And another year draws to a close. I’ve lost track of what actually happened this year versus the previous year, so this seems like a good opportunity to go back and sort it all out.

What I Ran: My Oracle of War campaign started in 2020 when the local game store Vault of Midnight took their fledgling Adventurers League program online. It took us three years, but we played through all twenty five adventures, finishing in early 2023, and had a blast. I deeply appreciate having gotten to connect with new friends and escape to Eberron on Monday afternoons while the world went haywire.

My Sunday home game carried on strong. We started in Ptolus, delved the Scarlet Citadel at the request of a sewer cat, caught a boat to Hot Springs Island, and ended the year on a banger of a cliff hanger.

What I Wrote: I started the year off writing a Tier 3 Adventurers League adventure for GameholeCon 2023, Rule or Ruin. Set in their dedicated area of the Forgotten Realms, the Border Kingdoms, it’s a sequel of sorts to the Tier 4 Adventure I wrote for them in 2022, A Grim And Ravenous Arrival.

Speaking of, that one was published in April 2023. A Grim and Ravenous Arrival opens with a nod to the moat house from the Village of Hommlet and its frogs, proceeds with a point crawl exploration of the ruins of Castle Torn, and concludes by answering the question, “where do you hide a magical device from Tier 4 characters?”

There are a few demons and devils that the party might encounter in the course of that adventure, and Rule or Ruin answers the question, “What would they do if they got stranded on the material plane?” I’m really happy with the results and can’t wait for it to be published. The writing process led by the GameholeCon AL team was great, with lots of time for writing, editing, playtesting, and rewrites. I’m grateful to have been a part of it.

I took a return trip to Moonshaes at the end of 2022 to write The Lost Song for the current Moonshaes AL campaign. I aspired to write a tribute to my favorite AL adventure of all time, Moon 11-2 A Darkened Court by Justin Vandermeer. I ran that a couple times at Winter Fantasy 2020, shortly before the world shut down because of the pandemic. It was a challenging module but an absolute blast. The players have to ingratiate themselves to the nasty characters who make up the Slain’s wicked court with no clear solutions to help them along. It’s absolutely fantastic. I don’t know that I did it justice with my adventure, but I tried to capture a little of that den of iniquity and intrigue.

2023 was the year of Dungeon 23, Sean McCoy’s challenge to design a megadungeon by sketching out one room per day. I contributed to Kobold Press’s effort with some other great folks. I also wrote a series for the Kobold Press blog on adventure modularity, specifically, stripping the Scarlet Citadel for parts for your home game. True to my word, I ran a chopped up version of the Scarlet Citadel in my Sunday morning home game, placing it in the dungeon beneath Ptolus.

My adventure Dead and Buried saw print in Tales from the Wastes. I had a monster I designed appear in Tome of Beasts 3 (the inciter, sung like Exciter) and a few in Wastes of Chaos (including that lizard on the cover), but it was particularly exciting having one of my adventures properly in print for the first time. It’s a delve into a lost temple and is bound to devolve into my usual brand of chaos.

Conventions: I worked quite a few this year: Emerald City Comic Con, PAX East, Origins, GenCon, PAX West, and PAX Unplugged. I didn’t make it to Winter Fantasy, and Adepticon and GaryCon are the same weekend as PAX East, so the only one I attended strictly for fun was GameholeCon. I played my first games of Lords of Waterdeep and Vaesen, got a refresher on Betrayal at House on the Hill, ran a few sessions of Andrew Bishkinskyi’s Tier 4 Border Kingdoms adventure, and got to run a rollicking table of this year’s Border Kingdoms epic. Oh! And I got to play in Stefan Pokorny’s AD&D game again. My dwarf cut the head off Donald Drumpf’s corpse and booted it off the battlements of the prison tower, crying, “For Valoria!” Of course, I rolled badly and it bounced off a market stall. Good times!

What I Bought: What are you, the police? Let’s just say I’m justifiably concerned with two Dwarven Forge campaigns due to land on my porch in 2024. Lift with your legs, not with your back!

Next Wednesday: Looking ahead at 2024.