New Year’s Eve is always a weird liminal space that I have never quite understood. Celebrations filled with hope and recollections of the past year seem alien to me. And yet, here we are, another year has passed.

At the start of 2022, I wrote of my simple hopes and I think they are probably still the hopes I carry into 2023:

• Spending time with people I enjoy being engaged with creatively.
• Immersing myself into deeply-grounded and evocative fantastic worlds.
• Exploring those worlds through the senses of well-crafted, likeable, and believable characters.

It has been a strange year in which I resigned from my teaching job and then walked into another school to do cover, only to be picked up and offered a greater role and responsibility. The difference, of course, was to move to a place where I am treated as a human being and valued as an individual. This makes all the difference in the world.

2022 was the year in which I ran more games and longer, more successful campaigns than I had managed in many years. It was a year of relatively stable mental health and a time when I have been able to make progress creatively. Yet, it has also become the year in which I have learned to accept a period of hibernation and slowing creatively too. A complex, human type of year.

Who know what lies ahead? Nobody knows anything, let’s be honest. But we can hold on to hope and work for the things we value. We can care for the people we love and forgive those who challenge us. We can stand alongside those who are struggling and lift them up with all the strength that we have.

Here’s hoping for a year in which we can continue to build communities of discovery where people can, if we are very patient, feel accepted.

Game on!