Looking Back

It's the obligatory navelgazing retrospective post reacting to gaming, blogging, and associated whatnot over the past 12 months!

I've seen much coolness whiz by on my laptop screen, and now I can watch it more easily on my new tablet. I'll touch on a few things that spoke to me this past year, because going into miniscule detail would take more than a year to both write and read.

Thanks to Jeremy Kostigew
for the logo design.

I Started Something
On 21 October 2011, I put my hat in the ring for an editing gig. I'd been toying with it for a while, but on that day I bit the bullet and did something about it. I ended up with my first gig for pay. In 2012 I put myself out there and found other projects, and I'm happy to say that I made about a mortgage payment and a half from editing RPG materials. Not near enough to live on, but enough to sustain my hobbies.

I couldn't have done that without the creators and publishers who gave me a shot and trusted me with their projects. Many thanks go out to Carl Bussler, Larry Moore, Wolfgang Baur, and Brian Liberge. For more about the projects I've worked on this year, head on over to my recently-revamped RPG Editing Curriculum Vitae.

Image found at Cape Cod Gaming Blog.

Community Is King
Google Plus has become my social media platform of choice. There's a vibrant gaming community with many diverse voices. I've met many great gamers and seen ideas go from thought to deed in a matter of minutes.

I feel like we're in the golden age of connectivity, where people can easily find tribemates for whatever oddity they can think of. Google Communities are great for this, though I'm still figuring out how to fit them into my consumption habits without becoming overwhelmed. Search for something and you'll find at least a dozen others interested in the same thing. It makes putting up flyers at game stores seem as archaic as a dial-up BBS.

The Gamer Assembly is still chugging along. We had a great panel at PAX East 2012, and we've got a couple of panel ideas submitted for PAX East 2013 so we'll see how that goes. We retired the Weekly Assembly collection of links, since it felt like it was taking too much time for too little return. It feels like we coasted a bit this year at times, but I think we'll get some group projects going in 2013. Thanks to the regulars (Adam, Brent, Brian, draco, e4mafia, hyperform, Paul, thedandmom, Tresi, and Zed) and everyone else who stopped in and contributed to the Gamer Assembly this year.

Make Way For Kickstarters
This year Kickstarting gaming projects just took off. I've contributed to a few projects this year, and it looks like next year will be even more busy. Gird thy wallet and open up a new budget line item, because Kickstarter projects tend to give piles of bonus material for cheap money, which is usually worth the woefully underestimated production and shipment times.

I'm purposefully keeping this vague, as getting me started will spawn an entirely new post.

Personal Projects
In looking back, I posted a goodly pile of things here at the Gaming Den of Iniquity.

• The Traveller Adventure Arc - After starting in September and getting sidetracked, I finished up the last half of the arc this past spring, everything from MediShield's Black Market on.
• Schrödinger's Gun GMing - I got a few more posts squared away this year (MacGyver Theory being the most popular, followed by Agile RPGs), but I'm hoping to complete the idea arc and compile all the posts into a useable system in 2013.
• Art Spotlight - I tried something on a lark to shine some light onto really cool artists out there. I may restart this series of articles as the mood strikes me.
• Blog Carnival Posts - Between May of the Dead and Classics Return I designed a couple of cool things in my spare time. Related: I haven't posted a Game Night Blog Carnival entry since March. Bad blogger. No donut.
• Gaming With Kids - Stay tuned for more game sessions and lessons learned in 2013.
• NaGaDeMon 2012 - Yes, I designed and prototyped a board game in November. The idea actually started with The Domain Game, but it morphed into its own animal in November. It's called Domo, and you can use it to fill in what's happening in the world behind and parallel to a role playing game.
• The Tao of Gaming - I got the first 9 chapters down on paper and released before Christmas. More forthcoming. Related: Anyone know an artist who does Chinese Brush Painting?
• Plus the usual array of theorizing, ranting, RPG archaeology, shameless plugs, and armchair quarterbacking you can expect from a personal gaming blog.

I hope to do even more in 2013. For more on that, stay tuned for a companion post called Looking Ahead.