2019 in Review and Looking Ahead

Another year, another review post.

Once again, RPG has dominated the gaming calendar - I played over a hundred hours of RPG, including two one-shot adventures where I was a player instead of a GM.

We managed to close the arcs on four campaigns this year, all of which we are planning to continue in the upcoming year or beyond.

February will see us returning to the A Team campaign in Terrinoth, which I consider our main campaign. I have been stressed about finding a suitable campaign module for the party now that they are in charge of a little village and have a few artisans and retainers under them, but I think I finally found something that will work for this level of play; that should take us through February and March. The PCs were at level 6 when we paused the campaign last year, and may hit level 8 or 9 by the end of the campaign, which may be a good point to retire them and start a fresh campaign...

April and May see quite a few holidays in 2020, and I am planning a spot of vacation too, so there will likely only be four sessions in these two months, during which we hope to play the sequel to our Sorcery! campaign. The campaign is based on a comment by Glowulf's player, who wanted to play an 'evil' campaign - so we decided that the PCs in the campaign will be evil PCs hired by Valerian to take revenge on his erstwhile comrades. We plan to be using the Forbidden Lands rules for this campaign, chiefly so we can learn the rules in preparation for the campaign which would follow.

In June and July my friend FG will be taking over the GM's seat. FG had backed the new Forbidden Lands kickstarter, at the level which would include the core rules, and plans to making his GMing debut with these rules. I've heard good things about the hex-crawl part of Forbidden Lands, and am very excited to be playing in a campaign.

So that's the first seven months of the year planned. From August onwards we have a few options.

I have backed the Mongoose Traveler The Deepnight Revelation Campaign kickstarter, which is scheduled to deliver in July 2020, although the pdfs of the campaign core books have already arrived. I had a quick read through the files and was very impressed. As mentioned in the final Campaign Diary of the second season of our Space Opera campaign, the premise of the Deepnight Revelation campaign should dovetail with the Seven Worlds campaign with a little work. Whether we go this route will depend on what genre we feel like playing at that time. If we do go ahead, we are likely to do troupe play style, where each player will play their old character (who will be in a command position), plus a more junior character (who will be in a field position). This system will also allow me to have guest players joining the sessions where not all the main crew can make it.

The other option, and one which I am currently very excited about, is a campaign using the Five Torches Deep rules, which is essentially 5E 'lite' with some OSR features. I have an idea of using the rules in combination with a megadungeon module, and setting the campaign in the same world as the A Team and B Team - essentially a C Team, but played using a different set of rules. The campaign will have a drop-in, drop-out system similar to the one we used for the first season of the Space Opera campaign, and will hopefully allow more of my players to experience the rules and the megadungeon.

Yet another option is to revisit the Gamma World campaign. I have always wondered what happened to the mutants of the village after they obtained advanced weaponry from the crashed spaceship, and whether they successfully repel the human attack on their village.

That's on the RPG front.

On the wargaming front we managed to finally play a few of the games I have been working on for a long time, such as the Trojan Wars variant of the Tribal rules, and the Napoleonic rules based on the ACW rules by Realistic Modelling.

Chief in my list of to-play games for 2020 is our Roman-Sassanid campaign. I have painted up two units of Gothic heavy foot and a small Armenian contingent, both of which can be used in our campaign, and Martin is working on his Palmyrans, some of which can also be used.

The other game I would like to play is Kings of War 3rd Edition. I finally glued my Night Goblin and Wars of the Roses figures onto their movement trays, and I plan to paint up enough conversion movement trays to allow me to field my LOTR dwarves as a KOW army too.

Finally, I hope to get a couple games of Gaslands in now that I have the vehicles done.

And that's it for now. I wish you are your family a good year ahead.