Happy New Year from your bestest buddy Angry and the entire Angry Games team.

Yes, Angry is the entire Angry Games team. Shut up.

This ain’t your regularly scheduled feature article. That’s because the regular feature article schedule has changed. And that’s just one of several changes happening here at Angry Games HQ. And this update’s about those changes.

The Short, Short Version

If all you care about is when the next article’s coming and what it’s going to be about, let me hit the highlights for you and then show you the content schedule for January. Cool?

The Year in Angry

Here’s what to expect at TheAngryGM.com this year.

• Every month, I’ll publish four Feature articles.
• New articles will be published every Tuesday starting on January 10th for Patreon and Subscribestar supporters and January 17th for everyone else.
• Two features every month will be part of my new advanced basic skills course, Mastering Your Game.
• Yes, advanced basic. I know that sounds weird. That’s what you get from just reading a summary.
• One feature every month will provide a finished, polished system hack, mechanic, or rule you can cram into your home game. And design-bloggy discussion, of course.
• Actually, the article will be design-bloggy discussion. But it’ll have a link to a PDF that’ll contain the actual, finished hack.
• The last feature each month? I can write whatever I want for that one.
• Articles will be shorter, tighter, more focused, and will not turn into multi-part series that never get finished.
• Until forced to do so by external forces, I ain’t changing anything because of One D&D.
• In fact, except to throw hilarious shade as part of my particular ilium, I ain’t engaging with DBox One at all. So don’t ask me about it. As far as I’m concerned, DBox One doesn’t exist until WotC s$&%s out the actual books. And maybe not even then.
• By the way, One D&D will forever hereafter be referred to on this site as DBox One.
• The D in DBox One stands for neither Dungeon nor Dragon. If you catch my drift.

The Angry January 2023 Content Schedule

Angry January 2023 Content Calendar

Production Code	Tentative Title	Early Access	General Release
F0101	Unleashing Your Inner Angry GM	January 10, 2023	January 17, 2023
F0102	Mastering the Game: Better Narration Through Visualization	January 17, 2023	January 24, 2023
F0103	Mastering the Game: Inviting the Principal Character to Act	January 24, 2023	January 31, 2023
F0104	Hacking the Game: The New, Improved, and Final Tension Pool System	January 31, 2023	February 7, 2023

Angry January 2023 Event Calender

Production Code	Event	Date	Time (EDT)
LC0123	Angry's Mostly Monthly January Livechat and Pre-Birthday Extravaganza (Bring Presents and Cake)	January 17, 2022	8:00 PM

That’s it. You got your schedule, you got your summary. If that’s all you care about, get out of here. You’re done. If you want another 1200 words of bulls$%& context for those bullet points, than read on, Macduff.

Chasing Angry

I don’t want to go into a whole lot of personal drama bulls$&% right now. God knows I did enough of that last year. But that drama did help me see that I’ve lost touch with my role as TheAngryGM. I didn’t really know what I was doing or why or who I was doing it for. Thankfully, I’ve always got plenty of feedback to analyze. Angry, sweary feedback.

But, if I want to fling poo like a monkey, I’ve got to expect a few turds in the face, right?

To make this long story slightly less long, my goal for 2023 is to get back to doing what I’m best at. That is, teaching GMs how to run the least worst games they can possibly run. And building the tools — rules, hacks, and systems — that systems designers won’t.

But I want to do that stuff better. Instead of writing random, scattershot articles about whatever — and dropping scheduled articles every time I get distracted by some new, shiny topic — I want a plan. An outline. A curriculum, if you will.

Mastering the Game

If that book I wrote way too long ago to keep bringing up was an Introducing to GMing 101 university course, this year, I want my site to provide the upper-level version. Call it Advanced GMing 201. Or rather, 201, 202, and 203. Because I’ve actually taken the time to outline this s$&% already.

The way I see it, being a Game Master is about four things:

1. Running Games
2. Managing Campaigns
3. Building Game Content
4. Hacking Systems

I ain’t saying every GM has to do every one of those things. Only the first one’s mandatory. And they’re arranged in order of increasing optionalness. I’m just saying that those are the big four uber skills that make up the whole field of Game Mastery.

Every month, I plan to devote two of my four features to this core curriculum. So, by December, I’ll have written a 24-lesson course in Advanced Game Mastery. Call it my Mastering the Game series. And that pile of articles will provide a great answer to “I just found TheAngryGM; where should I start?”

That means, taking this in order, I can write eight articles about Running Games, eight about Managing Ongoing Games, and eight about Building Homebrew Adventures. Pretty cool, huh?

Angry, Did You Forget Something?

No, I didn’t. My math is solid. And so is my plan.

The thing is my skill-building articles remain my most popular and well-trafficked articles. But my hacks and systems also get a lot of traffic. It ain’t hyperbolic to say tools like my Whatever Stat mechanic, my F$&% CR monster-building system, and my Silver and Gold treasure tables have revolutionized the way lots of people run their games. Among others tools.

So, every month I’m going to put out a new hack. A new tool. A new system. A new rule. Something. But I want to hold myself to some higher standards here. First, much as I know y’all love my game mechanical analysis and all the yammering about how I build this crap and why, I will never write about a hack or system before I’ve finished designing it. And second, I’m going to put the hacks out as finished PDFs linked in the article about the hack.

That way, I’ll actually have to finish what I start.

I know there’s a chance this plan’s doomed to fail. I absolutely have to start with smaller projects and establish my workflow and good habits before I tackle big, unfinished projects or start any new ones. So I’m asking for your patience if I start small. I figure small, but finished and polished hacks are better than giant-a$& systems I never actually finish.

Getting Angry Better

The high standards thing ain’t just about my rules hacks and ability to actually, you know, finish things. I want to improve my overall writing quality. My work’s gotten bloated over the years. Mostly with hypothetical arguments about why my advice is good advice. The whole point of giving Angry advice is to deliver it in a solid, no-nonsense way. Skip the bulls$&% and get to the point.

I don’t think anyone’s going to accuse me of “cutting right to the point” these days.

As time goes on, expect shorter, more tightly focused articles. And don’t expect articles into which I cram ten different topics. Or articles that surprise me by turning into three-article series I never finish.

And don’t expect me to give a crap about DBox One.

DBox One and the DBoxes Making It

Time to address the oily font in the sanctuary: One D&D, AKA DBox One. How does DBox One affect my plans?

As of now, it doesn’t.

Let me be clear, I don’t personally give a crap about DBox One or its bulls$&% non-playtest. And I don’t want to. I certainly don’t plan to address it before it’s release and I probably won’t care to after either.

My advice is timeless GMing advice. Yes, I have a D&D mindset and my hacks are built for D&D-style play, but I’m actually pretty system agnostic when you get down to it. The only thing DBox One will affect is the specifics of the shade I throw at Crawford and the mouthbreathers at WotC. I ain’t changing my focus, I ain’t switching systems, I ain’t changing a damned thing.

That said, there’s one iffy little gray area. One iffy, big gray area, actually. And that’s to do with what I can publish regarding pulling apart D&D’s systems and hacking rules to replace the crap WotC craps into their so-called game. There’s a lot of drama currently swirling around what WotC will and won’t be suing people over as they do their damndest to lock out third-party content creators. Or at least, like Scott Pilgrim without the charisma, hold down third-party content creators and punch them until money comes out.

Point is, I plan to keep building my own stuff. But what I can build and how I can build it and how I can talk about it? All I can say about that is, “we’ll see.”

And the same goes for bonus content. I intend to make good on my promises to provide site supporters with bonus content — custom game content, maps, monsters, rules, and so on — in the new year. And I’ll find a way to do it. But I might have to change what I provide and how once we’re living under the benevolent dictatorial eye of the Wizard on the Coast, safe and sound in our RPG Police State.

I wish I was kidding.

… and the Rest

Content ain’t the only thing in my Angry planner this year. I’ve also got not one, but two actual products in development. By summer, I hope you’ll all be able to at least pre-order a set of Tension Dice for your home game. And by year’s end, I plan to send a sequel to Game Angry to to the printer. With a revised and updated edition of Game Angry to keep it company.

In the longer term, there’s that whole Angry RPG I’ve been threatening to actively design and develop. Given that we’re going to need some solid, less abusive, less fascist alternatives to DBox One in the next few years, it’s probably high time to push that project forward, huh?

After all, that’s probably the best way to help GMs run the least worst RPGs they can possibly run.