State of the Blog (2023 Retrospective & 2024 RPG Resolutions)

It's been a fun year here on weplayinasociety! 

In 2021, we started our Red Hand of Doom conversion; we outlined our goals, and converted chapter 1 (part A and part B) / Drellins Ferry. Unfortunately, as that campaign fell apart due to scheduling, we put it on hold.

In 2022, we started and completed our remix of Strength of Thousands Book 2! I think this was the only thing we did that year, but I'm really proud of it, and lots of folks seem to be getting good use out of it.

This year, we did a TON of different things!

• My Abomination Vaults Resources & Retrospective after running the whole AP for my partner in like, 3 months!
• Advice on Running Haunts in PF2 that many people have said was tremendously helpful.
• I outlined a goal of creating a Sandbox(ish) Pathfinder AP
• I remixed Stolen Fate Book 1 Chapter 1 - not my finest work, because I basically slapped it together after being underwhelmed running this chapter, but I think it's still an improvement on what's there!
• I re-started my original Red Hand of Doom project, posting some collected links from across the internet, and converting the Elsir War and Ruins of Rhest - I'm also probably just hours of work away from finishing chapter 3, might even finish it before new years!
• We posted some tentative house-ruled Remaster Cantrips (not for every group) and Expanded Spell Schools (still subject to GM fiat, but I think the expansion helps a lot)
• I first reviewed and then remixed Strength of Thousands Book 4 Chapter 1 (Mzali Influence), which included a more formal review of the Pathfinder 2e Influence (spoilers: it's fine, but it's not scenario design, and APs keep pretending it is)
• I designed a sandbox Mausritter scenario (a really cute OSR game), but hacked it to basically take it out of the OSR genre haha (by making PCs more survivable, and by making the PCs better at stuff to make it friendlier to new players - I have a lot of respect for OSR games, and have even published adventures for some of them that I won't link here, but most of the people I play with tend to rebel against the deadliness that drives a lot of the interesting decisions, and I don't think they're necessarily the most beginner friendly)

That's a lot of posts! Across all of those, my blog got over 8,000 views this year! That's pretty wild honestly, but I'm glad folks are finding my work legitimately useful, that is honestly the main reason I do this (other reasons include having a place to organize my projects, practicing my writing, and motivating myself to continue projects that I otherwise might drop). By far the most popular post is the Strength of Thousands Intro/Structure (along with several other posts in that series, to a lesser extent), which makes sense, but I'm glad my Abomination Vaults and Haunts posts were well read as well. I do want to be careful not to care too much about the views - ultimately, I'm doing this because it's useful to me, and hopefully to other people too, not for clout or attention.

I think one of the reasons my output was so much higher this year is that I'm (accidentally) playing a lot of RPGS! This time last year, I had my long term Strength of Thousands group, and had just started playing one on one with my partner, introducing her to rpgs. This felt like a good amount of time! Within a few months, I got pulled into a friend's campaign as a player, and then some friends at work made me run a new campaign for them, so at this point I feel like I am playing more than I'd necessarily like haha - it makes doing anything else pretty difficult. This is also the reason multiple project this year (Stolen Fate Investigation and Mzali Influence) were retroactive remixes, rather than proactive ones like SoT Book 2.

I therefore want to keep things reasonable and achievable, but I also want to push myself. With that in mind, here are my 2024 RPG Resolutions!

1. Finish my Red Hand of Doom conversion (I'm almost done with Chapter 3, which means I did 2 chapters in less than 3 months, and only have 2 more chapters!)
2. Finish my Necromancer Class (In the vein of the Kineticist, but with minions! It's almost done, just need a dozen or so feats)
3. Try to notice structural problems ahead of time with the APs I'm running, rather than being quite so reactive (I'll try to cut myself some slack here because I have a lot going on, but not too much)
4. Continue my Sandbox PF2 project (I'm in the process of outlining factions - the faster I can get past the background info the faster I can jump into the scenario design that drew me to this project to begin with)

If other things crop up, I will run with them rather than trying to constrain my very ADHD brain, but the above will be my priorities. Will I publish my OSR hack of PF2 (Shadowfinder) that I've been working on for over a year? Who knows! I'm excited to find out.

Here's to an even better 2024!

xoxo, societygirl