Tag / Gardens

by Moreau Vazh

A Year that Ends in 25

We reach the end of the year with both this blog and its author at something of a crossroads.

I started this blog after spending over a decade away from the TTRPG hobby. The idea was that it would do two specific jobs in support of my regular game.

First, it would serve as an idea funnel. I would read widely, watch films, strip-mine them for ideas, and feed those ideas back into play. The blog was intended to function as a kind of creative stomach, using criticism to digest new material.

Second, it would act as a venue for re-appraisal. Returning to the hobby as a grown adult with decades behind the GM’s screen, I knew I was not a blank slate. Absorbing new ideas meant making space by re-examining old assumptions, old methods, and familiar narratives about the hobby’s past. It took time to find the right balance, but I am pleased with how much ground I cleared by engaging with memory, modern writing about RPG history, and a series-based approach to breaking down old tropes and habits.

The problem with this method was that, while it helped me dismantle old assumptions, it assumed a degree of exchange with the wider hobby that never really materialised. I kept breaking things down, clearing space, and looking outward, only to find that the dominant ideas circulating online offered little in the way of challenge or inspiration. That stalled exchange eventually led me to stop listening, stop looking, stop buying, and finally stop reviewing.

Meanwhile, the tools that were meant to be instrumental to my engagement with games have become joys in their own right. What began as the industrialised strip-mining of Lovecraft’s fiction has turned into one of my proudest critical achievements, while writing about Thomas Ligotti and cinematic folk horror has become something I actively look forward to.

This leaves me in an odd position. The question facing this blog is not whether I still care about games, but what role, if any, they should play in a space that now feels more at home with criticism than with hobbyist engagement.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Gardens at Taskerland – A Change of Format

I’ve been thinking about time…

About how much of it disappears into the making of good things. And how much more disappears trying to keep up. This blog has always been a place for thinking-in-public, a rhythm of attention and care… but lately I’ve noticed that rhythm becoming a kind of siphon. What was meant to nourish the deeper work has begun to crowd it out.

So… a change of format.

From now on, I’ll be posting at least once a week. Sometimes more, if the mood or a particular project takes hold. I want to leave room for seasonal arcs and for small rituals that gather shape over time. I want to protect the quiet where the deeper work happens.

You’ll still hear from me. Just with a different cadence. Less out of obligation. More out of necessity.

Canon Fodder and Things Resurface will continue as regular series. Other strands (reviews, reflections, reading notes) will surface when the mood takes me. My coverage of RPGs is likely to drift a little further from recognisable products as I find myself creating more and purchasing less. But there will be seasonal arcs, too… focused runs of attention, moments when the light hits a certain shelf just so.

I’m also beginning to revise the early Canon Fodder essays into downloadable collections… something more deliberate, something that gathers its own weight.

Maybe you won’t notice the difference.

Maybe that’s not the point.

Maybe it’s just a reminder… to myself more than anyone… that the good work takes time. And that trust, not output, is the better metric.

Thank you for reading and for your companionship.

by Moreau Vazh

The Gardens at Taskerland – V3.5?

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I didn’t post last Thursday. This was the first unplanned outage since the blog switched over to focussing on RPGs and I adopted the current two posts-a-week schedule.

The most obvious reason for the outage is that I was away for a week taking pictures and exercising my social skills. The deeper reason for the outage is that I didn’t manage to come up with anything to fill the gap before packing my bags and heading out the door.

This was somewhat unusual as there have been times when the posting on here flowed with such frequency that I would build up a two-month lead time. I have never struggled to find anything to write about before and yet I not only struggled to post, I also found myself largely indifferent to said struggle. This too was unusual.

My wandering focus is partly a result of having broken a long-standing creative log-jam resulting in my returning to various photography projects with a clearer head. It is also a result of a growing sense of frustration with where I stand in relation to the world of contemporary TTRPGs.

This is a post about re-orienting my cultural antennae and re-focussing this blog.

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by Moreau Vazh

2023 in Review (Part Two)

2023 was a year in which I could feel my patterns of consumption shifting beneath me.

Writing for a the blog meant that I put a lot more effort into reading books, but the time spent reading books very definitely came at the expense of television, which I  seem to have almost completely abandoned as a means of engaging with culture. There’s probably an article to be written about this but I am reminded of the old Simpsons joke about cable TV: “Seventeen different streaming services and there’s nothing on…”

This being said, while I would rather *not* have spent the year inhaling content, I was fortunate enough to encounter a load of lovely stuff that really served to keep the dark cobwebs from covering up the windows. N/B This is a list of stuff I have enjoyed this year, rather than a list of stuff that has come out this year.

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by Moreau Vazh

2023 in Review (Part One)

I haven’t historically bothered with annual review posts as – for the first few years of this blog’s existence – nothing much happened. 2023, by contrast, was a year in which an extraordinary amount happened both creatively and personally. As a result, I think I shall indulge myself and talk about what a year this has been and what I hope next year will be like. I will then follow this up with a second post about the books, films, and games that I enjoyed this year.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Gardens at Taskerland v3.1 – Reviews Policy

The Gardens at Taskerland is the series in which I talk about this blog, the direction it is headed in, and any tweaks and alterations I feel like making. The rest of the series can be found here.

I do not accept review copies.

As someone who has spent quite a lot of his life producing different kinds of reviews and reports for a variety of different audiences, I naturally have opinions about the ‘role of the critic’ but roles vary according to social context and I have no desire to comment on any contexts other than my own. No offence, no discourse. No kick-a, no punch-a.

I will however explain my policy.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Gardens at Taskerland v3.0 – Year Two

The Gardens at Taskerland is the series in which I talk about this blog, the direction it is headed in, and any tweaks and alterations I feel like making. The rest of the series can be found here.

I was planning on making a minor course correction based around what I was enjoying writing about but then I looked at my schedule and realised that this post would have coincided with this blog’s relaunch on June 12, 2021.

To be honest, I am not sure how this lines up with when I decided to start this blogging project as I do schedule stuff a couple of months ahead of time and am actually writing this post on Easter Sunday. Regardless of the actual dates and timelines, this post will go live around the first anniversary of the blog’s relaunch and I am amazed that I have not only stuck with it but stuck with it whilst maintaining a steady two-posts-per-week rhythm. Yay me!

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