Chain Link and Concrete: 2019 in Review

 The year 2019 has concluded.

That year resulted in 1 post on this blog - the 2018 Review - bringing us up to 130 posts total.  As I had said last year, it seems gaps has become something of a norm, and that's about as large as a gap as one can have in a year.  Work and other obligations keep me away, and outside of those the blog has been shifted very low down on my list of priorities - and I seem to have generally less creative energy these days besides.  But I am still here, and I did work on a few blog-relevant things every now and again for the duration of that span.

To My Readers

It has been quite a famine of content this year, but I extend great thanks for anyone who still remembered to check in every now and again.

Things of Note in 2019

In spite of the lack of published content, I did continue to work on some projects, many of which might actually belong here.  Indeed, though it isn't immediately obvious if you visit the blog, I did begin hosting content on here for a project I'd mentioned last year for Force on Force:  Tiberian Dawn.

Force on Force:  Tiberian Dawn

This was my gaming project success for the year.  I made good on a goal from last year's "Year in Review" post, wherein I considered creating fixed pages here on my blog to better organize (and expand) what I had written for the Force on Force:  Tiberian Dawn project so far.  I not only met that goal, but surpassed it!  I first deployed a centralized "hub" page for the whole project here on the blog sometime in mid January.  I incrementally added content radially from that page for a few months off-and-on, and ended up sharing some of it out on a fan group on Facebook I had found.  It actually turned out to be liked by a few people on said group, who encouraged me to compile it into a single document with an eye towards creating an "official" PDF of it.  I ended up doing basically that, though it currently still lives as a Google Doc as it hasn't hit Version 1.0 just yet.  Once that edition hit version 0.5, I decided it would become the sole source and it is now linked to the top of the Force on Force "hub" page linked earlier.  There's open comments there, if you'd like to provide some feedback - you don't necessarily need to be all that familiar with the system, if you're curious.

I enjoyed writing for that project, even if it sometimes got tedious.  As I have mentioned before, Force on Force has some commonality with GURPS, wherein the core mechanics and gameplay is actually pretty simple, but myriad add-ons and rule extensions let you build considerable complexity into your scenarios if you want them to have it.

To date, I have not actually gotten a chance to play it - either Force on Force itself or my conversion of it.  However, I have since shared said document out to a few places besides the Facebook group, where it gained some traction from wargamers and C&C fans alike.  One of them lives only a few hours from where I am at now, and expressed some interest in giving it a try sometime in the coming year - so whenever I actually get all of the appropriate miniatures collected and painted, these rules might actually see the table.

There is still more that needs to be done with it before it can really make it to a real release - the editing is still pretty rough, and I have a lot of outstanding reader comments to actually follow up on.  I have also become open to the idea of folding in some more vehicles from Renegade, under the general idea that they were limited production models, late war debuts, or specialized units that did not see widespread issue - perhaps most especially for the Brotherhood, as they lack a little variety.  I am not the greatest fan of Renegade - more to how it doesn't seem to fit into the C&C timeline all that well - but I believe I would be remiss to the fans of the series if I did not make the best out of it that I could.

Once that reaches version 1.0, I will probably either move on to doing the same for the sequel, Tiberian Sun, or the Dune one I had been mulling over a while as well.  Stubs of each are already in place, but I definitely want to complete the Tiberian Dawn one first.

This project, while fun, is unfortunately several niches deep.  This makes it a little difficult to get some real feedback - a lot of Force on Force players are really more into Historics or hypothetics, and the Tiberian Dawn aspects don't typically seem to interest them.  The Tiberian Dawn people are even less likely to have an interest in Force on Force, and not everyone really has time to peruse some stranger's 100-some page fever dream.

Other Stuff

The Force on Force project has kind of been the only real product of game creativity for me this year.  I've even cut way back on things like miniature painting, as time and attention has gone elsewhere.  But, back in early November I found my old GURPS:  Hybroean Age campaign notes binder, something I had been looking to transcribe onto this blog since more-or-less the beginning of it.  Doing so has been slow going, however, as the notes were never greatly organized and fell further into disarray as they were actually getting used all those years ago - last game was something like 2013.  At some point these posts will make their way up here for a mass release, but it wont likely be a very "pretty" product, such as it is.

I managed to get some table top gaming in a few times this year, having helped playtest the 2019 Holloween Scenario for "This is Not a Test".  I enjoyed the scenario, and even pulled off a narrow win in the end.  I used a warband of my own creation (The Mõtłəy Krû), which you can get an warband roster and concept doc for at those links (should you ever want to run them for some reason).  I actually liked that warband, which was pieced together from some miniatures I'd picked up from (I believe) either EM4 or Copplestone Castings.  I took pictures of the game with the intent to do an AAR here, but I never got around to doing so (and posting them here wouldn't fit with my usual review photo theme!).  Something for a later time, if I get around to knocking a few more out.

I lucked into meeting a few (semi)local historical wargamers who wanted to give The Pikeman's Lament - a wargame I am familiar with and generally think positively of - a try over on their table.  The host wasn't particularly familiar with it so the scenario he had worked up was rather ad-hoc to say the least, but it was a fun evening never the less, even if some rules were a little less than clear to us at the time.  I don't anticipate another round with these guys, though, as they're very much old-style carts-and-tables types, which The Pikeman's Lament (and related games like Lion Rampant, Rebels and Patriots, etc) are definitely not.  Either way, I do find those rules interesting and I have put together a few warbands for fun, with the intent to collect against these lists in case I ever find another interested person.  Indeed, one army list is actually evolving into a compilation project dedicated to The Battle of the Severn, which is something I reenact yearly with my 17th century group.  That document sort of pulls together a variety of fragmented information on persons and events leading up to the battle, culminating in a speculative battle list for the game and a little bit of information on how to run the scenario.

I very briefly worked on a bit of GURPS:  Tiberian Dawn stuff way back in last January.  Specifically, this was a vehicle article that was supposed to outline one of Nod's light tank class vehicles.  That one will be a long time coming, I suspect, since like all GURPS vehicles I find myself doing a lot of double checking and second guessing in the minutia, which eats time.  Plus, since it is semi-fictional, I will have to commission someone to do a lot of the imagery for it, since that only exists in my head alone.

Sometime in June I wrote a little about a game setting that proxies something like early American exploration / colonialism in a High(ish) Fantasy style setting.  This isn't married to a system, as all of the notes are setting related without any mechanical specifics.  I don't know that I'd ever actually run it, nor do I know what I'd run it in, but the basic ideas had been rattling around in my head for a while now and needed to get down somewhere.  GURPS would probably fail to attract any actual players (or retain them), and I have not been fond of how D20 Modern/Past handles mixed gun/melee environments (I've actually had something for this in Drafts for over a year...).  I have not touched those setting notes since then, but I do think about it from time to time, and might use it as a Fantasy writing exercise when I feel up to it again - just need to clear some other projects in the queue first.  It leans into the 17th century themes I've been exposed to a bit lately, and true to form would include religious and political strife as major drivers of conflict.  I am actually of split mind - part of me wants to focus more on the classical Adventuring elements in their equivalent of The New World, but anther part wants to focus on some of the factional strife back home and the inevitable explosion of strife between the factions.

Right at the tail end of the year, I started taking another look at the HL2:  D20 materials I had started messing around with back in 2018 (how time flies).  While D20 Modern is basically irrelevant as a system these days, I still have though notion to run something in it one day - something in the HL2 setting seems viable.  Or so I think, anyways.  I might actually even know a few potential players, one of which is even still a HL2 fan.  Time will tell on that one, however, but I do have a bit of energy for it right now so stay tuned - something may actually show up!

Background Noise

Google Plus went away in early April.  I was never a frequent user of G+, but I did drop in there a few times a week, and it was a source of interaction with other GURPS writers and players.  It was also a sizable source of traffic for this blog.  As I don't really frequent any other GURPS hideouts with any regularity, I've sort of become a bit isolated in a way (which might explain my declining drive to post GURPS stuff).  Should get on that...

My Impression of CL&CC in 2019

Quiet.  Perhaps a little too quiet.

CL&CC Goals for 2020

I can't say I can promise anything, but I'll set a few goals that I think are at least plausible.

Certainly, I will try and publish all of my old GURPS:  Hyborian Age notes up here in a series of blog posts that range from some general setting notes to specific encounters.  Be forewarned - they weren't great.  Putting it up here is more to digitize and provide a bit more longevity to an old project I had fun writing for many years ago.  Then again, Blogger is run by The Googs, so I figure they'll decide the pull the plug on it some day for [reasons].

I fully expect to release the full version 1.0 of Force on Force:  Tiberian Dawn sometime in 2020.  Most of what I planned to be in there already is, and excepting a few more bits and bobs and some slight rule adjustments I have in mind, what I'm really after is mechanical feedback - which is unfortunately kind of lacking even in the fan group for that game.

The GURPS:  Tiberian Dawn ball might advance a little more sometime in 2020, but I don't exactly have plans or high hopes so it might not be much.  There has been a couple of articles in Draft for a while that are almost publish-worthy, but they never got the final pass that passes for polish in my writing (and lack illustration).  I'd kind of dragged might feet still hoping for GURPS Vehicles to come out before I commit to any more vehicle posts, but honestly I don't think that's ever coming for 4e.  Other than Nod's modern light tank, I've had the M60 Patton and M1 Abrams on the radar for a few years at this point, since they're GDI's principal "Medium" tanks.  The tough part about the latter is that most of the information about the armor is still Classified - which means guess work and reverse-engineering, and I don't like that nearly as much as having hard numbers to work with.  Further, I've kind of gotten myself used to delivering lengthy and (somewhat) detailed articles on every little thing in this campaign that I need to publish, which makes each post a big time sink.

Lastly, as I mentioned above, the HL2:  D20 material might actually become my active "role play" project, giving a bit of counter-balance against the Force on Force project and preventing concept burn-out.  I actually had a fair bit written up sometime in 2018, but it has been on ice since then.  Now if only I'd written it against a system that's popular!

Closing

This blog isn't totally abandoned, but the drive for the projects that generated most of the productivity here has been curbed and there is also much less time to dedicate to it.  Never the less, I have things planned for the year ahead, so it might cough back to life for a time, at least.

Chain link and Concrete was never intended to be a purely games blog, let alone such a heavily GURPS focused one, so I suppose I could have been sharing out stuff from some of the reenactments I've done, or even the longship I have been helping out with and rowing on, but I never felt particularly motivated to do that.

There are a lot of irons in the fire here, and too little time these days to give them all the attention they need, so let me see what I can unpack from here.  Maybe by year's end we'll be seeing actual progress and maybe even a few projects come to their conclusions.  Or perhaps the complete reverse - maybe dead silence until September, after which I debut yet another rabbit hole to run down!

Thanks for reading!

Cheers!