Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 116, January 2020 by John Joseph Adams

Science Fiction

The Men Who Change the World (Christopher East) - this story gives me serious “Severance” vibes, but it was written before that show came out. I think there was something in the air they were both tapping into.

All Together, Now (Jason Hough and Ramez Naam) - even though we know where the story is headed, it still managed to surprise me in the final paragraph. Because humanity doesn’t change, this remains so relevant today as so many civilians die to try and kill a small enemy

Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are:

Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.

Trends

Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.

At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).

Once again grouping a bunch of book reviews into one blog post. Here we go!

An Artificial Night by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.

This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

It’s the last 2 days of the calendar plus some images of all the sets together and some final thoughts on the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

When DMing for my kids I used to always pick one of my dice sets for my DM rolls. Sometimes when we would play on dndbeyond we would take advantage of the ability to roll any amount of any dice. (or the fact that it would automatically roll extra dice if needed for an attack or spell) Then I read the 2024 version of the Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master Guide…