2018 is on the horizon and it's going to be a busy year...

So as ever I've not posted here for some time.

Why now?  Well this remains my primary "brain dump" source for what's going through my head hobby wise.  I do brain dumps less and less these days because I have a number of other channels in which to do that but if I want to rattle off a few things then I'll likely come back here.

2017 has been an interesting year for me and my hobby.

End The Turn ended.
Largely down to availability, surprisingly not my availability but Liz's.  Will we revisit a podcast in the future? Unlikely but only because of other stuff that's going on that is eating up time.
It was an interesting and enjoyable experience doing the podcast and whilst I have no desire to start another one I'm not ruling it out.

RPGLiveUK happened.
I ran a RPG at it and that seemed to go down really well.  The weekend as a whole was great fun and I came away from it with the desire to run more RPGs but also accepting that right now that isn't going to happen for all the reasons I've listed previously in this blog.  I'm not giving up but if I do run something I can see it being one-shots and I'd definitely re-run Brave New World again if the notion took me.

Roll Against Cancer faded.
Largely down to venue challenges, i.e. not finding one but more on that to come...

Convention Calendar on Google Sheets became a "go to" thing.
People on Facebook and Twitter started to contact me about it and were actually USING IT to plan their convention travels and perhaps more importantly convention organisers started to contact me about getting their 2018 dates on it.
If you've not seen it before I've tweaked the Bit.ly link to be - http://bit.ly/UKRPG_BGCons - if only because it's not just a 2017 list now...

Objectives & Principles largely remained on track...
If you ignore the lack of RPGing and End The Turn ending that is.

What does 2018 look like then?

Well 1st of all this is happening...

After 4ish years searching for a suitable venue, one appears from left field and I have to say it's damn near perfect.  So on the 1st and 2nd of September 2018 you should come to the Dewars Centre in Perth to attend Tabletop Scotland.
I've written a fair amount on this blog on what a convention should and shouldn't be.  34 posts (excluding this one) are tagged with convention.  I'm sure some of that will come back to haunt me but that's absolutely fine.  If my team and I fail to hit the heights of what I expect then I assure you the first people who'll be pointing that out will be us.

Alongside that I will be going to GenCon again. Whilst I won't be posting with quite the same voracity as I was ahead of that first trip, I hope to post some stuff in the run up to this trip.

Since announcing Tabletop Scotland I've visited a lot of game stores that I haven't been to before.  That will continue with some repeat visits no doubt for those I've recently visited.

I'm hoping to be at UK Games Expo, potentially going to AireCon and more than likely will be at Conpulsion at least for the Saturday to promote Tabletop Scotland.

I'll obviously continue pushing East Neuk Tabletop Games forward and go to DWARF for regular gaming.

Beyond that I've no idea.  All of my spare time and energy is going into making sure that this convention is all that it can be.

So yeah.  2018 is going to be a very busy year.

#RPGLiveUK A RPG mini-con in Nottingham

So I probably should have posted about this a long time ago but other things took priority.

This Saturday (14th October) I am running a RPG at #RPGLiveUK which is a RPG mini-con being held in The Dice Cup in Nottingham.

There are 4 games currently on offer and tickets are on sale here - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rpgliveuk-tickets-36042083843?ref=estw

Games are -
1) Shotguns and Sorcery (Cypher System)
2) Gamma World 4th Edition
3) Starfinder
and
4) Brave New World which is the game I'm running.

Long time readers of this blog will remember me talking about Brave New World before and may recall a post I did on Super Hero RPGs in general.

In short I decided to run BNW because it's been sitting on my shelf for more years than it should without being played.

I find the mechanics (particularly around how damage works) a bit clunky so I've refined those for this one-shot. I might revert in due course but for this one-shot I wanted to make some changes to how it works.

So yeah, I'm running an RPG at a mini-con this Saturday.  Who knows what will happen, certainly not me!

Attending More Events (2017)

So I think I've been saying this for years and it was about time I actually did something about it...

But to know which events I should attend I need to know which events exist so that I can attend them, right?  Otherwise it's a bit of flat objective isn't it...

So I've built this - http://bit.ly/BrdnRPGUK17 - No it's not some malware, it's a Google Sheet with a list of every single Board/Card and RPG focused convention in the UK in 2017 (that I can find at least).

If you don't want to trust the Bitly link then here's the link in it's raw form - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p5iZrLlU7EthiItODGO5ZweyhCIOVFu7ULj2c25iPQU/htmlview - it looks so pretty doesn't it?

Anyway that's me got a list of options which is all well and good but which events am I going to go to?

This is where you come in.

Months to avoid for me are -

• February - Going to London for the 2000AD 40th Anniversary thing.
• April - I'm likely to be at Conpulsion but if not then I could do something else.  Assuming the day job doesn't get in the way.
• June - I'm at UK Games Expo which is my trip for that month.

Beyond that it's largely up for grabs although I do plan to go to Glasgow Games Festival again once they have their 2017 date announced.

Which events should I go to then?

2017 checkpoint.

I need to stop stopping this thing and instead need to keep keeping it.

So over on End The Turn we've launched a few episodes and posted a number of reviews. We've not had much feedback on how we're doing so please give us feedback.  We'd love it.

Even if it's just people laughing at +Liz Mackie shouting at me.

Our most recently published episode is Gaming Resolutions and it reminded me of my previous New Year posts on here and in turn prompted me to write this post.

So a quick checkpoint on where I'm at before I get onto where I'm heading.

Objectives :

1. Balanced gaming - Still very board / card game heavy.  That's no bad thing but something I want to improve on in 2017.
2. More gaming overall - Think I'm sustaining my ENT / DWARF attendance levels plus with a splash of other home / holiday based gaming it's getting there.  Just needs more!
3. More involved - End The Turn is a large part of this for me but not all that I want to do.
4. Event Attendance - 2017 will be the year I improve this. 
5. Organise Events - I'm going to do everything I can to ensure that Roll Against Cancer will happen in 2017. Venue selection so far has been a challenge (apply many expletives of your choice to this) but hope to make some progress on that in January and February.

Principles :

1. Only buy it if you're going to use it - Still largely sticking to this although I think my board game purchasing record is proving a challenge to comply!
2. Is everyone having fun?  Including you - Cornerstone of every time I play a game.
3. Accept that you're going to be the GM - Well this is an eternal principle but hopefully 2017 will see me be a Player Character if only in games ran at events.
4. Change is a good thing and is necessary - Cult of the new is something of a thing with board games especially. The "edition change" dynamic hasn't occurred for a while...
5. Opinions aren't as important as knowledge and experience - So this is being challenged a little via End The Turn where I'm essentially giving my opinion on things but hopefully it's an educated opinion.  I've not had a hobby related rant for a while though!

Next post will be about number 4 in my Objectives.