2018 Antagonist Relations Recap

Image: Twenty Sided Dice set to 20 19

Antagonist Relations, Inc is back from holiday break, which was not particularly a break since I’ve run 6 game sessions and prepped a 10 part Cypher Game campaign since my last post in addition to all the normal family hoopla around the holidays.

Blog Business

It was a good year for blog writing last year— I posted 102 items in 2018, more than twice the next highest year (2015 with 47) and almost five times what I posted most years since I started this blog in 2012. The volume is especially notably because I only had a single post before March 2018. It was a questionable year for blog reading though… at least from what I can tell. Posts will get 10-20 views in the week I post them and that’s about it. Almost all of the referral links in the blog stats are for scammy clickbacks, for sketchy pharmaceutical hawking blogs or other obviously fraudulent and more importantly non-RPG blogs or sites. The few comments that I did get on posts in 2018 were all spam as well. Despite attempting to promote the blog with a twitter account (@antag_relations) and making sure to post fairly regularly on it to keep it from entirely being a wasteland in between blog post tweets I don’t seem to have grown the blog audience from the three people I know read it which has been disheartening.

Ultimately though, I’ve decided to keep posting here and to accept that maintaining the blog is something I’m mostly doing for myself and not for an audience, after all Lonely Fun has a long and storied tradition as part of the RPG hobby and so this blog will be my outlet for that. That said, if you’re a reader of the blog and not someone I know personally, if you send me an email at “Antagonist.relations(at)gmail.com” to let me know you’re out there, I’ll happily send you one of these snazzy stickers or a pack of the AD&D Second Edition Collector Cards if you’re interested.

Image: Shit Stickers where the I is a 1 on a d20, unopened pack of 1992 Series TSR D&D Collector Cards

So, what are my goals for the Antagonist Relations blog for 2019?

• Keep posting Weird Magic Items and Music to Game to Posts.
• Post more module and system reviews.
• Post at least 100 updates again.

Back in 2018 when I made the conscious effort to revitalize the blog, I planned on putting up lots of tables, but by the summer I had discovered that churning out a table every week or two was difficult, so I’m going to let those drop away and not spend time trying to come up with another table of names just to say I got another table made. On the other hand, I’ve really enjoyed writing the Weird Magic Item and Music to Game to Posts so those will continue.

You’ll also continue to see cross-posts from the Antagonist Relations Podcast, we recorded our first episodes of 2019 on January 4th and I hope to have them edited and ready to post soon. I swear that eventually I’ll do another Lonely Fun podcast just for Ben and there is a chance that there might be another potential podcast to come as well, though that one is really tentative.

Non-Blog Writing

Last summer I wrote a first draft of a Godless module, titled Cleanup in Aisle Five, and ran it twice, though each time I ran a separate half of the adventure. After trying for months to schedule another play test session before I published, I have accepted that I need to just edit and format it and publish it instead of delaying it and finding myself at the whims of player schedules and interest for a play test session. Incidentally, I re-listened to the podcasts we recorded where I ran the second half and honestly, they are probably some of my favorite actual play I’ve run. You can find them here:

Cleanup in Aisle Five Actual Play, Part One -  Employee Orientation
Cleanup in Aisle Five Actual Play, Part Two - "How You Did Me Wrong"
Cleanup in Aisle Five Actual Play, Part Three - Halt, Party Time!
Cleanup in Aisle Five Actual Play, Part Four - Karaoke Dreaming Explosions 

I’ve got rough drafts of a few other Godless/Shadow of the Demon Lord stuff that I want to take another look at as well, so hopefully I’ll have some announcements in the future on the blog about publishing more stuff through the Disciples of the Demon Lord program.

Playing RPGs in 2018

I can honestly say that I played more RPG sessions in 2018 than any year since I started the blog at least. The 2nd Edition al Qadim Sunday morning game is on its fourth year (we started back in September of 2015) and still playing twice a month and the 5th Edition D&D Tomb of Annihilation game just got in a sixth session this last week. Getting to play a 5th Edition D&D game past one or two sessions has reminded me of the player side of the game, helping as I run a 5th Edition game online, plus it has just been fun to get to play in two drastically different styles of D&D games. I notice more and more that getting to play in RPGs regularly has helped me to avoid burn out as a game master. So I’m excited for both to continue into 2019, even if the al Qadim game might be entering into an end-game as our PCs have reached higher level. I was also lucky enough to have one of my online D&D 5th edition players volunteer to run a one shot game on Roll20 in October, which was fantastic.

Running RPGs in 2018

 Here is a non-exhaustive list of the games I ran in 2018, as best as I can recall.

Campaigns/Ongoing

• 13th Age – Eyes of the Stone Thief (January 2017 – Ongoing)
• Ran this campaign for my Sunday RPG group all through 2017 and then all through 2018 and hoping to wrap it up before summer of 2019, but we’ll see. We’ve had a few droughts of play due to scheduling issues and I think I enjoy the conceit and features of the Stone Thief mega-dungeon more than my players might, but like Ahab after the great white whale, I refuse to give up the hunt, and like the book Moby Dick, I am aware that I enjoy it more than most others. Still, after two full years, it will be very nice to get to the conclusion and wrap the story up.
• Changeling 20th Anniversary Edition (Started in Fall 2017 - ???)
• Thomas and I started a Changeling campaign for our high school friends in fall of 2017 and I ran at least one session in 2018 before busy schedules intervened. 
• Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures (Spring 2017 – June 2018)
• After my Wednesday RPG group discovered that Iron Edda was not suited to our sensibilities or play group size, I switched them over to Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures, which I had run as a one-shot a few times before that. The campaign lasted a little over a year and was pretty successful from my end, providing a low prep game I could run every two weeks, though play did get a little bogged down when PCs were at higher levels.
• AD&D 2nd Edition – Planescape (February 2018 – Ongoing)
• The first of two online campaigns I’ve run with Roll20, I’ve been using the Great Modron March as the spine of the campaign, bringing in the Eternal Boundary, Harbinger House and parts of Well of Worlds as well. After a rocky start with three of five players dropping from the game, I found three new players in April/May and the group has been stable since. I’ve really enjoyed getting to revisit my favorite 2nd edition setting and having a fantastic group of players
• Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures (March 2018  - Ongoing)
• This is the Antagonist Relations Actual Play campaign of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures which aside from a near TPK at the hands of a half-dozen skeletons has been going strong.
• D&D 5th Edition - Against the Cult of the Reptile God (May 2018 – August 2018)
• I ran Against the Cult of the Reptile God, one of my favorite of the 1st edition adventures, using 5th Edition and Roll20. Honestly, AtCotRG is a module I could run again and again and I’m glad that the online group has become a great stable group as well.
• Godless (July 2018 – December 2018)
• Inspired by Tales of Blood and Stone, I ran a six month Godless campaign using the Tales of the Desolation module as the backbone of the campaign. It was an absolute blast and I was surprised at how easy it was to adapt Shadow of the Demon Lord modules to Godless
• D&D 5th Edition - Curse of Strahd (October 2018 – Ongoing)
• After taking September off, the group that I ran AtCotRG re-convened to play Curse of Strahd. I had gotten the module on Roll20 back in 2017 but hadn’t gotten a regular game off the ground due to scheduling issues, so it has been nice to get my money’s worth for buying the module. And, if you’re interested in running Curse of Strahd online, it is more than worth your money to buy the module in Roll20 as it is amazingly nice to have all the maps, tokens, handouts and more at your fingertips in Roll20.

One-Shots

• Godless – In A Pig’s Eye / Dancing in the Ruins
• Ran these two modules on New Year’s Day 2018, enjoyed the Hell out of them, hence the longer Godless campaign later in the year. You can read my thoughts on them here: Godless: The World of Fire and Blood (review)
• Godless – Cleanup On Aisle Five
• Ran this online using Roll20 as my first playtest. Players only got through the first half of the module, but we started late to accommodate time zones.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord – Dead by Dawn
• Had been planning on trying to run Clean Up on Aisle Five again to playtest on my birthday, but then my player group ballooned suddenly and I decided to run something that might better accommodate 7 players. I only ended up with six, but this was still a great module to run.
• Godless – Clean Up On Aisle Five, take two
• My second playtest of the module, recorded for posterity on the Antagonist Relations Actual Play Podcast. I fast-forwarded to the second half of the module to make sure that I would fit it in to the 4 hours we had and had a blast running it.
• D&D 5th Edition – The Wild Sheep Chase
• Ran this short 5th Edition module for my online AD&D 2nd Edition Planescape group as we had a session fall on Extra Life Weekend. A great little module that I’ll hopefully find time/motivation to write a little review of later in 2019.
• D&D 5th Edition - Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
• For Extra Life 2018 I ran Expedition to the Barrier Peaks using this helpfully color-coded conversion. It reminded me how a few nice handouts can really elevate a game, but if I were to run it again I might have to rethink a few things.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord – He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
• A Krampus themed Shadow of the Demon Lord module? Hell yes! Had to run this around the holidays so I got a group together on Roll20 and everyone had a blast despite multiple character deaths facing a single Ghastly Chorus.

Looking ahead to 2019

In addition to the ongoing campaigns mentioned above, I started a Cypher System campaign that I’m calling Peculiar Times, on January 2nd, where most of the PCs are teenagers in the 1980s, drawing heavy and obvious inspiration from Stranger Things and Paper Girls. Perhaps I’ll have to record a Lonely Fun podcast about putting that campaign together or write a post about it. I want to limit it to 10 chapters with the idea that each session is its own chapter, which if scheduling and timing holds would have it wrapping up in late May, early June 2019, so perhaps I’ll have several new campaigns starting then if I can wrap 13th Age, Peculiar Times and if the Great Modron March ends then.