It’s almost hard to believe that I’ve completed seven years of writing in this blog. I mean, yes, it’s a ton of writing and it FEELS like a ton of writing, but still. Seven years is almost as long as my whole career in the video game industry to date. In the past year, my freelance writing has grown steadily, if slowly. I’ve released the first two of what will be a sizable series of PDFs with Rite Publishing, and I don’t think I’ve missed a week all year in Tribality. We had our second child back in January, around a week before Dust to Dust’s closing one-day. Last weekend, the Eclipse campaign ended its ten-year run. It was not deliberate symbolism that Harbinger of Doom also moved from Blogger to WordPress – just more in a year of changes.

Games I’m Running

1. Aurikesh – five years, 78 sessions. I write about it a lot, though, so if you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know all about it.
2. Over the Edge, 25th Anniversary Edition – two sessions so far, though I hope we’ll continue. Running this feels nothing at all like running any other game.

Games I’m Playing

1. Altera Awakens is a new fantasy boffer LARP that has just started up this year. I’m excited about my character and can’t wait for the next event!
2. The Reborn campaign ran several more sessions, but it’s now gone on hiatus until the DM has free time again. Incidentally, the last session ended with a party wipe, but not one that ends the campaign.
3. Kainenchen’s Liel campaign ran a few more sessions. Incidentally, the last session ended with a party wipe, but not one that ends the campaign.
4. Stands-in-the-Fire started up a Planescape campaign, titled the Granite Sledge. We’re trying to repair a planar ship and getting into all kinds of trouble along the way. In the last session, I was pretty sure we were all going to die, but instead we got the Hand of Vecna. God knows what we’ll do with it.
5. I played Pyre, Supergiant’s new game of escaping hell through the power of magic basketball. This game is gorgeous and I loved it, but I wish I had played it using a console controller rather than keyboard and mouse.
6. I played Guild of Dungeoneering, a deck-building dungeon crawler with a sardonic sense of humor. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Their alternate play mode to rack up trophies may be a little more interesting than their core game. I might check out the expansions at some point.
7. I played a good bit of Dungeon of the Endless, but didn’t quite get the hang of the best early-game approaches before I got distracted. Great game, though.
8. I’m playing Endless Legend while writing this post. I have always been a big fan of 4X games, going back to Civ (no number, you don’t get a number until your sequel exists, and it didn’t when I was playing it), and Endless Legend is great. I have a lot to learn about its subtleties still, but I’ve just beaten the AI on Hard for the first time (in the time since I started writing this list item).
9. I’m playing Attack the Light on my iPhone. As a serious fan of Steven Universe, I wouldn’t miss it, though it doesn’t offer anything in the way of new story. As iPhone JRPGs go, it’s excellent, but more than that, it’s a precursor to Save the Light, which Kainenchen is playing on the Xbox One as I write this.
10. I played Tyranny and loved it to death. I plan to play it all the way through a second time before too much longer, since they’ve released a substantial new DLC that covers some of the things I specifically found lacking.
11. Still playing Pokémon Go.

Games I’m Observing

This is a new category for actual-play podcasts, and Twitch games if I were watching any of those. I’m not currently looking for more games to add to this list.

1. How We Roll Podcast – I loved their first Call of Cthulhu season. I’m lukewarm on their 5e game, because they go for silly rather than maintaining tone, but the mysteries that they’re investigating are still pretty cool.
2. Critical Role – yeah, I’m super late to the party on this one, but I’m listening to Vox Machina go after K’varn. It’s interesting to see what Joe (HWR Podcast) and Matt Mercer each do well.

Thanks for reading and supporting Harbinger of Doom for another year! The shift from Blogger to WordPress did weird things to my ability to just sit down and write. I hadn’t realized how much I had conditioned myself to need the exact look and feel of Blogger’s blank page rather than WordPress’s. After the better part of a year and a lot of great support from the webmistress in changing tiny things that shouldn’t matter but totally do, I think I’ve found my groove again.

If you want to support the blog financially, well, you’re a wonderful fan and I salute you. There’s a Donate button on the left-hand side of the page there, or you can pick up any of my products on DriveThru RPG. Even better, rate them, review them, and tell your friends!

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