A Journal of the Plague Year

I am not dead. 

It was never my intention to abandon the blog for an entire year. Last September I took on some new responsibilities at work, and I thought, OK, maybe I won't be posting much of anything for a few months. Then in the new year I got more into miniature painting, which ate further into my free time, but I continued to tinker with half-written posts and to tell myself that I'd get something written up properly any day now. (The perfect, as ever, being the enemy of the good.) And then, in March, Covid hit and everything fell apart. The last six months have been a kind of ghastly blur. I still can't believe it's already September. 

One thing I have done is carried on gaming, because seeing friends over Roll20 once a week and rolling virtual dice together has been something of a lifeline in these troubled times. I've been running my current campaign for thirty-something sessions: it's called City of Spires, and it's basically an adapted version of ATWC suitable for players who've already read the blog. It's set in a ruinous city on the fantasy Silk Road, ruled by cruelty and injustice, and the PCs are peasant refugees turned aspiring revolutionaries. Over the course of about a hundred hours of play they've pieced together an alliance of the fallen, the marginal, and the desperate, and any session now they're planning to launch a coup and seize control of the city. It's been wonderful to watch, and I hope to write a bit about the campaign and what I've learned from it in the near-ish future. 

As things settle into some kind of 'new normal' I plan to resume this blog, by posting at least some of the things I meant to write and never did. More Condensation in Action. More Wicked City. More ramblings on art and art history. More photos of my terrible miniature painting. (It's better than it was.) I expect I will be doing so irregularly, and to a much reduced audience, both because this blog has lost so much momentum and because the broader OSR blogosphere appears to have suffered a massive die-off while I was away. But as long as someone out there gets some use out of the things I write, I'll be happy.

I hope everyone reading this (all three or four of you) has managed to stay safe during what I'm sure, for many of you, has been a very, very difficult year. More actual content should be coming soon!