Cheers To 2025

​   Here at the end of AD 2025 I figured I’d pause to reflect on the year. It’s been a year full of triumphs and hardships, of joys and sorrows, but I am left most of all with profound gratitude to God for my wife and children, for my family and friends and church, for the blessing of a good job where I can use my gifts to both provide for my family and do interesting and fulfilling work with people I like. I won’t go long on the personal side here, just know that while I’m going to talking gaming and writing below, the people in my life matter to me far more and I'm thankful for them all.
   I appreciate you, the e-person reading this, too. Whether you’re reading this on the blog or the Twitter (keep calling it Twittermas, none of this X-mas nonsense), it’s really heartening to see your page visits and views, not because I’m looking for some kind of “winning at the internet” points (if I cared about that, I’d be focusing more on Civilization IV game reports), but because its really nice to know somebody’s reading what you write. Hopefully what I put on here is amusing to you, be ye here because of my Crapshoot Monday reviews, Adventure Site Contests, other reviews, thoughts on maps or gaming, podcast interviews, or because you accidently clicked the “follow” button and were too lazy to correct your mistake. The comments and replies are even cooler…this is nowhere near the levels of feedback found in Sierra Online Homeworld fanfiction forums in 1999, but whatever could be?

​   Some of you are reading this because you’re frantically hitting “refresh” here looking for the Adventure Site III reviews, and don’t worry, those are coming soon. Deadline for this year’s contest ends January 1st, so by 56 hours from the publication of this post, we’ll be done with submission and its on to the judgement. We’ve already received over twenty entries and I’ve got reviews written already for every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday of January. It’s a ton of work to review every single entry, but I appreciate every single one and there are already good entries from designers old and new. This contest is going to keep rolling annually for as long as I can keep getting submissions, it’s a privilege to run.
   Of course, all these great adventures would make a body complacent, so I’m reviewing a lot of other stuff too. Every single Monday, I release a Crapshoot Monday review, finding some freebie adventure on itch.io to look at and, more often than not, be horrified by. While that’s the majority of what I find, my real dream is always to find some unexpected gem, languishing in obscurity. I’ve become well-known enough as a game reviewer that people have begun to send me things to look at, too. I’ve been generally impressed with these offerings. I also did some deep-dive system reviews, Shadowdark early in the year and ACKS II more recently. Both were positive, although one is much more to my own personal taste. As always, reviewing others’ work has helped me a ton in thinking about my own…but don’t be fooled, I also set out to make my reviews entertaining reads in their own right.
   Earlier this year ASC II came out to the acclaim of everyone who’s ever read or used it. I stand by all eight top contenders as some of the best session-scale D&D possible. Heck, I’ve used more than half of them in my own games this year, all playing great. My players finished exploring the winning site, Tower in the Lake, just three nights ago and they had a blast. You really should check it out if you haven’t already.

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​   My own gaming-material release schedule (via Coldlight Press on DriveThru) has been rather sedate this year, just restricted this time to my Fog Valley Retreat, which took adventure site judges’ reviews in consideration to be polished and edited into something that plays great (run it twice). Any and all contestants can do this, by the way, if you’re cynical about it you could say submitting your adventure is a sneaky way to get free editorial commentary. That’s part of the reason for the contest, I hope everyone takes shameless advantage.
   Of course, releasing gaming modules should always come secondary to the act of play. My activity as a game master has been right about at the happiest rate. I could run multiple times every day 365 days a year and never burn out, but I also enjoy all the rest of my life too, so this has been good. I’ve run:
-7 sessions of various one-shots, mostly convention slots.
-45 sessions of my Stars Without Number campaign, all online.
-59 sessions of the Coldlight Campaign, in the Skyshadow Isles and Shattered Valley regions (including finishing the Cairn of Night megadungeon). All of these were in-person with wildly varied parties of the roughly forty or so players involved in the campaign. Players range from ages 6 to 68, and character levels ranged from 0’s in a couple gauntlets to some 18th levels that have been playing for over half a decade. The campaign is an utter delight and I look forward to decades more in this world.
   I don’t play nearly as often, I think I’ve been in roughly two dozen additional sessions as a player? Mostly AD&D, although a few in other odds and ends system. 111:24 is a fine ratio for GM:Player in my book.  
   A big part of the reason for the continued growth in the Adventure Site Contest this year is that this is the year I made a concerted effort to be more active on social media, talking both gaming and writing to a wide range of Twitter and Discord friends. Some (but not all):
-The CAG Braintrust on Classic Adventure Gaming
-Alex Macris on ACKS to Grind
-Dunder Moose on This is Dunder Moose
-Matt and Gary on Second Watch
-Jack McCarthy on Jawin’ With Jack
-Yang on Yang Yan Zhao
-Dave (DJ) Butler on Gopher Wood Lounge
-Dan Roberts’ on Dad Lit Pod
-Jason on Nerds RPG Variety Cast
And more. I’ve also been on several of the book review club panels of the Carbines and Cantrips show, which has been very interesting as a deep-dive writing review. 

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​   …because there’s more I do than gaming. Along with my wife Karen, I write fiction, both sci-fi and fantasy. We’ve been working together for a long time on novels, submitted to a few slushes with earlier work, but this year was the year we kicked up into a higher gear with media activity and networking. In April I went to a local comic convention to map the territory a little bit, but the real push started at LibertyCon, a Chattanooga writer’s convention in June. We’d been researching the market for years so I found it less educational than I’d hoped, but I met some great people and found some very good reads. Learning about a few of the smaller publishers there, we’re now working with some of the decent ones:
   Raconteur Press specializes in story fiction anthologies (although they also do novels) and had some themes that interested us. One of the stories we’ve submitted, “In the Company of Shepherds”, appears in Mercs and Mayhem as our first official writing credit (B K Gibson, right there on the cover). They’re a great group of people and one of the very few places to submit short fiction that won’t automatically algorithmically tank you just for contributing.
   The world of that story mentioned above is where our Grecian-themed novel trilogy takes place, starting with Shepherd next year. We’re going to have all three novels written before the first releases; in a world of George Martins, Scott Lynches, and Patrick Rothfusses, I’m not going to ask an epic fantasy reader to start a series that won’t be finished. We’re in talks with John (JF) Holmes for publishing this one; his Cannon Publishing has dabbled in fantasy before but he’s looking to spin off a new imprint with a fantasy focus next year which is where we’ll probably land. Of course we’re not going to ask a publisher to sign for all three at once, but one way or another, this story’s getting told.
   That’s not the only iron in the fire, of course. In addition to sending Rac Press a middle-grade boy’s adventure book, we’ve a sent a novel in to Ark Press for their “America 2076” contest and there’s a pitch sitting on Alexander Macris’ desk right now for a short story added to his upcoming Auran Empire fiction anthology. Co-writing doubles output of course, but just this year Karen and I have completed:
-3 full-length novels
-1 middle-grade novel
-1 novella
-6 short stories
   It’s a lot of fun and a pretty good output for a hobby. We, uh, don’t watch a lot of TV or play many video games anymore. All in all, I’m happy with what’s been done this year and look forward to 2026. As for what’s coming? Well, there’s going to be a lot more here on all that soon. But soonest...here come the ASC III reviews. First one on Friday…

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