Month in Review: October 2023

It has been a hot minute since I last did one of these overview articles. I took a break in August, and when the end of September rolled around, I was busy playing games at Con of the Rings. So I will recap a bit of the past three months in this article, and look ahead to the end of the year for what the blog has in store for you all.

October

In the past three months, we did get a new release by FFG. Nothing to be super excited about as a veteran player, as it was the revised version of the Two Towers Saga box. If you own the two expansions covering that part in the books, you don’t need to buy the new version. AleP also released a new POD quest on the Siege of Erebor. This is a revised version of an old project by Seastan that I love seeing brought back. I always thought that the battle at Erebor was forgotten amidst the other things that happened around the same time. With those releases, we can be satisfied for a while and continue playing.

Scenario analyses

Since August, we have seen the continuation of the Saga analyses with the Passing of the Grey Company. That means we are officially further with our analyses than FFG got with their Nightmare content! We will continue to cover this section of the game, but please be patient, as real life is catching up on the author, so it might be a while until the next one. In the meantime, I have taken it upon myself to cover the Siege of Erebor POD inbetween some Nightmare articles. I hope to release the article next month, which will be the first ever AleP article. Since it is a POD, I think it is much more approachable than the Oaths of the Rohirrim cycle. Hopefully this will spark an interest in some people to start covering that cycle.

Nightmare analyses

I have completed the Lost Realm Nightmare pack in the past three months. It is a start to the Angmar Awakened cycle, which I hope to continue towards the end of the year. I do need some breaks from the Nightmare content every now and then, so I hope to keep the pace of 1 per month. Other NM articles are not in the pipeline at the moment, but I will welcome anyone to send me a message if they are interested in writing on some quests.

Additional articles

I have released a bunch of convention themed articles in the past 3 months, leading up to the summary of Con of the Rings 2023. It was a fantastic time and I hope that the article is going to convince more people into attending the convention next year. I have also done a broader article on preparing for conventions, which I hope will come in useful for people going to Lure or a local convention. There was also a request for an article on alt art cards. I think that was a wonderful suggestion, so I did an article on that as well. Having received more alt arts at the convention, I feel that this article is quite relevant!

The Future

A lot has happened in the past three months personally. I have gotten a better grip on my fatigue thanks to new hormone treatments that have been catching on well. I’m now no longer too tired for anything at the end of the week, though work has certainly tried to drain my stamina lately. Hopefully I continue to improve leading up to my next CT-scan in December. But all this extra energy has allowed me to travel to Con of the Rings without too much concern, for which I am thankful.

Another major life-event happened this October, where I bought my first house! I’ve been renting up till now, but will be moving into my own place at the start of the new year. This will be amazing, as I will leave the cramped studio behind and have additional rooms that I can use for hosting games at. This will impact the blog’s productivity in December and January, but I hope to build up enough articles in the backlog to be able to fill those months a bit. This is made a bit more difficult by work blocking the blog on my company laptop, so I will be constrained to writing in the evenings or weekends, when I would prefer not to be staring at a screen. I suppose it cannot be helped, but it might reduce productivity a bit for me. Nevertheless, there are plenty of topics left to be covered, so I’ll try and maintain a steady stream of content leading up to the new year.

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~