Year 2024 – My Plans, Predictions and Wishes

I Like to start each year with at least a few days dedicated to reflecting on my overall goals, the direction I want to move in, and the values I want to bring about in my life. This includes not only achievement-like, challenge overcoming but also – and each year even more importantly so – the life balance values. Creating stories for my games and running them at the table became a more and more meaningful way for me to exercise and avail myself of my creativity. Given that, I wanted to share what I set out for the coming Wheel of Time’s revolution and what I predict will happen regarding some of my favorite RPG titles.

Isn’t that a bit late?

Well, it’s not. Reflections like this take time to happen. They’re more than just sitting through an hour or two with the calendar and a notebook to write down when I go on vacation. And I really recommend you to make some time like this at least once a year. Make a couple of hour-or-so sessions to write down what you want your life and yourself to look like in a year or five. Then, give it some days to settle down and get back to it, and try to make some action items of that. Divide these actions into chunks that can be done on a monthly basis. And then, each month, get back to your values and respective to-do’s and plan out the coming month. This time, it took me a month and a half to make it – and I feel great with it completed at last.

So what’s the plan?

First, I see myself progressing towards the less is more approach. Gaming-wise, I tend to value quality over quantity or intensity of my games. That means that I want to dedicate more time to trying and honing new ideas before moving on to the next ones. Last month, I decided to kill one of my two ongoing campaigns. It was a tough decision, but I saw the game wasn’t going anywhere I wanted it to. Thus, I wanted to commit myself to something actually worth the effort. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll have another game replace that one in my fortnight alternating schedule. Still, I have some ideas that may depend on personal conditions, like moving out to another city and working out my new weekly calendar.

Meanwhile, I really want to tie up the almost-finished series here: The Forbidden Lands’ The Lush, the Wench & the Goblin, and The Ghosts of the Noman-lands run for Adventures in Middle-earth. These really got me a lot of positive feedback, and I don’t want them lying around without the proper endings. But I may have to speed up their timelines to make room for the new things.

The New Things

Both LWG and Ghosts campaigns are actually quite aged now. And I moved forward a lot while not maintaining my writing here. And I’m more than happy to share these new Game Mastering experiences with you. I want to focus less on the session reports, though I will keep recounting my games as the starting point for most of my texts. I’ll rather bring out my personal practices to have the games I want to run. System-wise, I want to write about:

• The One Ring RPG, my beloved setting and system with my cornerstone campaign, Sagas of the Northmen; also, I’ll add much of my homebrew rules I like to call “the 1.5 edition.”
• Call of Cthulhu – reflections from that one campaign that didn’t fly for long and another that I actually played through
• My homebrew content for Forbidden Lands – including some adventures following one already published; but also Sub-Roman Britain and my very own creative take on fantasy RPG with Mutant: Year Zero engine that’s still under testing (more on that last one below).
• Dungeons & Dragons 5e for an over 100-rooms, 5-floor Megadungeon

What am I waiting for?

You probably expect that heading to precede some motivational speech, right? But I actually have its literal meaning in mind. There are some things I’m waiting for to happen this year. What are they?

The One Ring – New Campaigns

To hint at my future TOR posts, I’ll tell that I was pretty disappointed with the new The One Ring RPG. Maybe I’m just an old man inside, but maybe there’s something more objective than the sentiment for the “good old times.” Find out soon! But I’m honestly keen to see the coming Moria, the Long Dark campaign. I hope it’ll be structured more like an actual campaign and not an open-ended list of Landmarks. Sandbox format doesn’t fit Middle-earth, in my opinion.

Also, I would be more than keen to see any announcements about the project abandoned after Cubicle7 lost its license for TOR, that is, the “Errands of the King” campaign. It was outlined around the story of the young Aragorn, adventuring in the Rohan, Gondor, and beyond under the name of Thorongil, the Eagle of the Star. This chapter of Middle-earth’s timeline really speaks to me and presents solid RPG material. I hope that the Free League shares that view, too – and that they’ll be able to work out the presumed legal restrictions to pick up where C7 stopped.

Forbidden Lands – maybe it’s time for a new incarnation?

To be honest, I wasn’t incredibly excited about the new supplements for the FoLa coming out for the last couple of years. I think that while the setting was brilliant, the original product had some downsides. It’s all my speculation here, but I suppose that the publication was a bit rushed. Thus, there were some minor inconsistencies, and also some gameplay elements didn’t quite click. What I mean is, for instance, the scale of the map was somewhat contradictory with the game’s fundamental assumptions. I mean, the game’s about exploration and survival, but a clever party can traverse the whole land in a matter of a week or so. So, there’s actually not that much room for being creative as a GM, especially in a long-term campaign. The following supplements seem to build on that somewhat unpolished groundwork, and I don’t think any further releases could fix that.

But I don’t want to beat one of my favorite games here. I think that maybe Forbidden Lands, as we know and love it, has run its course. It’s a great title, very intuitive, and immensely fun to play. I would like to see its creators take all the experiences their playerbase has and make something even greater than the original.

Guess what – I’m making that new Forbidden Lands!

Well, that came probably as surprisingly to me as it does to you now. I was sitting with my bucket list of campaigns and games I want to run. As I was thinking about the starting 2024 year, I started to figure out what I’d change in the original Forbidden Lands to run my long-awaited stories with it. And then – boom! – a lot of things connected, and I had this semi-materialized idea for a game system. The setting came with it, too! (Some of my longer-time readers may remember a newsletter about me trying to invent a setting for a fantasy open-world game – it’s that setting but fully developed.)

I thought: Why not actually make that game I want to play so much? And while Free League has that fantastic open license, I’ll be able to publish that game for all to play. Until now, I did some initial tests of the modified M: YZ mechanics. Now, I’m trying to work out a schedule for a long-term game. That could test some character development ideas I want to incorporate. So I will definitely write more about that – get back here in a few weeks. Or let me get back to you by the mailing list.

The rest?

In that list of the games I want to write about a few headings above, there were also Call of Cthulhu and D&D. But I don’t really look out for any releases for those titles. They are great games (well, at least CoC is), but they are at their best when played with homebrew stories. Call of Cthulhu doesn’t require any mechanical supplements. D&D, on the other hand, has its newest version coming out soon, but I’m pretty skeptical about its publisher’s policy and strategy. The tons of supplements that were published for it actually made it harder for me to run it as a GM. So, I’ll turn to the older editions if I want to run a tactically-focused game.