My demo was a bust. No one showed. However, it gave me the momentum I needed to get a face to face group going. It was shockingly easy to find players in the end. My then-fiancé (now wife) has a nephew who was interested. He brought a buddy of his into the game and has another waiting in the wings who would like to play. I recruited my dad (who introduced me to D&D back in the day). I recruited a friend of mine who is a Warcrack addict. He dragged a friend along, too. I ended up with 5 steady players without much effort at all and have another guy chomping at the bit to play. The universe doesn't hate me after all. I'm running C&C. I love the materials, but all of the class and race abilities get to be a bit much for me to manage, even at first level. I chucked twilight vision, dark vision, and deep vision, etc. in favor of a general "you can see in the dark." I made a number of other house rules, but run the game pretty straight. Over the years I've spent a lot of time trying to identify the best game system for my tastes (ultimately, you have to pick something, so just saying they are all great isn't especially useful as a practical matter). I think my ideal game would be a streamlined C&C with greatly reduced class and race abilities, more in line with B/X, but without level limits and separating race and class. There was talk of producing a basic C&C a few years ago. I wish that project had gone somewhere. Anyway, I'm playing regularly, so I've got no right to bitch and moan. Gaming is good!
I did this on the OSG board on FB. One human illusionist, one halfling fighter/thief, one human cleric (NPC), three fighters (elf, 2 half orcs), three thieves (2 humans and a halfling), all between levels 4 and 14, go out to locate the Rod of Seven Parts. What's your perceived chance of success from this description?
Still running AD&D for players new and old at Lake Geneva Games every Wednesday, and my play-by-post AD&D game currently has 42 PCs in seven parties running around making their mark upon the campaign world.
Gave Fantasy Flight's ARKHAM HORROR board game a go this past weekend. Wonderfully detailed game with a good feel of Lovecraft. Definitely something to play with more than three people (or two, in our case) though.
I recently started playing 50 Fathoms for Savage Worlds at my FLGS Tuesday nights. The first week I was there, I played a character for someone who was absent that night, but I just picked up the books and made my own character for next week.
Finally got some Dungeon Crawl Classics going.......now to get my hands on more stuff for it.....Hmmm..... ~Rex
Ran a session of Incursion II: Canadians Across The Galactic Empire using "loose, made-up as I went" rules. Essentially percentile and each player picked 4 skills or knacks. They could pretty much have anything they wanted that fit in with the character and circumstances and off we went.
Playtested WARS OF THE THRONE THIEF last night. It's based on the histories told in the ARTESIA line of comics and graphic novels by Mark Smylie. Similar in style to many semi-cooperative board games out now, it still has some kinks to work out before a final product. Even so, it's a richly detailed game with some complexity, like ARKHAM HORROR. Good times!
Badassery all around Sir Jon! I have been playing the R. Tal Cyberpunk games since 1987. 2020 was my favorite of them all. I know we all try to forget about Cyberpunk 3.0, but I do have my name in a the credits of the some of the books. I was an honor to work with the great Mike Pondsmith however.
Currently we are using Universal Horizon Rules for a Pathfinder Fantasy Series (Kingmaker), Araqunidia for a Future Genre (Alien Bugs invade a rich world of discovery), Bloodtooth Paradoxals (A time-loop fix-the-past issue), and Bloodtooth Genres (Circa 1980s alternate Earth with conspiracy theories). It is awesome to take the same character and move it from genre to genre. I write and run the Bloodtooth (Bt) and Araqnidian (Aq) campaigns. We meet once every one to two weeks depending on kid's schedules and wives. :lol: I am fortunate that I have lot of help with writing and <cringe> editing. I play a nature conservationist elf (Herbalist Vocation) in the Pathfinder series (Kingmaker) using Universal Horizon Player's Handbook. We supplemented the systems with a few hundred of the 3500+ spells we have written (Thanks John!). Fantasy is a great challenge for the characters and Guides, but well worth the experience. We love the versatility and players get to keep playing their same character in all the genres. All in all, we love the idea of sharing role-playing with younger gamers. Too many kids just war-game or video game. The problem-solving and social experience of RPGs has opened up worlds of interaction that they love! Good Gaming and see you all at the Con!!!! _AJ_
Our Savage Worlds 50 Fathoms campaign reached its final night. At the store I play at on Tuesdays, there are several campaigns running at once, and periodically they will all stop and new campaigns will start, giving others a chance to run games and people an opportunity to play something different. Yesterday was the first night of the new campaigns, and I am now playing Star Wars d6. Chargen took long enough that there wasn't much point in starting since there was only 30 minutes left, so I am looking forward to next week!
I've been playtesting my Dungeons Deep fantasy RPG for several months and its really coming together. (The rules should be ready for public consumption by Gary Con VIII.) I've also been playing in a weekly 1Eish AD&D campaign for the better part of 20 years. Also tried the King of NY boardgame for the first time this past weekend with the family and it was great fun.
Been play testing Basic Psionics Handbook for the last year with my 3 years running B/X campaign of 8 twelve year olds.
We just finished up my Age of Rebellion game and will spend two of the next three sessions playtesting the adventures I'm writing for Gary Con. This last weekend, we tested my Paranoia adventure, "Bugs in the System." I still have to write and test my Numenera adventures, then, if all goes as planned, on Jan. 29th, I'll be starting a new D&D 5E campaign. I don't have a name for it yet, but it's basically going to be a Spelljammer game using some of the surviving PCs from my Hoard of the Dragon Queen campaign earlier this year.
Being the only one of our group with time (?!), I'm currently running a homegrown 5E game that grew out of Phandelver and is kind of the G1-2-3 D1-2-3 Q1 arc. My group consists of 4 of us that have been playing together since 1984, and my brother in-law who I quickly corrupted when I met his sister in 1992. Because we're spread geographically, and all have complex schedules and kids, we use Roll20.
Most of my current face-to-face group will be coming to Gary Con with me. We currently rotate through three games (we play roughly monthly). The first is Alex's. She is running a big-narrative-arc D&D 5E campaign. I'm trying to talk her into writing it up so I can get Paolo Greco (who will be at Gary Con)/Lost Pages to publish it. I have an awesome picture for it commissioned from Gennifer Bone. It is...well, its name is "Worn-Out Shoes" and from my perspective it's about freeing slaves. The slaves, however, are an incursion from another dimension, and there's a big back story where we're apparently Heroes Of Destiny who must stop the High Monarch from returning. My character is Jimbo Stubbins, halfling rogue with a very very dark past, fueled almost entirely by self-loathing which he usefully translates into rage against the powerful oppressing the weak. She, unfortunately, won't be coming with us to Gary Con because she's still in high school and her dad (also part of that game group), understandably, won't let her come. The thing is: this is a damn good adventure. I think back to what I was writing at 17, and....whoa. Which is why I'm trying to nudge her to get me something we can turn into a publishable product. The second is Image's. He's running a GURPS Star Trek Game, original series continuity. We started as ensigns on the Yorktown and are now mostly Lieutenants Junior Grade. I'm about halfway to Lieutenant. My character is Atilla Vörösign, a Security Officer. His continued survival is astounding. Our most recent game was basically the six-months-later sequel to "Bread and Circuses." Image will be coming to Gary Con with us. So will my wife Amy, who is the other core member of this gaming group, and Jason, who plays sometimes but isn't really core. The third game is mine. We just wrapped up a game that was kind of a mashup of Call of Cthulhu, JAGS: Wonderland, and The Matrix. Next up, we are doing a straight-up Fallout game. It will be set in the Midwest (in St. Louis, in fact) in 2288. I am planning to use either Whitebox20 or a stripped-down BRP as the system under it; BRP would make it easier to emulate S.P.E.C.I.A.L., but I really like Whitebox20 and it feels faster and lighter. However, my players may want more structure than W20 would have. I am planning on structuring this very much like Fallout, in that there's a main narrative arc that will totally wait for everyone, and a bunch of sandboxy small arcs around it. It's going to be designed for casual play because I want people besides the core group to be able to drop in and out without busting up continuity. Because of the way Fallout works, this should be fine; essentially, dismissed companions go back home and are just waiting around there when you want to rehire them. I'm still at the design stage on this one, but I might have enough written to run a pickup game at Gary Con in a month. I also have an on-line game (we just use Google Hangouts): I am running a 5E game for my wife, my brother-in-law, and his son. We just finished up Wave Echo Cave in the Starter Set, and Princes Of The Apocalypse is next.
