SEVEN YEARS

Awesome Lies is now seven years old. I’d like to take the opportunity of the anniversary to thank everyone who reads and comments on the blog. I am grateful for your support.

I would also like to thank those sites that have mentioned Awesome Lies over the last year, especially three recent additions to their number: Kelvin Green’s excellent and long-running blog Aiee! Run From Kelvin’s Brainsplurge!; Zekiel’s new blog Ill Met by Morrslieb, which is ably filling a gap with reviews of WFRP4 products; and the Jordan Sorcery channel on YouTube, which provides well-researched histories of tabletop games.

I usually take advantage of the blog’s anniversary to look back over the last year and forward to the next one, and this time is no exception. The last year’s writing contained a few highlights for me. I thoroughly enjoyed ranting about Greek goblins. I was also relieved finally to post my review of Empire in Ruins. Probably the most significant posts of last year were the belated resumption of my history of WFRP1. After forty instalments I finally got to the game itself! I hope future sections of the history will follow with shorter gaps than on this occasion. The completion of the last section was delayed by the need to write my Enemy Within reviews and a shift to writing all the constituent parts prior to posting. Since I now have only one more Enemy Within review to wrap up and the timing change is a one-off effect, I think my hopes are not unrealistic.

My other long-running history series, ‘Lost Warhammer‘, seems finally to have run out of material (though every time I say that something else seems to surface). I was pleased, however, to start my ‘Topos‘ posts on intertextuality in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. It’s something that’s been in the works for a number of years, and there’s more of it to come (whether you like it or not!).

The most popular new posts on Awesome Lies in the last year were:

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
My review of Empire in Ruins.

LOST WARHAMMER: FANTASY EPIC
Richard Halliwell’s unpublished wargame.

THE STORY SO FAR
An index of my ‘WFRP Story’ posts.

LOST WARHAMMER: A TALE TO TELL
A WFRP article that vanished from White Dwarf.

THE COLOURS OF MAGIC
An excerpt from a future section of ‘The WFRP Story’, discussing the origins of the colleges of magic.

The observant may have noticed a change in the blog’s tagline during the last year with the addition of the words “…and other tabletop games”. It does not indicate any change in emphasis. It merely reflects the fact that from time to time I have already written, and will continue to write, about games other than WFRP. WFRP, however, will remain Awesome Lies‘ primary focus.

New WFRP products were somewhat thin on the ground in the past year. The long-awaited Lustria supplement finally took the game out of the Old World, but other releases were few and unremarkable: Archives of the Empire III, Ubersreik Adventures III, Forest of Hate, Reikland Miscellanea and Taverns of the Old World. Cubicle 7’s focus was apparently on other games in its lineup. That might change in the future. A guide for rogues and rangers, called Deft Steps, Light Fingers, has been publicly trailed. Cubicle 7 also stated at GenCon that a new campaign, starting in the Old World but moving outside its borders, is in planning, along with guides to Ulthuan and Marienburg. This seems to confirm my previous speculation that Gav Thorpe’s campaign was under consideration again and that a revamp of the first- and second-edition Marienburg material was on the way. Guides to dwarfs, orcs and goblins were also said to be in the works.

As for the future of this blog, I would be interested in readers’ feedback and suggestions. If you have any, please let me know in the comments below.

Best wishes to you all for the next year.

Last year’s anniversary post can be read here.

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