My 2022 Gaming Retrospective
As 2022 has drawn to a close and 2023 is already off to a start, it's time to look back over the previous year and reminisce about days of gaming past. The year marked the true end of many restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and, while some conventions took place in 2021, it was in 2022 that I have started to make the effort to attend cons again.
Regular gaming
I have three main groups that I've been roleplaying with throughout the year. One I've been running a sporadic Tomb of Annihilation campaign for using the D&D 5e ruleset. We've been going at it for around three years or so, given we started just before the pandemic! However, various life and pandemic related issues have gotten in the way of running it to a regular schedule, so I make do with picking it up as and when everyone can arrange to meetâwe're mostly academics, so time is always left wanting. The adventurers have reached the Tomb of the Nine Gods though and are roughly half way through it, so a good run of sessions should hopefully see us wrap the campaign up next year. After we finish, I have a few ideas for what to run next, including BranCalonia or perhaps a 5e version of the Cravana hexcrawl that I've been designing.
For my second group, I have been running Age of Sigmar: Soulbound. We're playing through the Shadows in the Mist campaign, although we did kick things off with the free adventure Crash and Burn and segued that into some adventures in Brightspear using the Starter Set before everyone jetted off to Anvilguard. The adventurers are now knee deep in intrigue, know that something is amiss in the city, but aren't quite sure what it is. I have started to weave their backstory elements into things, so that everyone has something extra to explore. I was somewhat sceptical of Soulbound at first, but it is a well-designed system aimed at pulpy high adventure that still allows you to pull in some of that grimdark grittiness from WFRP. I also highly recommend the Shadows in the Mists campaign, which allows for adventures on the high seas, in cityscapes, and out in the jungles. It provides fascinating locales to explore and a plotline of intrigue, betrayal and mystery that is just great. While it's a tough pick from all the games I've played this year, I think Soulbound just edges the competition out for providing everything I want in a game and more. It's been easily some of the most fun I've had all year.
My third group is the one I play with most often (every Tuesday and Thursday evening). Consequently, we've played a number of different campaigns and one-shots over the course of the year. Our long running Vampire: the Requiem campaign has continued every other Tuesday, with our vampires suffering all manner of torment as expected. It is a slow burn campaign, and highly character focused. We've been playing it for getting on three years now, and have only seen around 6 months of in game time go by. The world building and NPCs for this game have been fantastic and there are so many threads to pull at, so there is plenty to occupy each character. Seeing through all those tangled webs is sometimes difficult though, and a few times we have definitely have to slow the pace while we look for opportunities to advance our agendas, meaning a single night can take 2-3 or even more sessions. This slow pace has meant limited experience as well, with only three 'learning curves' throughout the entire campaignâhopefully 2023 beings some more XP, as I do need to improve my disciplines and skills!
Our other Tuesday evening games, alternating with Vampire, have been a mixture of one-shots and mini-campaigns. I got things off the ground with a run through of one of my favourite Call of Cthulhu scenarios, Forget Me Not, which is in The Things We Leave Behind from Stygian Fox. Then we moved on to playing an extended Shadows of Esteren campaign, which was enjoyable, although did have some ups and downs caused by some 'table issues' that almost caused the game to stall out. Despite this, it did come to a satisfying conclusion and I am glad we managed to finish it off!
For our Thursday night games, I starting the year off with Impossible Landscapes for Delta Green. However, I ended up pulling the plug on this about halfway through. My players often seemed confused about what to do when we hit the second act of the campaign. Despite gently coaxing them to try and investigate more of the leads they had and follow up on what was weird, plus providing guidance that the campaign was supposed to be confusing, given that reality is slowly being eroded, I felt my enthusiasm for running it slowly ebb away. The characters walking into a Delta Green hit squad, resulting in their summary execution, was kind of the final nail in the coffin. Running it left me somewhat anxious, and lead me to question my own GMing abilities. I had to pull something out of my arse to cover that TPK as well to get the characters back on track and explain away why they hadn't died that still fit with the narrative of crumbling reality that the campaign evokes. Hardened Delta Green Handlers will probably scoff at my light touch in this respect, but it (somewhat) staved off the reaction that such a TPK was "bullshit". After having a frank discussion between myself and the players, we eventually decided to shelve the campaign for the time being and hopefully return to it in due course. We did manage to get to a good halfway point, which should make it easier to pick up again in the future. Still, it ranks up there with one of the worst GMing experiences I've had and picking it up might be difficult. However, my players have been requesting that we get back to it and I take that as a good sign that they are invested in seeing it to its conclusion.
From Delta Green, we moved on to Monsterhearts. I was a player for this and enjoyed the chanceto play through a new to me Powered by the Apocalypse game. I have quite the collection of games that run on this system, but rarely get to play them. Plus, my undead ghoul was fun to play. I never really did get to resolve their plot line at the end though...
From Monsterhearts we then went back to Liminal, picking up from a short campaign we had played in 2021. It was good to jump into an old character again and I very much enjoyed Liminal the first time around. This time, however, my character's backstory has been very much in focus. Our GM brings elements of all our backstories out during play to some extentâin the first campaign, it focused heavily on elements from two of the other characters, while having something from all of us coming to the fore here and there. However, there was an unresolved thread linked to my character from that campaign, and it looks like that has blown up, leading to us learning more about House Annwn and the thirteen treasures of Britain, which seem to be a central plot point this time around! And I am loving it! Liminal definitely has to take a spot up there with Soulbound for one of my favourite games this year and I am really looking forward to seeing where the story is going in the New Year.
Between these main campaigns, we've played several one-shots. And, while Delta Green did kind of nuke my wish to GM at the time, I have since run games of Mork Borg, Vaesen, The One Ring 2e and Romance of the Perilous Lands amongst others. Plus, we also played Forbidden Lands (ending in a TPK!) and some Pathfinder too, amongst others. I even ran a few sessions of our pick up game of Delta Green, so I haven't been put off running that system entirely either!
As well as my three main groups, I have also been playing Free League's Alien RPG on and off with a group of friends from Newcastle Gamers, which I used to attend regularly back in the day. We completed the Destroyer of Worlds mini campaign at the start of the year and managed to squeeze in the first session of Heart of Darkness, the next of their three mini campaigns/extended scenarios, before the end of the year. I'm looking forward to digging further into this one in 2023 too.
Overall, I've managed to cram 114 roleplaying sessions, either playing or running games, a drop of only one session from 2021's 115 sessions. So, it looks like my gaming has hit a steady pace! In addition, every year since 2017, I have played the Ladder of Insanity over on RPG Geek, where each rung corresponds to the number of games you need to have played and the number of times you have to have played them. So, for instance, Rung 1 is met by playing one game once, while Rung 8 is met by playing eight different games for eight sessions. I've never managed to get above Rung 6 until this year, when I've managed to achieve Rung 7. So, a lot of games played this year have seen multiple sessions across both my regular gaming groups and convention games!
Conventions and other meetups!
Getting back into the swing of conventions, this year I managed to attend four, starting with Airecon in March. A continually growing convention based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, it was my first visit and I didn't really report on it at the time, as I didn't really do much gaming or any roleplaying, instead visiting for the trade hall. I did pick up a few books, including publications for BranCalonia and WFRP. I did play a few enjoyable board games though with my friends, Roger and Zoe, who I bumped into by chance.
The experiences I had at the other conventions I attendedâConVocation, Grogmeet and DragonmeetâI've already written about previously, and you can click on those links to read my thoughts on them if you're so inclined. Suffice to say that all of them were great and I played some fantastic games at them, but if I was going to do anything better this year then it would be to make the effort to socialise more at them!
Talking about socialising, I've attended a few different meetups over the course of the year, with the Grognard Files Bookclub and Friday evenings at the Mitchester Arms being the two best and the ones that I am very happy to have plucked up the courage to jump into. Both of these were something I've been wanting to attend for a while, but knowing only a few of the regulars only through Twitter, my anxiety prevented me from doing so for quite some time. However, now that I've been to several of these gatherings, I definitely feel comfortable with keeping up appearances going into 2023. Plus, I has been great to meet many of the grogs from both in person at conventions throughout the year and I've always been made to feel welcome. The challenge for the New Year will be to actually run some games for some of them!
Resolutions for 2023
I'm not a good one for making resolutions, as I always find them hard to stick too. That said, I do have a few gaming resolutions that I would like to achieve in 2023:
- Run more convention games: outside of ConVocation, YSDC's Cthulhu themed convention, I didn't run any other games at cons in 2022. Let's make 2023 the year to fix that!
- Buy less, play more: The hard one! I want to aim to buy fewer new games in 2023 and play the ones that I already have. I've a full library of games in my office, many of which have never been played (and quite a few have never been read, bringing us to...)
- Read my backlog: I want to aim to read through my RPG backlog of unread purchases. I'd like to aim to read one core rule book every month.
- Play what I want to play and run what I want to run: While I am part of several groups and we do play a range of games, there are some games that I really want to run/play that I haven't had the chance to. So, in 2023 I'd like to make opportunities to play those games. That may mean having to shuffle things around and/or taking a break from some groups to get the games I want to play in.
- Paint and play with my wargame minis: A non-RPG one! Having been a big 40K and Warhammer Fantasy player back in the 90s, I recently got back into Games Workshop's systems in 2019, picking up a Skaven Age of Sigmar army and some bits for Kill Team. However, I never got to use themâI wanted to paint them up, got halfway through the project and then the pandemic happened. For Christmas 2022, I've bought myself the newest Kill Team rules and starter set, as well as the new AoS rules, more Skaven and even one of the Warcry boxed sets! That's a lot of models to build and paint! So, I hope to get my Skaven army painted in 2023, as well as get some games in with friends throughout the year.
- Complete #Dungeon23: This is a creative goal. If you've not heard of #Dungeon23, then I invite you to give Sean McCoy's substack a quick read over. Basically, the aim is to create one dungeon room each day throughout the year, across 12 levels of a megadungeon, one for each month. I've already done Room 1, so we're off to a start, but I would love to stick to it and post my progress each week or month for you to follow.
Well, that about summarises 2022 and what I aim for going into 2023. If you've gotten this far, then all that remains is for me to wish you a happiest of years ahead, and may it bring you much joy, merriment, good times with friends and, of course, plenty of gaming. And maybe, hopefully, we might bump into each other at a convention or in a game sometime over the course of the year too...