It’s been a while but this months blogging carnival which is being hosted by The Bone Scroll hit me like a carrot on a stick. After Viri Cordova had to pull out of hosting it at the last minute The Bonemaster stepped in to keep it going.

This month we’re looking back at a previous carnival hosted by unclebear where we commented on our resolutions for the year. This isn’t something I normally do so I took a different slant on things and talked about how I thought the year would go both for myself and for everyone else in the RPG Bloggers network.

ChrisL AK @ Flickr

So to cut to the quick I have to say that I failed but you guys took the ball and ran with it. From a personal view point almost everything I touched and took part in has remained unfinished and in some case have been forgotten about. I signed up for the RPGBN collaborative campaign setting which seems to have died a death. I had to pull out of helping start up Nevermet Press and my contributions to Geek Dad have dried up as well.

I could lay blame on a lot of things but it comes down to two very significant events in my year. In April I was diagnosed as dyslexic and despite feeling good about finally understanding my failings and realising I wasn’t as stupid as I usually felt I was at the back of my mind it’s became the new excuse. It’s my go to answer for not being able to do anything. It really isn’t an excuse but I’m only just beginning to come to terms with what it means and after fighting with my work for the last 8 months to get help has mostly fallen on deaf ears I’m now taking voluntary redundancy in order to start a business up and look into returning to university later in 2010. I’ve lived for 33 years without knowing I was dyslexic and managed to get by so why should that knowledge change matters now.

The second event was the birth of my daughter. I just didn’t have the time for writing and gaming in 2009. She’s great but only now am I able to do anything other than look after her and her brothers and sisters. We had so many worries with her sister that even the slightest cough or illness gave us sleepless nights.

So why, I hear you ask, does this have anything to do with gaming and blogging? Well my involvement with the groups I pulled out of and my Geek Dad articles were aimed at pushing people towards others great work. I managed to help out a little bit but nowhere near as much as I’d liked to have.

Nevermet Press has had a hugely successful year and with the upcoming work they are about to release I can only wish them even more success especially as I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be.

The RPG Bloggers Network has grown that huge in such a short period of time that they now have the writers of the games we play joining us in our blogging ways.

The RPG Circus podcast has taken off and has found many followers as well and wouldn’t have worked without collaboration between the bloggers involved.

There were many more collaborations this year that ended well and it didn’t just have an impact in our blogging field. The building of grassroots following of games helped launch new systems and places like GenCon managed to see just what can be done when gamers and writers from across the world can do when they get together.

I may not have been involved directly with most of these success stories but I like to think that indirectly I helped out in any way I could.

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Very recently I found that a group of folk from my office take time out once a week to run a game in our canteen over lunch. They don’t run in my social circles so I’ve never really talked to them or managed to work out what system they actually use. Apart from dice they only other things they have on the table are their lunch and their character sheets. The DM must run a system simple enough to play from memory.

ANYWAY… Today I overheard possibly the funniest encounter I’ve overheard in a long while. They are playing what appear to be vampires in a modern day setting that sounds more like True Blood than WOD Vampire.

One of the players was following someone into a kwikimart style shop but didn’t want anyone to know he was there so turned into a shadow and followed the next customer in through the sliding doors. I missed what actually happened as the canteen queue had moved by this point but on the way back I could see the player was getting very frustrated.

by akuban @ Flickr

Whilst the player was in the shop the lights went out and everyone ran out the front door leaving the vampire standing in the middle of the shop. With his target gone he went to leave as well only to find the automatic sliding doors wouldn’t open. At first he thought it was a powercut until he noticed the register was still working as were the overhead fans and air con. This was where his problems started.

He followed a belief system not far from The Masquerade and so he couldn’t use his powers in case someone noticed. He was quite happy that he wouldn’t show up on the CCTV cameras but he couldn’t force the door open. He jumped up and down on the door mat hoping to flick the switch to operate the door. He pushed over stacks of beer cans onto the mat hoping to trigger the same switch. It wasn’t until he lit his lighter to double check the lock on the door that it opened. He was going completely mental by this point.

I wonder just how many people that play vampires in roleplay games remember that in most systems they very rarely give off body heat and so infrared sensors will not work for them?

It made me laugh on a day that really needed it so I thought I’d share.

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So the big news from Wizards of the Coast at GenCon was that the next setting they will be producing will be Dark Sun. Timetabled for the tail end of 2010 the first book to come out will of course be the Campaign Guide.

I’m torn on this one. On one hand I’m not a fan of fourth edition D&D but on the other hand I was a huge fan of the original version of Dark Sun for second edition. So much so it was all we played for several years until I joined a new group that only ran Forgotten Realms.

From the information that WotC gave out at the con it seems like we might actually get a faithful attempt at bringing Dark Sun into the current system. I was joking about on Twitter this morning about how they could mess it up but after looking again at the press release and the blogs of those that were there I’m quietly hopeful. So hopeful in fact that I might actually give up my card carrying hatred of the system and give it another go when it gets released.

So what is it that’s making think this is a good idea? Well aside from originally wanting Dragonlance to be the next setting I can completely understand their reasoning behind it all. They have a system that currently has a couple of settings on the bookshelves of stores but everything they have out there is very similar. They are being compared to computer games like World of Warcraft with the style as well as the game play. So they now want to push the boat out and show us just what the system can do with you give it something like Dark Sun to play with.

They have a couple of the original writing team on board who really want to get this project going and seem to want to keep it’s history and style rooted in the original books. I’m slightly worried about the comment they made about making sure that the re-release of the Prism Pentad novels fit in with the back story in a way that allows it to ‘one possible way things turn out’. But that aside going on their interview in Dragon 378. I’m quietly optamistic.

I also think that 4e’s reliance on mini’s and battlemaps may be able to improve on the one thing about Dark Sun that I really didn’t like. Structured one on one fights in a normal roleplay you can get away with but when it comes to gladiators and the games I think the 4e combat system will work fantastically well. I’m still not a fan of it for most settings but I think arena combat will really benefit from it.

Considering the changes brought in for the revised edition that made it’s way onto the shelves not long after the original setting was published I’m really curious to see where they are going to take this. It’s not a setting where you can just shove everything 100 years into the future as everything will be almost the same. Unless there were major uprisings the bad guys will still be there and if they are beaten then it changes both the feel of the game but also the earth itself will change as the amount of defilers on the planet drop dramatically with the Templars out of the equation.

Suffice it to say I’m looking forward to it and August next year can’t come soon enough!

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