2026 is half over. Time flies when you’re having fun (or the world is a waking nightmare), I suppose. With that in mind, I wanted to review my side projects for the year and figure out to what degree that can inform my writing priorities for the second half. While I did write some short fiction this year, the majority of time I spent writing was game related; the first three months I was GMing a game that was fairly intense, and I’ve also begun writing a world for my next game (or rather my game after next, but I’ll get into that in a little bit). I also, of course, continued my typical cadence of writing a Cannibal Halfling article each week and something on this site each week as well, with only a couple of misses.

So how did that go? I’ve talked about my Apocalypse World/DIE game before; I think it was a solid, intense game but it also ended up being fairly idiosyncratic as far as characters and story were concerned. While I don’t think I’ve ever shied away from being metaphysical in the games I’ve run, how far I went this time may be one of the reasons I’m looking back towards traditional fantasy for my games moving forward, at least for now.

My writing has involved more fiction than I’ve historically done outside of NaNoWriMo and I’m happy about that; that said I don’t think the experiments ended the way I thought they were going to. While I wrote the recent Tickles piece somewhat on a lark to process our over three year campaign concluding, most of my fiction has revolved around my DIE Master from last October, Nat. While the core of this was Nat Meets Donnie, as I wrote it was clear that Donnie was kind of a supporting character in the story. Reflecting on who Donnie was when I played him in DIE back in 2023, this makes sense. Donnie was the Fear Knight and his story implied that, after leaving high school, he got very stuck in what he was doing or who he could become, with most of the resolution of that personal conflict happening closer to the time of the DIE game, in his late 30s. The Donnie I wrote into freshman orientation at Brown University was fairly passive, still only rocking the boat in small, safe ways. That made him, well, a bit boring, but also opened the floor to Nat, the more driven character. The story centered around events that, like a lot of the stories I write about college-aged characters, happened to me in one form or another. That said, Nat began developing the same way that Donnie did, into the character whose core lack, core conflict, still existed at the time they entered DIE (as is implied by the DIE persona generation procedure). This did not exactly end up as interesting as I wanted it. Some of my fiction experiments in the DIE space worked better; Lenny’s Halloween Party which is explicitly set before the ‘big question’ failure for each character shed an interesting light on who they were before they became the characters we played; Nat and the Dice played more with the DIE conceit and parallel realities which created an interesting situation that the characters themselves maybe wouldn’t have without supernatural intervention.

What does this mean for my future fiction writing? Well, I have at least one idea that is still fermenting in my head; this one is a bit more speculative/sci-fi and involves a thought about the future that will then need to be explored. I think it could be really neat but I only have the start of worldbuilding and a few characters and no real idea about what the conflict is. This very well may be a perfect NaNoWriMo idea, where forcibly extruding 50,000 words out of the idea makes it clearer whether or not it’s worth pursuing.

Speaking of worth pursuing, I’m still contemplating going back and editing Fratricide again. While there’s some fairly extensive rewriting required, I’m intending to keep to the same rough timeline as the second draft both as an exercise for myself and a way to identify when things need structural work. That all said, I have very little word count towards an edited version, and may make things easier for myself (or just waste time) by pulling my draft out of Scrivener and into Obsidian, which has proven an excellent tool for game writing.

Let’s talk about that game writing, then. I’ve spent a good chunk of time writing my Bastionland-inspired fantasy setting, and I now have several maps and a bunch of regions and boroughs that will let me use the procedures in the Electric Bastionland manual more directly. I’ve hit a soft wall at this point for two reasons: One, using the book feels more procedural and a bit more like work, even though this is where things come to life more. That can be overcome. Two, and perhaps a little more pressing, is that since one of our players who was also slated to be our next GM is now gone for six months, I’ve been called up to start a new game, likely at the beginning of August. To be clear, my setting is nowhere near done (and the rules framing in GURPS that I’d need to even start character creation isn’t even started), so I’ll be running something else.

Running something else is a huge curveball for me committing my ‘RPG brain energy’ to my new setting, though I’m not running something that requires me to write another setting. No, I’m going to be running Stonetop, which both has a setting included that will keep me from completely running off the rails but also aligns with my shift back towards traditional fantasy, at least a little bit. I am looking forward to running more PbtA, but Stonetop’s two books are quite a doorstop, so I’m going to need my month-ish of lead time to read the book, absorb the material, and get ready to run. This doesn’t mean my setting writing is completely on hold, but it will likely continue at a slower pace than it did previously.

The second half of 2026 is going to once again be more projects than I can really split my time between; I didn’t even mention that I’m in the alpha development phase of my Colony Sim Cortex game that I’ve been writing about on Cannibal Halfling. That likely needs even more of my time, and may be a continuing push on my other projects besides the upcoming game. I think the secret there, though, is to use what I’ve already written to come up with a minimum viable game and not get too stuck in the weeds. Even with that intent it’s likely going to end up more complicated than I thought…like pretty much all of my projects.

So where does this all leave me? First, continue maintaining the blogs, writing two posts weekly. Then, figure out my game design. In the meanwhile, start prepping and then running Stonetop. If there’s time or energy left over, you have a game setting and at least two fiction projects. It’s a lot. That said, by writing everything out, I’m going to be much more comfortable coming back to this in six months time and identifying how much progress I did make, rather than focusing on the (perhaps infinite) list of things I didn’t touch.