Seventh Year Anniversary

The blog is another year older, and that decade is approaching a lot faster than I thought. It has been another year of amazing interactions with this community, and the start of several new series on the blog that will keep content going while I am busy with work and writing the new book. Let’s take some time to go over the blog’s past 12 months, and look ahead at what is in store for us in 2025.

First off, the game has sadly sailed into the West, with official content coming to an end after the release of the Return of the King Saga expansion. It is a shame that we won’t have more reprints or more new stuff released, as this makes it more difficult to retain players who have recently joined the game. Of course, there is the option to pay ridiculous prices for second-hand packs, but I would argue that playing digitally will be a much better way to expand your horizons beyond the reprinted sets. And of course, there are the fan-made scenarios that will continue to release new stuff to the community. AleP is starting to drop hints at their first AP of their second cycle, and LoF has nearly completed their first cycle as well. All of this will help to keep the community going, and gives me reason to continue with the blog in its current state.

I will admit that the last year has not seen output of articles on par with the years before. The reason for this is two-fold. The first, is that I have less and less time to balance work, my household, my health (mentally and physically), and the blog on top. I do still like writing for the blog, but find myself having either not enough energy at the end of the day, or not enough motivation in the weekend when I have a lot of other things to do. The second reason is that I have been working on my third book. This project started last summer and is on its way to being completed towards the end of this month. That means that the bulk of the text and the cover artwork will be done soon (a special article on the artwork will be released separately). From there, I will need people to proofread the entire thing, have all the plain text transformed to easy-to-read pages in an organized layout, and bundle it all into a single book. I have no idea how long that is going to take, but I will be updating you all on the progress.

In the meantime, we are still continuing with some series. Autumn has taken over most of the QotW articles every week, and we are approaching the end of the LOTR campaign. We really appreciate everyone who joins in the fight every week, and we have a couple of plans in scope for what to do after this campaign concludes. Speaking of the campaign, Morten has been working on the scenario analyses of the Return of the King saga expansion last year, and is now down to the final 2 scenarios before the series is concluded. We hope to bring you The Black Gate Opens and Mount Doom in 2025. A new series was also started by Carter, who has started a new progression-style campaign with a couple of twists to shake up his gameplay. You can find the new series in the Ultra-Campaign link in the top menu. All of this regular scheduled content should help to fill in the gaps with me devoting more time to the book than to regular articles. I will still be picking up a Nightmare article every now and then, but since the demand for those is so low, I’d rather spend time on more useful things.

As for the coming year, I hope to be attending Con of the Rings again. I have not made any concrete holiday plans yet, but I feel that attending every 2 years will be worth doing. Meeting up with the community there always makes for fun times, and gets me a lot more games in than I normally get at home. Unfortunately, I have other plans for the weekend that Lure of Middle Earth takes place in, so I cannot be attending there. I will hopefully make time again in 2026, and will invite everyone reading this to go to that convention as well, as it is a very different atmosphere than Con of the Rings. In between these major events, I will be playing online a little more often if my schedule allows, so check the LCG Discord server every Sunday evening for a group there and we can play together. The local Dutch/Belgian group that I am also in should also be picking back up at some point, and I’ll be able to play some physical games as well.

Goals for the blog this coming year is to at least finish the LOTR Saga and the NM Dreamchaser cycle, plus I want to release the book. The new series should also continue every week to provide a steady stream of content for the blog. Anything on top of that, is gravy, such as a new convention report on Con of the Rings or some more AleP-related articles. I hope this will make for another great year on Vision of the Palantir, and that you will tune in every time a new article releases.

I want to thank everyone for their support this past year. From my editor to my writers, both old and new, thanks for maintaining this wonderful outlet of content for the community. To everyone who visits the blog and even reads articles like this one, thanks for taking the time out of your day for my ramblings. To all other content creators out there, thank you so much for keeping the lights in the community on. I love what everyone is doing now that the official content is over. To all Patreon supporters, I want to thank you so much for the continued support this past year. Your contributions allow me to keep the blog going without additional cost to me personally. Any leftovers have been put towards the production of the new book, and I will be in touch with how you can get yours with free shipping later this year. In the meantime, you will also get access to the full-resolution cover art which should make for a wonderful playmat, and you’ll have first access to the PDF version of the book if you want to print it yourself. Thanks all, and here’s to another fantastic year on the blog!