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A review of the year 2011 in gaming.
1. I kept working on my Campaign Wiki site. Of particular note for old school gamers are the Links to Wisdom (a collection of links to interesting old school blog posts all over the blogosphere) and Campaign:Monsters wikis (a collection of old school monsters with open licenses). The Old School RPG Planet (a collection of all the old school blogs I know) is still up and running but I haven’t looked at the logs to determine whether it is popular or not.
2. I ran the One Page Dungeon Contest 2011. I might do it again in 2012 unless somebody else feels like running it. I’d be happy to help. I also used several entries to populate my own sandbox.
3. Gaming is still strong. I had to cancel a biweekly Labyrinth Lord group because of dwindling players but I added the two remaining players to my monthly Labyrinth Lord group and that one is working out well. I rather enjoyed running two parties in the same campaign. Too bad this won’t work out anymore.
4. Our biweekly Indie game night is still going strong. I really liked Lady Blackbird. I wrote a very short, German FATE variant (Der Geist Mesopotamiens) for us. At first I really liked FATE because I thought I really liked FUDGE – but I had never actually played them. Now that I have, I think I prefer self-made and light variants of FATE, if at all. Spirit of the Century was long and confusing, Diaspora was dry, Starblazer Adventures and Dresden Files RPG were so big I didn’t even buy them. My Mesopotamia FATE variant fits on ten or twelve pages. I like that.
5. My monthly Labyrinth Lord game with three kids and their dad has managed to attract the attention of guest players. Maybe the group will grow? Doing my part pulling in the next generation.
6. I switched my biweekly D&D 3.5 campaign to Solar System RPG and when our montly Pathfinder adventure path ended, we switched to HARP. I even cancelled some of my Paizo subscriptions and will most likely cancel my Adventure Path subscription as well. I think I have found my preferred gaming style for the next two or three years: old school, {DIY do it yourself} D&D with a lot of inspiration from the {OSR old school renaissance} blogs and fanzines like Fight On! magazine.
7. I did some drawings and maps for Fight On! magazine but I haven’t finished the dungeon level I promised to do! Clearly this needs to get done as soon as possible.
8. My plan of having social meetups of the local role-playing gamers has worked out. We had a summer grill and I will be planning a winter fondue. And we played on December 25.
9. The blog that provided a lot of food for thought this year was Courtney’s Hack & Slash. Absolutely recommended. Topics to look up are the *quantum ogre* and *player agency*. Absolutely shaped my thinking about role-playing games this year. (Previous blogs in the same category would be Jeff’s Gameblog for old school madness and inspiration, The Alexandrian for the analysis of running the old school adventure *Caves of Thracia* and Planet Algol for the halucinogenic mix of science fiction, pulp and fantasy.)
10. I was interested in Google+ but somehow it’s not working out for me. I feel like I need to share with circles in order to not be a spammer and yet I feel this thorougly reduces discoverability. Something doesn’t feel right about it. I keep using Twitter a lot (@kensanata). I don’t use Hangout to game because I have enough opportunity to play at my table.
11. I posted more German RPG blogs (using the RSP tag) – if you’re only interested in English RPG related articles, make sure to subscribe to the appropriate RPG tag only.
I’ll need to collect a list of “best” blog posts. Tomorrow, maybe.
#RPG #Retrospective
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Merry Christmas Alex - you are a bastion of the OSR - keep it up in 2012.
– Jovial Priest 2011-12-28 08:46 UTC
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Thanks! 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2011-12-28 09:59 UTC
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Thanks for having me around as part of your RPG Year!
– Harald 2011-12-28 15:44 UTC
