As 2020 draws to a close, I want to spend a few minutes looking back, and then a few minutes looking forward.
Year in Review (in brief)
COVID, Lockdown, and New Games
Back in March, governments around the world imposed lockdown conditions in response to COVID-19. This put the two games I was running at a local game store on hiatus, leading a few of my players to push me to start a game on Roll20 and Discord.
After a quick tutorial on how to use Roll20, we played our first game at the end of March. Realizing how much D&D was helping people to cope with isolation, a number of other games soon followed.
Launch of mightythunderbeard.com
In response to numerous requests from no one at all, I decided to launch my own site back in the summer. The site was originally intended to provide database-type information to players and DMs, along with access to new homebrew content, but with the other work I had going on, it turned into more of an article driven blog site.
Extra Life Charity Game
Thanks to one of my players inviting me to join her Extra Life fundraiser, I got to run a D&D game for about 6 hours on Twitch as part of her gaming marathon. This was a highlight for me, and has gone a long way towards causing me to branch out more.
Live games on Twitch
Somewhat more recently, I’ve begun live-streaming a few of my games, and a few other weekly events as well. It’s been slow but overall, things have been encouraging.
What’s to come (I hope!)
Games, Old and New
With new lockdown measures currently in place where I live, one of my games will be shelved until gameplay can resume in person, hopefully by the end of the month. My other games will continue, albeit over Discord. I have a few people waiting to get in on games, I’m going to see what I can do to accommodate them. My (not-so-very) secret goal is to begin doing a lot more homebrew stuff as part of gaming sessions (time permitting).
More Content
The website will continue, and hopefully, with your help, it will continue to grow its audience as well. But that’s just a small part of what I’m hoping to do.
New Published Campaigns and Modules
From settings to NPCs, creatures, storylines, quests and more, I’m hoping to take a lot of jotted down notes and turn them into content for everyone to enjoy.
Some of this will be free access, while some will be available for purchase or as fundraiser donation incentives.
New Fundraisers
As many of you are already aware, there are plans for a 24 hour marathon game for sometime in the early months of 2021. There’s no date for this as of yet, but I’m hoping before the end of March. If it’s successful, more marathons may follow.
Extra life will be a target again this year, and other causes have been brought to my attention, and I am certainly interested in gaming to raise funds and awareness of various causes.
More Video Content
This one will take some of the most effort, but I’m hoping it will be worthwhile for everyone. In addition to Twitch streams, Youtube and some other platforms are goals as well. The groundwork for this has been set up, it’s a matter of time and energy to make it happen.
The End Goal?
Ultimately, what I’m aiming at is to provide fun and enrichment for as many people as I can. These are difficult times, and for many people, lonely and depressing times as well. D&D is a great tool for many things, bu it’s also a great form of entertainment as well, and hopefully, together we can help each other to make it through together.
Beyond the era of COVID? I’m hoping that we can make new friends, new memories, new adventures, and new laughs together.
I hope that you’ll help me in that.
You can support my efforts in a number of ways, the simplest is to sign up for email updates, read and share posts, and check out my content wherever you can find it.
Thanks for a great year guys! Next year will be even better!