take place online.

Sessions

We had a total of 16 sessions in 2022 (down from a whopping 37 in 2021). That is an average of 1.3 sessions per month (SD 1.2). In 2021, by contrast, the average was 3.1 (SD 1.5). This can be explained for the most part by the long break between the final Castle Xyntillan season and the new Planet Karus campaign kicking off. If we removed the months when no plays happened from the data, we get an average of 2 sessions per month in 2022 (SD 0.8) versus 3.4 in 2021 (SD 1.2). Still lower, but not as dramatic a drop as it would first seem, and it can largely be explained by the fact that one Friday a month is now devoted to face-to-face board games.

Attendance

Our group still consists of seven players (eight, if you include the undersigned). Two players did not participate in any of our roleplaying at all (they did join in on the board games occasionally). This year we had an average of 2.6 players per session (SD 0.7). That is down from 3.7 (SD 1.4) in 2021. However, in the last season of 2021, that number is 2.6 (SD 0.7). So things are staying pretty stable. Barring significant life events that impact the ability to participate, this looks like the “new new normal” for our group for the foreseeable future. As in the previous year, the top three players are once again responsible for 66% of attendance, but players did trade places.

Chart of player attendance.
Chart of number of players.

Character deaths

And now, for the statistic that all classic D&D referees care about the most: character deaths. It is interesting that I now get to compare a module written by someone known for their grasp of classic module design, and my own home campaign, in terms of deadliness (as well as XP, for which see the next section). Just to reiterate, rules and procedures have remained basically the same: My homebrew rules Hackbut, which largely has parity with OD&D, B/X D&D, and its retro-clones.

Castle Xyntillan season 4:
Seven sessions, zero player-character deaths, and 11 retainer deaths, for an average of 1.6 deaths per session (SD 2.1). The single deadliest session was #37 in which five retainers died when the company breached the Crusaders’ Tomb, went head-to-head with undead crusaders, faced off against the Giant Snail Guardian, and pilfered the treasury.

Planet Karus season 1:
Seven sessions as well, four player-character deaths, eight retainer deaths, for a total of 12 deaths, and an average of 1.3 per session (SD 1.5). The deadliest single session was #4, in which the same player lost two characters, and two retainers died as well, during a foray into The Balok (the campaign’s current tentpole dungeon). One fighter was killed by a volley of gremlin javelins. (Gremlins are Planet Karus’ equivalent of kobolds.) As a result, a porter failed his morale check and fled back out of the dungeon, triggering a trap on the way out. The same player’s second fighter later stepped on a large venomous snake while heading back out of the dungeon and failed his save versus death. The last retainer also failed their morale roll at this incident and fled into the dungeon’s darkness to be captured by boogieman slavers (read: hobgoblins). (The party later declines to pay the ransom.)

So, it looks like Planet Karus is about as deadly as Castle Xyntillan, but we see more PC deaths on Planet Karus. This can be explained by the fact that the number of monsters and their deadliness is about equal, but PCs in Planet Karus are just starting out and so have far fewer hit points to rely on when things go south.

Chart of character deaths.

Experience points

Moving on to the flip side of character deaths: The sweet rewards reaped for braving danger in the form of experience points. I should point out that I only reward XP for treasure recovered at the traditional rate of 1 GP = 1 XP. (Although in Planet Karus, we use a silver standard for flavor reasons, the game is balanced accordingly, basically as Delta recommends here.)

Castle Xyntillan season 4:
The company gained 14,800 XP, all in a single haul in the very last session when they ransacked the suite of the countess. That amounts to an average of 2,114 XP per session (SD 5,594). By comparison, in the previous year’s gaming, they collected 132,796 XP, on average, 5,533 XP per session (SD 5,281). A pretty big drop which can be explained by the fact that by this point, they had cleared out most of the easy-to-reach treasure. The campaign ended with the company on average at level 4.4 (min 1, max 6, SD 1.9). Between the active characters, they had collected 126,926 XP.

Planet Karus season 1:
Here the picture is quite different. So far, the party has collected 7,071 XP in total, averaging 780 XP per session (SD 1,830). Am I being too stingy? I know there are big hauls tucked away in the tentpole dungeon, but players have been repeatedly repelled by the gremlin tribe that has made the first level their home base and appear to have lost interest in making a concerted effort to oust them. This dungeon has been set up more as a classic assault-style scenario in the vein of the original G series of modules. It is something the players are less accustomed to, and it is certainly a very different approach compared to Castle Xyntillan.

The single biggest haul (5,000 XP) was actually from a wilderness adventure where they cleaned out the treasury of a clan of swinelings holed out in a somewhat remote swamp. (Swinelings are the Planet Karus equivalent of hobbits. Don’t ask.) This may have taught them the “wrong” lesson.

The current total XP for the party is 5,631. The average level is 1.3 (SD 0.5), although 2 out of 7 characters in the active stable have managed to reach level 2. I guess I will not change anything about the treasure distribution for now, but if I place new treasure, I will err on the side of making it easier to reach.

So much for play statistics. Let’s move on to the games I acquired and then wrap up with some blogging numbers.

Game acquisitions

I will not account for every acquisition that sits in my DriveThruRPG account. When I went through the 2022 purchases, I was kind of shocked by the volume. I will call out some notable items instead.

I collected more than a few game books for science fantasy elements to steal for use in Planet Karus. Not all of them I ended up actually using anything from, but they were all useful to skim, at the very least. These included, in no particular order: Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells, Mutant Future: Revised Edition, Planet Eris Gazetteer, Echoes From Fomalhaut #04, Bloody Basic – Weird Fantasy Edition, and Blood & Treasure 2nd Edition Rulebook.

The book I actually pulled things from, technological items in particular, is Hyperborea 3e. I love the vibe of the items in this book, and they can be transplanted easily into any classic D&D rules framework.

(I should also mention Warriors of the Red Planet, Xuhlan and Carcosa; three books that I have drawn significant inspiration from for Planet Karus, but which I had already acquired some time ago.)

I also got the Hill Cantons Compendium II specifically for the white wizard class in there, which I adapted for my own Planet Karus “celestial wizard” NPC class (there are no clerics in this setting, so I needed an alternative source of magical healing).

And then, on the physical front, I was very pleased to acquire both Dungeon Geomorphs Set One to Three and Monster & Treasure Assortment Sets One-Three to add to my very nice Holmes Basic box. I also decided I wanted to own the core three books for AD&D 1e, and managed to acquire a Players Handbook and Monster Manual, both with the Easley covers, which I have a particular fondness for. All that’s left is to find a reasonably priced Dungeon Masters Guide.

Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment.
AD&D 1e Players Handbook.
AD&D 1e Monster Manual.

I also received some physical books from kickstarters I backed. Knock! Issue Three was once again fun to leaf through and sits nicely next to the first two editions. Through the Valley of the Manticore I liked for its solid art and compact yet comprehensive design. And Into the Odd Remastered is a refreshing example of what can be achieved by a formally trained graphic designer when they take a stab at a game book.

On the board games front, I managed to limit myself to two acquisitions, one for my birthday and one for Christmas. My shelf space thanks me. These were the aforementioned Galaxy Trucker, and Power Grid, another game I have played in the past but was still missing from my collection of classics.

Blogging

I did way less blogging this year. Seven Castle Xyntillan reports and two entries into the new “Running Xyntillan” series (on magic swords, and on downtime). That’s nine posts versus 33 in 2021. A big drop. A lot of my creative energies went into completing Planet Karus materials instead. The first note I wrote towards this when I was still following the Gygax 75 framework that I would later abandon dates from 29 August 2021.

My writing energies were otherwise pretty depleted by a lot of heavy lifting on my Ph.D. labors. I will have to complete my thesis in the upcoming year, so it is unlikely I will have a lot more room for blogging. But I will try to hit about a post a month.

Views

On to some readership statistics: The blog had 3,896 views and 1,108 visitors. In 2021 the numbers were 3,519 and 1,188, respectively. So about the same despite way fewer posts. This can be explained by those Castle Xyntillan play reports being of enduring interest to people who are (considering) running it themselves.

I have expanded the promotion of my posts beyond Twitter and the OSR Discord to also comment on the weekly r/osr blogroll curated by u/xaosseed on Reddit, and my new-ish Mastodon account.

The top posts were all Castle Xyntillan play reports: the first two, the last one, and weirdly, session number 17. The only other post that did well was the one on magic swords in Castle Xyntillan. An overview of the numbers is in the table below.

#PostViews
1Castle Xyntillan – Session #0193
2Castle Xyntillan – Session #1177
3Castle Xyntillan – Session #17106
4Running Xyntillan: Magic Swords104
5Castle Xyntillan – Session #4383
Table of top 5 posts of 2022 by number of views.

Referrers‌

The top sources of traffic are search engines (329 views) and Reddit (191). These are followed by a bunch of classic D&D blogs: Beyond Fomalhaut (run by Melan, the designers of Castle Xyntillan, 91 views). Twitter has yielded a mere 23 views. The final referrers I will mention are A Distant Chime (home to a great Castle Xyntillan campaign write-up, 16 views), Tales of the Rambling Bumblers (Joshua was kind enough to link to an old post of mine about ability checks, 11 views), and DIY & dragons (11 views).

Looking ahead

Okay, let’s wrap this thing up with a reflection on last year’s resolutions and make some new ones for this year.

Last year’s resolutions

2022’s notable achievements include bringing our Castle Xyntillan campaign to a satisfactory conclusion and starting up the new Planet Karus one, which, as planned, is indeed so far 100% homebrew.

I also did manage to get Quantum to the table, but not my other acquisition from back in 2021, Tigris & Euphrates, which I will have to amend soon.

Blogging-wise, I did not continue writing play reports and also did not continue the series on Hackbut. Reasons for the former, I have already addressed. I might revive the Hackbut series, but probably not by continuing to go through the rules section by section.

Finally, we ended up not adding any new players to our group, although I did ask around and got some enthusiastic responses from potential candidates. This year I hope to actually get them to join in.

Upcoming year

And finally, here are some new year’s resolutions: We will finish up the MOTHERSHIP: Bloom miniseries. Then we will pick up the Planet Karus campaign again, and I hope to run 2-3 seasons this year. One in winter, one in spring, and one in the fall. Maybe we can hit 20+ sessions this year? That would be great.

We will obviously also continue our last Friday-of-the-month board game nights, of course. Those are always great.

Blogging-wise, as already mentioned, I hope to post maybe once a month this year. Who knows if I will actually manage that. But this monster-size annual review is at least a solid start.

And finally, a “dream” I’ve had for some time is to get together physically with the group and play D&D for more than a few hours but do one of those marathon sessions we used to always do over the weekend when we were teenagers. Maybe rent a holiday home? It would be great to play face-to-face again sometime. Roll physical dice, scribble maps, and stain character sheets with crisps-soiled fingers.