The End of Another Spiritual Year

Spirits of Eden started in late 2008 when, after being rejected for the RPG Blogger’s network for good reason, I decided to make a blog that was all about RPGs. While that has definitely slipped a bunch of times, everything on this blog is at least tangentially related to RPGs as I view them, and my inspirations for coming up with game stuff. It’s been a busy year for one guy just typing away at his blog whenever he feels like it, and I’d like to take a look back and see what I accomplished, and where to go.

The start of the year was pretty wearying, as I started to push myself to doing more posts, particularly posts that I didn’t have the heart for. It’s hard for me to get inspired to commentate on news or events, even though I enjoy doing so. It’s also hard for me to post about GMing and tips and such. I rarely really feel inspired to do so, but that’s a huge chunk of what other blogs do! So I tried getting into that action and it didn’t really work out all that well. I don’t think I really have anything unique or interesting to say about GMing, playing and whatnot. So I’m not gonna force myself to write about those things.

In August, I announced I was writing my own fantasy RPG, called “Copper Coins!” Fast forward a few months later and the first draft of the game is nearly done. I call it the “alpha” document because I seriously haven’t even been able to play this. You’ll probably play it before I do. It is, first and foremost, a fantasy game for me to feel happy playing and GMing. But it is my hope it also manages to entertain others, and that I can get feedback to put towards making it easier to understand and better for the not-Wyatts out there. I hope to release it late January if all goes well. It’ll have the same license as this blog.

I started a bunch of post series about Eden that I feel went very successfully, even though nothing I write for Eden ever gets any traffic. I wrote about Threats, I started to write about Equipment, and most importantly I wrote about Common Culture and the Races. The latter two are extremely important to me and I’m glad I got them out. I am very satisfied with them. If I ever run a game in Eden, I would suggest prospective players read the article on their race and then read some of the Common Culture stuff. It is a treasure trove of material to get you thinking in-character. I am very satisfied with what I’ve done Spirits of Eden-wise. I cleaned up the setting page using a table, so it is much more seemly. There were actually a couple days were I noticed the Setting page was the page with the most traffic. Before I cleaned it up, it consistently got an impressive zero pageviews. Now everything is better organized you don’t have to scroll as much to find something.

I think the best thing I did for Eden was to remove all D&D 4e stuff from it. I felt when I was designing Eden as a 4e setting, it was constraining me. Now I’ve done so much stuff for it that works for me setting-wise, and will work with Copper Coins! or GURPS or even storygames if you feel like it, even if not with D&D 4e. I honestly really don’t like Dragonborn or Tieflings, I wanted to include firearm-type weapons, and some other stuff I felt I wasn’t gonna be able to do and still call it a bonafide D&D 4e-compatible setting. Now I don’t have to and the sky’s the limit for what I can do with the setting.

Speaking of which, one of the major decisions I made was to step away from D&D 4e. I had been GMing D&D for a year and a bit before I quit. There are a lot of reasons why I quit and all of them, if you really wanted to, you can argue with me about. I would rather you don’t, but you definitely can. I quit in part because I felt that my monetary investment in the game was not paying off, and would not pay off unless I had a monthly subscription to DDI. I bought books to support the game, but those books would quickly require patching to work “correctly.” I did not want to go through the effort of keeping up with the mountain of errors that required correcting, and I wasn’t about to pay a monthly subscription for software I didn’t really like using, in order to do so. So I stopped buying. I stopped looking forward to release. I was off the crack and the excitement was going down.

I also quit because GMing D&D 4e became a bit of a chore for me. In fact it really mirrored what happened with D&D 3.5 for me. I didn’t really like the fact that you needed a string of attrition-based battles to really challenge anybody. Solos weren’t working right (though they got a fix later on). Battles took very long, even the weaksauce easy battles. Skill Challenges were impenetrable to me. I felt that, the way I ran 4e, I wasn’t really getting it, and I wasn’t having a lot of fun with it. Maybe if I’d taken more warmly to DDI, I’d have had less problems. I dunno. I still play the game when I can. The game is a real blast to play, but it’s been even just as hard for me to DM as D&D 3.5 was, and that’s part of why I left 3.5! Part of it was also that I did not like the direction the game was going in.

This was solidified for me when Essentials came out. When Essentials was announced, it reminded me of my last year with D&D 3.5. I was tired of it, but then The Book of Nine Swords came out. The mechanics were revolutionary, offering tons of great, useful options for melee characters, that were pretty easy to understand and use. It offered new and exciting ways to look at D&D 3.5 mechanics. It quickly became my favorite book and it made me excited about D&D 3.5 again. Essentials was practically the exact opposite of the what the Book of Nine Swords was for D&D 3.5. It was unfair of me to expect a beginner’s product for D&D 4e to revitalize the game for me. But really, I FELT like a beginner to D&D 4e, even after two years running it, so I thought I’d dig a streamlined version of it. But I felt it streamlined the parts that didn’t need streamlining, and a lot of it was boring. I still am fond of D&D 4e. But I can’t run it again. Even if someone were to fix all my problems with the game as a GM, the energy just isn’t there anymore.

However, leaving 4e got me to connect with a few other games as a GM. I got to try out Savage Worlds. I’m not really stoked on it, but I see its potential. It got me to try GURPS, and made me a pretty big GURPS-head. It got me to take a look back at D&D 3.5, which was ultimately helpful to me in writing Copper Coins! It got me to try out FATE. I still don’t care about FATE. But most of all, I think leaving D&D and looking for another “big franchise thing” (shallow as that is) was what led me to the insanity of Warhammer 40,000, which is the most glorious thing. The most glorious thing. It also got me to read some of the Old School folks’ stuff with an eye towards seeing what I can apply from there. I’m not gonna be running AD&D any time soon (which is to say I’ll never run it) but there is a concept there of what a dungeon is and how you run it, and how a dungeon crawl can be interesting and the focus on a whole game. Before, I’d dismissed dungeon crawls. Now I’m right there with the guys who’d like to see a megadungeon done right, and drafting out my own super secret megadungeon that’ll never be finished or used. I’d always read blogs like the Tao of D&D, but I felt now I wanted to really understand everything, and understand how it goes into a game, any game, D&D or not. That helped me a lot.

I feel pretty satisfied with my year on this blog. I’m not really one for setting expectations. I grew up in a pretty tumultous environment, so my long-term planning skills did not get much development. Whenever I plan something it’s usually for the short term and I’m used to things falling through. So, I don’t really have any resolutions or plans, just “hopes.” I hope I can finish Copper Coins! before the heat death of the universe. I hope to, perhaps, write some guest posts on other blogs. I’ve no bloody idea what I’ll write about, but I want to try. I hope to get more reviews done. Aside from donations, I don’t make money from this blog, and that will likely stay that way. It does not really cost me any money to run it, just 20bux for the domain name every year. I don’t really have anything to monetize anyway. Still, I’d like to try something there. These are humble hopes from a humble life.

Hope y’all had a great year too, and I hope you’ll keep reading the Spirits of Eden.