A Fresh Year Ludic and Strong Arises

I was halfway through the obligatory 2013 in review post when I realized that those kinds of posts bore to me to tears.

Suffice it to say that 2013 was the Year of Retrenchment here in the Hill Cantons in which posting slacked off to relatively low standards and focus turned away from the broad based explorations of hobby history and theory back more to being a clearinghouse for all the various half-baked campaigns, mini-campaigns and other assorted vehicles for things I am actually playing.

Where is the blog headed in the Year of the Horse?

Who the hell knows, though I suspect it will see something like a balance between the old focus/posting schedule and the new/old one with perhaps a revival of the interview series, content posts (ruinscrawling and homebrewed Traveller ships and equipment have been burning up the draft box), vicious satire and my general self-indulgence.

And now the news...

Today this most blessed of days, all of Solarity hoists the white gravy urn in celebration of Our Most Puissant Sun Lord's annual chariot circuit around the World Turtle. Bedecked in his deo-fox robes of state the Overking solemnly removed the blackened-wood idol of Year 42113 from its garnet-encrusted pedestal in the Great Dome, ritually chuckled and blinded it with a red-hot poker while intoning the Invocation of Schadenfreude.

As the new idol of 42114 is installed, that great, if weathered grand dame of Zem, Kezmarok, begins a fresh, joyful new round of political violence and strife. The low-intensity civil war in the Eternally Besieged City has seen a shift in favor of the Autarch camp with followers of the Decade King being driven out of Lower Kezmarok altogether. Though deprived of access to the docks—and thus contact with the outside world—the Decade King seems to be preparing his next big move. Reports from the Wall say that all of the Great Captains of the bonded companies manning that vital edifice have been invited to a not-so discreet dinner at the palace of the not-so-much figurehead.

Meanwhile on the Feral Shore, a shockingly languid period of rest and peace has come to an end, the Nefarious Nine have refocused attentions on their expeditions upriver into the Weird coming dreadfully close to the old peaktopcity ruins of the Rusevin. Despite the turmoil gripping the land of its patron, the colony seems to have taken on new life with new foolishly-optimistic peasants moving out of the cramped swamp fort of King's Ten into the hill-villages of the Domovoy (total population now there up to around 160 humans and 520 of the furry house-spirits).

And the Cycle of the Eternal Scumbag may turn anew on the Feral Shore, reports say that its not just the exploitable and mundane immigrating to that Weird-begotten land, but that callow, young adventurers of a “lower level” of acumen and personal development are packing their backpacks and ten-foot poles for the colony.

Further south concerns over his mounting war debts have moved the Despot of Maarb to sell off a portion of his much-beloved flotilla of bizarre naval vessels. One particular favorite, a golden barge that is said to contain a bewildering array of Eldish devices, has been reportedly sold to Ul-Nahimirrha, a high satrap (and rumored necromancer) in the Scarlet Sultanate.