And now for 2021...

Well, clearly I didn’t plan that out well.

The last few months of 2020 and the first few months of 2021 have been a rollercoaster and I sort of hate rollercoasters. Ditched the orange evil and now we have to deal with all this other bullshit, Delta variants of Covid, and everything else. Mostly a lot of people doing stupid or hateful things.

Personally, I’ve not gotten much done in the writing front, except for running a D&D game over Teams. We had been doing Shadowrun, but with last year being what it was, I just couldn’t stomach dystopia in my fun times too, so we changed over to a 5e game. I know, I know… I was foolishly against 5e for a long time and it was a stupid place for me to be in. After watching two seasons of Critical Role and the assorted 1-shots they’ve done, and playing in a 5e game myself prior to the pandemic, I shifted my regular game over to 5e.

Gosh, do I love it. So this is me, eating crow. Some of that, of course, is that I like my regular play-group, and I’m not sure I could have done strangers over the Internet and have the gaming experience be right. But we’ve managed, and next month we are hoping to have our first in-person gaming session in about a year and a half. It’s been fun running this game for a lot of reasons, and this has gotten me to thinking about converting over the Kazarim setting to 5e and what that would involve.

I’m running a home-brewed, but fairly traditional D&D setting for the Teams game, set amid a region with a sort of post-Holy Roman Empire aesthetic. Lots of petty states squabbling for power and two larger successor states to an ancient empire sort of in a Cold War. The game initially sprang from a teaching experience for the wife of one of my regulars, who had an acting background, but who had never played RPGs. So my initial world-building was minimal, a bit free-form, so that we wouldn’t be bogged down in something if she didn’t like it. She liked it well enough, but ultimately decided not to continue after about level 5. The rest of us continued on though, and I’ve actually put some skeleton underneath the on-the-fly decisions.

One of the foundational world-building decisions I made was to have no real consideration of all of the shitty things people normally associate with the “reality” of fantasy based on history. So no child marriages, no fucking patriarchal bullshit, no fear of people for them just being people. I’m sure I fail somewhat in this, because I grew up in a world where all that shit exists and it’s hard to break completely free of that influence, but I’m trying.