Greetings and good wishes to you all for the coming new year!

I have put the blog on the back burner to simmer for awhile. I imagine many of us do this with projects they’ve started. It’s not for a lack of gaming that I’ve been silent, but on the contrary I’ve been gaming once a week on average.

My roll20 group, we call ourselves the Fatbeards, has been a wellspring of joy and relief from the soul sucking grind of real life. Actually, life is not that bad, but it gets stressful and escape into the world of table top gaming is a true respite.

With the new year, I find myself contemplating my direction in life and how to maximize my happiness and contentment. My son recently married a wonderful girl and we are so very happy he has found the love of his life. They are true soul mates and meant for each other. When I see them together, I know they are just right.

In the new year, all I can hope for is continued health and happiness for my family. As I’ve grown older, I’ve made a decision to limit my hobbies to music and roleplaying games. Both are going just fine. I have a life’s work ahead of me in gaming and am looking forward to more time playing and running games.

Recently, I’ve been working on a Frankenstein’s monster type of creation with rules. I’m calling it Fatbeards Style Rpg. I’ve discovered the Youtube channel DungeonCraft with Professor Dungeonmaster. If you get a chance, you will enjoy the videos he is making on DIY crafting of terrain and also rules that he uses at his table. So much of it really speaks to me. I like the usefulness and rules lite method he employs. There is something about rules lite gaming that I really enjoy.

My rules are a combination of Whitebox Dnd (Charlie Mason) mixed in with Index Card Rpg, Five Torches Deep, Pits and Perils (James and Robyn George), Helmets and Halberds (Alex Schroeder) and other houserules (such as luck points and rolling with advantage). My goal is to distill the rules down to just a few pages (including spells and monsters). I’d rather not even have to look at the rules when the game is on.

In addition to this, I’ve been running a Whitebox play by post on the Smoldering Wizard Forum. It is set in a new campaign world of my own creation called Thaerene. I’ll be working on this more in the new year.

The Perils on the Borderlands posting that I’ve done on this site had been on hold, but I will try to play and post more adventures of Arden and Company. This and the Roll20 sessions with my Fatbeard pals give me much to look forward to.

Here’s hoping all the best for each of you in the New Year!

John

As a sidenote, after publishing this post I learned that this is my 100th post. That is kind of a fitting way to end the year. Hope to have many more posts in the year’s to come.