Resurrection and ConVocation 2019
It's been over a year since I posted on here. That year has been a difficult one. We've had a number of issues with our car, our boiler has broken down twice, both my wife and I have switched jobs due to bad experiences with our previous employer, both of us taking significant pay cuts in the process. Plus, I've had a face up to the fact that my mental health has not been the best over the past 12–18 months due to work and stress. Earlier this year I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder and have undergone a course of cognitive behavioural therapy over the summer. So, it's been tough. And while I've still been playing and running RPGs, I've not been attending conventions as much as I used to, I've barely played board games, and I have let this site and my RPG writing slip by the wayside.
I've since been feeling better, though my current job still has its stressful moments. It's fast-paced and we're currently in a period where several team members are on leave, so the pressure to get both your own work and everyone else's done is high. Things have been swingy mentally, but slowly I am coming back to a sense of normality. As part of this, I've been thinking a lot about getting back into scenario design, as well as getting this blog back up and running while I do that. I've also been wanting to get back into going to conventions, so I packed a (semi-)busy schedule for the last few months of the year with Owlbear and Wizard's Staff (OBaWS) 2, ConVocation (or YSDC Games Day VIII), Meeple Con 2 (Durham's local con) and Dragonmeet.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to OBaWS in September due to illness - my wife had a stinking cold the weekend before and passed it to me. I just couldn't face a 7 hour round journey with a head full of snot and a splitting headache, whether by car (as originally planned) or by train (which was unfeasibly expensive). However, I did make it to YSDC's ConVocation last weekend, where I ran Adam Gauntlet's The Silence Mill from Out of the Woods for Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu.
YSDC's Games Days have become a staple and highlight of my year. I've been to the last five now, and I hope I manage to get to the next five. They are always fun and I've met some amazing people there (including Paul, who runs the site and is an all-round top bloke). This year was no exception - an excellent gaming session following by a sumptuous spread of food and entertaining conversation at Pickles afterwards.
The Silence Mill was a great scenario to run, cleverly mixing werewolves, Breton folklore, 1930s nationalism, Arthurian legends and the Cthulhu mythos into a coherent whole. It was, however, a bit of a stretch for a con game, even if Games Day sessions usually run to 5-6 hours. I'd say that to get the best out of this scenario and play it roughly as written, you're looking at two 4 hour sessions. However, with some GM fiat, the story progressed to a satisfying conclusion and I think my players were all happy with the outcome in the end! A big thanks to Debs, Chris, Shim and Jon for choosing my game over the others available on the day. Players make an RPG session, and you four really brought it home for this one.
The afterparty, if you will, was as exceptional as always. Pickles Delicatessen, which some may know from YSDC's podcasts, always provides amazing food, though this year I think the size of the jacket potatoes may have over faced a few of us! The talk was of as high a calibre as the food. It was really at the evening event that the spark to resurrect this blog was ignited while chatting to one of the attendees. They had mentioned joining a writers' group to encourage them to write the novel they'd been tinkering with for a while, and how creative endeavours were good for mental health. That got me thinking about this blog and about my RPG writing, and how I'd left these activities behind while I've been dealing with everything else. I remembered how much I had enjoyed writing RPG content and how happy it had made me. So, I'll be endeavouring to get back into this before too long.
It also kind of gave me an epiphany about this blog as well. I realised that I'd been trying to create gamable content with it, both for games like Call of Cthulhu and, more recently, the OSR-style games that remind me of my youth playing BECMI D&D. However, the epiphany was that I had been trying to create stuff that I thought people would be interested in using, not the kind of stuff that I wanted to be writing and using at my own table. So, from now on, I'll be mostly talking here about what I am doing in my games and how I am running things at my table. Hopefully, some of that might be useful to you - if it is, please use it, but if it's not, then hey, not everything I write is going to be for you.
For the foreseeable future, I'll probably be writing stuff about my ongoing Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign and the weird Science-Fantasy OSR-inspired D&D campaign I running at my local game store. I'll intersperse that with other stuff I'm writing and I hope to get some scenarios out by early 2020.
But for now, I'm off to play Fury of Dracula for the first time in years with my friends...