The End (Of 2024)

The Traditional End of the Arbitrary Calendar Year Roundup

At the end of each year, I look back on my blog post about the end of the previous year and see what I hoped would come to pass in the future… and most of the time it’s me saying “Next year, things are gonna happen, and it’ll be great!”. (Narrator: “It wasn’t.”)

This year, I look back on last year's “end of the year” post which I wrote on Christmas Eve 2023, and see I was (as usual) disappointed with the way the year had turned out. 2023 wasn’t bad, but I was hoping for bigger and better things in 2024.

Of course, that didn’t happen either. 2024 sucked. I felt like a miserable hamster on a wheel, going around and around and not actually getting anywhere. Just when I got some speed up and thought, ‘you know, this is actually okay!’ then something came along and tripped me up so I fell onto my face, smashing my stupid grin into a bloody mess.

It’d be great to get that project off the ground

Nope, didn’t happen.

At least nothing bad happened

Bad things did happen. Far too many funerals this year.

TV & Movies

The one thing I talked about at the end of last year that I actually DID do was keep track of all the stuff I watch during the year. So, with that in mind, let’s look at what held my interest throughout the year.

January: 

Top Watch: Star Trek Prodigy (Season 1) - went in with very low expectations only to discover that it was brilliant. Great crew, great animation, intelligent story that didn’t talk down to its target audience. Phenomenal. 

Honourable Mentions: Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Lupin (Part 3)

February:

Top Watch: The Creator - blimey, that was epic wasn’t it? Original, cool, and amazing special effects. It felt like it was part of the same universe as Blade Runner, and watching that while playing the Blade Runner RPG just made it even cooler. 

Honourable Mentions: True Detective (Season 4), A Shop for Killers (Season 1)

March:

Top Watch: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 1) - c’mon, let’s face it. While I enjoyed Star Trek Discovery, my favourite part of all of the seasons was the introduction of Captain Pike and the Enterprise. So, getting their own series was perfect. Great cast again, really great Trek stories. Loved it. 

Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 4), Will Trent (Season 1)

April:

Top Watch: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - first time back in the cinema since the last of the Star Wars movies, and it was a perfect birthday treat. Love the characters, especially the new generation, and it punched me in the nostalgia feels all the way through. Not as emotional as Afterlife, but still great. 

Honourable Mentions: Three Body Problem (Season 1), Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Season 4)

May:

Top Watch: Sugar (Season 1) - I like me some weird stuff. Colin Farrell, before his amazing transformation in The Penguin, is a cool noir detective with a love of classic cinema, investigating weirdness in Hollywood. I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but it has a couple of seriously good twists. 

Honourable Mentions: Destined with You (which would have ranked higher but there’s a scene with an octopus that’s unpleasant), Star Trek: Discovery (Season 5) 

June:

Top Watch: Dark Matter (Season 1) - Once again, I like me some weird. This was good, maybe a little too long, but in a world of stories where the ‘multiverse’ is the ‘in thing’ this was pretty darn good. Apple really knocking it out of the park with their series (I mean, the Monarch TV series is easily the best of the Monsterverse media, and don’t get me started on how amazing Severance and Slow Horses is). 

Honourable Mentions: Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Enemy (Denis Villeneuve)

July:

Top Watch: Shogun (Season 1) - Stunning. Brilliant acting again, visually stunning, and I can’t really fault it. My memories of watching the old Richard Chamberlain one in my youth with my dad may have surfaced a couple of times, but really good. 

Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Prodigy (Season 2), A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Season 1)

August:

Top Watch: Travelers (Season 3) - Started watching this for an RPG that didn’t quite work, but the series itself is stunning. Genuinely heartbreaking, moving, and smart sci-fi and a great take on the ‘coming back from the future to save the world’ plot line.

Honourable Mentions: No One Will Save You, Travelers (Season 2).

September:

Top Watch: Ludwig (Season 1) - I really love murder mysteries and police procedurals, so this quirky little series was a complete delight. And some great acting in here too. Really clever use of the obsessive consideration of detail being used to solve murders. Highly recommended.

Honourable Mentions: The Batman (movie), Will Trent (Season 2)

October: 

Top Watch: The Devil’s Hour (Season 1 and 2) - Watched a lot in October, I don’t know why, but the standout was The Devil’s Hour. Really original ‘time travel’ series (and I use the term in quotes as it’s not really about time travel, it’s time loops). Capaldi on top form, but Jessica Raine was amazing in this. Season 2 builds upon the genius, though not as amazing as season 1. Really intrigued to see where it goes from here.

Honourable Mentions: The Black Phone, Ouija: Origin of Evil

November:

Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 1, 2, and 3) - Late to the party, but I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about, and it was well worth it. Great and interesting characters (Amos kinda stole it for me), and the realistic interpretation of ‘space physics’ was really cool. I could so easily see how this was created as an RPG setting before it became books, and a TV series. Can’t believe it took me so long to get around to watching this.

Honourable Mentions: Arcane (Season 2) - so good, so very good, Fargo (Season 5)

December:

Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 4, 5, and 6) - I watched a LOT in December, and while seasons 5 and 6 were not as cool, The Expanse was better than a lot of the nonsense I watched this month. Frustrated that we haven’t had the rest of the series to complete the books’ story.

Honourable Mentions: Squid Game (Season 2), Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Gaming

I know most of the people who follow this blog and Substack are here because I write tabletop RPGs, so Gaming needs to be mentioned. This year I continued the long-running D&D game with my old gaming group from 40 years ago, as well as my other group finishing off the epic Aegean game we’d been playing, shifting the setting from Ancient Greece to Mythic Vikings. We did some more Blade Runner RPG, tried our hands at FATE for the first time, and have returned to Aegean in a whole new setting.

Next year, I’m hoping we get to try Deathmatch Island, Mothership, Slugblaster, and a few other games that are brewing in the background. 

In May I went to UK Games Expo, which was MASSIVE and exhausting, but great fun. Met loads of publishers and people I knew, and was kinda overwhelmed by how huge it is. I’m really hoping to do the full three days for UKGE 2025. 

There was the second Norwich Gaming Convention, which was cool if strangely laid out - but that wasn’t the convention organiser’s fault. The location used before was under repair so it was held in a temporary home in the University of the Arts in various parts of the campus and nearby buildings. It’s certainly growing and should only go from strength to strength.

In September was Tabletop Scotland which was our first time attending, and I helped on the stall with Stoo and the We_Evolve games, and had part of the table for my wife’s Etsy business of cool gothy wares from Misery Makes. It was cool, huge, slightly damp and very foggy, but good. Didn’t make any money after the expense of going to Scotland, but the trip was great fun, and got to see lots of cool people.

And in November it was Dragonmeet, which again was great and exhausting. 

Gaming Experience of the Year?

Mothership. Which is weird, because I haven’t played it. Stoo bought a copy at Tabletop Scotland after we watched a review on Quinn’s Quest, and after thumbing through the various books in the basic set my mind was racing with ideas. I’ve always loved the ‘small book’ format and wanted to bring back the feel of Traveller, and Mothership really scratched that itch and beat me to it. It’s not so much the subject matter, but more the execution. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week and ideas and plans were hastily jotted down…

One day I’ll get around to doing something with them…

Other Media

Finally, just a quick look at some of the other media I’ve been absorbing. I read some books, as always not as many as I’d have liked - I’m a terribly slow reader, I like to try to absorb it, and I often get distracted and start something else. Just my brain at the moment I guess. I read the new X-Files book, Perihelion - which was good, and great to see what happens after the 11th season. Had some issues with the ‘Charles Xavier School for alien hybrids’, but I hope there’s another one coming. I read the X-Files Origins books (though I’ve not quite finished Devil’s Advocate) which are pretty cool. 

I started Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword and then got distracted by having to read something for work - speaking of which, I did the first seven Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross over the last year, which were cool. I must get back to The Bright Sword, but Debs bought me I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom by Jason Pargin, so maybe after that. It did remind me that I haven’t read the latest in his “John and Dave” series…. I also read Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, which was great, gripping, and genuinely terrifying, but not the happiest of reads. 

Music-wise, I’ve been mostly listening to the usual Nine Inch Nails music as always, along with some metal like Bring Me The Horizon, Falling in Reverse, Ice Nine Kills and the new Poppy album. However, real discovery for me this year has been Night Club. 

I’d not heard of them before, but this electronica duo are the perfect, dark, synthwave, retro-80s cool that I needed right now, and it has been on constant loop for weeks.

—

And that’s it. What a crappy year. Let’s hope 2025 is better. What do I want to get out of the coming year? That’s easy… CHANGE. A change in what’s going on, what I’m doing, everything… I’d post that video of The Stranglers singing “Something Better Change” but I do that every year and yet everything stays the same. 

May you have a brilliant new year, and all the very best for the future. 

My Nerdy Life in 100 Geeky Objects - #2 - Super Spider-Man and the Titans

#2: Super Spider-Man and the Titans, Issue 203 (1976) 

When I mentioned last time (for object #1, the Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit) that my parents were ‘enablers’ of my nerdy life, I’d almost forgotten an even earlier moment. 

Set the wayback machine to the mid-1970s. Living in my favourite home in my small coastal town with my parents, I was about 7 years old and one Saturday morning my went with my dad to the local newsagents (one that is still there today!). I have a strange memory that the shopkeeper was someone called Mr. Jenner, and it was at this newsagents that my dad had a couple of standing orders. One for a morning paper - the typical tabloid that was full of cheap headlines, and one for an evening regional newspaper. 

While there, I think dad was there to pay the monthly bill for the papers, and he said to me that I was allowed one weekly comic. We’d put it on the order, and it’d get delivered on Saturday with the morning paper. I had a look at the comics on offer, most of them were war titles or traditional British action comics. But one really stood out. It was the wrong way up, but had a bright cover with Spider-Man on the front. I’d heard about Spider-Man from when my grandfather had visited (with his wife - who preferred to go by ‘Aunt’ and their son who told me about Spider-Man - he was only a couple of years older than me). 

So Spider-Man was the obvious choice. 

In the UK, this comic was “Super Spider-Man and the Titans”. A cool landscape format comic that reproduced the US comics in black and white, two pages of the original comic per page. It meant that when you opened the comic, you got four pages in a spread, and they could reprint loads of storylines in each issue. 

It wasn’t just Spider-Man in each issue. It included Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Doctor Strange. I loved every darn issue of it. It was amazing. When Marvel decided to print their Essentials range - huge phonebook collections of the old comics in black and white - I had to get the Spider-Man ones, as they were how I remember them. And the black and white artwork was awesome. 

It was where my love of Marvel started. It was just as things were getting really serious, and when they (spoilers) killed Gwen Stacey, I was shocked! 

I even got to see the Spider-Man cartoon when we went to stay with my granddad in East London (the TV regions ‘up north’ didn’t show it). Just the one episode though, while I was visiting, I remember it had Rhino in it. 

My love of this comic continued until, in a truly fickle way that kids are, something new came along. My dad stuck to his ‘one comic per week’ rule, and TV was becoming more interesting to me and I changed to reading Look-In - that strange British hybrid of comic and TV guide. But I soon learned that something bigger and better was out there. I was a week late, but starting with issue 2, I switched over to the powerhouse that was 2000AD… but that’s another story.

Watching X-Files with no lights on

 One Week...

...to Dragonmeet that is!

Just a quick post this time, don’t worry. This time next week it’ll be Dragonmeet, the UK’s second largest tabletop convention and it’ll be the first one I’ve been to since the pandemic. 

Dragonmeet was always one of those cool conventions where I get to chat with loads of really cool creators and publishers. See what amazing new games have been released. And also wish I had more cash to buy all those cool games… 

I won’t be on a table. 

I did that once before for Cubicle 7, signing copies of Doctor Who… well, signing one copy of Doctor Who… everybody else was rightly there to get their Lone Wolf RPGs and books signed by Joe Dever. I also manned a table at GenCon UK (remember those?) for Eden Studios back in the dim and distant past. Ah, those were the days. 

No, I’ll just be wandering around, looking a little overwhelmed as usual. If you see me, come and say hello. I’ll be wearing the same suit/tie combo as my new tarot-style business cards. Happy to chat about anything.

I’m particularly excited this year to be taking my lovely wife with me. It’s her first Dragonmeet, and it’ll be good to have moral support while I’m looking a bit lost. We’ll also be taking one of the players from our regular game group (hey, Fred) and meeting up with Stoo, our usual GM, who printed and published WILD for me all those years ago. Should be fun. 

Hopefully see you there!

-

In other news, Will Brooks, who did the awesome covers for the Doctor Who RPG books for all of the second edition publications, has teamed up with Alex and Nick to produce a new podcast talking about Doctor Who. They’re watching every episode, and releasing podcasts as they go through. First one is up today on Spotify and Youtube, hopefully reaching other streamers soon. 

I’ll be listening to that while I do the cooking tonight!

-

Until next time, enjoy having that song stuck in your head. (I hope the Smoking Man’s in this one…)

My Nerdy Life in 100 Geeky Objects #1

Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit (1977)

When thinking about geeky objects that made an impression on me, I struggled to think of what could be the moment that I became a geek.

1977 was definitely the year the world changed for me. So much happened, but the first instance of true geekdom involved James Bond.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my parents had nerd tendencies. Maybe the term should be geek-adjacent. Nerd enablers.

“That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Enabler?”

My mum introduced me to Doctor Who, as she was a fan of Jon Pertwee from his comedies, but she also had a complete collection of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels - a collection I still have now. She was always an enthusiastic reader, and had a complete Agatha Christie collection too (kinda wish I still had that).

My dad could be just as enthusiastic when it came to some fandoms, but it wasn’t quite so obvious. It just crept to the surface when he got really invested, something that would be most evident in the hunt for a Darth Vader helmet in the following year or two.

However, they both were supportive, and liked introducing me to cool things. Many of which will appear on this list. From the comics that were subscribed to at the local newsagents that introduced me to the worlds of Spider-Man, Captain America, and Doctor Strange, to the beginning of a lifetime obsession with Star Wars.

Bonding with my Parents

My parents liked movies and TV. I guess that’s where I got it from. I have distinct memories of being taken to the cinema as a child. My earliest memory of this was being taken to see The Three Musketeers, the 1973 Richard Lester movie that starred Michael York and Oliver Reed. It was good swashbuckling fun, but I must have only been about six years old so it didn’t really have much of an impact on me.

The next cinema trip was The Man With the Golden Gun. It came out around Christmas 1974, so I must have seen it in 1975 towards the end of its run. Cinema trips were always a big deal and usually on quieter days for the movies. My mother was paralysed from the waist down by polio as a child, so moving around wasn’t easy, but thanks to metal callipers she could walk about. Add to this that the local cinema was fifteen miles away in the city, a place my dad didn’t really enjoy driving, you realise that the movie had to be something really special for them to venture out to the cinema.

I remember sitting on the back seat of the car, a big estate car so that it could carry my mother’s wheelchair, and asking my dad where we were going. My dad had a wicked sense of humour, and for the whole journey (what seemed like forever, but was actually only about 45 minutes) he insisted that we were going to see Gary Glitter. A joke that has aged particularly badly looking back on it now…

We entered the cinema - I was still confused as to what we were going to see - and my mum had to make her way up the many stairs to the screen itself. (Something that would put a pause in her cinema attendance in years to come, until cinemas became more wheelchair friendly). And, then, on came The Man With The Golden Gun. My mum was suitably enthralled - not only did she love James Bond movies and books, but it also starred Christopher Lee, and she was also a big fan of his Hammer movies.

I was hooked from that opening sequence in the funhouse arena Scaramanga had created. Of course, I’d not seen a Bond film before, so had no idea of the relevance of the dummy at the end of that sequence, but I soon caught up. It was great, and we discussed our favourite parts on the way home in the car. Of course, at this time I must have been about seven years old, so I just liked the car chases, the action, and the gadgets. A lot of the plot was lost on me, but it was great.

Cars & Gadgets

As I mentioned at the start, the real revelation of both mine and my parents’ geekdom really comes in 1977. We had another cinema trip between to see Disney’s The Rescuers, but it was probably late 1977 when the next James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, became quiet enough at the cinema to warrant a trip to the movies.

I was older and wiser, and knew a bit more about Bond by then. My mother had told me all about the books, telling me stories about how the plan was to kill Bond off at the end of the first book (something I believed for years - I don’t know if this is true), and letting me watch Bond movies on TV. After all, they were (and on some channels still are) the traditional bank holiday movie on TV.

The Spy Who Loved Me was more over the top, more guns, gadgets, girls, and introduced Jaws, the legendary Bond villain with the steel teeth. However, the standout moment in the movie was the introduction of Bond’s new car, the Lotus Esprit. It was cool, white, and best of all, could turn into a submarine when necessary.

It was so darn cool. I could see my dad’s eyes light up at the moment it dove off of the pier and the fins came out. And that’s when the hunt began…

Still from The Spy Who Loved Me, with the Lotus diving into the water

We left the cinema and dad got it into his head that we needed to buy the Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit right there and then. Dad always had a thing for toy cars, collecting vintage cars and even those partwork James Bond cars right up until he died. We tried shop after shop in the city, but alas, no sign. We started the journey home, even stopping at a couple of tiny independent toy shops on the way, but still nothing.

Dad tried a few more shops over the next couple of weeks, eventually coming to the conclusion that we’d missed the opportunity and they’d sold out everywhere. He came home one day from work with the Corgi Stromberg Jet Ranger helicopter, like the one piloted by Caroline Munro in the scene, but I could tell dad was a little disappointed.

Corgi Stromberg Jet Ranger - image from 007Magazine.co.uk

Swapsies

Remember the old days of being at school and swapping stuff? Trading cards, stickers, even toys. I remember a friend of mine called Darren had the Lotus Esprit, and he’d already become bored of it, and offered to swap it for something of mine. I honestly can’t remember what I swapped. I do remember he was slightly obsessed with the “Little Big Man” I had, Palitoy’s miniature version of Action Man… it may have been that. Anyway, swap done, I took the incredibly battered and bashed up Lotus home and my parents were suitably confused and slightly concerned.

I do remember there was a phone call, and Darren’s mother came around with him, and we told both of our respective parents that neither of us had stolen anything off of the other, it was a swap, we were both happy with the arrangement.

Of course, dad wasn’t happy with that. The Lotus I’d gained was very beaten up. No box, some of the missiles were missing, and the fins had a tendency to pop out when you least expected it.

The Hunt Is Over

Finally, many, many month later, long after the movie finished its run in the cinema, dad managed to get a pristine and new Lotus Esprit from one of our local stores.

Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit - image from 007magazine.co.uk

Thus ends the story of the first of the 100 Geeky Objects that really define my sad, little, nerdy life. It’s strange, but I loved that car, loved that movie, but the enthusiasm my dad showed trying to find it made it more special and certainly more memorable. I think I still have it somewhere, though the missiles are long since lost, and while it has the box, I don’t think the inner cardboard with the submarine printed on it, or the black plastic clips that kept it in place have survived. And I don’t think the little 007 sticker on the bonnet survived either. In my pre-teen head I probably wondered why a spy would advertise their presence on their own car.

If you want to keep up to date with the other objects, be sure to subscribe to my Substack (there will be other things on there as well, don’t worry).

You Can't Take The Sky From Me

At least, we can hope! I thought I should do a new, almost introductory, post on the Blog as there are a load of people migrating from what we affectionately call 'The Hellsite' over to its logical replacement - Bluesky. 

I'm David F Chapman, but you can find me online on most platforms under the name AUTOCRATIK. I'm a game designer/writer (having worked on Conspiracy X 2.0, Buffy, Star Trek Adventures, and designing the Doctor Who RPG for Cubicle 7, as well as my own game of dreamshare technology called WILD). I've talked about them loads, and you can see all the books I've worked on in my "About Me" page - just click the link at the top.

But what's on this blog? Why look?

Most of the time on here I talk about games and what I'm working on at the moment - at least as much as my NDAs will allow. If it's not bound by contracts and stuff, it'll be on here.

I also talk about movies and TV shows - I'm such a massive nerd that I do get a bit carried away with cool media. I used to write reviews and do previews/interviews at press things for various online blogs, and went to press conferences in the heyday of Marvel, when Avengers was just about to come out, through to Guardians of the Galaxy... (after that, the invites kinda dried up. I guess when the movies are that huge, you don't need to drum up interest!)

But I love all that stuff. I love Marvel movies, Star Wars, Star Trek, cool genre shows, and I'm still absolutely obsessed with The X-Files and Twin Peaks. So be warned, there is likely to be a lot of that sort of stuff being discussed here. (I'm actually watching The X-Files again as I'm typing this... season nine at the moment in my current rewatch).

My love for genre movies and TV is probably why I'm such a massive fan of licensed games. Always have been. When I started tabletop roleplaying, the first game I played was Traveller, but I really just wanted to play Star Wars (which was why Star Frontiers was the first game I bought). My favourite RPGs as a teen were the West End Games Star Wars and Ghostbusters games. There's just something about getting to play around in the worlds that I love...

I hope, one day, to merge my obsessions once more. 

There we go. I thought I'd pop something a bit more positive at the top of my blog for a bit - especially as there were possibly some newbies taking a look to see what I do. 

Stay safe and stay multi-classy!!

Not Content with just Content

I listened to a rather enlightening theory recently known as the “Dead Internet Theory”. In it, it discusses the fact that the ‘content’ we put online, is lost in a sea of replicated and AI generated crap, designed to tick boxes that are read by other bots and AI routines. It speculates that over half of the users and activity on the internet these days is automatically created or tailored nonsense designed to appease algorithms to get it promoted. That means less than half of the world’s users of the internet are actually people.

What does that mean for artists and creators? 

It’s a dangerous time indeed. If you’re a writer, artist, blogger, journalist, game designer, film maker, etc. you can put your heart and soul into something and put it online only for it to be lost in a sea of generated crap just because you did something different and didn’t appease the algorithmic gods.

It’s like this post. This post is about creativity and writing. But if I don’t add an image, it’s not going to get seen. So I add an image.

Me, when I worked for the council’s archaeology department as an on-site illustrator (circa 1988-89)

By adding an image, even though what I’m writing doesn’t need it, I’m appeasing the algorithm. Sooner or later, we’ll all be doing it. You write a post and it doesn’t get as much engagement as another post, and so you start customising what you’re writing just to get more views. Just so you get noticed in the sea of content that’s out there.

It’s like the TV series “Dead Pixels” when Nicky is just making the spooning action just shovelling ‘content’ into his face. We’re surrounded by so much content at the moment that it’s hard to get anything noticed without appeasing the algorithmic gods. 

A feature on BBC news today interviewed a Michael Fortin about the state of Hollywood and how streaming has impacted film and television, and it’s just the same - there’s simply so much ‘content’ out there, the big producers are struggling to get their products seen. So they assume it’s no good, cancel it, and try something else. Or remake something that was successful before. 

And that could be my problem. There’s just too much to see, too much to read, and algorithms are hiding half of it.

Tabletop Scotland didn't help - wandering around the halls and looking at the hundreds of cool games on display and I just felt "why am I bothering? No one's going to see anything I make with all these cool games out there". 

What's the solution?

You Do It To Yourself, You Do...

To paraphrase Radiohead, going back to my earlier post about where the name "Autocratik" comes from, the only solution I can see is to do what other creators have done. Do what you want, and don't give a monkey's. 

North of the Borderlands

 Last weekend we ventured north, stayed with friends, and experienced the wonders of Tabletop Scotland.

It has been a while since I’ve crossed the border into Scotland. As a kid, my parents loved Scotland, and one of my happiest memories of my entire childhood was a quiet little self-catering cottage in the middle of a forest in the Borders. I hadn’t been to Scotland for over twenty years, but Stoo from we-evolve invited us to join their table at Scotland’s largest tabletop gaming convention, so that I could help sell copies of WILD, and Debs could sell her Goth-gaming wares from Misery Makes. 

Scotland was just as beautiful as I remembered it. Crossing the border on the train all you could see were green fields, epic hills, sheep, and dry-stone walling. It was the highlight of the 8 1/2 hour train journey that was (on the whole) exhausting. 

We stayed at Stoo’s, his awesome partner Rhi (author of the awesome Action Potential, and A Show of Hands, as well as a host of mini games) driving us and the piles of stock to and from the convention every day. (Thank you both for your amazing hospitality). 

Friday, we set up for the ‘half day’ of trading. We got used to the layout, checked out the other stalls, and managed to sell a few things. I saw a handful of things I liked, but resisted the urge to purchase - it was Friday after all. There were two more days of this ahead of us.

I did, however, find the most amazing dice in the world. I instantly fell in love with these dice, and pondered spending monies on them…

I mean, look at them. They are amazing. So beautiful. And readable too!! Especially important at my ancient age. Unfortunately, by midday on Saturday, they had sold, and my hopes were dashed. One day, I’ll find them again, and I won’t be so slow to snap them up… (I found them on a great stand called Trayed and Tested - I’ll be keeping an eye on that Etsy to see if they return)

Saturday was busy. Very busy. As you’d expect! I got to meet face to face with a couple of my work colleagues (and former colleagues) and a few regular convention faces from other publishers - but as with most of these conventions, everyone is so busy I don’t want to bother them with gossip about the gaming industry. 

Sunday, however, was like a veritable ghost-town for the first half of the day. I think everyone was either gaming, or sleeping off the late night gaming from the night before. I mean, look at how busy the aisle we were on was at 12:30pm…

Weird, huh?

Anyway, it picked up in the afternoon, and before you know it, it was all over. I thought about popping up to the gaming floor upstairs where a game of Doctor Who was being played on Sunday afternoon. Y’know, just to say “Hi, I wrote that!” but I thought it may be a bit weird. If you were in that Doctor Who game, let me know how it went.

Ho well… we just about covered our costs, so it wasn’t a complete wash-out, but it was certainly exhausting and before long we were back on another 8 1/2 hour train journey home. 

All I want is some good with my bad…

While the sales were a little disappointing, it was worth going. There were certainly a couple of highlights, and I’m not just talking about getting to chill with some awesome cats…

In addition to getting to stay with some great friends (and their lovely cats), there were a few other good takeaways from the weekend. 

I bought Debs a copy of Be Like A Cat from the fab people at Critical Kit, along with the super-cute dice with little paw prints as pips. 

Debs, in return, bought me an amazing tie with dice on from the lovely people at Witch Hunt Tabletop Treasures. 

Everyone at the stands were especially lovely, and there was some awesome stuff on display. From super-expensive top of the line gaming tables to low price zines. In fact, speaking of zines, Stoo bought a copy of the Mothership boxed set which was an inspiration to us all. 

I mean, I’ve been ranting about how I wanted to do an RPG about the size of those classic Traveller RPG books from the late 70s, and here comes an RPG which does exactly that. In a cute box with loads of cool stuff…

It set the brain whirring while sitting on that stand. Many notes were made… 

Many. Notes. 

Anyway, I thought our stand looked fab, and Debs put a heck of a lot of work into all that stock. 

Next stop, Dragonmeet. While we won’t have a stand there, I think I’ve convinced Debs to come to Dragonmeet this year to experience the UK’s second largest gaming convention - at least it’s only a couple of hours on the train…

Maybe we’ll see you there.

Stay Multi-classy!!