2023 in Review
I started this blog in 2023 as a creative outlet and because I want to share my work & play a tiny part in building a non-commercialized DIY RPG culture.
This year I got into the OSR in a big way; I read blogs and books, collected all sorts of adventures and rulesets, browsed the subreddit regularly, and joined several discords to get up to speed. The OSR offers a style of play that meshes well with my strengths & weaknesses as a GM but is also undeniably dying as a unified subculture. In this post, I reflect on what I learned and think about where I want to direct my creative efforts moving forward.
This Blog
I launched Idraluna Archives, migrating my D&D posts from a more general blog hosted on Substack. I'm most proud of two posts about using GIS software for fantasy worldbuilding.
I ran an ongoing Worlds Without Number campaign in which I tried (with mixed success) to apply OSR principles to a puzzle-focused megadungeon, and played in a GLOG campaign in which we explored Jacob Hurst's Hot Springs Island.
I got into using LaTeX to typeset RPGs and started writing a variety of personal campaign materials, and even wrote my own hack just for fun.
I started doing my own illustrations this year and have found it to be really rewarding, even though my skills are quite poor.
Systems
I acquired maybe 30-40 OSR systems and hacks this year, and I actually played Worlds Without Number, Many Rats on Sticks GLOG, White Box OD&D, and (non-OSR but definitely cool) Ars Magica. Looking back, I had the most fun with White Box, though that owed much to the referee.
Reading-wise, I perused old systems like OD&D, AD&D, B/X, and BECMI, and newer systems like Into The Odd, Cairn, Knave, Vaults of Vaarn, The Electrum Archive, Songbirds 3e, Into The Dungeon: Revived, several GLOGs, and probably others I'm forgetting.
My preference (against my better judgement) is tending towards 'light' systems -- the most fun moments over the last year were often in situations where the system 'got out of the way' as it were. I'm also busy and don't have a ton of mental real estate for memorizing expansive rulesets, nor do I have the time or ambition to put such rules to proper use. I'm pretty ok with my campaigns just being 'dungeon crawl of the week'. Running Into The Odd is high on my bucket list if only to set an upper bound for how minimal I'm willing to go.
Appendix N
I did a lot of fantasy/sf reading this year, hungry for inspiring ideas to meld into my mental amalgam. My initial ambition was to voraciously read pulp, with the self-flattering notion that I would 'upcycle' the neat overlooked ideas into my own work. In actuality, I pretty much only read the entries in the genre that are generally regarded as 'literary' (Wolfe, LeGuin, Eddison, Peake, Moorcock, with Vance as an edge case) and bounced off my handful of attempts at reading lowbrow stuff. The reality is that my creative process is a matter of 'downcycling' superficial/trivial details of quality works into silly fun at my gaming table. And that's fine.
Adventures
I downloaded 100+ adventures this year, read many of them, and played in a Hot Springs Island campaign. My 'must-play' list ballooned up and then shrank way down as I became more picky and more invested in DIY adventures. At the rate I play, I'm more interested in adventures as examples of good design and sources of ideas than modules I'd actually run for my friends. Accordingly, I must confess that the TSR adventures I've read are profoundly underwhelming, case in point Keep on the Borderlands, which, while I can grok the sandbox design, is too generic for me to take any interest in.
I've also come to appreciate megadungeons over hyper-detailed one-pagers. The experience of navigating a space that feels vast and labyrinthine & where encounters are rare but impactful is (imo) more fun than trotting about a 'dense' but small dungeon with a new encounter every room. Moreover, I find that campaigns devoted to unraveling the secrets of a single large-but-coherent complex are more rewarding than disjointed 'dungeon-of-the-week' affairs.
The Future
First and foremost, I want to cajole my irl friends into playtesting Archons & Armigers. I don't expect it to be a hit, but I want to at least have tried to play it.
It seems like winds blowing over the TTRPG blogosphere point toward growing interest (from disparate and mutually antagonistic camps) in revisiting 'trad-style' play culture in some way; either injecting a DIY ethos into narrative- and character-focused games, breaking down the neo-trad style into well articulated maxims as was done for old-school play culture, or revisiting the, heroic, high-level gameplay of old-school games (e.g. this year's No Artpunk contest). For my part, I recently recovered my campaign notes from my first (and only) full 5e campaign, run while I was stuck in a remote location with a captive audience and no internet. I'd like to review that campaign in detail, breaking down what worked, what didn't, and what lessons I want to draw on for future campaigns.
Finally, I want to keep emphasizing the creative parts of this hobby: more drawing practice, more adventures, more magic items and spells, etc. I want to fill the four(!!) new notebooks my wife gave me with art & dungeon layouts, to continue developing my overly ambitious procedurally-generated Antarctic hexcrawl, and to keep running and playing in games with my friends.
If you're reading this, thanks lol, and happy new year!