New Year's Resolutions 2025

Introduction

I haven’t done New Year’s resolutions in many years. My life has been focused on caring for my mother with severe dementia and getting through each day. Yet, as I look ahead, I feel a spark of hope. This year feels different. I want to transform my 40 years of gamemastering experience into a business, return to streaming, and participate in more World Anvil challenges. When my mother’s journey ends, I hope to build a life of purpose and passion rather than return to an office job. I'm embracing the New Year’s Resolutions Challenge with hope, courage, and determination. So, here are my resolutions:

1. Become a Professional GM: In 2025, I’m embarking on an exciting journey to run five campaigns in the reality of Earth-196169. To bring this vision to life, I’ll complete my timeline and enrich it with articles as we begin. Each game will unfold on a different day, with an average of one session per week (or two during particularly cooperative months). I may also run Marvel Multiverse preprinted games to complement these for additional income. My Patreon is nearly ready to launch—another milestone on this journey—with seats priced at $35, group rates, and special reservations for patrons at certain tiers.


2. Finish My Patreon Page: This will be a much larger chore than I had hoped because my original concept saw a severe failure to launch. Originally, I wanted to be able to host games on a text-only basis with voice and video optional, so people who might be shy or concerned about privacy would have a group. Some players congregated on their own voice channels and weren't typing in the chat, which created confusion in the game. My real-life duties caused several delays, which made the "Enter Hydra" introduction adventure take much longer than it should have. I had to run the game late at night and that was hard when I still had to be up with the sun. So, I have to reimagine what PUG-VTT might look like. I learned the hard way why everyone else requires at least voice chat, and that I should not reinvent the wheel.


3. Return to Streaming: When I finally close on my own place where I can get a better internet connection, I want to get back to streaming. Streaming my world-building and GM session creation, streaming video gameplay, and just chatting with viewers to promote this world, future worlds, and my Patreon. I was on a roll when I started streaming in 2017 until 2019, then things went belly up and I just haven't been able to get back on track. I'm hoping this year, with some help taking care of my mom, and a little more privacy, that I can get back on it and start actually making a career of it.


4. Participate in More World Anvil Challenges: As is the case with this January challenge... that I'm finishing near the end of February, writing is difficult with such an erratic schedule. I was also struggling to even write anything at all before with the stress of my mother's illness, my living situation, and my self-esteem through it all. Although this is all largely fan fiction, it has lit a new flame in writing in me as I put together all things superhero-comic book-motion pictures into my own little universe in the larger Marvel multiverse. Spooktober and WorldEmber really helped with progress on this little misadventure of mine and I want to do more. So, I'm still pushing to make this happen. I must catch up and I will.

The slog to accomplishing these goals has been long and difficult in the new year around buying a new place and getting my mom in-home care and hospice care, but I'm still pushing to make it happen. Things that are worth doing are rarely easy. And things that are easy to do are rarely worth doing. At least that's what I was told, but sometimes I think I get myself in the trap of making things more difficult than they need to be.

Articles

The other part of this challenge was to read 10 articles, provide feedback, and then write about what you learned from them. Well, I started going through and decided to use articles from people who encouraged or helped me through WorldEmber as I was finding myself falling off the rails of my plan for the challenge and not finishing nearly as many articles as I wanted. I have to say that this community has so many talented people and my subscription to World Anvil has been a great investment. The articles I read are below along with my impressions of them.

1. 
   Demongrey does such a great job of painting a picture of the pieces of their world, and they provide a unique perspective on worlds like The Million Islands. So many island worlds will have every variation of navy, privateers, pirates, sailors, smugglers, fish-people, etc. But he has variations of Indigenous Pacific kingdoms and island tribes, otter-people, and just the little details that are familiar to us but are unique because they are so rarely ever used in a fantasy setting. Then the ideas are conveyed engagingly. I like it.


2. 
   The thing that really works here is the integration of song and prose with the listing of facts. I experimented with this in my Ragnarok article and I wasn't sure how I felt about it but the flavor text here really works. It shows that an informative piece can be enhanced with moments of entertainment. Infotainment.


3. 
   Generally, I feel like I'm a pretty learned fellow but this article was so beyond what I know about linguistics and language. That said, the fact that it seemed to have a level of complexity that rivaled German, Latin, and English made it feel real. It seems like so much work. The unique grammar structure also gives it an alien quality that keeps the language familiar yet makes it feel novel.


4. 
   There's a reason why Dmitris and Janet started World Anvil. The work in this article is phenomenal. Reading this, I really saw how far you could go in developing an original class's description and history. I also learned how that can benefit the property. As I said in my comment to them, the detail makes this feel like it's based on a licensed property. This feels like decades of development coming to fruition whether it is or not. Though, in some ways, I wonder if players will feel locked into certain aspects of their backstories.


5. 
   This one felt like a scene from a larger story and I wasn't sure if it was something that would help me for now. The story was beautiful though and the interactions between the father and the daughter were organic and sweet. Then reading the comments I found out that the author uses these story snippets as a cutaway during his games so that his players have a sense that things are happening in other parts of the world. I think I've only tried this back in the day of D6 Star Wars, and it confused my players but I might try it again in this environment.


6. 
   This article really hooked me and it also blindsided me with where it went. If I were a player and going through the lore, I would be into what's happening in this world and Alumenar if nothing else. The description of a place that is beautiful, indulgent, and full of debauchery turned into a nightmare worked well and it's a side of fantasy elves that is rarely explored. It also goes into some pretty edgy content without being too graphic or even pornographic as most people would write it. It's crafted to be interesting and arousing before it hits you with the story hook.


7. 
   This is a passion project like mine but it's more original work than I am working on. I often criticize my own writing for being too factual and lacking flair, and I am constantly editing to add more flavor and flash. This was an easy read as it was straightforward in saying, "This is what my world is, and this is what you should expect," and I wasn't missing anything. It makes me consider my self-consciousness in my writing and that worst criticism from the internal voice.


8. 
   This is the kind of fun article that really makes you wonder about a fictional place and makes you want to see it. As I read it, and the author described this tavern that seems to be moving around supernaturally and interacting with people, I immediately thought of Danny the Street from DC Comics. The parts of it that touched on the afterlife, a place where the dead or dying find themselves that serves drinks and hosts games, I then started to think about the myths of Valhalla. By the end, while those elements from before remained, it became clear that this was an urban legend of a culture in a fantasy world. It became more and more entertaining.


9. 
   This article created a very intriguing item that I immediately thought of players in my previous tabletop games who would make it priority #1 on their "I gotta steal that" list. The history gives you a great sense of its place in the setting and how the world works around it, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. But then it added some intriguing questions. For instance, it said the pendant endows anyone who wears it with a connection to the lineage of those who wore it before. My first mental image was a thief trying to take it but being struck by that connection, communing with its previous owners, and putting it back before slinking away because they realized it needed to stay where it was. Then I wondered if that was the intention.


10. 
    This article had me flashing back to concepts from the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, but composed of fantasy clerics instead of priests and nuns of course. The imagery of the sun, its danger, and the iconography is so flashy and grandiose much like the emperors of the Eastern Empire and the Cardinals and Popes. The belief systems were strong, being in communion with this higher power of light, purity, life, and glory while living in luxury and being innately granted political status and influence. All that said, I thought about plotlines in almost every third paragraph that I could create with the content of this article. A Seraph removed for corruption or betrayal coming back for justice or revenge, maybe he was corrupt, maybe he wasn't, maybe he is now, maybe he isn't. He could be a huge threat, still wielding great power that wasn't properly stripped of him because he was wrongly removed. The first female chosen to be Seraph. A new Seraph is chosen, and it's someone no one knows, but the Seven Rays don't want to acknowledge it. On and on. So many possibilities.


11. 
    Reading through this article really took me into places that I have always loved as a kid who just discovered Bruce Lee, wushu films, and Chinese culture. I immediately started thinking of people in silky, brightly-colored robes, golden pagodas, and guilded palaces reminiscent of The Forbidden City. I also thought of the Daimyo village from the Shogunate era of Japan. This article was right up my alley and just having the description of the ethnicity gave me a vision of what the whole society might look like. I enjoyed this.


12. 
    Reading through the article, I was reminded of UN Peacekeepers during and shortly after the Cold War and how they weren't very trusted because of their close association with the United States. Or, for a more fictional reference, the Jedi Order and the Republic where politics became intertwined with the business of an order that was supposed to be the keepers of the peace and roaming moderators. I wondered how the two parties interacted and how an alliance that seemed very militaristic by their references in the article might complicate the work of a peacekeeping religious order like the monks. I also wanted to know more about their deity, Vumar. A deity of light, life, and protection can manifest in many ways and those manifestations can affect how worshippers would go about their mission.

These articles mostly reminded me that I have a tendency to have diarrhea of the keyboard, and I suffer from wordcount creep. Instead, I should focus on trying to stay somewhere below 3,000 words probably. I should certainly avoid writing novels about magic across the comic book multiverse, although I would imagine that the science and technology articles will probably be about that long. I was also feeling a little intimidated by some of the amazing CSS layouts and page designs on some of these articles, but many enjoyable articles also had a simple design to them as well. So, I learned that it's important to make the CSS enhance the idea rather than be the star. The world's content should always be the star. Lastly, I learned that WorldAnvil has a great community of people who share ideas and support each other, which isn't an easy thing to find. I really appreciate all of you.

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Table of Contents

References

1. BuWeiLong on StarPlaying
2. PUG-VTT on Patreon
3. BuWeiLong on Twitch