525,600 Minutes of D&D Blogging

Dreams in the Lich House has been around for a year - first post was December 14th last year.   Table top role playing games are such an interesting hobby; the bloggers and players that visit here are well educated, and I appreciate that the discussions cross over into film, horror and fantasy literature, history, and mythology.  It wasn't hard to find interesting stuff to write about to keep a blog going for a year; I'm confident there will be plenty more to discuss in year two.

Thanks to all who've dropped by this corner of the internet from time to time to leave a comment or drop a vote on a poll; I've learned a ton from the blogging community and my games are better for it.  Thanks!

Year One Goals
Last year, I had laid out some goals - run a campaign for the year, run a bunch of Cthulhu one-shots, design the Black City, and read 12 books off my Appendix N list.

I did run a campaign for the entire year (Gothic Greyhawk) and that one is still going strong.  I bombed on working in some Cthulhu one-shots.  The Black City project is moving along again, and I should be ready for adventurers to enter it in a few weeks.  My reading project got derailed halfway through the year - I started L Sprague De Camp and then got buried by historical reading - 17th century research, Viking research, and the tech books - GIMP and Publisher to help prepare for publishing some day, Joomla to help build a church site, and some career-related enterprise data warehousing.

I did get 11 books out of the way off of Appendix N, so it wasn't a total loss:  Gormenghast, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword, The Worm Ouroboros, Return of the Sorceror, The Moon Pool, and books 1-5 of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series.  I'm currently reading Alexander Dumas with the oldest kiddo.

Looking Ahead to 2012
I'm going to keep "active campaigning" and "appendix N reading" as evergreen goals, and add two new ones for 2012.  First, I expect to get the Black City published.  I'm undecided if that means the whole thing in one book, or just the islands and first few dungeon levels to get the campaign launched.  I'll make revisions after some early play testing and decide in January.

The second goal is to include more blogging about Lovecraftian gaming - at least once a week I’d like to have something that's either a book review, game review, module or campaign review, monster discussion, literary review, rules discussion, or whatever, in the Lovecraft gaming space - mainly Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, but I like Dark Ages Cthulhu and Invictus just fine, as well as Delta Green.  The only cautionary note involves the gamer ADD; there's so much awesome stuff out there it might drive me into paroxysms of campaign indecision.  Hopefully I can sublimate such impulses into one-shots, or harness the ideas for use in the active games.

Okay, there's enough introspection.  Useful posts to resume shortly.