2023 Year in Review

Happy Holidays! Tomorrow, the next year will begin and we'll get the chance to reflect upon and renovate different aspects of our lives. I wanted to take the opportunity to do that here. Enough preambling!

Out With The Old

My yassified 1974 facsimile Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, besides some stray typos and me still wanting to make a four-volume version, is complete and out of the way. More than or rather than being a retroclone, I think of it as an exhaustive counterpoint to the old-school conception of role-play and its supposed history of D&D. So many readers messaged me, confused or angry, about things being missing or out of order, so I consider this project a success! I hope people continue to read FMC and, being less likely to fill in the gaps with their memories, continue to reveal to themselves the real nature of the first D&D.

I also made FMC Basic to make it easier for me to play (not even run!) older D&D how I like. What distinguishes it from other little rulesets, I think, is its emphasis on pure structures rather than ability scores or other quantitative things which tend to be the crutch of games like Into the Odd or Knave. This, to me, is the way in which it echoes FMC proper, and why I gave it the title of FMC Basic. It represents a different possible development of D&D than we saw happen in history or in the old-school scene. This, together with my bite-sized (6-room) dungeon pamphlet, will also help make it easy and quick to play or run casual old-style D&D.

I feel like this marks the end of my excursion into the OSR. I originally wanted to do a deep dive into the scene and past history of D&D to see what either had to offer and also how they differed from each other. Although I appreciate casual arcade-style D&D and have fun playing it with friends, its aesthetics or specific approach to gameplay aren't my cup of tea. I came to appreciate the DIY context of the early-to-mid OSR, but less so its play culture that I saw as deeply reactionary and patriarchal (see also). I thought about what lessons for play could be learned from the OSR, being neither specifically old-school nor necessarily attached to old-school motifs like dungeon-crawling.

In With The New

This culminated in a phrase that, I swear up and down, was coined by my friend Nova a.k.a. Idle Cartulary: DIY elfgames. Forget Gary Gygax. Forget dungeon-crawling. Forget gold for XP. How can you play tabletop games without relying upon published works? How can you participate in the hobby without publishing them? How can we better focus on enjoying time spent playing with our friends? Do it yourself! Make things specific to yourself and your friend group. Borrow and steal from anything on hand, disregarding their intended context. Develop a ludic literacy that helps you synthesize these things in a practical way, as well as improvise play on the fly so you don't need to rely on any book, system or adventure. Finally, as my friend Jenx has been writing, participate in the scene to learn others' experiences and share your own!

This is precisely the path I want to take: a non-old-school DIY hobbyist. I'm tired of being confused for an OSR historian or whatever. It never was about preserving and reproducing the OSR! For me, it's always been about criticizing the OSR to recover the kernel of DIY activity that it once had and then lost (in the most prominent social contexts/communities). Otherwise, the OSR as such is nothing but a reactionary fantasy except—as I've said before—in the works of those almost embarrassed to be associated with it, like I was. So, why associate at all? I don't want to be a nameless adventurer crawling a cave, anyway. I want to be a bear priestess heralding her bestie as the rightful king of Wherever-The-Fuckia, or a fantasy Cuban auto-mechanic with a robot arm who longs to see the ocean again.

I also want to challenge myself and others to think less in terms of systems than of settings and situations. Honestly, I feel like I haven't done much of any of that anyway, being stuck in the OD&D mines. But whereas before I was doing math and writing rules in hopes of bringing to life one concept or another, now I want to challenge my creative capabilities to make something that inspires my and others' imagination. I also want explore fiction writing in general. There's stories I want to tell but don't have the skill or confidence to put down on proverbial paper. Will figure it out!

Finally, on a similar note, I want to write about my other interests here. D&D isn't the only thing I do, and in fact it's not even really my main hobby or anything. I want to write more about baking, music, books, and other random things. In my personal life, I feel like I made good on this year's resolution to make new friends in my new city. I think my resolution this year will be to host friends at my place for little occasions or even just to hang out.

Friends of the Blog

I was really excited to do this section. I want to share things my friends have made that have impacted me, or things they will be working on that excite me. In alphabetical order:

• Amanda P. is writing a lesbian pirate adventure of which I have only seen and heard glimpses so far, and I am so excited to play it one day. Also congratulations on concluding your three year campaign! That is a one in a million accomplishment, it seems like.
  
• Ènziramire ran an incredible game of Systems Without Number for his high school students, where they took on the role of 'benevolent' interstellar imperialists. He also wrote a fruitfully scathing review of The Mwangi Expanse, a milquetoast attempt to fantasize Africa through a diasporic lens.
• Jenx ran a really cool near-eastern OD&D campaign, which inspired me to take OD&D seriously as a wargame that can be played as such—and also led directly to the skirmish rules that I tend to use for OD&D now. He's also working on a wonderful exploration of best practices for hobbyists.
  
• Luke Gearing published two excellent adventures, The Isle and Wolves Upon The Coast, in... 2022. This is a little embarrassing on my part. Time flies! Take this as an overdue congratulations, especially since I think the latter project serves as a cool model for DIY development.
• Nick LS Whelan revisited and redeveloped his concept of Flux Space, transforming it from an abstract unit of distance into a representation of sites located somewhere inside an abstract space. Already played with one variation of this in Nova's Bridewell, and it's really neat. Also congrats on the Kickstarter!
  
• Norn Noszka and Ty Pitre developed and posted Gulch, a starting town for an urban fantasy game, on the latter's blog. This was such a wild and cool choice, and one that I hope serves as a model for others to share things they write or draw without worrying about formal publication. It's also a really neat town!
  
• Nova is about to publish her super-incredible adventure Bridewell, which is her reimagination of the Ravenloft setting for D&D. It has been such an honor to play this as well as Hiss, which I'm proud to say I'm editing and laying out for a print-on-demand release. No one does social design like her.
  
• Sandro released an early version of their mecha game Steel Hearts, but truthfully I've been way obsessed with their planned setting for WILD which redoubles Gygaxian motifs (remember: "D&D is anti-medieval") onto a fantasy American West. I wanna be a cowboy babeyyy.
  
• WF Smith released Barkeep on the Borderlands, which should receive an award for being the OSR publication with the most whimsy and zest for life. I and many other friends contributed to it, so it's wonderful to see the product of our collective efforts. It also won an Ennie, so congrats!
  
• Zedeck Siew published Reach of the Roach God, a big ol' book installment in his A Thousand Thousand Islands. Although it's unfortunate what had happened, this work is such a triumph on his part and I hope he knows people are so excited to read what he writes next.
• I discovered so many new blogs!!! Check out: The Distillery, Fae Errant, Forlorn Encystment, If Our Lives Be Short, Illusory Sensorium, Roll to Doubt, Vaulting Skies & Emerald Swords, VDonnut Valley, What Do You Do? For those who are new to blogging altogether, welcome and congrats! :)
  

Sorry if I forgot anyone! Happy New Year to all y'all, and I'm excited to see what everyone has in store! :D