STALKER7

To say it’s been quite a year is an understatement. And to think it ain’t over yet. *holds breath*

Still, everyone here is mercifully healthy, reasonably sane, and cautiously optimistic about the future. Christmas is upon us. I’ve got family, friends, work, and projects lined up in the coming months…. ‘Hope springs eternal’, I guess.

Despite all that’s gone on, I want to credit the tabletop war game hobby as one of the things that’s carried me through 2020’s deep strangeness. Come to think of it, the hobby has carried me through a lot of things since I was first introduced to it nearly 45 years ago; this is just the latest slog and I’m grateful.

Wait. Check that.

It’s not the hobby per se – although miniature building, painting, terrain making, rules writing are an awesome creative outlet and help me center myself – it’s the people in the hobby community that have been a real encouragement. Whether it’s the Stalker7 Facebook Group or my local game group, the mutual support, inspiration, and all around enthusiasm for the coolest hobby going has really been a genuine source of relief.

Although attendance in our weekly sessions has understandably been reduced from Covid19 concerns, a handful of us still meet regularly to roll dice, push figs, eat snacks and talk trash over our fictional conflicts and adventures.

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We’ve been playing a fair amount of our own Hardwired, Nightwatch, and Zona Alfa. Plus our current favorite RPG, Symbaroum. We’ve also got some good old 5E on the radar, as well as Free League’s new and hazardous-looking Alien RPG. I even managed to snag an extremely cool Praetorian Xenoform off eBay the other day. (Game Over, man. Game over. )

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On top of that, there’s all-important play testing to be done for Hardwired: Hostile Takeover and another solo/co-op game, Resistance: Earth, a tactical RPG set in our world, post alien invasion.

And of course there’s a couple shelves worth of board games we could dip into if we really, really run out of ideas.

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That’s it for now. I just wanted to get those thoughts down, put some photos up, and say “Thank You” to the TTG/RPG community around me.

And perhaps encourage you to keep adventuring, keep exploring, keep fighting with your friends. You’ll make it through this and on the other side find you’ve scored some serious XP and perhaps a few very cool artifacts.

Have a good one. Take care.