New on Desk #52 — Year in Review

The newsletter has made it to the end of its first year! I decided to keep doing it for the foreseeable future, still too much to discover about how to best go about it. In the meanwhile, though, a review of what we’ve learned so far.

Breaking News: Muster a success!

So let’s get this out of the way, because what’s really the feature-worthy news story of the week…

I am pleased to report that Muster finished honorably at like 102% of its funding goal. While it’s not one of those seemingly magical 10,000% funded silver spoon projects, I’m entirely happy anyway, what with the project being primarily a ransom model thing where every backer is a hero of culture, a veritable patron of the arts: I (alongside my artist-dungeoneer) am actually the only one benefiting from this project in a personal way, everybody else are Lawful Good epic-level angels of crony capitalism, deciding to pay me to write a book that will hopefully be helpful for years to come.

Indiegogo apparently just allows me to leave the project page open, so let’s try that and see what’s what — anybody wishing to give us more money remains free to do so for the next few months, which might be useful in case somebody wants to get in on the Muster joint print order, or wants to join the “fun” trading game involved in the CWP stuff. (I mean, you could also barter illicit favours with campaign backers to get in on that particular amusement, but I’m sure giving me money is more fun.)

My year in retrospect

One good thing about doing a weekly newsletter is that I have a fairly complete record of my year. Let’s see, a quick summary of the big picture…

In the first quarter I visited with friends in Oulu. I worked on C2020 (with a weird James Bond off-shoot scenario) and a Blood Bowl rpg campaign. Wrote a few essays, too. The practical gaming consisted of:
wrapping up a campaign of Subsection M3,
an online campaign of Dragon’s Castle (the Castlevania Mountain Witch variant),
an online campaign of Fables of Camelot,
the Blood Bowl thing getting throttled by corona,
some random one-shots.

In the second quarter I did some frisbee golfing. I consulted on a few game design projects at Club Hannilus and started the Quest for Lucre, which ends in this newsletter. Lucre-wise, I published a PDF edition of the World of Near and started the Patreon correspondent program we enjoy today. I also did some fair amount of forestry starting at the end of the quarter. The gaming was more cohesive, consisting of wrapping up the campaigns from the first quarter and
playtested some Varangian Way,
playtested some Flame/Star/Night,
began the Coup old school D&D campaign.

In the third quarter I was much less overtly productive, and not just because the forestry kept pestering me: Coup was working well in play, and developing the practical materials for it kept eating up my discretionary time. I also put a fair amount of work into reorganizing and liquidating my brother’s geek cruft library. The gaming consisted of:
a campaign of Land of Nodd,
more Varangian Way playtesting,
weekly Coup.

In the fourth quarter I mostly kept on trucking for the first half. Sami visited for the Fall Sammies, which was a nice distraction. The year ended on a high note, though, as I ultimately pulled myself together to finish the planning for the Muster crowdfunding campaign. That worked nicely to keep me on track for the last month or so. The gaming in this quarter has been pretty simple:
weekly Coup,
a campaign of “Christmassy Lapfantasy”.

I guess it was a sort of average year, with the regular blogging and related productivity initiatives as the main difference. If these new trends have a chance to grow, who knows — I might publish something interesting in the new year.

The Newsletter project

I discussed this entire newsletter thing a few weeks back in a pros and cons summary. I have since then concluded that the newsletter’s still developing too much to make any final conclusions about whether it’s more helpful than harmful. It is a non-negligible effort to write, obviously, but it’s also a device of self-reflection and conscious goal-setting, so it might be a net positive for keeping hold of some shape of humanity in the void of existence.

For newsletter quality improvement, here are my favourite newsletters of the year:
#1, Xianxia Winter — The first issue, but what I liked was that I expressed my interest in the xianxia genre here. The topic has followed us over the year in various ways.
#4, Hellbound Mahou Shoujo — I think this one captured something I personally like about the idea of having a newsletter: it could be a place to present and store casual ideas. This one, unlike the xianxia thing, hasn’t become anything else since then, but it’s in storage now.
#7, Sports Drama for Geeks — This is more like #1 than #4; the Hellraiser thing was me putting down the theoretical building blocks for a future creative project of some kind, while this was just me writing a short, educational summary of a cultural history topic. I like these because I imagine some like-minded fellow who reads the thing and then has this particular tool in their head. In this case, the idea of the historical scope that sports drama has as a genre in pop culture.
#8, Slice of Life — Same here, I like it because I imagine it’s educational in attracting attention to a thing of relevance
#10, 007 by the way of CRedux — This has a different thing to like, it’s an actually useful actual play report. What makes it “actually useful” in comparison to most is that it’s a summary of my technical design choices in a quick oneshot; I expect that having a reference report on that will be useful for me at some point in the future.
#15, Back from the Grail Quest — Again, what I appreciate here is that I sat down and wrote something that to me feels like informative on a relevant topic. It’s also a bit of an actual play report, but mainly it’s a breakdown on a complex literary historical thing.
#17, The Quest for Lucre — Obviously one of my favourites, it’s basically the “gamified” crystallization of what I wanted to do this year: get some shit done. The events of last month are much easier to understand by reading this one.
#21, Muscle Wizard — I like this one because I either live a relatively boring life, or don’t feel discussing my non-gaming activities very much, and this was a bit of a change of pace in that regard. That was something of a part of my summer, muscle wizarding in the woods.
#27, High-Tier Coup — A substantial game design piece on the general systematics of Name Level and higher-level D&D in general. More of an essay than a newsletter article, but nevertheless a pretty good showing. I ended up featuring D&D game development material quite a few times over the last two quarters of the year, but this remains my favourite newsletter in that line.
#33, Mysteries of the Gradient — I don’t know if it transmitted to other people, but I thought that it was hilarious to write an in-depth snapshot of where I was with Gradius at the time of writing. The technical nature of the writing amuses.

That’s ten picks by coincidence, about 20% of the total crop that I am particularly happy with. The rest aren’t that bad either, but I would obviously like my own writing. The most melancholic ones verge on amusing for their sadness, which I guess was the idea in writing them. The description of the monotonous apple-pressing and the numinous disappearance of the autumn wasps was almost poetic.

What I get from this review is that I don’t seem to care about the day to day actual play reports that I keep writing. What I do care about are clever feature articles on various topics, apparently. I also like the newsletters that feature my game design notes on various projects and ephemeral ideas.

The Quest for Lucre

The progress bar doesn’t let me show ~115%, my best estimate for around where we ultimately ended up on the Quest for Lucre. When the quest started back in the spring it seemed pretty grim; I managed to pull up to around 10% over the first month or so with some quick-fixes, but then real-world commitments, enduring sadness over the human condition and incessant old school D&D campaigning distracted me for almost half a year. The Quest was probably around 20% or so before the Muster campaign, but of course the campaign had been my genius masterplan all along: succeeding in that would fulfill the Quest in one fell stroke!

Which is to say: all’s well that ends well, and I’m a financial genius. Ask me for investment advice.

Plans for the new year

Well, the Quest for Lucre will actually continue with a new leg of the journey: apparently my consistently redlining gaming business has 3k € of deprecating deficit on the line in year 2021, which means that I’ll need to figure out some more money-making initiatives or allow the tax bear to walk away with the moneys. The overflow from this year counts for that, of course, and I do think that we might maybe produce a little bit of that from the Muster project. (Basically depends on how much art I’ll end up purchasing for the book.)

Before worrying about new adventures in fiscal cunning, the priority is to make good on the commitments created this year: Muster and its sibling project, the Coup Workbook Partials series, need to be written. I’m hoping that this’ll be a Q1 thing that we’ll all look back to fondly by the summer, but who knows. It takes what it takes. If I’m lucky people get so enamored by the CWPs that they’ll keep pushing money at the Muster campaign, which’ll make reaching the 2021 Quest milestone that much easier.

The third-most priority is actually keeping consistent about blogging, I guess. I would be happy if I didn’t fall off the newsletter wagon without a good reason, and it would be even better if I managed to write an essay now and then — every month, ideally. The Patreon correspondent money is money too, after all, and that’s clearly what I am about now: being productive and racking up the fat stacks.

Monday: Coup de Main #28

When we last left the game, it was at a crossroads of mystery: after Rob Banks’s Greyhawk adventure concluded, we could have done anything… so we ended up going dungeon-delving! Unusually many players were with us, some in one of their last appearances for a while, so it behooved us to do something practical rather than counting mules for the session. The natural choice was to go back to the Ytragern Manor for a more careful look at the undermanor caves, accessed via a secret door the party had discovered earlier.

I’ll take this moment to acknowledge that I am artistically opposed to the idea that every adventure location ever has to have an extensive series of descending lower levels. It gets old after a while, and tends to steal focus from wilderness adventuring. I don’t think it fits this adventure in particular in the big picture of things. In this sense the entire affair of going into the “2nd level” (or is it 3rd?) of the manor dungeons is a good example of how the GM really has fuck-all to decide about the content of play when your procedure is sufficiently detached. I’m just a functionary, a veritable captive of this dumb adventure text.

I do of course interpret what the text gives me, but ultimately if it tells me that this manor is again, surprise surprise, one of those places with an absolutely massive underground dungeon network, there’s only a limited amount of design space that leaves me to work with. My only consolation is in the upcoming TPK when the party finds out how much the level of danger can jump when you go deep.

What the party ended up finding on their delve was a fair tangle (what’s the plural noun of “snake”?) of graydun snakes, an underground dwelling constrictor with a remarkably tough hide. A spirited fight netted the hunters some snake-skins, which I actually quite like as a type of treasure or loot. The skins aren’t super-valuable, but kill enough of those snakes and have a ranger to skin them, and it’ll add up. Could even use them to make some high-quality snake-leather armor!

It was pretty funny how the bad dice had a snake almost kill Rob Banks, the fairly mid-level Thief and blessed co-leader of the party. A considerably unlikely event with a constrictor snake against a HP pool of what, 27 HP. That’s randomness for you. After the spirited snake-wrangling session it was time for the party go up to rest, and for us to break for the night. However, coming up, the party found that a large troop (I’m pretty sure this one’s the correct noun) of goblins had infested the manor…

We’re going to continue right with the goblins tomorrow, so be sure to come with — we might well need every man on deck to repeal the invasion of the Double Dagger Tribe!

Tuesday: Coup de Sunndi

As a surprise development, we played some face to face Coup de Main here in Upper Savo on Tuesday! Sipi told me on Friday that he’d arranged for a demonstration session of “some kind of D&D” for a friend who’d never played D&D before, asking me to run the game. I’m all for evangelizing the hobby, and old school D&D is a very good intro game (like 20% of people don’t like the harsh challenge, but the rest tend to love the game), so it was pretty obvious that I’d go there with some Coup stuff. Not like I could be bothered to prep something else when I have a finely tuned campaign on-going.

I did some quick-but-excellent prep for the new session by establishing a new theater for operations in the Greyhawk campaign world: the face to face group would be adventuring in Sunndi, a rebellious county or independent kingdom (depends on who you ask) in eastern Flanaess, south of the Great Kingdom. The area had attracted me earlier for a slightly different reason (the “Eurofighter adventure”, I’ll get to that later if we manage to play it), but I concluded that it’s a perfectly fine region to host a simple newbie adventuring party as well. The Eurofighter stuff would benefit from having the region romped in a bit.

I’ll note that the GG Greyhawk material pulled through once again: it’s all really sparse, but as long as you don’t delve into latter-ages supplements it’s not actively dumb the way D&D materials often get. I could let my imagination work with finely selected sources, discarding the irrelevant and interpreting the good bits to make something compelling. The end result is that I got convinced that Sunndi is a sorta fantasy-Mughal land, intensely elf-ridden (which is to say: the human population lives under many a fae charm) and predominantly agricultural. Exotic compared to the vaguely Euro-humdrum Selintan Valley where the main campaign branch has been brewing. I ended up discarding just the teeniest sliver of core canon material, like some GG claims about the locals favouring typically urban armaments (crossbows and whatnot) despite living in a land-locked agricultural nation with literally one proper town in the entire polity, but all in all I managed to be greatly inspired with a vivacious understanding of what makes Sunndi special.

(What’s a good campaign setting like? It’s not necessarily that it has superb writing or comprehensive detail. Greyhawk, limited to the original GG treatment, is an interesting study in how potent you can get by simply not over-engineering it. I’m frankly rocking this stuff, and it’s largely because the Greyhawk setting manages to shut up and let me work.)

The party started in a petty town on the southern edge of Sunndi, near the border between the Menowood (faerie forest) and the Vast Swamp (total lizardpeople affair there). We rolled up some characters, I gave the party three freebie adventure hooks, there was some fairly reasonable preparation (gathering information, hiring hirelings), and off we went to look into Maliszewski’s Ruined Monastery. I would judge that the delve was quite successful: the players enjoyed themselves, with the veterans eager to do something simple for once and the newbies enchanted by the magic of the medium.

I was quite horrified when the veteran party leader allowed the two magic-users, played by the newbies, to investigate a pile of books covered in yellow mold — he just wasn’t paying attention to the description. The mold exploded into a choking cloud, and one of the two failed their save, which gave us quite the intensive climax for the session. Some vivid imaginery, and a grotesque attempt at emergency tracheotomy. Normal D&D stuff, basically. Fortunately the players enjoyed it as much as I did, rather than being dismayed by the senseless lethality of the game.

We’re doing another session on next Tuesday; although this will no doubt eat into my leisure time, I hope this’ll become a habit. The local gaming scene isn’t so large that we can discard a couple of new faces just like that, and it was actually quite fun to sit with the guys face to face for a change. (Corona has basically not entered the region at all over the year, we seem to live too far into the backwoods; at this point I’m quite comfortable with running some face to face games if there’s interest.) I also think that it would be useful for Coup to have a bit of a side action in Sunndi, even if it’s ambitious for me to run two weekly sessions.

State of the Productive Facilities

I published my last Muster update (a sample Coup Workbook Partial, go check it out!) on Christmas eve and then declared myself to be on vacation for a bit, so I’m not even customarily angry at myself now for not having gotten much done. Besides, I actually did write most of another CWP issue yesterday despite the supposed holiday vacation, so things are happening.

Still, my basic plan for next week is to not worry overmuch. I’ll come back to Muster plans and whatnot next Sunday, after the social season winds down some. Maybe that’ll be the feature topic of the year’s first newsletter, even.