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!

RPG: 2025

Last night we convened in person to complete Stuart's West Country Vaesen campaign, and also eat festive treats.

According to my records -- yes, I'm that sort of nerd -- I have played the following role-playing games in 2025:

• Alien in February (Stuart's Space: 1999 hack), March (the "Chariots of the Gods" campaign; I don't recall this!), and Stuart's Expanse-style custom campaign in September. I've enjoyed Stuart's games more as, while I like the Alien system, the setting does nothing for me.
• Cthulhu Hack in October and November. I'm not sure about this game. It's fiiiiiiiiiiiine, but nothing about it convinced me to use it instead of Call of Cthulhu. Stuart is thinking of running it, but I'm not sure I will again. I'm glad I tried it though.
• Old School Essentials from May to June. I converted the Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign "The Chained Coffin", and it worked fine. It was enjoyable enough, but the pacing and setup of the campaign is a bit wonky; it's full of fun and evocative encounters, but the inbuilt time limit forces the players to rush straight to the climax, so they miss out on a lot of the fun. OSE is a solid system and very easy to run, and it was fun to play classic D&D again, for the first time since the 1990s.
• The Quiet Year in February. I'm not sure if this is an rpg or not, but it's close enough. Interesting to play, and I would like to have another go at it someday.
• Shadowdark in March and April. This was requested by Ben and I wrote about my thoughts here. I like Shadowdark but there's something that's not quite right about it for me.
• Star Wars d6 in June and August. This was the first time that I'd played SWD6 since about 1997 and it reminded me of how much I like the game. I'm planning on running it myself in early 2026.
• Vaesen from August until, well, yesterday. I very much enjoyed this campaign. This variant of the Free League Year Zero system is a bit loose and wonky -- I was rolling 15d6 for a lot of things towards the end -- and doesn't feel as robust as Alien, for example, but not so much that it ruined the game. We all enjoyed how it's a less despairing and nihilistic approach to investigative horror than other games, even my beloved Call of Cthulhu, and the emphasis on folk and local horror, rather than eldritch aliens from beyond space and time, is another nice change. Of everything we've played in 2025, I'm most keen to play Vaesen again; I have insidiously made Stuart aware of a Japanese campaign setting for the game, so we'll see what happens there...

In 2026 I'm hoping to run some Star Wars d6 -- as noted above -- and I would of course like to cross something else off my unplayed list. There are quite a few games I'd like to play, including Coriolis (the new one), Dragonbane, and Forbidden Lands. Stuart may have been bullied into convinced to run his long-promised Ars Magica campaign, and Ben should be running some Pendragon in the new year.

What was your favourite rpg played in 2025? What do you have planned for 2026?

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!

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.

Lying to Oneself

Well, that didn't last long. The thing I mentioned in the last post, the shocking-but-good thing I was being so coy about, I discovered to be nothing at all in the end. In a way I'm glad, because if it did happen it was going to be a lot of pressure, but it does also mean that I'm not going to say what it was. Sorry.

On an unrelated note, I didn't do much blogging in 2012, as you can tell from the archive over there on the right. I thought I should try to explain why.

2012 was difficult for me. I've lost contact with friends before, and I've met plenty of people who never liked me much in the first place, but I've never had a friend take active steps to cut me out of their life, as happened earlier in the year. I'm not blameless in what happened; I let my insecurity get the better of me and tricked myself into thinking my friend had lied to me over a minor, petty thing. Then I confronted them about it.

Oops.

So I can see why they decided they'd had enough of me. I can see it now, at least, but back then it came as a huge surprise. Not only was the rejection a shock, but it also dragged some other stuff out into the light, stuff that with hindsight I realise I'd told myself I'd resolved but in fact I'd just hidden away.

It's a long story that I may well tell another time, involving my then wife and my stepmother, but the key point for our current purposes is that my father disowned me in 2000. I acted as if I'd accepted this and had moved on, that it was his loss, not mine, and perhaps that was true to a certain extent. Then again, I was married and we'd been through it together, so it was easier to accept or, as I discovered much later, hide.

Then in 2010, my wife left me. There had been trouble before then, but I'd made promises to be a better husband, to make things right, all the time ignoring the actual issue, which was that it was over and she just wanted a clean break. It was difficult -- I don't think a separation and eventual divorce can be anything but -- but it was necessary for both of us and we remain good friends. Once again, I thought that I had everything under control.

What I couldn't see was that it was all just being pushed to one side and stacked up, like when someone in a cartoon tidies up and stuffs everything into a cupboard, the door develops an ominous bulge and you just know it's going to burst open in the final act.

So it came to pass.

My friend dumped me, and everything came tumbling out of the cupboard. Things got bad then, but they would have been worse had it not been for an ironic twist. A couple of weeks before I blundered in and ruined everything, the same friend who would want nothing more to do with me suggested that I sign up for some free counselling sessions; I did, and ended up starting the sessions not long after I lost that friend.

I discovered a lot about myself during those sessions. I was convinced of my own complete lack of worth and it took a homework exercise -- in which I had to ask my friends to tell me what they liked and disliked about me -- to get me to realise that I wasn't worthless after all. The biggest shock came when my counsellor told me that I was talking in suicidal terms; I hadn't realised it, but I couldn't deny the truth of it. It was that realisation more than anything that made me step back and decide to make a change; I don't think I could ever kill myself, but the fact that I'd got to a point where I seemed to others that I could was enough of a scare.

Things turned around then. I was more positive about myself and tried harder to engage with the people around me. I even went on a couple of dates; no romance resulted, but I made new friends. I got involved in more art and writing projects, and somehow convinced a couple of hundred people to pay me to produce a book. My father turned up out of the blue and more or less apologised, or as close as he's ever going to get. It was all going so well, and I thought I was on the mend; I'm not so naïve to think that all that damage could be fixed in a couple of months of counselling, but I really did think that I was getting better.

Now I'm told I've had wobbles these past few weeks, and I admit that I'm disappointed, but I'm going to be positive and learn from that discovery. It was a lack of awareness that led to all the harmful baggage building up in the first place, so I have to take this as a warning to be more vigilant.

A Year in Review

This won't be one of those best-albums-films-books posts, because I lack the capabilities to be a music enthusiast -- although I have developed a liking for Crystal Castles -- and I've spent most of the year trying to get through Don Quixote, so I've not had much time for anything else. I did see quite a few films -- including some new ones for once! -- and I'll be a dissenting voice in saying that I didn't think Inception was nearly as good or clever as everyone seems to think it was, and Scott Pilgrim was miles better.

Instead I'm going to have a whinge, in the manner of Mr Phill Hall.

2010 started for me with one of those big life-changing events, and not one of the good ones, either. It's not something I feel ready to talk about in detail, but it's fair to say that I've spent the rest of the year trying to recover, with limited success. Some days are good and I feel quite normal, but others are a proper struggle and I wonder if I'm right in the head. I suspect I may have acquired a touch of depression in there, but it's hard to tell if it's that or if I'm just being a stick-in-the-mud.

So there's that millstone, but it's not all been bad. As I hinted at above, I've been to the cinema more often this year than I think I ever have before, in part due to a good friend who's a bit of a film buff -- and who seems to love everything he sees, which is quite charming -- and who often requires company. It's a simple thing, and it seems absurd and more than a little embarrassing to talk about going to the cinema with a friend as a highlight of the year, but it's surprising how sometimes even that can feel like I'm doing something special, and it becomes quite cheering as a result.

The other highlight -- and it's entirely possible that I'm being naive and optimistic in my estimation here -- is that my art seems to be taking off. I still look at the stuff I draw and hate it almost as soon as I put the pen down, but people seem to like it, and I've been kept busy doing something I love. I received a big commission in the summer, to illustrate an entire book, including covers, but the client seems to have disappeared. On a happier and more productive note, I've been contributing art to Fight On! on a regular basis, did a few pieces for a Dungeons & Dragons product, and have contributed to a book of fictional gods for release in 2011. That said, comics are my first love in terms of art, and while I continue to battle against writers' block on my own projects, Rol has been keeping me fed with scripts for his anthology title PJANG! That doesn't seem like a lot now that I put it down in words, but it's been keeping me busy. I may be forgetting some details somewhere.

That's pretty much it for my year. With the ConDemNation cutting public sector spending, my job has got worse over the year and will likely continue to spiral downwards in 2011, but that's the thing I do for money and I try not to let it invade the rest of my life, the important bit, which is all that stuff up there. So 2010 has been a bit of a mixed bag, with one big howitzer of a bad turn throwing everything else akimbo, but I wonder if, in the end, I haven't made an extra effort to make the most of the good stuff as a way of dealing with the bad stuff. If so, I think it's worked.

So to all three-and-a-half people who read this blog, I hope you have a happy 2011!