Year in review: 2022

Games

This year I mostly played OSR-style games although the label has become somewhat meaningless as “Sword Dream” style OSR and genuine revival games don’t have a lot in common.

However I did enjoy a lot of Mark of the Odd games and they are pretty traditional.

What about the storygames? I did still play a few of those but it seemed a bit harder to get people involved and things that I’ve previously enjoyed like PbtA and Forged in the Dark seemed much harder to do online than essentially freeform games.

The key thing I missed from storygames was essentially GM-less play. Other than that I feel that there was a lot of fusion in game design and crossover.

What I played in 2022

The games I played most of were MiniBX, Electric Bastionland, Warlock! and Mork Borg. MiniBX and Mork Borg were my absolute favourites of the year. Mork Borg’s dark comedy background has limits for me but MiniBX I’d be happy to play again.

I also played little runs of Vaults of Vaarn, Better Left Buried and enjoyed a few games of Kriegsmesser, Maze Rats and especially Skorne and Kanabo.

I played a few sessions of Old-School Essentials but I now think that any game that sticks literally to the Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) rules is simply not going to be enjoyable for me.

Pre D&D gaming

There was a lot of interest this year in games that had a Braunstein, “Original Game” or pre-OD&D feel. There was also some great analysis on what the difference between Blackmoor and Braunstein compared to Free Kriegspiel.

This interest in exploring the paths not taken on the road to D&D was really interesting to me and it felt this was where the game design creativity was this year.

M. A. R. Barker being a Nazi

People have argued this back and forth but whether it was ironic or posturing ultimately what is clear is that he did write a racist novel and didn’t choose to disavow it while he was alive.

I started the year reading through the reprints of the Empire of the Petal Throne game and reading some accounts of how the game was played by the original players.

It was harder to give the more questionable Tekumel material the benefit of the doubt in light of the new information though.

Ultimately though I think there are other quirky science fantasy worlds and ultimately Tekumel may just be mined for the bits that are good in works that are less problematic.

Weird science fantasy

Possibly every year is good for this genre but I feel that overall that there was a move away from weird and horrible and from high and low fantasy. Spelljammer was there in the mainstream but I also enjoyed Dngn, The Electrum Archive and the conceit of Exarch. See also the aforementioned Vaults of Vaarn.

One advantage of the science fantasy genre is that you don’t need to feed shackled to historical verisimilitude and have a lot more freedom to invent societies, cultures and mores.

Problematic and liberating AI

Midjourney genuinely expanded the possibilities of what people can create (including the number of fingers possible on a human-ish hand). It was a fraught topic and I’ve started a more detailed article because this is something that is going to take a lot more effort to understand and respond to.

Gaming music

My discovery of dungeon synth continued to be a thing this year I enjoyed Flying Fortress a lot and the SpellJams album was bonkers in a good way.