Do Better

Honestly, RPG blogosphere. If there were a Bloggie for 'worst blog', I'd be a contender.

I'm not trying to beat myself up here; it's just a reflection of fact that I've barely written anything, my site doesn't even have a blogroll, and my web design would have been awful in 2008. Which is, incidentally, the year the internet was at its best.

But, like everyone else with a blog, I couldn't help but look myself up at graph.elmc.at. Imagine my surprise to discover I'm ranked 157 out of 514 on interconnectedness. Which is not the totality of what constitutes a good blog. But apparently nearly 70% of RPG bloggers are even less connected than me.

Low bar, folks.

If you're reading this and not blogging anything, write something. You might like it. If you're reading this and you are blogging something, link to other people. Even if it's just to say 'hey, look at this dingbat who thinks he can tell me what to do'. That's how conversations get started.

And that's what made the internet so good in 2008. People had conversations about the stuff they liked on blogs and forums.¹

Anyway. What have I been up to?

Playing games, yes. Mostly my BEOWULF: Age of Heroes group, which takes a surprising amount of effort to keep off the vanilla 5e rails. Mostly my fault for allowing vanilla 5e classes. But I've got a group of players who mostly get it, so that helps. A thought on that front: that system is designed for one GM and one player, not for party play. But rival heroes adventuring in a shared world could be interesting.

I've also recently tried Night's Black Agents; good fun playing James Bond at the Paris Opera House with some supernatural shenanigans. I can see the appeal of campaign play. That group is meant to be fortnightly, playing one-shots in a range of systems. It's also largely a group of game masters: I can't remember who said it, but it does seem to be the case that if you want to play different games, you should play with other GMs.

On the board game front, new additions to the stack have been Aspens from Ludivore Games, and Old King's Crown from Eerie Idol Games. Wildly different vibes here. Aspens is a quick, simple, surprisingly deep two-player strategy game in which you play as a forest. No really. A little bit of randomisation helps make sure there isn't a clear winning strategy, but it takes longer to put the board together than to learn the rules.

Old King's Crown goes the other way. Lots of moving parts. Takes a while to figure out how it all works. But it's full of moves and countermoves, and although there are a lot of moving parts it's actually surprisingly minimalist - everything is there for a reason. And the art is fantastic as well. I can very easily see a sword & sorcery story (or game) fitting into the Old King's Crown world. Almost certainly of the Elric persuasion.

Anyway, will I write again soon? Who knows. There are only 40 or so posts I've got sitting in my drafts folder, in varying levels of completeness.

¹: Hey, what's a good RPG forum anyway? There must be one, right? Discord just... ain't it.