2023 Gaming Retrospective: The Year of Warhammer?
This year has had its ups and downs, both in everyday life and in gaming. I started a new job in January, which is really my dream job—working as a post-doctoral research assistant in Palaeolithic archaeology at Durham University. That came with a healthy pay bump. My wife, however, was forced to step away from her current job in October and return to freelancing, which has been a bit stressful on our joint finances. Overall, things are pretty healthy, though there is plenty to work on and towards in the new year.
Gaming overview
Gaming also came with its share of ups and downs. Earlier in the year I stepped away from a long running group who I have had a lot of fun playing a number of enjoyable games with over the last few years. Unfortunately, the end of 2022 and start of 2023 saw my enthusiasm wane and small episodes of frustration grow, culminating with the Impossible Landscapes campaign I shelved the previous year being returned to and then eventually falling back apart again. It was a slow realisation that what I wanted out of the games wasn't gelling, so stepping away was the best option. I do miss playing games with that group, and I hope that we can get together and play some more games in the future!
Leaving this group did leave something of a hole in my gaming schedule, as we used to play regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. Tuesday nights were easy enough to fill, given one of my local pubs has a boardgame night every week that some of my friends go to. So I started going along to that every week, mostly playing lighter fare that can accommodate smaller pub tables. Thursday, though, were pretty empty up until I saw Bud from Buds RPG Review advertising a spare seat for the Enemy Within Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Campaign. We've been playing regularly each week since July and it has been excellent, capturing all the elements that make Warhammer Fantasy grim and dark. I mean, my bounty hunter had their jaw broken around session three or four! I'm really looking forward to this continuing into 2024 and there has been talk of the group trying to meet up at UK Games Expo and try and play in person, which would be lovely.
My other gaming has been a bit more on an even keel—my regular Age of Sigmar: Soulbound group is coming to the end of the Shadows in the Mist campaign, having just entered into the final adventure. We've managed to keep a pretty regular run of sessions, with two most months, which has kept things running fairly smoothly. With the campaign drawing to its inevitable close soon, we're looking to The One Ring for our next game, and I am already starting to read through The Darkening of Mirkwood with a view to run it using the Second Edition rules in the new year.
My D&D group is also coming to the end of Tomb of Annihilation, a campaign we've been playing for the best part of three years now! That seems a long time, but we've had regular cancellations of sessions and large gaps in play due to vacations, research leave and so forth. It probably doesn't help that we're mostly all academics. However, we're one-to-two sessions away from the end now and so should have things wrapped up by early February at the latest, based on the sessions that we've booked in. For the next campaign, I put a number of options in front of my players, including Brancalonia and Eberron, but it looks like we'll be starting a campaign in the dark fantasy world that I've been designing, Cravana. I'm actually really looking forward to running this, as it gives me a lot of freedom in designing the campaign world. It will also be a change for the players, as this will be a very proactive campaign, driven by the players' goals, rather than a more narrative campaign, such as the published 5e adventures from WotC. I am really interested to see how they approach this!
In addition, to my regular campaigns, I have been taking part in helping to organise a monthly RPG night at the same venue that we play boardgames each week. This has allowed me to run a variety of one shot games that I otherwise wouldn't have had the chance to play, including Mausritter, Deadlands, Call of Cthulhu, Vaesen, Orbital Blues, Eat the Reich, and Jonathan Hick's new game, Pressure. These sessions have gone from strength to strength, with us now regularly filling out two tables each month, and I am hoping that they continue into 2024.
Finally, I've started playing in a The One Ring campaign with some friends who had been playing through all the published adventures for the ALIEN RPG from Free League, completing the final scenario, Heart of Darkness, earlier this year. We've played about three sessions and it is going well, despite some technical hang ups with Foundry, which many of the players are learning as we go. It looks like it's going to be fun and will be a regular part of the gaming rotation into 2024, though I'm hoping it doesn't clash too much with my own The One Ring campaign that I plan to run.
Year of Warhammer
This year really turned out to be the Year of Warhammer, though. Cubicle 7 literally attempted to crush me under the weight of Warhammer RPG products that they churned out over the course of 2023, with multiple books arriving for WFRP, Wrath and Glory and Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, as well as the release of Imperium Maledictum at the end of the year. Age of Sigmar: Soulbound has fast become a firm favourite of mine, given its simple but effective ruleset and its well realised world, on top of the Shadows in the Mist campaign being a lot of fun to run, and I've been picking up all the supplements for it in PDF as they come out, with the lastest—Ulfenkarn—looking absolutely fabulous. Getting to join in on an Enemy Within campaign for WFRP has been the icing on the cake and has allowed me to put to good use all of the WFRP books I've been resolutely collecting since Cubicle 7 obtained the Warhammer licence.
Added to this RPG onslaught is the fact that I have delved deep into the miniature wargaming side of the hobby again. I'd dipped my toe in previously, picking up a Skaven army for Age of Sigmar in 2019, as well as a bit of Kill Team, just before COVID confined us all indoors and put paid to any attempts to play. Since Christmas 2022, however, I've been bitten by the wargaming bug hard. I've picked up the latest iterations of Kill Team (with the reasonably cheap starter set) and the Age of Sigmar skirmish game, Warcry. Then I added more Skaven to my existing army. Then I decided to pick up an whole new army in Seraphon, another with the Kruleboyz from the Stormbringer magazines, and then yet another in Troggoths with the release of Trugg the Troggoth King. I've also picked up Blood Bowl and the new edition of Warhammer 40k.
Personally, I blame my friends, Darren and Clarky. They're such enablers that we have a messaging group specifically for us to talk Warhammer which is, funnily enough, entitled "The Warhammer Enablers Group". I'll probably get my own back by encouraging them to pick up Necromunda in 2024...
Trip to Warhammer World
Talking about Darren and Clarky, it was over some Christmas pints in 2022 that I discovered that neither of them had visited the fabled Warhammer World. So, I suggested we should do a lads day out and visit in the new year. After some scattered organisation, we settled on Saturday 18th March 2023 to drive down to beautiful(?) Nottingham for the experience. Of course, yours truly drew the short straw and ended up ferrying us all there and back...
We had a great time reminiscing about miniatures of the past in the exhibition, drinking Bugman's in the bar, buying miniatures, and me and Darren even squeezed in a game of Age of Sigmar in which my Seraphon crushed his Cities of Sigmar army. He got his own back later in the year when his Blood Angels utterly annihilated my Death Guard in our first game of Warhammer 40K tenth edition.
Resolutions...
Last year I made several gaming related resolutions. Let's see how many I stuck to...
- Run more convention games - unfortunately, this one was a bust. I ran a game at YSDC's convocation as per usual, but didn't manage to get to any other conventions throughout the year. I was planning on going to Dragonmeet in December, but the train strikes put paid to that. However, I did run a good number of one-shot games throughout the year as part of the Durham RPG night I helped to run, so that is a positive upside.
- Buy less, play more - Yeah, no. I probably played less that in 2022, after stepping back from one of my groups. And with getting back into the wargaming side of the hobby, I almost certainly spent more on gaming product this year.
- Read my backlog - Again, I've still a weighty backlog of books to read, which steadily grows as I and new games to it. I am quickly running out of space and do have to cycle through things that I know I'm just not going to get to the table in order to make space for new books. That said, running a variety of one-shots at the RPG nights has meant that I have to read through some new material, and I expect 50% of the games I ran this year at those events were new to me.
- Play what I want to play and run what I want to run - This I think I have come the closest to meeting. Realising that there was a disconnect between what I was playing and what I wanted to play earlier in the year meant that I could work towards fulfilling what I wanted to get out of may gaming over the course of 2023. There is still a whole load of stuff that I do want to play, but I think I have the opportunity to play those games more readily now. And with us moving to finishing Tomb of Annihilation, I am hoping that the new 5e campaign we'll be starting will run closer to the type of game I enjoy running, whereas the tomb section of ToA has been something of a drag over the course of the year to the point that I just want to get it over and done with and move to something fresh!
- Paint and play with my wargame minis - This is something of a half done, half added to. I have managed to get a fair bit of painting done this year and, in fact, got one whole army completely painted (though it is only 11 models!). Still, I have a lot of work to do in order to clear out my backlog of miniatures and get some more armies fully painted up. However, I have worked on improving my technique and my hobby area to help me work on painting, which will hopefully serve me well in 2024.
- Complete #Dungeon23 - This was an utter fail. I don't think I made it through January. Though, the work that I did do is pretty good and will serve as fodder for the Cravana game I am planning on running next year.
Do I have resolutions for 2024? I don't think so at the moment. There are a lot of things I'd like to get done, and a lot of games I would like to play. But I think that resolutions end up putting pressure on you to perform or adhere to them. So, my one resolution for 2024 is just to have more fun with my gaming. Not to compare myself against anyone else, or to try and achieve the most or aim for a specific goal, but just to have the most fun I can have with my hobby and be truly satisfied with the games that I get to play and run. Because, as long as I and my players are having fun, then that's all that matters...