#176: 2023 Retrospective

Dec 24, 2023

I. Dear Reader

Let’s take a look back at 2023! As far as my work goes:

I sent out 51 newsletters, with 44 of them having some kind of original writing and 7 just being the links. This means I never missed a week!
- I also started the round-ups of new games on itch.io, which was initially monthly and now comes out every two months.
In my first year as host of the Yes Indie’d podcast, I did 14 interviews.
- I also released 2 episodes of the Teaching Games series, featuring Apocalypse Keys and Girl by Moonlight.
I released a game, This Ship Is No Mother, first in a series of games that explores all the cool stuff you can do using a standard deck of playing cards in an RPG.
Last week, I released Fantasy Cities Vol 1, the first collection of essays about fantasy RPG cities. Maybe we can call it the Little PDF Series.
I co-authored an academic paper about three games from Southeast Asia that is basically done but will come out in a year or so. I know that’s a long time but I’ve come to understand that this is just how academia works!

Overall, that’s a lot of stuff and I’m generally happy with all of it. I wanted to do 24 interviews (i.e. once every two weeks) but these turned out harder to schedule and organize that I thought. I’m really happy with the start of the Teaching Games series even as I struggled with the technical side of things a lot. But it’ll only get better, I feel.

Also, we celebrated three years of the newsletter and Issue #150. The most popular issue (based on likes) was the one about “Books on RPGs” and after that, “What is XP for?” and the analysis of Drivethru’s best-selling games.

My best bit of RPG theory was probably this one called the “Axes of Game Design” where I try to improve a framework to analyze games created by Ken Hite and Robin Laws.

Gaming-wise, I had a fantastic year. I played a little more than 100 sessions. I didn’t keep a very precise count so it’s a bit fuzzy. The game I played the most was Blades in the Dark, two separate series with my regular group. The games I played for the first include: multiple sessions of Apocalypse World 2e, Pasion de la Pasiones, Swords for the Serpentine, DIE, Bite Marks, Nahual, The Veil, and Capitalites. And one shots of This Discord Has Ghosts In It, The Ground Itself, The Giaccone's Rat, Torq, and Follow Me Down. Almost all of these games were made by one person or small teams. It’s amazing they exist. Actually, I realize now that I haven’t written about a lot of these games and should remedy that!

So yes, a busy year! Thanks for reading!

Take me to Patreon!

Last week, we hit 71% of our patreon goal, which is fantastic. If you can add to that, please do. But if you can’t, that’s totally fine. We’ll get there eventually — and I will stop going on about it very soon!

Another way that you can help me make the newsletter - for free! - is to fill out my end-of-year survey! It’ll take less than 5 minutes and is again just to help me figure out who is reading the newsletter and what to do to make it the best it can be! I know they’re kind of dull but if you can, that would be helpful because I don’t really know a lot about who you are and why you’re reading this!

Take me to the survey!

And of course, have a merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Yours retroprospectively,

Thomas

PS. Substack recently announced that they refuse to deplatform any nazis on their platform. This sucks and I'm currently trying to figure out if it's feasible for me leave. No other place will let me send emails for free so I think I'm stuck here till I figure it out. Thank you for your patience.

II. Media of the Week

RPG historian, Shannon Applecline, goes back to the Dieku Games podcast for another year-end review. They talk about the OGL and other fiascos from WOTC as well as other more pleasant events across the year.
Dice Exploder did a year end bonanza episode where the host and game designers Aaron King, Sharang Biswas, and Lady Tabletop shared their favourite games and other highlights for the year. (I call in and give my 2 cents as well.)
Dice Exploder

2023 Year End Bonanza
Hello and welcome to the Dice Exploder 2023 year end bonanza! I love me a good ranked list of movies on an end of year movie podcast, but ranked lists are bad and this show’s about RPGs not movies, so you get this instead. It’s me, Aaron King of the RTFM podcast, Lady Tabletop of the Alone at the Table podcast, and Sharang Biswas of winning tons of Ennie…

Listen now
2 years ago · 2 likes · Sam Dunnewold

III. Links of the Week

On the Dreaming Dragonslayer blog, a case for “matrix games”: “Start with a problem. Say what happens next. There is no order of play. Anyone can add to what happens. Any player may challenge what another player says and tell them to roll 2d6. On a 7+, what was said happens and cannot be altered. On a 6-, it does not happen and cannot happen. The host may veto what another player says, but this must be done before dice are rolled. The game ends when the problem is resolved.”
Vincent Baker with another great post in his series breaking down the PbtA philosophy. This is one about three different models of PbtA games - one is Apocalypse World, another is Under Hollow Hills, etc.
On the rpg.net forums, there’s a massive overview of every TSR-era Dungeon magazine modules by level and theme from 2017. Worth bookmarking if you like the idea of exploring old adventures that you can still find in places like archive.org.
A nice post about how to design a good pointcrawl
Split//Party have a glowing review of Lancer: Battlegroup (which is a surprise - at least to me). Seems to be a skirmish-type game and not a RPG though!

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

Coming soon to Kickstarter- The Magical Land of Yeld 2nd Edition! Starting January 2024- check out our pre-launch page here!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

Two Numenera bundles with adventures, one shots, bestiaries and more. First one and second one.
Also, Kobold Press’ series of guides: gamemastering, designing boardgames, worldbuilding, etc.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!