2026 has been crazy

I haven't posted since January. This year has been crazy, zipping by at times painfully. Honestly, it's been a really good year for me, just stupidly busy at the same time. Let's see if I can summarize:

I'm still GMing two ongoing regular RPGs, each of which has a session ever-other-week. So I get to GM once a week. I have two campaigns rolling along so when writer's block hits me, I can just pivot to the other campaign for a bit, which helps keep me on task and over-prepared. 

Those two games are: 

• Amber Diceless Roleplay, were on year 6 of this campaign, there's a ton of backstory and history, a huge cast of NPCs, and we've seen multiple universes get built and destroyed. Epic, metaphysical, character-driven, lore-rich, heavy emotional stakes. 
• Cyberpunk Red. We're about 20 sessions in to this, and it's stylistically nearly the exact opposite of my Amber campaign. The PCs are a combat ambulance team, so it's frantically paced, dice-heavy, arbitrary emergency-of-the-week, tactical play on a virtual table-top. 

And then I'm playing in two RPGs:

• A D&D game that I can only attend about half the sessions, so as I mentioned at the start of the year, I'm playing a Dao-Genie-Patron Warlock and I'm just trapped in my bottle in the weeks I have to miss.
• The other campaign is a Star Trek game. I'm the Andorian Captain of our Miranda-Class exploration vessel in the classic "TOS" era. 

I've been traveling to game conventions and trade shows for work a lot this year. This has been common for me for more than a dozen years, but this year has seen even more trips than normal. Several local conventions in the Seattle area, plus events in Kentucky, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Quebec. There was one convention in particular where I kept track of how many games I played or ran, and it was 25 sessions of 9 different games with 50 different people. Mostly RPGs and RPG-adjacent Story Games at that one.

Early this year I broke up with the girlfriend whom I'd been dating for about a decade, and moved out into a new apartment. That upended a lot of the normal daily and weekly patterns of my life. It meant my long-term D&D game that I've been running a few weekend-long sessions of every year for the past 8 years has come to an end, because it just didn't make sense to continue that storyline without the character my ex was playing. The rest of the group and I are gearing up for a new rambling Spelljammer campaign that we'll do a few weekends a year. 

I have also tried a few new miniatures game this year. I've played a couple games of Alpha Strike (the faster-playing sister-game to Battletech), a half dozen games of 5 Men In Normandy, and just since Gen Con I've been diving in deep into Cyberpunk Combat Zone. I've got dozens of little cyberpunks sitting next to my desk in various stages of undercoating and painting, and a burgeoning new collection of near-future terrain to support it.