A Third Year of Blogging

This is my third Anniversary Post for Harbinger of Doom. Its predecessors are here and here. In these posts it is my custom to talk about the games I'm running and playing, since I otherwise largely abjure blogging about matters of normal life. Much like when I started this blog back in 2010, I'm out of work - game design and writing are fickle fields, especially if you aren't a programmer.

Games I'm Running

1. Dust to Dust has now run eleven three-day events, three one-day events, and two World Events. The game has continued to thrive, though the work of running the game is no easier than it was - the challenges keep changing. I love it, though: in this season we got to stage some of the scenes we had been planning since the early planning stages.
2. D&D Next: If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I've been blogging obsessively about the public playtest of D&D Next and my campaign. Prepping for DtD events always disrupts the schedule of my D&D game, but we still found time for twenty sessions over the last year.

Games I'm Playing

1. Eclipse has ended its first arc and run the first event of its second. The four-day closer of the first arc was quite the blowout, and the transformed setting going into the second arc is a brave new world indeed.
2. Oceanhorn is a new iPad game that does everything in its power to capture the feel of the original Legend of Zelda in a 2.5D perspective. I'm maybe two or three hours of play into it, but then I lost a lot of time because I got stuck on finding the key to one locked gate and re-explored most of the setting trying to figure out if I was supposed to do something else first.
3. Robbery Bob: I just picked this up, though I guess it's been out for awhile. It's a stealth game, tuned to the relatively-low-difficulty mobile gameplay environment. It's way more fun than it has any right to be.
4. XCOM: Enemy Unknown: I finished this maybe two months ago. It was really, really outstanding, and once I get Enemy Within, I'll probably start over from the beginning.
5. SolForge Beta (on iPad): I'm impressed so far, and I'm looking forward to the next content update.
6. Hearthstone Beta: This game is pretty excellent, though as more people play it I get comparatively worse at it.
7. Path of Exile: I wouldn't say that action RPGs are really my bag, but I like this game quite a lot. Its only weakness, in my mind, is the difficulty of understanding some of the choices you make - its learning curve for active and passive skill selection is brutal. Other than that, it's pretty amazing. And really-free - I don't feel like I'm missing out on major parts of the game by not paying.
8. Lords of Waterdeep: WotC has started capitalizing on the incredibly deep IP that D&D represents with a series of boardgames: Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, other thing, and most recently this game. I haven't played all of them, but I've played enough to say that this game is a ton of fun and I can't wait to play again. I have not yet tried out the mobile version, though.

I want to mention one of the last games I worked on for MFV.com, Quarriors! They have now announced its upcoming launch, and I am very excited about this. I enjoy the boardgame version of Quarriors!, but I enjoyed its mobile version even more as we worked on it. I don't know that MFV.com and NECA have announced its release date, but I would definitely encourage you to pick this one up, because I think it's a great product.

I expect that the coming year will sharply curtail my available time for both gaming and blogging, but I plan to continue both to the best of my ability.