Auld Lang Syne 2023!

Happy New Year everyone!

I have had a nice little reprieve from work the last few days, so I have been productive both in the blogging sphere (I at least have my posts for January lined up) and in the game designing sphere (some more tweaks for Prismatic Wasteland, a bit of progress on the Vile Plume Mountain adventure–enjoy the cover as a teaser)!

2023 was a nice one for the Wasteland. Barkeep won a slew of awards. Releasing something I like is all I really wanted, industry praise be damned, but it is safe to say that I can consider that project a success. Blog traffic remained strong even though I am not as proud of this year's output as I was of 2022. I've included some screencaps of the analytics in case you want to see which month I had the most views (during the Ennies), where the readers are (USA, with some Canadians mostly), what the most popular posts are (still my Hexcrawl series by a country mile), and what the top searches were (still a surprising amount of dopplegänger haters). Also I got married, which was nice. I also attended many weddings, god so many weddings.

2024 looks even brighter. I anticipate some big changes to my work that should leave me with more time and energy to devote to something I actually enjoy: writing and running imaginary games. I played very little in 2023, which is a real disappointment, because writing without a solid basis of play is a bit like running without first carbo-loading on obscene amounts of pasta. But I plan on running more games next year (but tbd on actual running and honestly probably less pasta).

More specifically, my goals for 2024 from an RPG perspective are: (1) release at least a playtestable version of Prismatic Wasteland, so that I can start running that and getting feedback, (2) release Into the Oddish and Vile Plume Mountain, and (3) finish the bulk of the writing and art for Candy Country. Lots of exciting stuff, which is necessary so I can switch between them rapidly.

Cheers and thank you for the support! I am wishing you a wonderful next spin around the flaming ball of gas we all share.

W.F. Smith