2024: My Year in Entertainment

Books

Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook (Onyx Path)

Recommended Reading (James Edward Raggi IV)

Trinity Continuum Aberrant - Swine and Cheese Party, et al. (Onyx Path)

Battletech: A Time of War Quickstart Rules (Catalyst)

Dark Sun - Player's Guide to Balic (Dark House Rules)

Pendragon - The Adventure of the Great Hunt (Chaosium)

Ex Novo - Gameplay Overview (Sharkbomb)

Ex Umbra (Sharkbomb)

D&D 5e module A Night of Masks and Monsters (Ashley Warren)

D&D 5e - Dread Encounters: 13 Horrifying Hooks for Ravenloft (Charles Gerard, Tyler Hudak, Noah Lloyd, Ed Possing)

Pirate Borg (Limithron)

Vampire: The Masquerade 5e - homebrew Clanbook: Baali (Jasin Holliday)

Trinity Continuum - House Rules: The Basics (Mateus Luz)

Chronicles of Darkness module The Radford Estate (Ryan Wheeldon)

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary module Sleepy Hollow (Zachery Noldrett)

Demon: The Fallen Player's Guide (White Wolf)

Demon: The Fallen Storyteller's Companion (White Wolf)

Scion 2e - The Spiritual Hierarchy of the Ascended Masters (Pablo Vasquez & Cameron Hare)

Holdfast Station Quick Play (Michael Low & Maurice Poplar)

Interlock Limited (DataFortress 2.0.2.0)

Lex Arcana module The Mark of the Wolf (Quality)

How to Name A Dwarf (??)

Visitor's Guide to Dillhonker (James Edward Raggi IV)

Guide to the Mûmakan (??)

Storypath Ultra System Review (Onyx Path)

Scion 2e module The Village (Onyx Path)

Tales of the Valiant module Caverns of the Spore Lord (Kobold Press)

Cults of Ruin - Forbidden Gods and Unclean Powers (Kevin Crawford)

Solo Heroes - Lone Adventurers Against the World (Kevin Crawford)

The Pacts of the Wise - Secrets Better Unspoken (Kevin Crawford)

The Yellow Bone Legion - Soldiers of a War Long Dead (Kevin Crawford)

Hirelings Toolkit (Stephen J Grodzicki)

Clerics of the Majestic Fantasy Realms (Rob Conley)

Apocryphal Sector (Zak Smith)

Vampire: The Masquerade module Feints within Feints (Chris Larr)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! (Onyx Path)

The World Below Ashcan (Onyx Path)

At the Gates Ashcan (Onyx Path)

Scion 2e: Dragon Jumpstart - Live by the Blade (Onyx Path)

Pathfinder 1e Adventure Path - Tyrant's Grasp Player's Guide (Paizo)

Trench Crusade Playtest Rules (Factory Fortress)

Trench Crusade - Allies & Mercenaries (Factory Fortress)

Trench Crusade Campaign Rules (Factory Fortress)

Castle Zagyg - East Mark Gazetteer (Troll Lord)

Helltown (Dennis O'Neil)

Movies

Inside (2023)

The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

The House in Between (2020)

The House in Between 2 (2022)

Oppenheimer (2023)

Lord of Misrule (2023)

Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)

Poor Things (2023)

13 Ghosts (1960)

Hagazussa (2017)

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)

Talk to Me (2023)

The Watchers (2024)

Ghosts of the Ozarks (2021)

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)

Saint Maud (2019)

Ma (2019)

The Devil Below (2021)

Hold Your Breath (2024)

Salem's Lot (2024)

Starve Acre (2023)

Oddity (2024)

In Fear (2013)

The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Trap (2024)

Inner Worlds Outer Worlds (Documentary; 2012) 

TV

Survivor, Seasons 12-36

X-Men '97, Season 1

Grimsburg, Season 1

Interview with the Vampire, Season 1

Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini, Docu-Miniseries

Ragnarok, Season 3

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance, Miniseries

Comics

Solo-Leveling, Chapters 0-30

Magazines

Pyramid #3/41

Video Games

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster

If anyone has any questions, comments, or concerns about this list, I'd love to hear them. In a reversal of 2023, since I had just had my amputation at the tail end of 2023, I spent almost all my time at home the first five months. I watched A LOT of stuff, especially Survivor, because my mom wanted to watch it. We're now both kinda burnt out on that show.

A Little about the Death of the Blog (This isn't the End)

 So, all you have to do is look at the right-hand side of the blog and see that posts were pretty decent for the first few years, peaked in 2013 and then the site almost died for the 12 years since. I've made my apologies for that time and again and half-hearted promises to keep posting, but only a smattering here and there. 

The amount of activity in 2013 was always my goal and I had intentions of keeping the pace of posting up for as long as I could. My job at the time had other plans. I was working late most nights and what little time I had, I didn't want to be set at a computer, because that was most of my work time. I was still gaming heavily, I was spending free time with friends, my girlfriend, and family. I started experiencing some health issues but largely assumed it was fatigue and stress.

In 2018, I lost the job that I had banked on making my career when the company unexpectedly closed. The new job was even more stressful and in 2019, that company and I parted ways. Around this same time, I had been feeling "off" and decided to go to the doctor, which I never did before. I was diagnosed with diabetes and the physician I had at the time admittedly had little experience with diabetic patients. My initial prescriptions were a mess, and I got worse.

The job search that summer added to my stress and took up a majority of my time. I landed a manufacturing job at a small company that was looking to grow as the night supervisor. Though I held a position, I still had to do all the physical tasks with my crew, and the hours were really late. Medicine management and proper nutrition were hard to manage working those hours, and due to my condition, I developed several skin infections due to micro-abrasions and other factors.

I enjoyed that work and stayed with it until 2023, when I went on vacation and developed a blister on my foot that wouldn't heal. After a bungled period of dealing with a wound clinician that wouldn't listen to my concerns for a month, further tests showed that the infection in my foot had moved into the bone. I had surgery on my foot, and they did a bone scraping to remove what they thought was all of the infected area. I was out of work for quite some time while I went through heavy dosing of antibiotics.

The efforts were mostly fruitless, as I returned to work and was experiencing incredible pain in my foot until one morning I woke up with the top of my foot dark black. The tissue had necrotized inside around the bone, and I admitted myself to the hospital on December 23rd and 40% of the soft tissue of my foot was removed the next day by an ER surgeon. The surgeon who had performed the initial procedure on my foot came in to look at everything and I was given the choice of slowly having my foot and leg amputated piece by piece or having a below-knee amputation to clear all affected tissue and move into healthy tissues and bone. I chose the below-knee procedure because I wanted to heal and rehab and get a prosthetic so I could continue with my life. That surgery took place on December 29th, 2023.

In May of 2024, I had gotten a prosthetic and immediately started looking for a job. I landed a security guard gig and started working on paying off medical bills. The time since my amputation has been a pretty dark one. Lots of learning some lessons about limitations, lots of falls, a loss of good income, tensions building with loved ones because I withdrew, etc.

Fast-forward to today, things are looking up. I'm the site supervisor at my job now, I've gone through the stages of grief with my leg, and I accept and embrace it. I'm learning what works and doesn't for my health and about being an amputee still, and just generally in a better place.

This all to say, basically, that I've had my reasons for the fall off in the last few years. I've been working on my Khardtha setting quite a lot (more to come on that later) with the hopes of developing it into something fleshed enough for me to use almost exclusively for Pathfinder/D&D, and I'm excited to share some of that work. My philosophy for running games is ever-shifting and I still have musings on that, various systems, and other gaming-related topics to share in addition to actual play reports.

If anyone still reads this thing, is there anything that interest you that I could cover?

Finally!

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I've been locked out of the blog for a year. Posting will resume at some sort of pace, but no guarantees are made. 

Our group has wrapped up the Scion storyline, which we all finally kind of figured out in the last few sessions. It's possible we could return to that at some point, but it was a nice change of pace from our usual all-Pathfinder/D&D all the time campaigns. 

We also finished up the Pathfinder 1e adventure path, Tyrant's Grasp, having played it to its completion stretching over a year of sessions. I think everyone had fun, though Sam (our DM) seemed to be suffering crunch fatigue which is understandable in the later books of these APs. We lost some characters in the final battle, but the end of the world takes place in the denouement to make way for Pathfinder 2e.

I run my own take on the Wilderlands of High Fantasy where the highest-level characters are 6th level. They're currently on the trail of a doppelganger that tricked them into allowing it to accompany them into their hometown.

We're in the last sessions of a campaign set in my own homebrew world of Khardtha that began revolving around the megadungeon Anomalous Subsurface Environment. At the moment, they are investigating a beast cult that has subjugated a settlement in the swamp while in search of a missing paladin.

I've just started Volume III of my Defenders campaign set in a modified Eberron. This time around, we're using gestalt rules again, but one side must be D&D 3.x and the other must be Pathfinder 1e. This adds a little challenge to character creation while also opening up so much. We're currently two sessions in and the party are investigating a series of murders.

Taylor started running a Wild West-inspired Pathfinder 1e game set in his own homebrew world once Scion ended. We're currently 5th level and facing off a pack of were-coyotes in their den.

Chris is set to start an FFG/Edge Studios Star Wars campaign when my Khardtha game ends. Not much is known about that, other than we will be working with/as a Rebel Alliance cell.

Hopefully, I'll get some posts up in the next few days about the last sessions played in our current games.