What to expect in 2014

Following on from my 2013 wrap-up, I've thought a bit about what I would like to do with my gaming this year and writing about it. I am a player in two face-to-face games, and the regular Weird Adventures G+ Hangout game I play in will be going on hiatus for a bit. I'd like to run something, even a short self-contained cycle of sessions, either face-to-face or over G+. Getting my schedule straightened out will be the main obstacle.

I don't want to make promises like I did this time last year. It was my goal to run Night's Black Agents sometime in 2013 and it didn't happen due to other real-life committments (I did get to play in two one-shot sessions). I will try to be more Zen-like about it and simply say "I'll do my best" this year.

With the new American Godzilla film out this May (and related DVD/Blu-ray releases) I'll have plenty to write about concerning giant monsters, along with the usual fantasy, sci-fi and horror topics.

I also want to get more gameable content posted. Often I feel as if something isn't thoroughly playtested and edited, it isn't worth posting, especially when I see all the great work done by other gaming bloggers. I need to get in the habit of posting work-in-progress, just so I can see some progress and move forward.

Areas of interest at the moment:

• Cyberpunk settings have been on my mind lately, so...
• converting rules-heavy settings like Shadowrun or Dark Heresy to rules-light systems: Fate Accelerated, Savage Worlds, or maybe the 2d6 system from Barbarians of Lemuria.
• Going into more detail about my Montgolfier Brothers alt-history setting, or one of the others in the back of my mind
• Getting Night's Black Agents, Hyborian Age/Conan, and/or a back-to-basics OSR game (Dungeon Crawl Classics, possibly) to the table or on G+
• At the very least, adding more links to my neglected NBA resources page.

Is it too late for a "2013 year in review"?

January and February seem to have flown by. Between work, the weather, and other real-life adventures, I haven't taken any time to reflect on the past year.

I didn't get to run as many games in 2013 as I would have liked. At a local games day in January, I ran a Call of Cthulhu session that was based partially on a rulebook intro scenario mixed with a con scenario I wrote up some years ago. It seemed to go over well, and after some additional work this one might become my go-to Cthulhu convention one-shot. I also ran one "episode" of Original Series Star Trek over G+ Hangouts using Starships and Spacemen 2nd. ed. in January, which was great fun.

As far as producing usable gaming content, my creativity was really low last year. Still, I'm proud of what I did accomplish. I contributed an article on medieval cooking to the first issue of Burgs & Bailiffs, and two campaign pitches for the RPG Blog Carnival in May. You'll find a few bits of mine in the crowdsourced hexcrawls for Hexenbracken and The Kraal, and I was one of Santicore's elves, each of us wrangling a group of writers and artists for the Secret Santicore 2013 project (Volume 1 and 2 of 3 available now).

I was invited to participate in three RPG convention panels last year -- the 2013 GM's Jam! advice panel at Gen Con in August, and two panels for RPGGeek's Virtuacon13 in October, Role-playing in the Digital Age and How to Handle Difficult Players. Each of these was a blast, and I hope to be on more panels and webcasts in the future.

Wednesday: What to expect here this year.