Milestone

What did I enjoy in 2024?

Welcome one and all. It's time once again. The end-of-year Round Up. 2024 has been an exciting one for me: it's the first where I've properly lived as an Adult with a Job to Work and Rent to Pay. It's been pleasant! Cambridge is a lovely city, especially the Mill Road area. I spent the first half of the year building up some savings before living it up and enjoying myself more: RPG books, clothes, furniture, music, and - most importantly - eating nice food in the company of friends. I've unfortunately become quite fond of weissbeer, which I have spent many hours drinking in the company of other inveterate Belgian beer addicts.

I've spent a lot of time making an effort to better myself. This included two separate role changes at work (I now make maps!), learning a lot of different art mediums (I've picked up lino-printing properly again, as well as experimenting with watercolours and miniature painting), and pushing myself to do things and go out places more. I've seen some good bands this year (Ryley Walker in September was great) and made some good new friends. One of my main focuses was writing and publishing a tabletop roleplaying-game product at least once a month. I smashed this goal, putting out a lot of work I'm proud of while also meeting new people and developing my taste significantly. Thanks go out to Luke Gearing's Thinking Adventures community especially. If you want a taster, try the one-page adventure I wrote for the Jennell Jaquays memorial jam. A big step came after watching a travelling show called Three Acres and a Cow in April, which inspired me to begin working on a series of RPG books based around The West Midlands. It all really came together after that.

I've also lived as a vegetarian for a year now! I've perfected my katsu curry with the help of Mill Road's bountiful Asian supermarkets and looking forward to doing the same with a few Indian curries in the coming year. If anyone has any suggestions for recipes like that, just let me know. I've also begun hosting larger dinners, culminating in a well-executed Early Christmas Day feast a few weeks ago. I'd like to think I'm a well respected cook and host amongst my friends at this point.

So, what's next? Well, I'm taking a much needed break from intensive RPG writing. I'd like to actually run some of the books I've written. I also want to get more into miniature wargaming with my friend Deryn, especially Mordheim (unit-based battles) and Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader (the original edition, without any of the lame lore and stuff). I'll feel a lot more comfortable once I've developed a strong style with that. I'd also like to pick up cycling again! Depending on how I manage going up and down the Cam to neighbouring villages, I'll see if I can do some kind of cycling holiday in Europe. If I can manage to get decent times running, I might even be able to do triathlons (I can reliably swim a 30 minute mile, which is more than enough for that segment). Not making any promises though.

Anyway, enough of my own year. Time for a look at the media that's really caught my interest. I'll start as usual with video games (even though I don't play them half as much anymore!) and then go through RPGs, books, internet media, TV, films, and end with music. I'll stick where I can to tweet length. Alright - onto the games:

I also did a lot of gaming away from the computer. This was the first year where I played a lot of board games. The most frequent was probably ROOT, which is an incredibly frustrating and unbalanced game (the cats suck and all the expansion factions are just better versions of the base ones). The best was probably the simple card game Sushi-Go, which I played for the first time in a cafe in Birmingham! That's a hilarious little game.

On Sundays I've continued to play in my housemate Hattie's Wolves Upon The Coast RPG campaign (sixth century vikings in Europe). Much of this year was taken up by someone's ridiculous boast to kill the Archdruid of Ruislip (Ireland) which sparked a religious crusade that almost destroyed the whole island. My character, Cathal, ended up killing his whole family (for largely unrelated reasons) and then turn-coated to the side of the Christians (despite the fact that a few seconds earlier he had just assassinated the Christian king-to-be during some battlefield chaos). After the battle at the Druid's circle, we were all at a loss for what to do besides flee to Albann (England) and swapped to Hattie's own game for a break: EIGENLICHT, a retrofuturist sci-fi game inspired by the Weimar Republic and Jewish mysticism. Characters are randomly determined: we ended up with a cybernetic fascist policewoman, a blood-drinking noble scion covered in Mensur scars, and me, a techno-dybbuk that possesses androids to cause chaos. I'm very proud of Katarina: I'm playing her as an extremely annoying liberal who constantly virtue signals about android rights. In the new year we'll be trying out some Warhammer Fantasy RPG - my rolled character for that is a fat paranoid smuggler called Gerald van der Reever.

On Wednesdays though, I've been playing in my housemate Lys' home-made system Soldiers of Fortune. It's a fun system where you build your character by rolling the different events that have happened to them over their life (where were they from, what did their parents do, did they migrate, and a bunch of other random events). We've had two seperate 'campaigns' so far. Both were intended to be playtests, but they've both spiralled out of control into operatic levels of drama, betrayal, and player-on-player slaughter. They've been so much fun. In the first one I played a bloodthirsty racist who, as a teenager, began collaborating with an invading nation to put down peasant rebellions. She was obscenely wealthy from her treachery yet wasn't actually good at fighting (most of her experience was of killing serfs). She attempted to start a mutiny against the "Vaalish sodomites" but was locked in the hold for most of the campaign when she failed horrifically. My second character has been a barber-surgeon who follows ridiculous self-imposed rules 'as to not provoke the spirits'. This has included insisting for numerological reasons that another person should be left to drown when a river-crossing went horribly wrong. Both great characters. Excited to carry on with that. We're currently assisting a bunch of essentially Mormons in an archeological dig that they believe will prove their religion has been worshipped for milennia. We hate them: we're going to kidnap and ransom their nobility SO hard.

While writing my own RPGs, I read an awful lot for inspiration. I'd like to give a quick shoutout to Castle Grief, whose RPG zines and mini settings were extremely helpful for thinking about how to make a playable setting. Luke Gearing's stuff has also obviously been great to read. Sag River Extreme Cold Research Facility, Alaska was a joy to run for a group (it gets very eerie if the chimpanzees ambush you early on!). His Monsters & and &&&&&&&&& Treasure books were also brilliant (and so cheap - I'd recommend them to anyone interested in taking RPGs further). I've printed and bound up He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More by Tom Mecredy, where you play as American paratroopers over 24 hours as they drop into Normandy behind Utah beach on D-Day (and get scored on completing different objectives). It seems like a cool little rogue-like experience due to the random elements and the scoring system. There's an incredibly sobering rule for generating your paratrooper's age (1d8+16). The best RPG I've read this year though is none other that AGAINST THE APOCALYPSE by Oleander Garden. It's a satire of PbtA systems that pretends to be a rules-light story-game but is essentially Free-Kriegspiel with extensive guidance on calculating bullet velocity for different firearms. I'd love to run it at some point.

One issue with the amount of RPG reading and writing I did this year is that I haven't had much time for actual books. I read the delightful The English Year by Steve Roud for research, which detailed extensively the traditional abuse of cocks around Easter (they hurled horseshoes and played pinata with them!). There was also Vermis, the fake RPG walkthrough book, which was nice to read with some fun ideas, though I'm cautious of the slew of imitators that has sprung up (I don't think there's that much you can do with the format).

As for proper books, there were only two. There was What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murukami, which was a pleasantly short meditation on discipline and hobbies in general (high recommendation), and there was Ways of Seeing by John Berger. Wow! A perfect example of a specific kind of post-war-consensus public intellectualism: a talented and clear spoken gay didact talking you through these academic concepts with obvious charm and a sense of modernist duty to the people, who he hopes to educate and uplift. Also, the form of the book itself! The tiny bold text and thin margins. The small paragraph breaks and 'in-text' illustrations. The 'pictoral' chapters! Neither the image or commentary is privileged - it's all just one conversation, as if Berger is talking you through these diagrams in person. Their "principal aim" - coming from a beautiful place of love and trust and social-democratic pride - is merely to "start a process of questioning". Required reading.

What about writing online? I've read an awful lot of blog and journal articles this year. Most of them were about RPGs (I'll spare you most of these). But there were some other fun ones!

Beyond the written word, there's also a couple of Youtube videos that caught my attention this year.

Bridging the gap between internet things and TV, I'll take a moment to talk about some stage shows. First, Three Acres and a Cow. This was a strange travelling show telling an alternate 'peasant' history of England through stories and folk songs, aiming to educate the masses on topics of nationalism and colonialism and historic class struggle. It was really good! It covers quite a lot - from the Norman occupation through to the present day. It goes over a lot of important events that should be known about more (Peasants' Revolt, the Diggers, Parliamentary Enclosures, the Peterloo Massacre, etc). It avoids being parochial or agrarian or pre-lapsarian, and it does a good job drawing the history into present struggles. They've actually released the script online so other people can give shows like this, but I really recommend seeing it for yourself if it comes to town. And just quickly, I'll say that I saw another great production this year: a panto production of Cinderella put on by a bunch of student barristers. Hilarious and very saucy (discussing the working pattern of two builders: "Peter works during the morning, and Jack's off in the afternoon"). Absolutely bravo to Tom, who wrote and directed it, and to all the cast (especially the drag Ugly Stepsister).

Ok. On to television. I still haven't finished Better Call Saul (maybe eventually). I did watch some other things though, including several new absolute favourites:

On to the other moving picture category. Early on in this year I finally got a Letterboxd, which encouraged me to start watching and reviewing a ton of films. It's a little bit of a shame, because I usually like to save my thoughts for these round-ups, but it should be ok. Part of my method with these blog posts is to think about what stuck with me and my hindsight-shaded opinions on them, whereas with Letterboxd I do the reviews instantly without looking up anything about them ("the film is the talking"). Anyway, let's go:

I never number these round-up lists because I find it impossible to rank them. I'd recommend all of those films to just about everyone I know, especially Stress Positions, Violent Nature, Seance, and Lake Mungo. Really fun films that are all pretty short. I watched Seance using a Youtube rip for goodness sake! Try 'em out!

And now, as we round the corner into the final stretch, it's time for music. I listened to a ton of music this year, old and new. Virtually all the time at work I've be listening to something. I've especially enjoyed listening to stuff while writing in the living room on my laptop. Having a big sound-system is nice. Some of my favourite nights have been inviting people over for a meal and sitting around in my nice candle-lit living room listening to an album or playlist. Here's a list of twelve recommendations for this year:

Well. Just as the year is drawing to a close, so is this blog post. I capped off my round-up for 2023 by suggesting that this year will be "a turning point for me, many of my peers, and the country in general". Well, in retrospect, this was true for me, true for my friends, but certainly not true across wider society. Despite the spate of elections we've had, I detect no sudden upwards (or even downwards) inflection in the trajectory of progress: I think it's probably going to keep on getting slowly different (if not worse). That's not for me to worry about though. I'm going to continue to do my best to enrich the lives of those around me, and to keep an eye out for those small victories (like the incoming bus gate on Mill Road, active from the 2nd of January - suck it up motorists).

I sincerely hope everyone has a lovely Christmas and a fantastic 2025. See you all in the new year. Yours Truly.