As I mentioned in my last post, I see this time of year as a point of time for both reflection and looking ahead, as I'm sure many of you do. Looking back at my posts over the last year or so, particularly my plans for 2012, I've realised that; while my interests haven't changed as such, I actually didn't achieve anything I'd planned, other than to research and polish background fluff, and sort out organisational details etc... and then usually abandon the idea. I won't make excuses, as even with a busy schedule and other stuff, a few hours of painting, or whatever, a week, should have been achievable. My bad.
So what's in store for 2013?
Well my tastes haven't changed, so the plan is to use and expand on what I've already acquired, so in 28mm; The Wars of the Roses/Burgundian Succession Wars, the Spanish Civil War and Portugal's war in Angola are for definite. Varied adventure type gaming set around my 'World of Adventure' blog is also there, especially as we are talking about painting single figures, or small groups, as opposed to armies of figures.
Away from 28mm, things are little more obscure. My plan for gaming an imagined US invasion of Cuba in 1962, along with games set in my Imagi-Nation of Bulonga, are somewhat held up by my indecision over whether to use 20mm or 15mm for these, with good arguments for either option. I will probably succumb one way or the other at a show or something, which is more likely to be the deciding factor, rather than a reasoned and logical consideration of the pros and cons for either option.
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| Mutineer Miniatures' 20mm Christian Militia... I'm sorely tempted. |
The only new thing on the horizon, is my adding a third blog and possibly even a fourth blog, to my current crop. This might seem excessive and indeed if I was to attempt to run them like this one, this would be the case. My train of thought has always been that I've wanted to run a single blog, to act as my main one, which would carry the bulk of my posts, research, reviews, modelling and what have you.
The others would be done in a sort of narrative format, with after action reports done as 'stories' within the overall framework of the setting and keeping the whole blog 'in character' as such. I've seen this done to good effect, especially when it's interspersed with 'fluff' posts to link the games together. What generally spoils this elsewhere for me, is that the blog author then puts normal posts in between the 'story', be it semi-topical ones, or "we've got a new dog" and stuff like that.
The downside is that such blogs rely on regular games and reports to maintain interest. Like most people, I don't exclusively want to play just one period, so the regular maintenance of several blogs would be hard work. It's also not practical to maintain a separate blog for everything that you're into. These are going to be slow burners and it might be a while for anything exciting to happen on them, if indeed they are actually exciting at all.
Because of this I've tried to be practical and limit the narrative blogs to solely my 'fictional' settings, namely; Bulonga - the imaginary African country, Worlds of Adventure - which will be done like a group of serialised TV shows and thus a little more eclectic, and Lords of War - which is merely a vehicle by which I can play with disparate Medieval and Early Renaissance armies together, as opposed to separating the Wars of the Roses, the Burgundian Succession Wars and the Italian Wars into separate pigeon-holes.
There may also be a fourth blog in the offing at some point, which will likely be an Inter-War based one, but I'm still thinking about this and I've more than enough to be going on with at the moment. Other than setting them up, I'm nowhere near doing anything with the ones I've got as it is, without adding to that.
Historical and semi-historical games will be covered on this blog, there seems little point in recreating the real world, especially as you can easily find information on it that is far more thorough than anything I have the time to reproduce on here.
That pretty much covers my plans for the next year and somewhat beyond that. I just hope that I can motivate myself a bit better and I won't be sitting here in a year's time and realising I've done nothing again.
You won't be surprised to hear that I find the proposed alt history US invasion of Cuba interesting - looking forward to it. As for more blogs - a tough one.
ReplyDeleteThe Cuban invasion sounds interesting! I'll look forward to more of this.
ReplyDeleteThanks Gents! I'm somewhat gutted I didn't get round to 'Cuba' this year, being that it has been the fiftieth anniversary of the Missile Crisis and all.
ReplyDeleteAs for more blogs, I've thought long and hard over it and had a look round to see what other folk are doing, The common mistake seems to be trying to do the same thing across each blog, which is a hell of a lot of effort. The other is trying to constantly drive up the numbers of followers and views, by numerous and frequent posts.
I see these other blogs as adjuncts to this one. There's some time and effort required to set them up initially, but after that, no more than is required to create a page and posts on here. The difference is being able to 'theme' a separate blog to what it's about and being able to promote it on this one, by use of an additional blog list, which updates itself.
Added to which is the fact that my primary audience is me in any case... :-D