It’s four years now that I’ve been writing this blog. I’ve just passed 250 published posts. Considering that I average more than two thousand words per post, I conservatively estimate half a million words, and possibly closer to twice that. Every year of writing has slightly fewer posts than the year before it, but raising a child will do that. Also moving… twice. If you think to yourself, “But Shieldhaven, you don’t have a job, surely that means you have more writing time?” then I’m guessing you do not so much as know anyone with children.
In keeping with my custom:
Games I’m Running
- Dust to Dust has now run fifteen three-day events, four one-day events, and two World Events. Much like I said in last year’s post, we got to stage scenes we’ve been excited about since some stage of pre-planning. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished to date, and I’m excited about next season.
- D&D 5th Edition: My Aurikesh campaign is still active, though the aforementioned moves and other things mean that I’ve only run seven sessions since this time last year. I hope that next year will be a little better on this front, but I may be kidding myself. I have ambitions of starting up a second group to play through some of the published adventures as well.
Games I’m Playing
- Eclipse is in the first full season of its second arc. It’s been really interesting to see how the tone and style of the game has changed.
- 13th Age: We’ve created characters, and the first session is coming up soon. I am playing Caoilte Apthach, an elf paladin. (I deliberately chose a race and class that are stereotypically douchebags, just so I could play them in a not-douchebag way.) For a moment it looked like we would have an all-elf party, but one player changed his mind. Which is fine – one of my favorite characters in fantasy is a human who hangs out almost exclusively with elfs.
- Scion: We created characters for a Scion game, but circumstances beyond anyone’s control have conspired to keep us from playing. I created an Irish warrior with ríastrad, because how could I not?
- Darksiders II: This is the most recent video game of any kind that I’ve played. I like what I’ve seen of it so far; the athletic stunts feel a lot more like problem-solving and a lot less like “press A to parkour like crazy.”
- Rather longer ago, I played Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Dragonfall. I got stuck on one particular fight in Dragonfall and haven’t gone back to it, but the game is incredibly good and very well-written. I should write about it in detail at some point, but the short version is three smilies on the FACE scale (a very high rating that acknowledges its minor faults, without blowing them out of proportion). I had zero prior attachment to the Shadowrun setting, but these games got me to care about it.
- …I have a ton of other games sitting in my Steam library waiting for me to get a better computer and a bunch of spare time. Wish me luck!
And that’s about the size of it. Maybe by this time next year I will have a Games I’m Writing segment – it’s worth a shot, anyway. This time last year I was writing Quintessence of Dust, but I stalled out on that right around the time my son was born, and haven’t picked it up again. I also had some Big Plans about working on video games with some friends, but those stalled out too. If they’re reading this, I am sorry about that and hope to revive that project.
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