Looking Back At Last Month's Blogging...

Image by Ana Carolina Franco from Pixabay

Last month was, of course, the month I decided to "retire" from blogging and so November saw a record low number of posts pop up on HeroPress.

I still posted a write-up of the latest escapades of The Tuesday Knights in Pete's Hollow Earth Expedition game (of which more later), and some promotional pieces for Film Masters (a preview of their next Roger Corman double-bill and a number of Saturday Morning Matinee films that they've shared).

When I announced (suddenly) that I was stepping away from HeroPress, I was touched and uplifted by the outpouring of understanding and supportive comments here, on Facebook, and even Twitter.

I've taken onboard everything that was said, but it's too early yet to say if my regular blogging days might not be as over as I declared on Halloween.

One thing I have noticed in the last month is that the few times that something has appeared on the blog it has garnered more attention than if it had been just one post among four or five dropped in a day... so that's maybe something I need to consider should I ever return to this blog (or another).

So, what have I been doing with all this new "free" time? I've been watching a LOT of television, that's what. 

The day after I "retired" from blogging, the BBC released the Whoniverse: that is (nearly) every episode of Doctor Who and its official spin-offs on the BBC iPlayer.

On top of that I've been watching movies and bingeing serials; the most recent being The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, which creeped me out in a delicious fashion. I'd tried to watch it before (as I love The Haunting from 1963, it's one of my all-time favourite horror movies), but it didn't click with me then.

This time round I was coming off the superb Fall of The House of Usher, the latest adaptation by horror auteur Mike Flanagan, and Paul had been telling me how great Hill House was. I'm so glad I listened to him.

Flanagan's Netflix work also reminded me that I have a copy of Shirley Jackson's original novel, which I've now queued up to read after I finish Agatha Christie's Murder on The Orient Express.

Yes, I've also been reading and am ploughing through my first Agatha Christie novel. I did a ton of investigating to see which I was most likely to enjoy and eventually settled on Murder on The Orient Express, even though I know the twist, because it involves trains, foreign countries, and snow.

I'm also kind of justifying all this goggleboxing by telling myself it's "research" for some nebulous gaming project.

I'm currently leaning towards the investigative horror genre, which makes Call of Cthulhu a very strong candidate. This is a game I've been collecting since it first came out (I'd discovered Lovecraft just before the RPG erupted into the geek consciousness of the 1980s), but I've only run it once and played it once in all those years.

It's a genre very close to my heart, but I've never really had the confidence to try and run it before, fearing it would simply devolve into a D&D meatgrinder.

But now - if I can get a grip on my aphasia - I think I might be in a position to give it a shot.

As I've been saying for years, I would love to run a "forever campaign", and contemplating that goal got me reviewing the three major campaigns that the Tuesday Knights have been fortunate enough to play through.

Although we've been gaming as a group since August 2008, and have played a fair number of medium-length campaigns, our first real long-running game was my own Chronicles of Cidri, a Heroes & Other Worlds fantasy campaign which ran for 28 sessions from May 2014 to October 2016 (29 months).

Next was Simon's 5e Dungeons & Dragons Curse of Strahd/Ravenloft campaign, which also spanned 28 sessions, running from September 2018 to January 2021 (28 months) and eventually falling foul of the pandemic (despite our fortnightly Zoom sessions).

Currently we're heading towards session 31 of Pete's "weird science" campaign, which started as GURPS Atomic Horror then shifted to Hollow Earth Expedition when Pete sent our player-characters into a parallel world (slipping from a 1950s setting to a 1930s setting).

We've been playing this campaign since January 2021, having picked up straight after Simon put Ravenloft on hiatus. That's 34 months and counting.

There's talk that this next session could be the end of this chapter of the campaign and then I would be given the opportunity to step back behind the gamesmaster's screen.

I'd talked a lot about running a superhero game in my Knight City setting, but I've lost my enthusiasm for that idea in the last couple of months.

Past experience has shown - when I've tried to run supers games for my group before - that it's a genre where we all have wildly conflicting ideas about what it should entail. 

Basically, it's never worked before, so why am I wasting time trying to convince myself it will work this time?

Fantasy - particularly old school Dungeons & Dragons style - seems to be our lingua franca but I really don't want to run such a game, unless it was a grounded, swords-and-sorcery affair rather than the ultra high fantasy of modern D&D. 

That's what I tried to cook up with my Frankengame, but I rather suspect that in my quest for a gritty verisimilitude of my own making I created an overcomplicated beast that's exactly the sort of game system I rail against. 

I'm also shit at creating fantasy worlds.

My current reading/to be read shelf