I think it’s an understatement to say that no one’s 2020 went quite as planned. But, in spite of the still-ongoing pandemic, I had a pretty good year in gaming, although not quite in the form I had anticipated. At the risk of being a little redundant to my summertime reflection, I finally gave online gaming a try, and played in three different games (of varying length) over the course of the year. I even ran a couple Carcosa sessions myself before the school year started in September!
I had initially planned to hang up the gaming spurs and concentrate totally on school for a while, but I ended up signing on to a Forbidden Lands campaign after midterms. That game is still happening on alternating Saturdays, but now that our second child has arrived on the scene, I think I’m going to have to go on extended hiatus, and really focus on family and studying. It seems like the kids have an innate sense of when “game night” is, and decide that those are the nights that they need to be restless and temperamental! And, of course, there’s the studying factor. I did alright with my grades last semester, but I’m in kind of a demanding program with a harsh grade curve, so I’m hoping to improve this semester. If it were an undergrad, or in a more casual course of study I’d be perfectly satisfied, but I want to bolster my GPA a bit more if I can. I probably shouldn’t even be “wasting time” writing this right now, but reviewing notes and working on that writing assignment instead…
Which leads me to my next observation… I can’t seem to go cold turkey on gaming, especially after finally getting back to it a bit this past year! I’ve been toying with the notion of trying to run the mythical “low prep” campaign— maybe just a dungeon romp like Stonehell or Lost City of Barakus, where I (theoretically) only need to “read ahead” of the party to know what’s going on. I’ve also been formulating a notional hexcrawl campaign again, this time based off of Isle of the Unknown. After reading The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights over the summer, I got to thinking that all of those chimeric monsters roaming around the Isle seem like they could be Questing Beasts… and didn’t Arthur get taken away to the mysterious and magical isle of Avalon at the end of his saga? So, at the moment I’m formulating something of a mashup campaign framework of “what if a bunch of LotFP 1630’s troublemakers got shipwrecked on King Arthur’s ‘afterlife?’” It’s kind of a Lost World concept in that the island is just a total “Technicolor Hollywood Medieval Land” of knights errant, damsels in distress, and all that SCA-style stuff you see at the Ren Faire, or the Excalibur in Las Vegas. In short, it’s the chivalric romanticized version of King Arthur that was popularized during the 1600s that we think of from The Sword & The Stone or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s still only half-baked, and since it’s a hexcrawl I’d have to develop a lot of resources for myself, like encounter tables, adventure sites, interesting NPCs, etc… but it’s something I’ve been thinking about again lately. Will I ever get around to bringing it to an actual game session? Who knows? At the very least I’ve been indulging in that gaming adjacent hobby of worldbuilding, so it’s been a pleasant diversion, even if nothing much comes of it.
There’s a small chance I might be running a game in the next several weeks, though. During a conversation a couple evenings ago with some friends, they mentioned their son wanted to try playing D&D, but since they themselves weren’t players, they need someone to show them the ropes. It would probably be a 5e game, which I’ve never played, but looking through the free basic rules, it looks like it would be simple enough to plunk a group of neophytes into Stonehell and convert on the fly a bit. I’d definitely be taking the more Old School approach, of course, with random encounters and whatnot, but I think they’d have a much more pleasant experience just jumping in and fighting some orcs and spiders than if I attempted to intricately walk them through their ‘backgrounds’ or ‘ideals’ or whatever all that other business that’s been added to the character sheets is! It seems like it might just be a one-shot event (if it happens at all), but if it ends up blooming into a longer campaign, I’ll probably have to get more properly acquainted with the 5e rules!