Monday, January 4, 2021

The Plague Year


For me, it's become harder to focus on RPG material with so many terrible things occurring within the world, and obviously, the COVID-19 global pandemic was front and center for last year. I've always tried (and failed sometimes) to keep world events, especially politics from this space and I've become so disillusioned this year that I didn't know if I could do that so I took some time away.

As I've written before I have General Anxiety Disorder but I have a good support circle including my GP so I weathered that storm better than I expected.

Our group is still playing and we are starting our final adventure in our Saltmarsh campaign. I'm enjoying being a player and honestly can't wait to get together each week. My monk died and I'm now playing a 16 the level Human Fighter Battle Master. I like the Battle Master but unless you are taking short rests fairly regularly it's a bit underpowered.

I haven't worked on any new products even though I have a couple of ideas, mostly because my wife's parents retired this year and we are in the process of buying their comic and game stores from them. I'm busier than ever and we are always brainstorming new ways to connect with customers.

I need to thank Wizards of the Coast for its Magic: the Gathering products that helped keep us afloat this year, especially some free products that made a huge difference for us. Sadly, I'm not sure they are on the right course for M:tG and I hope I'm proven wrong about that this year.

I got to play DnD 5E, Tiny D6, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Vampire: the Masquerade 5E, and playtested the Fallout 2d20 RPG from Modiphius.

I'm contemplating a couple of games to run online but we'll see what happens.

My intention is to give the blog more attention and I hope I am able to do that.

1 comment:

Jonathan Linneman said...

Happy new year, Mark! I am definitely with you in hoping that WotC proves to be making the right decisions--and I'm specifically thinking about LGSs here--when it comes to MTG. In the more than 20 years since I started playing, I've seen wave after wave of changes that were going to "destroy" MTG, and I never had any real concerns about it. Now, with the rise of Arena, the pandemic, the dramatic "experimentation" in product releases...well, I think MTG is going to keep going strong in some form (probably stronger than ever), but the past year has definitely thrown a shadow of pessimism over the prospect that the game is going to have the same feeling it did when I first fell in love with it.

Of course, I'm a worrier, I'm getting old, and the world's been in a really weird place. So...hopefully we all get vaccinated and I'm back to beating down with goblins at FNM before long...!

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