I've always tracked my gaming progress like the US Federal fiscal calendar (October through September). Don't ask why, it's always been like that, I'm not going to change now.
I'm notorious for burying the lead, so let's have some positivity first!
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| A bulletin board from a basketball tournament in at North Schuylkill Middle School. The basketball did not abate this year. |
The Blog:
The Top Ten Blog Posts Over the Past Twelve Months
The Top Ten Blog Posts Over the Past Twelve Months
- Historicon 2023 Action Action Ramblings (Conventions)
- Fall-In 2022! (Conventions)
- Dollar Store Genestealers (Painting)
- Cold Wars 2023 AAR (Conventions)
- The Bachelor Gaming Lifestyle (General Blogging)
- (Planet 28) Battle for the Tractor of Ukrainius (Planet 28)
- (Planet 28) Incident at Colgar Station 6 (Planet 28)
- Lehicon 7 with Twenty-Six Years of Hindsight (Conventions)
- (Planet 28) The Murder Ball Extrication (Planet 28)
- (Planet 28) Waiting to Extract (Planet 28)
Let this be a lesson for you all. Take lots of pictures at cons and paint up for dollar store toys, and you'll get all the views you ever wanted.
With all my delays on other long-term projects/games, it was great to see Planet 28 get all the love. The big Pulp game just never could materialize, so I'm happy to have played around with the sci-rules, even if they were still the 1st edition. There were a couple Star Wars games in my top 20, so that was enjoyable to see.
My biggest surprise? My "Twenty Question About My Gamma World Campaign" skyrocketed near the top 10, and that was just posted last Tuesday! Apparently a lot of people have "Gamma World" triggered on their social media search. We'll see how that evolves as the Gamma World actual play starts posting in October.
Why is Singapore so Singa-Rich with hits? I've been doing this long enough to cheer an uptick of hits one second, only to wince when 500 hits in 5 minutes came from Sierra Leone. Years ago, one of my first banner months I deemed corrupted when 10,000 hits from Italy at 6:01am skewed an otherwise awesome month... on the last day.
This summer, my bot-nemesis was Singapore, but to make things stranger, about a quarter of the daily hits when to somewhat random posts in the past. Still it's skewing the data that only I care about.
I've manage to become immune to the horribly inflated numbers, until they deflated... yesterday. Singapore is no longer on my stats at all. Either Google finally cleaned up stuff (it's been awhile since that's happened), or the poor bot has finished my blog and wished for a mercy killing. Good news/bad news: I won't be rushing to my 1,000,000 (that's one millionth) page view quite as fast as I was heading, thank God!
#RPGaDay2023 - Ten years of #RPGaDay brought the return of the Year One questions, and an uptick on activity. It's still not pre-COVID numbers, but as a blogger, those pre-COVID numbers are from another era.
#CharacterCreationChallenge - I decided to participate in this in early December, rather than the night of New Year's Eve, so it only took me till the 20th to finish up the last few characters. It's an intriguing exercise that doesn't seem to generate any more traffic, unless I promote the hell out of them with a dozen superfluous hashtags. If I manage to accumulate a decent pile of character concepts and/or AI art by the end of the year, I'll take a stab at it for 2024. And any excuse to introduce Ko'rona Vyress to Gamma World was welcome indeed.
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| Soul'Miz, Maja's Venus Fly Trap Mutant Plant for Gamma World |
#RPGBlogCarnival: I investigated this monthly community project, after #RPGaDay. Heck, I even have about a third of a great piece about the archeology and anthropology around the Temple of Alasku in my World of Georic, but, requiring a significant rewrite, it's been tossed back into the bin. The results by the contributors reads something like Alarums and Excursions, if it merged with the Forge, and a podcast question mailbag. The article will see the light of day, just not for September.
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| The Tequila Worms shot up the town in a Fistful of Lead game at Cold Wars 2023 |
#ZineQuest/#ZineMonth - While there was plenty of material to post about (and I'm pretty picky with the zines I post about), there wasn't much enthusiasm for more than a few items. In fact, I picked up as many zines away from the supposed promotional months. Now, playing some of them in the future might be an even more impressive feat.
Project 350: 472 (314/158) from 457 (293/164) I did get a large quantity of saved pictures (AI and procured off the internet used on posts.) and only processed through half of them. I also have about half of January's #CharacterCreationChallenge mapped out.
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| Planet 28: Firefly versus the Gnomish Space Marines |
STAR WARS D6 PAUSE - The actual play blog posts lasted until August, but I put the Star Wars campaign on pause around Thanksgiving of '22. The last episode finally posted at the end of August. There are plenty of reasons and opportunities to restart the game, when the time comes.
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| Wars of Ozz |
Planet 28 Progress: Fistful of Lead is stealing some of its thunder, but I feel my style and play closer resembles with bare-bones sci-fi game with a healthy dash of grimdark in every game. It also doesn't help my ego that the P-28 games supplanted my normal Gnome Wars and Pulp entries.
Fistful of Lead: My favorite part of FoL is that I can convert scenarios designed for one genre into another with only minor modifications. Many of the scenarios out of the western For a Fistful More can be directly translated onto the streets of Carf for Galatic Heroes.
The Federal League Online!: More so than online/video games, I would much rather take up some time playing Dice Baseball solo. As solo works much better when you're a single guy in your own place, I've resurrected my Federal League, and reset it back during its inaugural season (1920) and am actively keeping statistics on my Google Drive and writing snippets and write-ups on its own separate blog.. My 1995-2008 stats/records still exist, but I have little chance of filling in the years after that were on a corrupted hard drive and never printed off.
1920 was completed with speed and even with a few tweaks to play to resemble the 1920s, stats were quite comparable to to 1995-2008. It brought joy and enhanced my calm in an otherwise turbulent time.
(Note to self: fixed points in time are a) 1938 New York - Pittsburgh playoff game for the pennant b) New York Knights 3b Rich Klupa born in 1940 and joins the league at 16. c) Donald Trump (yes that guy) buys the Newark Bears and moves them to Atlantic City in 1986. George Steinbrenner moves the Yankees to the league from 1987-1994.
CATASTROPHES:
It's Life, Jim, but not as we know it: So, two weeks into the gaming year, I made the biggest announcement for the blog. My wife and I, after 16 years of marriage, were separating, I was moving out, and divorce was imminent.
Almost a year later, we're still separated, I moved out December 1st of last year, and full legal divorce is still slowly evolving. The kids are still at some acceptable level of okay/not okay, but they've also fully benefitted from "Separate Parent Attention" plus that of my wife's short-term former fiancée (Yeah, there's drama that's worth mentioning but not in detail).
I moved twenty minutes away to a 2nd floor, bedroom-and-a-half place. Just enough room for an office... and a painting table.
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| The double table requires some furniture moving, but it works! |
To my life's complication or relief, my job was part of a giant layoff in June. I've spent the Summer enjoying time off/decompressing/living off of months of PTO and a decent severance package.
HMGS Board Election - I got cornered and ask to run for the board of the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society. On a silly platform of "Let's be reasonable/Stop panicking for no good reason," I did not win, did not end up in last. I did not let it deter my Historicon.
And if that wasn't all bad enough, most of my plans for this past year, blew up. The only item that had any progress was the Gnomish Space Marines, and there's still a ton of unpainted lead for that to be a sizable success.
GENERAL MUCKERY:
Basketball: Basketball still dominates the girls' lives, although as certain other girl's have left programs or started working recruitment showcases (and not in high school yet!), Millie lives and breathes it, while Maja has realized she can slow down/shut down these social media darlings without immersing her entire life into the sport.
Maja's second year of school sports wasn't as successful, per se. The majority of 8th graders were kept exclusively to the Freshmen team, leaving a significantly weakened 8th grade team, and a 7th grade team that was ignored in development for most years pitching in to the cause. Freshmen lost only two games, both to the eventual league champion. The 8th grade team suffered some ignoble defeats due to lack of manpower/7th graders playing up. And the 7th grade team, the forgotten group, upset the #1 seed in the playoffs and lost in the championship game.
The big news for the summer/upcoming winter season is the replacement of the Varsity head coach, Maja playing JV/Varsity over the summer league, and Millie making her junior high debut to much fanfare. Despite some poor decisions my various coaches and administrators, both girls are set to make a great impact, wherever they're going to play.
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| 2022 Back Mountain 9th Grade Tournament winners (as 7th/8th graders) |
FALL-IN! - Fall In! literally fell into the final weekend of Millie's AAU, so Maja and I spent the Friday cramming wargaming, spent Saturday morning down in Spooky Nook, Saturday Afternoon back at the Host (Wyndham) and all of Sunday at the Nook. A good time all around. My first foray into the Friday/Saturday flea markets was a huge success. Everyone was winning PELA awards except me, which was fine as I brought one unit to the weekend festivities.
MEPACON - Mepacon 43 returned near its roots this Fall, arriving in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Vaccination cards were still mandatory, but with no masks, it was a well-attended con that finally felt like a con. Maja had a great time at her first LARP, I cleared out a couple more tubs in the auction, and outside of the the food truck delays, it was a near perfect convention.
Sadly, I missed Mepacon 44.
Historicon 2023! - I spent my Thursday and Friday running Fistful of Lead - Galactic Heroes and relaxing Friday and Saturday night with Maja.
I still haven't gotten my PELA yet, even though I've been the thank you list in four awarded events.
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| Gnome Wars |
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| Fistful of Lead: Galactic Heroes |
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| Fistful of Lead - Wasteland Warriors |
I’ve got the Magic in me…. The "nearby" FLGS, Sword in the Stone Games, moved from its basement downtown location to a prominent spot in the mall, and things are looking very, very rosy.
I have ventured over there and slowly jumped into a few Magic games. A pre-release here, a few Pauper games there, and some practice on Magic: Arena, and I haven't made any crazy investments.
Kickstarter Status
KS: Attack from Space - July '22 - ARRIVED
KS: Black Rabbit - ARRIVED!
KS: Blackvale - July '21 - ARRIVED MARCH '23
KS: Carpace & In the Heart of Oz - July '23 - ARRIVED
KS: Caves of Refuge
KS: Children of Uma - September '22 - ARRIVED
KS: Cthulhu and Pulp Characters - Wave 2 - ARRIVED
KS: Cthulhu Wars Cataclysm - I still don't think this will ever show up.
KS: Delta Green: The Conspiracy - April '22 - ARRIVED
KS: Exit, Pursued by Bear - ARRIVED
KS: Escape from Stalingrad Z - November '22 - ARRIVED
KS: For a Kitten - ARRIVED
KS: Four Kingdoms - ARRIVED
KS: Here We Used to Fly - ARRIVED
KS: In Soviet Russia, Spy Are You! -ARRIVED!
KS: Macrocosm Chaos Space Dwarves - Wave 2 - ARRIVED!
KS: Macrocosm Chaos Space Dwarves - Wave 3
KS: Macrocosm Space Dwarves - The Party - ARRIVED!
KS: Madness at the Mall - ARRIVED!
KS: New Dark Age: Death of Magic
KS: People in Peril - May '24
KS: People's Prison - ARRIVED
KS: Planet 28, 2nd Edition - September '22 - ARRIVED
KS: Reaper Bones 6 - April '24
KS: Salmon of Knowledge - ARRIVED
KS: Seven Murders Till Midnight - ARRIVED
KS: Trouble at Mill Manor - ARRIVED
KS: Trouble with Gnolls
KS: Village of Omelette
KS: War for the Wasteland - ARRIVED
KS: War of Orcs and Dwarves - ARRIVED
I'm a little embarrassed by the plethora of Kickstarters I supported this year, and the small handful that will never see the light of day. Over half of the Kickstarters that I pledged to, or are awaiting were either cheap zines or the dollar modules that I discovered in the spring.
I also think I'm swearing off 99% of all international-based Kickstarters, save Macrocosm. The hassle with my bank or credit card company dealing with out-of-the-country transactions, while a minor pain, has not been worth the effort, save Macrocosm.
Painting - A more productive year than last, despite the "Bachelor Lifestyle," but more than half of my output were items I purchased this year. I still bought more than I painted, but I definitely need to review the dreaded "lead pile" and see if I need to get a table at Wally's for Historicon.
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| Millie's Candy Truck |
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| My "Colorado" Elf |
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| Killer Cacti of the Death Planet Iota |
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| Gnomish Space Marine Dreadnought #2 |
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| Dollar Store Trailers and Gnome Wars Surgeons |
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| Dollar Store "Genestealers" |
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| Chaos Space Gnomes |
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| The Dinks |
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| The city of Carf |
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| Brigade Games' take on a Finnish badass, which I turned into a Delta Green themed Soviet operative. |
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| The stage is set for Pulp Season 4 |
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| The stage for Pulp Season 4 is even more set! |
2022-23 Gaming with the Gnomies Awards
Best Kickstarter: Macrocosm Chaos Space Dwarves - Wave 2 Best turnaround for a physical product, from the dreaded UK no less! And the best part? They're all freakin' painted already!!!
Worst Kickstarter: Cthulhu Wars Cataclysm - Despite consistent but futile updates, this one reminds me of the failures of the Robotech KS, although I'm getting strong vibes from the Adam Scott Glancy WWI campaign, and the Kickstarter for the Noir RPG. With those, I think I threw in a buck for the possibility of watching the world burn for those other two. At this point, I wouldn't even want Petersen games to get my dollar for this one. 100% pledge's remorse.
Best Game: Ticket to Ride. As a Christmas gift I knew I was getting, we've not only gotten a couple games in but Millie of all people plays it her friends' homes. There's hope for her yet. Despite it's huge impact to my convention games, the only close runner-up for Fistful of Lead.
Best RPG Purchase: Gamma World 4th Edition (Drive Thru RPG Printing). The POD has been fair for the Kickstarters, but this one motivated me to pick up some more of the 4th edition POD. Runner Up: Finally picking up Atlantis: The Second Age.
Best Minis: Veteran with Pick and Pistol from Brigade Games made me think and develop some new characters, or even another league for Pulp Alley.
Best Other Purchase: D-Day (Avalon Hill) - I didn't get around to playing it, but the nostalgia in this one was too strong not to pick up. It has a prominent spot on my trunk/coffee table.
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