Gundobad Games is ... five years old!

Wow! This blog turns five years old today. 

On April 10, 2019, I released an introductory post and then, the same day, a discussion titled "If Only We'd Never Taken that Treasure: Some Musings on Archaeology and the OSR." I'm very grateful to you all for reading, responding to, and supporting the blog.  

Looking back over some personal highlights from the half-decade:

+ I offered a number of posts mashing up academic historical insights with gaming: for example, these have included entries about the late Bronze Age, patterns of societal collapse across history, the logic of feudalism, or a mini-series on why Merovingian Frankish Gaul would make an excellent basis for a fantasy sandbox campaign. 

+ I reviewed a number of game systems, adventures, and accessories. In my reviews, I strive to offer robust, thorough insight into the product under discussion, and to be as constructive as possible while always offering an honest and fair appraisal. I'm particularly pleased that I could help offer early publicity for some notable small-press items, including the now-famed adventure Black Wyrm of Brandonsford and the skirmish wargame Space Weirdos. 

+ I wrote some stuff to sell that I am proud of. Most prominent has been Brazen Backgrounds, my system-neutral character-background generator for Bronze Age (or other sword-and-sorcery) settings. Less polished-looking but still fun is my Hunters and Highwaymen: 30 NPCs + Story Hooks for Taverns, Highways, and the Deep, Dark Woods (affiliate link). I also wrote up a cooperative blackpowder skirmish game that I really love, though I've never got around to marketing it. This thing has been such a hoot that it has grown quietly in the background, providing the basis for our household's preferred way to run Mordheim-like games and, now, 40k science-fantasy skirmishes - we're currently several games into a little narrative campaign using this system for violence in a grimdark galactic future. 

+ I also wrote a bunch of other weird things and gave them away or described them here. These have included an ultralight, ultrafast, high-powered ruleset inspired by Tunnels & Trolls (but much faster); a set of playbooks for Apocalypse World-style PbtA gaming, but in a Dark Sun-inspired sword-and-sorcery setting; and yet another Knave hack. I offered some pithy (well, ok, not always) house-rules and tweaks for improving gaming, especially in the OSR sphere: my simple procedure for identifying found magic items without nerfing cursed objects or slowing down the game too much; a system for making it interesting to open secret doors in dungeons that lets GMs get away with showing the whole map to the players; thoughts on fun and simple mass combat rules; a semi-narrative overland travel system that we used to good effect for Night's Dark Terror and Isle of Dread; and a method for making historically coherent campaign-lore backgrounds and maps, without spending half your life working on a novel. This checklist for infrastructure in a faction's lair has seemed helpful, too. 

+ I offered detailed post-mortems on several campaigns, including B10, Night's Dark Terror, a highly modified, Iron Age, Isle of Dread-crawl, and others. I also experimented with running mystery-investigation adventures without a GM or a pre-set plot, whether solo or cooperatively -- and was surprised at how well it all worked out! Some of the ideas I was working on back in 2020 are now appearing (only by coincidence and independent evolution, I believe) in well-known storygames. 

+ As a wargamer, a modeler (but not a model...oh no), and a doodler, I indulged my creative hobby side with strange Warhammer kitbashes and scratchbuilds, fan art, big setting maps, etc. 

So. The blog is now 0.5% of a millennium old. To those who've been along for the full ride, thank you for being part of the journey. To those who've found me more recently and stuck around, thank you for your interest and engagement, which always encourages me to stick with it too. 

Happy gaming, everyone.