A Look Back at 2024 with Many Sided Media

Plus an Important Update About This Newsletter

Dec 31, 2024

The Twenty Sided Newsletter is getting a rebrand!

Starting at the end of January 2025, we’re updating this newsletter to now be the Many Sided Newsletter.

Because I know lots of folks are keen to do some digital cleaning up at the start of the new year, be sure to keep an eye out for emails that will now be coming from manysidednewsletter@substack.com.

Why are we doing this? We recently updated our Patreon to make it easier to find all of Many Sided Media’s content in one place—My First Dungeon, Talk of the Table, and more!—and that now includes this bi-weekly newsletter.

A brand new name is a big change, but we plan to keep everything else about the Many Sided Newsletter pretty much the same. You can expect a few new graphics, perhaps a new column or two, but otherwise, in 2025 we simply hope to continue writing more of the things you’re most interested in. So if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or comments on the types of articles you want to see, please send us a note!

And thank you for joining us for another year of Shenuque’s Chaos Corner, Elliot’s The Page That Got Me, and Brian’s top GM tips and tricks.

Cheers!

— Abby, Shenuque, Brian, and Elliot

A Look Back at 2024

From Viking Cats to Horny Santa

Well, hot dog, 2024 has truly been one for the history books! But actually, this past year has been the best so far for the Many Sided Media crew. We produced more than 95 hours of new content (seriously!) and played more games than I can even remember. We even launched an entirely new podcast, Bitcherton, after raising nearly $39,000 on Kickstarter! We also issued our first listener survey and used that feedback to make some much needed changes, like revamping our Patreon (and soon this newsletter too) to make it easier for folks to find all our stuff in one handy place. But that’s not all!

Shenuque and Brian recording Star Crossed

My First Dungeon

We hit you with 25 new episodes featuring 5 incredible games—9 Lives to Valhalla, The Wildsea, Paint the Town Red, The Time We Have, and Rom Com X-Mas Bomb—totaling more than 36.5 hours of spectacularly sound-designed AP content.

Talk of the Table

Brian and Elliot released a whopping 27 new interviews, bringing folks like Cassie Mothwin, Lin Codega, Kieron Gillen, Taylor Moore, Jasper William Cartwright, Quinns, and Johan Nohr to the table. They discussed everything from game design to AP critiques to community building, and so much more.

Bitcherton

Because two shows just wasn’t enough, we decided to launch an entirely new podcast this year! The Bitcherton Kickstarter kicked off in June, raising more than $38,700, allowing us and our stellar new cast to start recording a 12-episode season with an all-star line up of special guests (Rekha Shankar, Nathan Yaffe, Vic Michaelis, Will Campos, Sam Reich, just to name a few!). We’ve so far released five new Bitcherton episodes, including our feature-length Christmas special, each of which comes alongside a Patreon-exclusive original Lady Bigg-Withers gossip rag and cast talkback. Heavens!

Patreon

In addition to talkbacks with the cast of all the new My First Dungeon seasons, we also released an incredible 24.8 hours of new Patreon-exclusive content, with episodes featuring the games Scurry!, Star Crossed, I Have the High Ground, Honey Heist, Fedora Noir, Happy Haunting, The Fire Flickers Between You, and Wanderhome. We also brought back fan favorites Kumari, Maria, and droid Herbie for an Orbital Blues space battle, and got the daylights spooked out of us in a new run of The Wildsea GMed by none other than the game designer himself, Felix Isaacs (Part One out today).

Share this newsletter with your game group to get everyone in on the fun!

And as part of our Patreon rebrand, we went ahead and added the full backlog of ad-free episodes for both My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, so you can enjoy every single piece of content, from 2024 and beyond, without interruption.

Many Sided Newsletter (née Twenty Sided Newsletter)

Over the past 12 months, we nearly doubled our number of subscribers with 28 issues hitting your inboxes featuring even more GM advice from Brian, player tips from Shenuque, and some sneak peeks into the mind of a game designer from Elliot. We shared the hottest news in APs and shouted out our favorite new RPGs both big and small, and we’ve already started brainstorming bigger, better articles to bring you in 2025.

More Milestones

Did you think our list stopped there?! Fool, I’ve only just cracked the surface!

In 2024…

Elliot tabled at his first big game convention, PAX Unplugged
He also crowdfunded and released the new three-person RPG, Rom Com Drama Bomb and crowdfunded (with a release planned for 2025) the tragic zombie game for two, The Time We Have
We got into a whopping 11 webfests, with numerous nominations for everything from Best GM to Best Sound Design
And added to our growing list of awards with wins for Best GM (Baltimore’s Next Media Webfest), Best AP Podcast (Sydney Webfest), and Best Sound Design (Minnesota Webfest)
Em Friedman included My First Dungeon in her end-of-year “Best of” roundup for Polygon
And did I mention we made an entirely new show??

the best RPG-loving crew you ever did see

Safe to say, we’ve been busy! All these exciting accomplishments have only made us more excited for what’s to come in 2025—new games! new cast members! new interviews! maybe a fourth new podcast?! The world is our oyster!!

On a serious note, though, we very earnestly couldn’t have done any of this without readers and listeners like you. So thank you all for tuning in, whether you devoured all 95+ hours of podcast goodness or are really only here to learn how to be your best chaos goblin self.

Here’s to another 12 months filled with games, friends, and hopefully a whole lot of Nat 20s! Happy New Year, folks!

— Abby