State of the Sorcery 2018

It's been a year of ups and downs. The impending closure of Google+ has people feeling bummed out, spreading folks across a wide range of substitute social platforms, each one denounced by at least some people (reddit is for neckbeards! MeWe is the fourth reich!). Meanwhile a few sadly inevitable culture-war struggles fractured our small scene even further. Noisms actually did what we all think about every day. It's a bummer to watch people gradually drop off the map until one's G+ feed is a chorus of shills and crickets. A sad but familiar feeling - this kind of thing happens to scenes.

To compensate for this, I added a big new stack of blogs to the reading list. In case anybody's under a rock, you can find a big nasty old list of gaming goodness right HERE.

As for Terrible Sorcery, it's been the best year by far since I started blathering about my D&D notions back in 2011. I put The Spoils of Annwn on the shelf for a while with a case of thematic confusion. I returned to Land's End with some pals again. Having a looser, less high-concept setting is easier for me to deal with. Since actually playing is the important part, anything that gets me PLAYING more often is a good thing! My players seem to really love the sandbox format and are excited to come to the table and roll - more than this, a DM couldn't ask for.

I feel the quality of my writing has improved a lot this year. Probably because I spent more time doing it! Obviously I've tremendous room for improvement. I still don't have the focus to really follow an idea through in detail to the end. There were a few articles this year that only skimmed across the surface of their subject, which I don't feel great about. My style needs to be clearer and more concise. Sitting down to blog while I'm irritated has also led to some sloppy work in the past, so I should try and relax a little bit. On the positive side I'm still full of ideas, both for my home game and things to blog about.

Links have started cropping up on the pages of D&D bloggers I like and follow, which is everything I hoped for when I started out. Somehow more people have been checking out Terrible Sorcery, and the numbers are tremendous (by comparison). I don't know if this is poor internet form, but take a look:





What the hell happened? Did I turn into a porn site? Start selling vape accessories? Pay some bots to drive traffic? Maybe my posts are actually getting better...

If anybody has an explanation, I'd love to know!

This is also the first year enough folks left comments to have a conversation. Pretty cool, so I hope that keeps up. Thanks to everyone who has followed along on this journey - whether you started in '11 or are just stumbling over the page now!


Most Popular This Year

Random Monster Generator Book Shootout! 1 and 2 - These were wildly popular compared to anything else. Unsurprising - every good-hearted DM loves monsters and random tables. I only wonder why nobody else has attempted a survey of these books before.

The Lunar Giant - My entry in the Henry Justice Ford monster manual project, which you can score right here (for the low price of fuck-all). I'm proud to be part of this one, thanks to Eric Nieudan for putting it all together. I hear a print-on-demand version is in the offing; watch this space!

REVIEW: The Gardens of Ynn - In retrospect a muddy and all too brief write-up, I hope at least my enthusiasm about the module was communicated. It's awesome, so give it a look.

The Tomb of Abysthor remix - The beginning of my reinterpretation of a great Necromancer/Frog God Games dungeoncrawl. Juking the stats so I can play it in Epic 6.

Nameless Cults VI - The return of a classic series, this one's about the cult of Tsathoggua.

The Three D&D Economies - This was an excerpt of a much larger series I found on a D&D wiki which I wanted people to hear about. Go look at the original stuff!


Looking Forward

Many possibilities and projects lie ahead in 2019:

The death of google+ - MeWe seems the default option. I suppose I could try it...

Land's End - Plenty of ideas and content here for future posts. Dungeons, new monsters, blurbs about the setting in general. It needs more juice, more imagination, more weirdness, and that's where I'm going with it next.

The Tomb of Abysthor - I have the next two installments in progress but they'll be posted up slowly. I want to playtest them before I get too far ahead, so it all depends on the direction my players take.

Nameless Cults - The King in Yellow, Thasaidon, prince of all turpitudes, and some of the freaky shit from the Book of the Damned are up next.

REVIEWS - I'm having fun with the few I've done so far. New stuff, old stuff, whatever I buy with my leftover Paypal change, maybe shit I get for Christmas?

Warhammer Fantasy - Reading ATWC's Bringing Down the Hammer turned me on to WFRP 1st edition. I found a cheap old copy on eBay for 40 bucks (or '40 wooden nickels' to non-Canadians). Follow me as I force my players to try it out and everyone gets disembowelled! My roommates have a few friends that want to try out roleplaying games, so let's get them started out with something ancient, unglamorous, weird, gritty and violent with black & white illustrations! The complete opposite of the video games they've all been raised on!

Trying to convince my players to switch from Mathfinder - The DM's job is a thankless one, but less so than the evangelist's! If I can't manage it, expect more posts about paring down the complex rules systems to make my life easier.

*****

Now play us out into the winter dark: