The Best of 2020

Ok, let's do this. 

Best Blog: The age of the dinosaurs has ended, and the blogosphere is now roamed only by furtive ancestral mammals and scraggy feathered things that will one day approximate birds. Still, Age of Dusk promises the dawn of a new age of mighty beasts whose size may one day rival the titans of yore. This year was a good one for him.

Best Review: The aforementioned's review of Veins of the Earth, which manages to be both readable, detailed, fair, and constructive in critique. (Part I is here; there are two others.)

Best Blog Entry by Somebody Else: It might actually be this, although making it a recent one feels like cheating.

Best Entry of Mine: I have to be honest: this was not a vintage year for my blog. Looking back at the entries I wrote this year, I have the feeling that I was phoning it in half of the time. I'm sorry for that. I quite like this entry though, and this one.

Best RPG Product: The only game product I think I bought and actually read and used in 2020 was Ryuutama, so it wins by default, even though I found it disappointing.

Best SF, Fantasy or Horror Book Read: Jack Vance's The Palace of Love. I read all of the Demon Princes series this year; I liked this one best. Here is my Goodreads review (add me if you like):

There is something profound at work in this book, which like all of Vance's fiction is a deliciously sweet slice of pulp that hints at something much deeper. A meditation on love, identity, sex, power, insecurity, vanity, monomania, and meaning? It's all of those things, and the fact that you can never quite see the results of that meditation - just glimpse them from behind an opaque glass screen, like Falusche's face itself - makes them all the more important. (*What*, though, to those who have read the book, is the meaning of the druids and their tree?)

Best SF, Fantasy or Horror Viewing: Does 'The Inner Light' count? 

Best Gaming Experience: Without doubt it has to be my 'Riding A Giant Tadpole Over a Massive Waterfall and Falling Into a Plunge Pool Full of Giant Pikes' mini-game which I created for Ryuutama (I will put up the rules for this onto the blog one day). Sometimes something you create for next week's session really just pays off. 

Best Cancellation: It has to be the Adam Koebel thing, which even I heard about. I am not a fan of the concept of cancellation, but there is just something too precious about a self-righteous proponent of 'safety tools' in games live-streaming a session in which one of the PCs is sexually assaulted and the entire group quits in disgust. To quote GK Chesterton's introduction to Aesop's Fables: "[S]uperiority is always insolent...pride goes before a fall...and [there] is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks of any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything."