3 days left from the date of this addition. (08/09/2021)
Click the dancing bug if interested;
Ok now back to the post.
I spent so long putting this together I forgot to introduce and title it.
On Sunday it was ten years since I began blogging. I asked people what they wanted and they basically wanted everything, so here is a bit of everything, a journey through ten years, from 2011 to 2021, with highlights and a dab of commentary.
Dip in for a link if you like the look.
2011 - 2012 Birth
J.M.Szance
Teens! Reading! I ran games!
I think I ran more games for more people and more
different *kinds* of people in 2011 to 2013 than I have in all the years since.
In fact my first post, the
Vampire
Table.
The Teens games. The Apocalypse World group. I ran
storygames!
My first big post;
Monsters
of Incompetence and Atomic Bread pretty much set the tone for whatever this
blog is about
Oh god the teens, you can try
here for a
start
October 2012 - Veins
Fritz Schwimbeck
Here is
where I start writing Veins of the Earth
From October 2012 to march 2013 its largely veinsposting
In June 2013 we get the notable
Fuck
Information Design html and
'Art In
Games'.
2013 - Writing And Playing
Aki Akbar Sadeghi
Richard Corben
Black Glass,
a prose piece from march 2014 which ended up in Veins in altered form, got
popular on Reddit
I immediately poste
incomprehensible
darkness rules to get rid of the redditors. Just post poetry, its like bug
spray for a blog.
Did you know I did a
damn
TRAILER for Deep Carbon Observatory before it came out? I did this thing on
a fucking Toshiba laptop that was overheating, using only free download editing
software and publicly available video along with scraps music for the soundtrack.
Fuck old Patrick was HARDCORE, what a fucking chad.
AND BEHOLD I LIVE!
Deep
Carbon Observatory released! (A print copy would become available later).
In early 2014 you can see
this
rashamon-style play report- this was the high point and mid point of player
games with Zak and the G-plus crowd online
And in summer 2014 I finally finish reading Rebecca Wests
'Black Lamb, Grey Falcon' and do
this
pretty decent review.
Honestly for everything in 'Fire on the Velvet Horizon' I
think the Paladins of the Fall was probably the best, you can read
a
fragment of their entry here, I still don't know entirely where it came
from.
The end if 2014 and
the
conception of Broken Fire Regime! A long time ago!
2015 - Mainly Writing And Breakdowns
Harry Clarke
The breakdowns largely happen offscreen, this was a quiet
year for posting but I felt like I was doing a lot in the background.
Also this year at the mid point I got a temp job working
for Barclays, which I got fired from within a few months, BUT, this was the
last time I was deep in my overdraft on my main account.
Since university in 2001 I had never actually had 'money'
on my main account, just varying levels of overdraft - but since mid 2015 I
have actually had money, not much, and I still have my student debt looming
over me but better than nothing (literally in this case).
2015 also brought us....
Strange
Grains, a post Kenneth Hite liked
An
actual trailer for Fire on the Velvet Horizon. Chad Patrick strikes again,
I actually forgot I did that.
SLOW HEROES.
the first mention of snail knights. (Will they ever return?)
This
still brilliant interview with Dungeon Smash about FIRE. I follow this guy on
Instagram and he is still fighting fires! more than ever actually I think.
The
Greatest Image Known To Man
And
the River of Drowned Queens. Short but sweet. Think I did good on that one.
2016 - Flowers in the Frost
Victor Vastnetov
The year starts with this...
OPTIMISTIC
prediction of future releases.
The
Glass Dungeon Concept eventually became the maze of glass rooks in Silent
Titans.
Who
Will Stop the Worlds Most Evil Dog, written in a fume of time over about an
hour.
Maze
of the Blue Medusa came out. I was in something of a STATE at the time... I
was actually in the middle of braking up with my girlfriend at the time and
moving house, and having a meltdown at yet another call centre job, abut I did
(appropriately) find time to write about
Stephen Pynes
excellent book about Antarctica.
AND, strangely, in the same month, to write
this
pretty good post inspired by a book on neuroscience Arnold sent me.
Ha! Turns out I
was actually running a game;
the
Isles of the Imprisoned Moon. You can find a few play reports scattered
about and here is
a little
artifact of the last few years of G+.
After moving from Liverpool, my exploration of the Wirral
begins with me
travelling
about,
looking
through History books and
transliterating
Gawain because I was sad.
that takes us all the way to the end of 2016, capped be
reviews of Blood in the Chocolate and Broodmother Skyfortress
the autumnal hours of the culture are gathering, a year
of crisis begins....
2017 - CATACLYSM!!!
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkeiwitz
Despite it being a nightmare year I manage to start it
with a post I am still very proud of;
The
City of Infinite Ruin.
Where the fuck did the idea of wizards living in towers
come from?
this
meeting of great minds from G+ is the last of these collections and
attempts to answer just that question.
My attempt to
'Map the OSR'
caused me a fair amount of trouble. I called it a 'living document' but never
went back to it.
Robespierre loves Tarts, did you know? Discover more
here.
I talk about the
fucking
ennies. I would end up going to these awards to watch 7th Sea win
everything #stillbitter
September 2017! I have a total meltdown, cut my ties with
Zak, tell all of you to go fuck yourself and spend five months going through the Farie Queene,
resulting
in this actually pretty good review in 2018!
2018 - By the Fingernails
Agnes Miller-Parker
I literally have nothing else to do so try to continue
writing and making things. ITS THAT OR THE CALL CENTRE.
The
Great Crystal Debate haS since been lost I think - Kiel took it down, but
in it I take arms against the krystaphiles in our culture.
May 2018 and we have another drama, the details lost in
the fall of the G+
June 2018 -
Nightmares
in Syr Darya. I think this is the last game I actually *ran*. man it was a
while ago.
A
pretty decent review of Amber Diceless, a seminal but annoying text.
Just before the end of the year I bring forth the cursed
word;
ARTPUNK.
(I'm still sure I am not the first to use this, others are to blame!)
And then the Silent Titans kickstarter begins...
The Patrick of 2013-2016 is basically dead or near-dead
at this point. Will anything survive or grow in his place?
2019 - Birth of False Machine Publishing
Peter Klucik
Its 2020 and the long brewing remaster of DCO is in the
works. At the same time at the urging of Ram I read the Mahabharata and decide
that
I am not a fan (of its moral message, assuming I even understood it).
I begin to wind up work for Eldritch Foundry .
This
fragment is an important one, and we get maybe the last of the big
community posts? in which we
all
think about dungeon design by making the worst dungeon ever. This got Zedeck
to repeat the phrase ‘camouflaged rape engines’ on twitter, something for which
I will ever be proud.
This post,
gets big traction on…. twitter (pre first cancellation, I will be dead to these
people by the end of the year), and becomes part of a series in which I think
about creating a form of D&D for families and children. Think you may still
be able to find a version of the design doc on my blog.
Did you know the Streetfighter RPG was actually really
well made? Well you do now, find out more
here.
In July the first post mentioning 'Queen Mab' is
here. I
start weebing
here,
and get cancelled by twitter about the same time.
I ride out the year making monsters
2021 - That's This Year!
Peter Jones
Hell yeah. I've been here since 2015, and while your content has definitely shifted, I've been enjoying it all 6 years.
ReplyDeleteThe heavens part, celestial trumpets and showers of laughing gold, animals of both fang and cud unite in celebrous dance, even the rock, from sky spite-ing mountain to humble road stone , bring joyous undulating song to you Patrick and your throne of thought
ReplyDeleteI remember the Greatest Image Known to Man, but I missed the interview with Dungeon Smash. Great interview; his descriptions of fire are so lucid. Harrowing stuff. I have family in Colorado and Wyoming so reading the interview really made me grateful for the guys who fight fires out west.
ReplyDeleteThe Paladins of the Fall was another post I missed. Beautiful and poetic, and more than that it’s the kind of work that I think inspires others. Or inspires me, at least. I will have to pick up Fire on the Velvet Horizon – it’s one of the few pieces you’ve done that I do not have.
And then - Ye Ugly Face Clubb – another one I’d missed. At one point I did a table purely for NPC quirks, stuff like “picks nose, “looks perpetually surprised,” “Flowing, beautiful hair that they constantly stroke,” and “talks like they have to pass gas and are trying very hard not to.” The idea was to try to add a little bit of character to the random NPCs I hadn’t pre-generated. If the players stopped some random dude on the street to ask questions, or interacted with an innkeeper or a guard, or whatever, I had a way to differentiate them and make them at least a LITTLE more memorable quickly with one to three rolls on this table. Ye Ugly Face Clubb reminded me a bit of that, and also made me wonder – is there more of this stuff somewhere? I’d love to see it if there is!
Anyway, wonderful stuff. I didn’t find this blog until 2016 or so, but it’s one of my regular stops at this point. I’ve come to enjoy it immensely and am very grateful to you for doing it. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas with us – and for such a length of time and so consistently.
Well I've put 'Black Lamb & Grey Falcon' on the reading list, it sounds great. I got inklings of 'The Peregrine' from your review - am I off base there?
ReplyDeleteThere's tons of great stuff in your blog, Patrick, many thanks for all of it. Let my highlight the Rumble City posts as particular favourites.
ReplyDeleteAwesome!!! I never read your blog before 2018 so the highlights reel is great!
ReplyDeleteRe: Amber, I played the game very briefly in college. It is fascinatingly simple. I don’t feel it has much in common with modern storygames tho, because of both the heavy PvP “outwit the other players” focus, and the total lack of out-of-character meta narrative tools.
Missing the critically underrated To Steal a Sun (http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2020/12/to-steal-sun-full-adventure.html).
ReplyDeleteDoes this archivist even know his P. Stuart?
Really really enjoying working my way through this spelunk. I want more teens content! Today I was channelling the energy of the teens through the Jumblies, who at some point will be found rolling in the streets of Abermawr singing Call Me Maybe.
ReplyDeleteBTW the link to Fuck Information Design is broken.