The latest episode of my free-floating strand to be devoted solely to the books, TV series, games, and films that I have consumed of late.

It’s been a bit of a weird period for media… the near-weekly trips to the cinema sort of stopped and I found myself watching actual TV for the first time in a while (hence there being more series than Horror films). I’ve been trying to work out where my media consumption has gone and in truth I think it’s here… rather than watching TV or films I have been working on blog posts in the evening.

An infrequent series that shares personal news, interesting links, and any videos that I have been watching.

It’s been an interesting few months… in my last missive, I observed that it felt like I was struggling to move out of holiday mode and while a certain physical lethargy has undoubtedly been present, I have surprised myself with my keyboard-based productivity: Work has been surprisingly robust, the blog has taken all the energy that I have been capable of throwing at it, and my gaming has been stress-free. The only downside has been the photography… I have been doing a lot of desk-based research for future projects and decision-making about current projects but I haven’t been out explicitly to take pictures in quite a long time. I think I miss the group I had back in the South East, even if it did start to unravel a while before I moved. I’m feeling better, more positive, and more ambitious about the stuff I’m working on and I think that’s partly evident from the way that my blog posts have been getting longer and longer and longer. Anyway, in case you missed them, here are some favourite posts since the last issue of Purovoku:

• I did a deep dive into Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and was reminded of quite how beautiful and fucked-up and beautifully fucked-up that film is.

• I did a long review of Tracy and Laura Hickman’s legendary AD&D module Ravenloft and was so categorically sold on what it was that the Hickmans were trying to accomplish that I am gripped by the urge to revisit their work and find out where it all went wrong.

• For a while, I’ve been trying to orient myself in the world of RPGs, to try and work out what works for me, what doesn’t work for me, and seeing how that effects how I engage with the broader hobby. While I’ve long been comfortable writing about my personal gaming history, I was always quite reluctant to ‘do discourse’ and well… I guess that particular set of levees did not hold as I have produced posts on conceptions of community, whether or not system matters, and how we should be pirating more stuff.

Below the fold, you’ll find news from my current campaign as well as a load of links to some of the videos and articles that have captured my attention over the last couple of months.

An infrequent series sharing personal news, interesting links, and videos I have been watching.

It has been an interesting couple of months since I put up the last one of these posts (one per two months feels about right in terms of needing a break from substantial writing and collecting enough links to be able to curate an interesting selection for a post) as I have felt my habits beginning to shift.

In terms of my gaming, I must admit that I am getting quite close to burning out and have paused things in order to re-focus. For a while, this blog complemented my gaming quite neatly as I would stray into a new area, do some research/thinking, and write an article sharing my thoughts. I would then launch a mini-campaign and write about any scenarios I happened to use in play. That approached proved really productive when I was looking at old TSR sandboxes as they were easy to run and generally needed just enough ‘fixing’ to engage my critical thought-processes. I think those adventures and posts really helped me to cement a lot of my thinking about what I wanted both from the GMing process and RPG products more generally but it has served to strand me as I now have a very clear idea about what I want to do as a GM but I appear to be quite isolated in both my approach and preferences.

After running a load of Fantasy, I drifted back towards running horror and horror RPGs (by and large) are tailored towards producing these highly structured and pre-scripted gaming experiences that I don’t really enjoy running and which my group has a tendency to outright rebel against. I am aware that my group might well be picking up on my relative boredom at marching them through set-piece encounters but, as Popeye said, I yam what I yam. I’m aware I’ve been snatching at various one-shots and while some have worked better than others, I think I need to stop trying to fix adventures that don’t work for me. I made this decision a little while ago and then one of my group decided to buy me a Vaesen campaign. Frequent readers will be aware that I have something of a toxic relationship with that game as I love the idea of the game but absolutely hate what Free League have done with it. Our group had a lot of fun playing Vaesen largely because I stripped the game back to its mechanics and turned it into a game about ghost-hunters being radicalised by fairies and travelling around 19th century Scandinavia throttling landlords and blowing up dams that are threatening to drown ancient forests. I loved that game but that is not the game that Free League have chosen to support and their published campaign combines the game’s slightly shitty politics with a lot of railroading and a tendency to have scenarios finish with heroic NPCs swooping in to save the day. I’ll probably write about it when I’m finished but it is grim and it only serves to confirm my belief that Free League are in the business of pumping out expensive books filled with under-imagined and sloppily developed content. Admittedly I should have declined to run the game but I thought I might be able to ‘fix’ it and now I’m both bored and resentful. My fault… but still.

I think I need to start writing and running my own stuff and so you may notice a change in the contents of this blog. Fewer published scenarios, more deconstructed sourcebooks and campaign notes. On a less gloomy note, I do have some gaming-related stuff that I am looking forward to but I’m not yet sure how to approach or write about it.