Companion Podcast: https://anchor.fm/follow-me-and-die/episodes/Episode-198—2021-Year-End-Review-e1ccin5

Companion Vidcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/M9N9a_TGv2c

Conventions – Virtual Gary Con, Garage Con in my garage in July, Live Gamehole Con 8, GrandCon was cancelled, I skipped UCon when it went from a physical con to a virtual con. I play in a game every Wed. night on Roll20 and run one Roll20 game on Sunday afternoon. I get my fill of virtual table tops twice a week, so the fun of gaming I get from a con – interacting with real people face to face around a shared table, isn’t the same as playing virtually. I started using Roll20 when I couldn’t get a local group going once playing with my sons & their friends fizzled out.

Blog – 18 articles, and the other day (Friday, 17 DEC 2021) a comment mentioned that the RSS feed only shows 2021. That damn thing breaks all the time. I’m looking into a different option for my blog. I may migrate the back end to a static site, but I’ll migrate simpler and smaller sites I have first to see if my new method works for them first.

Podcast – Five episodes, the year end review episode makes six.

YouTube – I passed 1,000 subscribers, so am now monetized again. They changed the rules two or three times since I was monetized many years ago just by creating an Adsense account and linking to my YT channel.

I’ve only done 4 videos. I’ve got a couple in editing that I just never seem to complete, and ideas for lots more.

Twitch – I streamed once this year when I streamed for over three hours cleaning and organizing my game shelves here.

Drive Thru RPG – Nothing new this year. I think I updated a couple of my PDFs, but I didn’t create anything new.

Card Game – I got more art from my artist, but not all of it. I don’t think I’ll do a Kickstarter. To do that well, I need a team working like a well ordered and well oiled machine. I think I’ll just put it on DTRPG, as I’ve mentioned many times in the past. Polishing it and making it appeal to a broader audience is a lot of work. I don’t want to just pass it off, and I don’t want to research lots of people to find the right people for the job. Pushing forward on things like this is hard. Ideas are easy to come by. Putting in the effort to make that idea work for others, and grab their interest is a lot of work.

I played my card game on Christmas with my younger son and my granddaughter. They both liked it. That was the first time I’ve played it in over two years due to the pandemic. My granddaughter said, “It’s a pretty fun game for an almost seven year-old.” She’ll be seven in a week and a half from now.

TikTok – Started at Gamehole Con – 28 so far. It has a maximum of 3 minutes, so it forces focus. I haven’t gotten into the groove of regular use. It’s good for getting the word out about things on other media.

Obsidian – Knowledge Base application NOT the campaign building/running website. I’ve moved my local copy of my Sunday game notes into it and used it to run the last 3 games. I’m working on a full blog post on it.

I dipped my toes into Solo RPGs and did a podcast and blog post about it. I haven’t gotten back to it. My brain keeps seeing new shinies to check out. Always been my issue. Too many cool things I want to explore. I could live to a thousand and still want to check out more stuff.

I’ve got ideas for using Roll20 with some solo games, that I was ready to do a YouTube video.

I’ve also got a couple new things I put to use in my Roll20 game that I need to share.

Today, December 31, 2021 is the deadline to submit games to run at both Gary Con and my local con, Marmalade Dog which has a deadline of January 31, 2022. I’m not going to run games at Gary Con. I plan to sign up for war games like I had for the first Gary Con affected by COVID-19. I will bring my card game in the stable version and the iteration where I made icons too small with some new options just to see how it play tests. I’ll bring a couple small RPGs for potential pickup games. I plan a light schedule so I can socialize.
For Marmalade Dog I haven’t decided if I will run something all three days or not. Fridays are hit or miss. I plan to run Lizards vs. Wizards and am debating what else to run. Not much time left to decide….

My favorite RPG experience as a player was bringing back a dead PC into the Wednesday night game. When my ranger PC was killed I asked if I could bring back my original dwarf PC. There is a shields shall be splintered rule I forgot to invoke, so I suggested he could have just been knocked out. The DM was OK with that, but there is some backstory not yet shared with the others as to what really happened. I finally got to roleplay a situation where his mind is broken with grief and he has a new name, and it was several sessions until I revealed who he really was. That situation didn’t go over in the first campaign as another player misread it as he was mind controlled by the enemy, so I had to cut it short. Picking up that thread was fun. Talking to the “head” of the PC he decapitated when a storoper took him over was great. I didn’t reveal that it was a roughly head sized rock that he was talking to in his pack.

My favorite DM experience was introducing the Map of Destiny and watching the players keep “pushing the red button.” They went on so many side quests, it took several weeks to complete the original quest that was done in just over a week. The players were sent to it when one of them was geased to retrieve an item. The map shows whatever item you ask it. If you are under a quest or geas it just shows you the location on the world map. It doesn’t have more detail than that. If you ask it other things you have to save versus magic or be geased to retrieve that item and bring it to the map. They learned some helpful things, but also were chasing their tails going after stuff.

I randomly determined where things were located and had to come up with several on the spur of the moment. The real fun was when they brought back the first item and it sank into the floor. They used stone shape and other such spells looking and when they couldn’t find an empty space one of them asked where is it? They promptly failed their save but learned where it was. Another player, the higher level wizard in the group is 10th level with two fifth level spells and they rested and he memorized two teleports. Then he asked where am I, failed his save, but was immediately relieved of the geas, then sank into the floor. The first time he found himself on an island in the middle of a rainstorm. He investigated the island then teleported back. He rested and the next day did the same thing and was teleported into a blizzard in the midst of a herb of caribou who spooked. He teleported back. They hoped that it would go to a huge pile of loot, but learned that each item teleported it a random direction and distance. That player was the first PC to go “off the map” of my world.

The player with the last geas from the Map of Destiny asked about a former PC of a player that left the game and failed his save. While working on the geas of the player who asked about the first item to sink into the floor the other wizard was killed and resurrected. I ruled that death ends a geas (or a quest), so that saved them travelling for weeks in the opposite direction they wanted to go.

My players finally made it to the capital city of the kingdom and have been having city adventures and the city is growing and coming alive. I expanded the map and they bought a new, better world map so my pre-planning the new map worked out, I was ready for them. I came up with a minimal map to track where the characters are in the city without a city map and to preserve theater of the mind.

Now they are dealing with at least one vampire that they are waiting for sunrise to ensure it is dead. They also have the thieves guild after the higher level wizard as he revealed he has a portable hole and they want it. He keeps teleporting back to the town where the campaign started so he can sleep without getting killed.

They’re trying to wrap up and leave the city, but now they’re dealing with a vampire. Sunday’s game will be a lot of fun.

We passed 100 sessions of my Sunday campaign a few weeks ago. It is the longest regular game I have ever ran. It won’t end until either I, the players, or both decide we’re ready for something else.

I didn’t do all the things I wanted to do the past couple of years, but I did many things that I’m glad I did. I keep hoping things will ease up so I can actually go and do things without having to worry about getting COVID-19. I had a new health challenge of diabetes, but I kicked it hard and just have a once a week injection. No signs of cancer over a year after having my prostate out.

My mood and motivation at work are better than they have been in over a decade. I’m getting a lot of non-gaming things done so that I have more time for gaming.

I’m hoping by mortgage refinance goes through so I can get out of debt in less than ten years so maybe I don’t have to wait until I’m 67 to retire and enjoy more games.

The Year Ahead

For 2022, I’m looking at putting out my card game. It won’t have the polish and so forth of others, but it will be available via DriveThruRPG or GameCrafters. No promises on when, as I’m juggling a lot right now. My busy time of year at work is January, and I’m having to support a new to me product line so I’m spending a lot of energy getting up to speed on it.

I’ll be at Gary Con in March and also Marmalade Dog. I’ll have another GarageCon this summer. It will be a lot less work this year since I already cleaned out the garage.

If there’s a GrandCon, I’ll attend. I’ll also do GameHole Con and UCon if they are in-person.

I’d also like to give each of my PDFs a new editing pass and revise the layout, and add to them. When I do that they will no longer be Pay What You Want.

I’ll also keep playing in the Wednesday Night game and running my Sunday game. I’d love to run something for an in-person group, but not until COVID-19 is behind us. Not sure if 2022 will see that.

My mood and frame of mind is better than it’s been in a long time. Getting past prostate cancer in the midst of a pandemic, then dealing with diabetes must have been the shock to the system I needed. I’m having much more insight into why I have some of the struggles I’ve had with doing things related to maintaining motivation and not getting lost in lots of Netflix and YouTube. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but my much healthier lifestyle and mindset will lead me to do more of the things I want to do in the coming year.