New year, new start

Best wishes for the new year everyone! A lot of folks start a new year with resolutions and projects like #dungeon2023 or #setting2023. Personally I'm not going to bother. I don't have it in me to be productive daily, not even on a small scale. My productivity has always come in bursts. That said, I've been fooling around with various blogging platforms for the better part of half a year now, and figured: screw it, let me just dive back in using something simple like this.

So a bit of a short introduction on myself: I'm a European male in my late 30s; been into the tabletop RPG hobby for around 2 decades now. That means I started playing around the time D&D 3e came out, but strangely it took me almost 10 years before I tried my first game of D&D. 

During the 2000s my time playing was basically split between GURPS, Shadowrun and Warhammer Fantasy. The 2010s was the time I spent playing Pathfinder, then Starfinder and finally D&D 5E. Early on in the decade is also where I started taking on the Game Master role more regularly. By the end of the decade, after approximately 4 years of game mastering 5E I was quickly becoming dissatisfied with the system though and so I started thinking back to all the fun I had in my early years of TTRPGs. And so I decided to give other systems a try again. This time not just as a player but also as a GM. I first dove back into things with Forbidden Lands and Mörk Borg. Loved both of these so much they convinced me very quickly to dive deeper into Year Zero Engine and OSR games respectively.

We all know a lot of stuff happened in 2020, and as a result, my previously side hobby of TTRPG quickly became my main hobby and replaced most of the other things I was occupied with. From 2020 to 2022 I dove so deep and hard into TTRPGs that I feel I evolved much more as a player and GM in those 3 years, than in the 15-20 years before that all added up.

Nowadays I'm alternating my time between B/X based OSR D&D games on one hand, and indie TTRPGs on the other hand.

In 2022 I continued running my Forbidden lands campaign, which is expected to finish sometime early 2023. I also ran two shorter self-contained campaigns, one in Wicked Ones and one in Mothership. I joined the board of Delierium, a local TTRPG club which organises biweekly open gamedays; organised two (small-scale) virtual conventions; and I became a regular event GM at Outpost, the local gamestore. In total I ran just over 100 game sessions as a GM and played in about 20.

For 2023 my goals are to run a few more short campaigns (6-12 sessions each). Right now I'm considering Mausritter and Lex Arcana as the main contenders for those. On top of that I want to give a nice and clean finish to our Forbidden Lands campaign; and I want to start a genuine OSR Open Table game. I'm undecided yet what system I'll use for that, but it will be something B/X based. Beside the retroclones , I'm also considering Worlds Without Numbers and Basic Fantasy RPG. I'll also be running at least two one-shots per month, if not more - split between that local club and the local gamestore. We're undecided whether or not we'll try to run another virtual convention as the Fall edition wasn't very successful.

On top of that my goal is to be better organised again. Maybe set up some kind of spreadsheet/tracker for my sessions.

Anyway, that should do as an intro. Looking forward to type more later.