2017 in Review and Looking Ahead

2017 was a poor year for wargaming - we only met for a total of seven sessions. During the same year, I played in at least 28 sessions of RPG, which included a 10-session campaign, two two-session old school dungeon crawls, and GMing two convention games.

Things may yet pick up in 2018 though. Martin has hosted our first naval game at his place, and I certainly hope to redeem myself after our poor debut performance. Meanwhile, I hope to get a few Franco-Prussian War games played at my place.

But the value of the sessions lies not in gaming alone; I have known Martin, fg and wahj for more than a decade (I have been friends with wahj for more than two-thirds of my life, actually), and our gaming sessions are more about talking about old times, life, and everything under the sun than the games themselves, really.

By contrast I have known the players in my RPG group (excepting fg) for less than two years, and most of them I have met only since April last year; while a common hobby can kickstart friendships, it will still take time.

For most of the year we played through the Savage Worlds space opera campaign, which I enjoyed tremendously. So much so that I ran the first scenario from that campaign as convention game twice. I may in fact continue to use scenarios from that campaign for convention games this year.

The monthly mini-convention is likely to be a regular thing, but the venue is rather far from my home, and as I utilise a lot of terrain boards, figurines, and models for my games, traveling to and fro can be quite a strain. I still want to do that though, mainly as a way of giving back to the hobby and bringing newbies into the hobby, perhaps quarterly?

I did manage to start a Lone Wolf campaign as I planned. The campaign is scheduled to run until the end of March, after which a three-session Gamma World campaign is planned for April. From June I plan to run a new long campaign (around 12 sessions or so); I have not decided on the setting or the rules yet, but there are a few potential candidates lined up.

There is a synergy between wargaming and RPGs, of course, and one example of this may be the seven 'gangers' figures I hope to paint up over the next few weeks: these will serve as the main antagonists for my players in the Gamma World mini-campaign (where they will be the evil Pure Strain Humans who want to wipe out the player characters, who/which are all mutated humans, mutated animals, or mutated plants), and perhaps as the start of a Necromunda gang.

Experience has taught me not to put too much faith in my own predictions, but what's the hobby without ambitious plans?

Have a good year ahead.