The Old Year and the New, or, what to read/expect if you're coming here for the first time now for some unknown reason, or, Oh God Oh Fuck

Somebody is a lot more generous than I am with their definition of a standout blog, because apparently AEHElm has been nominated for the Bloggies 2024 'new blog of the year' list. THANK YOU!! to whoever got enough out of it in its brief run since late August to do that.

I was going to make this post anyway, but now it feels doubly necessary to push through a patch of illness and get it out.[1] It's a brief explanation of the things I've written so far which are, IMO, worth reading*, and the things that I'm planning on doing next. 

*My new years' resolution for this blog is to edit everything at least once before reading it, because some of my output thus far has been a triumph of 'getting something out before the end of a month' over quality. 

If you're somehow learning about the bloggies from this post and not the other way around, I earnestly plead with you to show no loyalty. Go in there, read all the amazing things new bloggers have written this year, and, comes the time, vote for the best - this is highly unlikely to be me, there are 35 of them by my count! (Also vote on the actual finalist posts obvs)

Old Father Time, or, Last Year in Sometimes-Chronological Order Ignoring the Posts I Don't Think Are Worth Your Time

I think my blogging efforts started off pretty strong. Speedrunning RPGaDAY 2024 in one day to get my blog-writing off the ground & introduce myself is mostly a bit of a laugh, but I do genuinely think you get a good sense of me from it: slightly verbose, slower writer than I think I am, with lots of odd ideas about terrain and a persistent conflicted love of doing odd things with 5E. Then we're into actual good stuff with Note On Trees, and Eldritch Horror, where I springboard off some speculative materialist philosophy into making a cosmic-horroresque monster that views humans as we do trees. I'm not sure I stuck the landing on the sequel post where I tried to make said monster gameable, sadly, but ah well. 

Same issue comes up in 60 minutes of Thoughts: the Geneomancers, wizards of the paternity test: too much fluff (the thing that's been brewing in my head for years) to crunch for a truly interesting post. I've been hampered in a lot of these things by the fact that I haven't finished making my own dedicated systems, let alone got them into postable format, so it's a bit hard to pick a system to frame things within, but I probably should have bitten the bullet and added generic stats and more spells. I still like it though, because they're primarily a plot device for which almost any caster stats could work and I think it does a decent job of expressing their role succinctly. 

By contrast, Table of Dream (and Vision) Types for TTRPGs, with thanks to Steven F. Kruger is exactly the kind of thing I want to make here, succinctly pulling something from an academic work and making it gameable. (Can you tell Coins and Scrolls was my main blogging inspiration?) It suffers only from me not knowing how to format the effing quote blocks, on which any advice is much welcome. I've not done much like it since, but hopefully more soon - on which see below!

Early October sees the release of the post that drove me to actually get into gear and make the blog, and the only thing I've written for Warhammer so far: Making a Magic System for Warhammer: the Old World that doesn't Feel like Being Repeatedly and Clinically Kicked In The Teeth by the Auditors of Reality (Part 1/several). It's the first of the long posts, and by far my most viewed overall. It's been controversial amongst Warhammer Fantasy fans I've spoken to, and that's entirely fair - it's complicated and deliberately unbalancing and weird - but it does what I want it to, I think. Parts 2/several and on are, alas, delayed until I can find a playtesting group, but there is no doubt they will come with time because I'm the alternative is not playing TOW (unconscionable) or playing with a magic system that ... well.

(Speaking of long posts in as-yet-unfinished series, I can't recommend Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 0: The Fool, OR, Delineation of the Scope and Intent of this Projeckt until Part 1 is out, but the precursor bit of theory, We should proceduralize Mage: the Ascension somewhat, is something I'm very pleased with.)

Also in early October, 60 Minutes of Thoughts: How to Doom Everyone, rules for lives hanging by four less-than-stout ropes is probably my favourite bit of rules design on this blog and one of my favourite bits ever. It's usable in virtually any game, especially more modular ones, for any situation where two sides in conflict risk escalating a situation that could destroy both. If you read nothing else I've written, this one please. (And thank you again to Desks & Dorks for permission to iterate on an idea from that channel).

October was very productive, because it also saw the release of the painfully enormous The 8 new TTRPG systems I've played since last October, reviewed (number 7 will SHOCK you!), a post which I finished writing on the 31st, on my phone, on a train, on my way to go for a Halloween walk in the wilderness. It manages to both be too little and too much at once for my perfectionist tastes, but hey, it's 8 game reviews. It may be worth your time if you've never previously played Until Sunrise, Poison'd, Pathfinder 2e, Yuggothi Confidential, LANCER, Royal Blood, [REDACTED], or Dungeon at the End of the Multiverse. It also gave me a lot of time to think about what I think a TTRPG review needs, which I put to more considered use in producing A Review of Shadow Ops, or On the Merits of Explicit Design a couple of months later. 

Oh, yeah, November exists. I remain unconvinced that anybody has ever played a 200-word RPG, but The Triggermen: a 200-word ttrpg after Harold Pinter was a fun exercise in a game as a piece of social design based on my favourite playwright and my academic reading into the social circles of Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitaries. Alternative rules for sorcerers and chiminage for Mage: the Ascension is a short, neat little pair of fixes for a problem that I have with the Mage 20 rules and a problem that a lot of people have with the Mage 20 rules, insofar as that statement can ever be true. They're unplaytested, but they have good vibes to me. I think they might work quite well.

December was mostly dominated by a new job, a lot of travel, the Shadow Ops review and the hangover thereof, but I did also write about the minis I painted in Autumn (all 17 of them... yayyyyyy /s) which may be fun to look at if you like looking at low-effort photos of other peoples' minis. 

So that's the best of what I've done thus far! IMO, anyway, YMMV of course. What next?

The (First Bit of the) Year to Come

 I currently have about 22 draft posts of varying completeness and quality and a couple of things from elsewhere that could become blog posts pretty easily, so no risk of running out of material any time soon. I think I've worked out that I can feasibly write around four posts per month, where each Big Thing counts as 2 - give or take some leeway for editing time meaning some things release in the next month. As such, you can expect me to keep going with this for some time. That said, I don't want this blog ever to become a stressor, so I reserve the right to post slower as and when I need or to ditch an idea that isn't working. Also, see my resolution about editing above. Also also, I'm writing quite a lot for my actual home game at the moment, a lengthy essay on the nature of gender in my personal fantasy heartbreaker's setting which currently stands at 6500 words and ~16% completion, so that might slow things a bit.

All of that in mind, it seems worth posting the 12/13 things that're currently most exciting to me as a sort of vague forecast of Q1 of 2024. Realistically, probably 6-8 of these will be made, 2-4 will be delayed. and 1-5 will vanish forever as I lose inspiration for the ideas.

• Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 1, in which I'll go through the placement of sites of power, nodes, ley lines etc. over which our mages and other supernaturals will compete ; and Part 2, which will place some odd supernatural beings of Lancashire, Cumbria, Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Flintshire and the Yorkshire Dales into their World of Darkness context.
• A piece of gamified-academia on Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You, describing a number of different traits a creature described to your PCs as a 'troll' by superstitious townfolk might actually have
• Notes on the Velkithi Anglercray, a diegetic account of the alchemo-biology and behaviour of a beastie some of my players recently fought.
• More gamified-academia from Tim Harper's Underground Asia, a more generic laying-out of plot hooks and so forth inspired by it
• A piece of meditation on my past experiences with TTRPG burnout and how I sort-of overcame it which I think may be the single most useful thing I can offer to the TTRPG community
• D50ish Radical Groups, a genre-neutral-ish random table for odd partisan organizations based on my own research.
• The First Two TTRPGs I Ever Read, Or - Wrote! in which I go over a couple of games I wrote between the ages of 9 and 12 which are nominally TTRPGS but written with 0 awareness of other games beyond 2nd or 3rd hand cultural osmosis of what D&D might look like. 
• A Fight in Every System I own (Part 1), a piece I've had for literal years where I run the same fight (6 minimally-capable street toughs, 4 starting PCs) in... every system I (physically) own, to see how the rules shape the outcomes of play at the most basic level possible.
• Gaming the Ground, or something like that, some thoughts on how TTRPGs near-inevitably fail to produce interesting, plausible experiences of terrain at the micro- to medio-(?) scale, and what if anything we can do to make interesting, dynamic battlefields and exploration spaces without investing £££ in scenery or having every dramatic encounter take place on an active volcano. How can mud, heather, and sand be interesting?
• The hidden adventure in the Warhamer Fantasy Battles 6th edition Tomb Kings army book - clickbaity title, but somebody really did just put a dungeon expedition with maps in a wargame rulebook and I want to talk about it.
• The Square Campaign, a campaign structure for a 2d 'ladder' campaign in Warhammer Fantasy Battles/TOW that I made and used a few years ago. A bit simpler than a straight up fight, a bit more fun. 
• (If I manage to get a few test-games in) initial thoughts on my Old World magic system homebrew & maybe a few more spell lores.

The following prompts are on my 60-minutes-of-thoughts list, and might or might not also make an appearance:

• TTRPG as mind-alteration
• Consequence Avoidance Points as an alternative to Hit Points
• A Few Stat Systems I Will Never Use But Appreciate Aesthetically
• Rocket Tag and Asymmetrical Power as Balance
• Archaon Can Read A Map - Progress, Grand Strategy and the End Times in Warhammer Fantasy

If any of those sound especially interesting, do let me know and I'll maybe be more excited to produce them, maybe. Probably! Maybe.

Thanks for taking the time to read this far, if you have, and I look forward to seeing you in the new year!

[1] I'm dramatizing... I'm ill enough to not want to move or leave the house, but not enough to struggle thinking or typing. Anybody else secretly really love that? It always feels to me like a chance to catch up on creative projects without feeling like I'm abandoning other duties.