2026 Shall Be Defeated!

Well, I didn't complete many of my not-goals for 2025.

Oh dear.

• I did finish writing WAR 16XX and got some good feedback from a couple of experts, but the art remains to be done. There are a few reasons why that hasn't happen, not all of which are my fault, but even so it's a bit disappointing that stalled.
• I made some progress on a new LotFP adventure, but nothing publishable, and I really need to finish WAR 16XX first.
• I didn't play 40K or The DOOMED, but I did get one game of Stargrave in, and designed a handful of missions.
• Legions Imperialis remains under my desk, unpainted.
• I played Cthulhu Hack so I made progress on the unplayed rpgs list. Very minor progress, but progress nonetheless!

Right, so what about 2026? Well, I am still reluctant to make any solid plans, but we can aim for something like:

• I need to get WAR 16XX out the door.
• Stuart and I have pencilled in a rough plan to play at least one wargame a month, including 40K and Stargrave.
• I'm sure I can get another game crossed off the unplayed list. Maybe. Ish.

I managed to complete three of my five not-goals for 2025, so I'll aim for three in 2026, and maybe complete one. We'll see.

Happy new year everyone!

No 2024 Survives Contact With the Enemy

So here we are, about to shuffle 2024 off into the euthanasia booth (for its own good), and how did I get on with my goals for the year? And those projects I was trying to finish?

Er...

Let's do the projects first:

• Maps for [REDACTED]: well, this didn't go well. [REDACTED] is out, my maps are not in it, and the whole situation has been a bit of a confusing mess that I would prefer to forget.
• The Gargantuan Ovum of Sir William Hatcher: I completely lost confidence in this with about 50% done. I'm just not sure it's any good. Maybe I will revisit it.
• Untitled Adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess: I don't even remember what this is, which suggests I didn't start writing it.
• WAR 16XX: Indeed not the final title. This one is almost done. I've decided to chuck an adventure in the book, even though it doesn't really need one, so that's added some development time. This one's coming out in 2025, whatever happens.
• Griffin Hill: This bubbles away in the background. I may end up publishing this myself, piece by piece, then go looking for a publisher for the final product. Maybe.

Not a great level of success there. And my other goals?

• Stargrave: Stuart and I got a couple of games in before the end of the year, but only just! I think we've got a taste for it again, so I'm confident we'll play more.
• The DOOMED: I played one game and enjoyed it, but I don't know if Stuart and I have enough headspacetime for another skirmish wargame. It does have solo rules, so maybe I'll try a few games in that mode.
• Legions Imperialis: Still in the box, unassembled and unpainted, under my desk. So much for my love of epic scale warfare.
• My gaming group and the unplayed rpg list: I didn't make a full return, but I ran a couple of sessions of Lady Blackbird and played in Stuart's Night of the Hogmen game, both in-person, and also playtested Stuart's 1941 Call of Cthulhu scenario over Discord/Roll20. I played in some of Ben's Delta Green game, and I also dropped into some board games with the gang.
• The 40K Project: It wasn't on my goals list, but Stuart and I finally kicked off our plan to play every single edition of Warhammer 40,000 in order and we had good fun. We're painting up some final units for second edition, and hope we can get that played in the first few weeks of 2025.

That looks a bit more successful!

I'm not going to make any real solid goals for 2025, but:

• I should be able to get WAR 16XX (not the final title) finished. I plan to do the art myself, which does mean regaining confidence in my drawing...
• I think I have at least one more LotFP adventure in me, so I'll see if I can get one done.
• More 40K, The DOOMED, and Stargrave.
• Legions Imperialis? Maybe?
• Let's try to tick another one off the unplayed rpg list. Why not?

That looks suspiciously like a list of goals, so maybe I should stop now before things get out of hand.

Happy new year everyone! I hope 2025 is better!

Checklist 2024

Right then, with that said, what creative projects am I planning to get done in 2024? This list exists as much to keep me honest as anything.

• Maps for [REDACTED]. This is my January job. Once this is out of the way, I can work on the other stuff.
• The Gargantuan Ovum of Sir William Hatcher, an egg-cellent adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I'm hoping for a March publication for this one.
• Untitled Adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. As long as this is published by the end of the year, I'll be happy.
• WAR 16XX, which won't be the final title, unless we go mad. For Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
• Griffin Hill, a horror campaign/setting/campaign setting. I'm not sure of the system yet.

That'll do as a minimum, and we'll see what else crops up as the year goes on.

Masterplan 2024

I would have posted this earlier but I noticed that I had 69 posts in 2023, and I am a child.

Well, 2023 was a bit of a crapper. Indulge me as I moan about why, or just click here to skip to the optimistic bit.

I have had a day job since February in which I don't know how to do anything, and there's no one to train me in how to do those things, which ends up being massively demoralising every day. So that's great for my mental health.

My creative work has also suffered this year. I did get some books out, and got noticed by wargamer.com and The New Bloody Yorker, but I felt my creative energies fail and flounder in 2023. I struggled to get anything written after Winnie-the-Shit; it has felt difficult to write anything and what I did write felt bad and shonky.

At the same time, while I've never held any illusions that I am a great artist, I've always felt at least competent, but in 2023 I became more dissatisfied with my art than ever before. I feel like I've got as far as I can with my current style and I don't know what to do about that. Is it too late for me to develop a new style? Is that something I can even do, or is the way I draw just the way I draw, no backsies?

I haven't done much gaming this year and I have missed it. I've played a few games with Stuart over the year but I haven't met with the rest of my so-called-regular group since around October 2022 (!). Again I seem to have lost confidence, which is a bit weird considering it's a hobby and doesn't require much effort, but there it is.

A loss of confidence is an apt description in general. I feel like a bit of a failure in all walks of life. Incapable or incompetent, surviving rather than thriving. A pointless existence. Heavy, man.

So, 2024 then. How do I turn this around?

Well, the intent is there, so that's something.

I have some long-delayed projects that I am going to try to finish off in January, to start the new year off with a clean(ish) slate.

After that, I have two adventures for Lamentations of the Flame Princess that I want to get out this year, plus another non-adventure book.

That's probably enough to be getting on with and if I get those three out I will consider 2024 a success, but I've also got plans for a non-LotFP adventure book, and also branching out to work with some new people. There are also some tentative discussions about a couple of comics projects, which should be a fun return to an area I've long missed.

I hope I'll get back to some more regular gaming too. I'd like to play more Stargrave, and I bought a copy of The Doomed -- or is it The DOOMED? -- and that looks like good fun. And of course I would love to get Legions Imperialis to the table at some point.

It would also be nice to get to play some of those unplayed games too.

So let's see what 2024 brings! I'm going into it in a more positive frame of mind than I ended 2023, which is a good start. Let's go!

Eternal Underachiever

2017 then. That's new.

Back in December 2015 I outlined some plans -- or a wishlist, at least -- for 2016. Let's see how we got on.

Run The Dracula Dossier. I did that! It's not quite finished, but once everyone has returned from their Chrimble holidays in the next couple of weeks we'll crack on. A good start.

Run Eyes of the Stone Thief. Ah. Those wheels came off soon enough, eh? We haven't played 13th Age since August 2014, so this one hasn't happened.

Paint my eldar army so I can play some second edition Warhammer 40,000 with Stuart. I am slow but I did get some painting done and I have about 1000 points ready to go, but no battles have commenced. In 2016 Games Workshop released a brand new range of genestealer cultists and a new edition of Blood Bowl, so now I have even more distractions from my eldar, not that I painted any of that stuff either.

Read more. This was my unread book pile in December 2015:

December 2016's is much more sensible, but many of the same books remain, and that's not great:

Write more. There's been a bit of movement on this, but perhaps not the right kind of movement. Quiet at the back. I've gone from working on one follow-up to Forgive Us to working on about four, none of which are near completion. I did write a handful of monsters for Mike Evans' Hubris project but that was a small job that shouldn't have taken as long as it did.

Catch up on computer games. Oh dear. I did finish a couple of games off, but a combination of PlayStation Store and Steam sales, an itchy eBay finger, and the release of Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian within weeks of each other has rather scuppered this plan, and my gaming list has got even bigger.

Play more and different games. I think I did okay. I played a lot of different games in 2016 -- more than sixty-one, so I have satisfied the meme -- and quite a few of those were new. I'll say I got this one.

That's two successes out of six, and if we're being generous two partial successes, so that's about 50%. That's not brilliant so I think I'll be a bit more modest for my 2017 goals.

Finish painting the eldar. Just that. It would be nice to get the genestealers and some Blood Bowl painted too, but I'm going to focus on the eldar and then see how I get on. Cue Games Workshop releasing umpteen new Blood Bowl teams and a new version of their epic system in 2017.

Write something, anything, by the beard of Zeus. It's possible that having four projects on the go means it's more likely that one will be completed, but it's also possible that I'll be spread too thin to finish any of them. One of the four -- Conqueror Worm is the tentative title -- is complete in note form and just needs to be turned into a publishable document; if I can do that at least I'll be happy, then we'll see what else I can pull off.

Play more more and different games. I've got Mutant Year Zero and its gaiden-prequel-spinoff Genlab Alpha and I know my group is keen to give them a try. I have borrowed a copy of Phoenix: Dawn Command and that will get played at some point. Stuart is keen to run some new role-playing games for us, and my group still has a stack of board games that we either haven't yet touched or haven't had a fair crack at. I also have more than a few computer games to play; on that subject...

Finish at least three computer games. I am an idiot and I keep buying sprawling rpgs that take hundreds of hours to complete but I don't have my eyes on anything for 2017 -- except Torment: Tides of Numenera, but I don't even know if my computer will run it -- so in theory I should be able to start catching up. Ha.

Read anything that's been hanging around in the book pile from 2016 or earlier. I'm somewhat confident about this one as I made a big dent in the reading pile in 2016. Which means, of course, that I'm somehow going to end up reading nothing, but let's try to be positive.

That's enough -- probably too much! -- to be getting on with. Check back in a year to see how I got on.

Don't stay away until then, mind you; I'll be blogging throughout the year so I hope there will be something of interest beyond popping back in December or January to see how I've failed to achieve anything.

Talkin' 'bout a Resolution

I don't do New Year resolutions because they're a bit naff and seem dishonest; if you're going to make a significant lifestyle change, why wait until the first of January? If it's worth doing, it's worth doing now, yes?

That said, here are some things I'd like to get done in 2016, but none are of the life-changing sort:

Run The Dracula Dossier. I love Dracula and the idea of mashing it up with a Bourne Identity style spy Eurothriller and making that the basis of a role-playing game is exciting. Alas, I am unconvinced by the Night's Black Agents ruleset and I am unimpressed by the minimal support given in The Dracula Dossier itself for running the thing, but I will persevere.

Run Eyes of the Stone Thief. I've been itching to get back to 13th Age for a long time, and this campaign looks like great fun.

Paint my eldar army so I can play some second edition Warhammer 40,000 with Stuart, although he will probably play necrons and necrons were a bit overpowered experimental in 40K2, so I'll be painting them only to send them to their deaths. Oh well.

Read more. This is my unread book pile as of right this second:

That doesn't include about a dozen larger-format books that won't go on the pile without collapsing it. I was starting to catch up, then Christmas happened.

Write more. Forgive Us came out a long time ago and people have asked for a follow-up. I've had some ideas but nothing has yet made it past both my own self-doubt and James Raggi's keen eye; I think we have something now, so I hope that will appear before June. Well, I hope it will appear before March, but let's be realistic.

Catch up on computer games. I have a rule that I don't get a new computer game until I've finished one, but that doesn't stop other people getting them for me and throwing the system out of whack. I've got my eyes on some upcoming releases so I need to clear the queue before they arrive. This would be easier if PlayStation trophies didn't sit there, glinting and taunting and implying that no, I haven't really finished the game, even if I did beat the final boss.

Play more and different games. I didn't quite manage fifty-one different games in 2015 but I got closeish. I'd like to try lots of different things in 2016; I have a number of unplayed games on my shelf and I know that the rest of my group is the same even worse, so this shouldn't be too difficult.

"Shouldn't be too difficult" I say, but some of those books have been in that teetering pile for over three years, and the eldar have been sitting in an undercoated state for about two. Oh dear.

But I shall be confident! I'll revisit this post this time next year and see how well I did. I bet you cannot wait.

Have a good New Year everyone. I don't do the party thing but for those who do, enjoy, and for those who don't, enjoy whatever it is you'll be doing.

I shall be reading.