A State of the Blog Thing

A lot's changed since the last time I wrote in here.

For one thing that game I was talking about never happened. Stuff kept coming up for everyone involved so it just kept getting postponed until finally I just accepted that we weren't going to play.

So I began retooling it as a free-for-all hexcrawl kind of thing. I was going to pull from the West Marches games and other internet famous hexcrawl and mega dungeon games. The plan was to get it to a playable state and then run it using the new Dungeon Fantasy RPG recently released by Steve Jackson games at my FLGS. It's powered by GURPS and I think it would've been a nice change from the D&D and Pathfinder games that were getting run there. Unfortunately the company that owns the building they operated out of decided to jack their rent up which, when combined with a slow holiday season last year, means that they had to close their doors at the beginning of this past September. RIP The Enchanted Badger, the best damn gaming store that this town's seen in the years that I've been part of the gaming community.

Now I'm back to writing it up to play with a smaller and more consistent pool of players, hopefully with some guest players periodically. I'm back to planning it out in GURPS as well since I'm currently playing in a D&D 5e game run by one of the other members of my group. It's her first time DMing a game (or maybe her second?) and the first time most of us have actually played 5e so things can be...rough sometimes but it's fun. I kinda wish there was a bit more RP at times but to be fair we're all pretty rusty and this is a fairly straight forward dungeon crawl so whatever.

I'm going to try and properly resurrect this blog as well. Right now the plan is to do play reports for the game I'm playing in that'll post every other Monday, since we play every other Saturday. On Wednesdays or Thursdays I'm going to do some game design stuff, mostly geared towards the fantasy game I'm planning on running, though it might be for other games too since I've got system ADD pretty bad and I'm hoping that this'll be a good way to help curb it so I can stay focused.

So that's the plan, hopefully I can maintain output consistently enough that I'll feel comfortable enough to push myself to expand the audience for this thing. Maybe even submit it to the GURPSday Thursday thing that Douglas H Cole does on Gaming Ballistic.

And we're back?

Since it looks like I might be running a game again sometime in the near future I'm going to try and restart this blog as a public place to noodle on my world building, game designs and planning, and possibly start reviewing products I've got? We'll see about that last one, if it happens it'll be ridiculously infrequent or possibly just me babbling about mostly out of print games that I've collected over the years. I'll probably start posting about my LARPing as well since that looks like my wife and I are going to start that up again and this seems like as good a place as any to talk about it.

I know I failed hard at the "D&D Thirty Day Challenge". January was a rough patch that I won't go in to unless someone asks but suffice to say real life ate me and has only recently released me enough for me to have the extra mental and emotional bandwidth to even think I might be able to keep this up. I did end up with a new-to-me car out of the ordeal which is nice, and I'll probably start the Challenge again but I'm not sure when. Anyway, back to business-

Like I was saying, one of the couples is moving into a bigger place with a guy from the FLGS and they'll have a spare room so we will hopefully (fingers crossed) be starting up a new game again! *cue the triumphant music*

First some logistics to help me organize things in my head. The current plan is the do a month or two of weekly gaming on Saturday nights or possibly Friday nights. After that we're going to switch to aiming for two games a month since we've proven time and again that we can't keep a weekly game together for very long. Ideally this'll happen once a fortnight but there will be some flexibility built in so when the inevitable conflicts arise we'll be able to shift things and hopefully still get two games in that month.

That leaves what we're going to be playing. I honestly would like to just jump into a GURPS game because that's a system I've wanted to run for literal years and have never managed to get father than getting everyone's characters made. One of my potential players brought up the fact that none of us have gamed in the last year so it'd probably make more sense to run something we all know relatively well already though, ie some flavor of D&D or something World of Darkness. After some thought I think I'm going to go with D&D because I've been wanting to do some fairly straight forward fantasy gaming and my World of Darkness stuff always ends up being a slightly surrealistic horror show with ghosts, demons, Mythos inspired insanity, dream-prophecy, and kinda oddly placed bits of mundanity for the "simple to get us back in the swing of things" game we were talking about. [Also if I play my cards right I can "encourage" a conversion to GURPS at a later point....]

Tune in next time for me arguing with myself about if I should run Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition or Adventurer, Conqueror, King System; the pros and cons of both for what I want to do with the game, and the thrilling conclusion of my perhaps too open display of my particular brand of insanity!