Merry Christmas!

Here is my wish that everyone has a joyous holiday.  Shortly not a creature will be stirring, not even a mouse.

I'm back.

My apologies for neglecting to update. 

I could blame recent medical complications for not posting.  I could blame work/family balance issues.  I could blame the fact that my stalled Warhammer Fantasy game is off and running full tilt.

But the truth is, I really didn't want to.  Yes, all of those conditions contributed to my being tremendously busy lately, but there was more.  Due to a conflict that has arisen in the last month, I've been pre-occupied with what the problem is and how best to resolve it.  However, my personal tendency to avoid (ie procrastinate) handling emotional issues until there is no other recourse.  This is not good for a balanced emotional state and coupled with the stress of everything else, I've not wanted to write in my melancholy mood.

So, after much navel gazing, I've decided that I need to get back to updating here and try to not allow any of the non-gaming issues to hamper discussing the progress of my Sunday night 4E game, or how well (relatively) my Warhammer players are doing, or some upcoming face-to-face games I may be involved in. 

Slow posting this week.

Due to a visit from the Mother-in-law, Halloween approaching, an all-day Battletech throwdown, and some upcoming medical appointments this week, including an overnight at the local hospital, I've been too busy to post.  Expect regular broadcasting to resume next week.

New Project: Learning how to do electronic cartography

Despite early exposure to computers and using computers for both personal and business ends, I am not very savvy outside of spreadsheets and accounting/tax software.  Back during the hey-days of DOS 5.x through 6.x, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about software, so much so that I had memorized the slash commands for Lotus123 and WordPerfect and had a hard time adjusting to Excel and Word.  With the arrival of Windows 3.x in the early 90s, I decided to go the accounting route and leave the computer route to those who liked to run cable through drop ceilings and constantly take courses to keep up with new computer technology (funny thing is about that decision, accounts are constantly training themselves).

So, since I've got back into gaming and I love maps and I love to draw maps (poorly I confess) I've been wanting to do my own maps on the computer.  I don't care for what either, Battletech, Traveller, Warhammer, generic D&D.  I just want to be able to do maps.  Guess what.  Its a pain in the ass.

I picked up Fractal Mapper 8 a number of months ago (why didn't I choose CC3, you don't want to know) and have taken/read a number of tutorials and have prowled the cartographer forums and I still haven't produced crap.  I feel totally lost when I look at graphic programs, whether its CC3, FM8, Inkscape, GIMP, what-have-you.

Well, I think I've finally have started to make some headway and I'm going to start posting examples of what I'm doing for both comment and pointers. 

TFADAV, Part IV

or, The Further Adventures of Adelbert Vaksmann, Part IV.

Well, not matter how much he would like too, Adel can't fault Oren, the party's dragonborn meatshield, for ruining our chance for surprise.  When we last left that shining example of graceful balance, Adel, the party had decided to rest in the room with the scrying mirror.  The party's intellectuals, you know the wizards and cleric types, conferred about the wisdom of leaving such a potentially dangerous tool (the scrying mirror) there and the dangers of destroying said tool.  After much debate, they had Adel trap the room and we were on our way into the tunnel we had found.

The tunnel was not a very well built affair, with ill-spaced timbers propping up the tunnel almost as an afterthought.  But that didn't matter much, since a short distance into the tunnel, the party found itself in a natural tunnel.  Dim light and voices could be heard in the distance.

Shortly, the party came to a fork in the tunnel.  With Ky checking the tunnel to our right, Adel snuck down the tunnel to the left.  Now the last few encounters, the jingling dragonborn has been the downfall to our ability to surprise opponents.  This time it was all Adel's fault, tripping over his own feet (well, it was a natural cavern, don'tchaknow) and falling upon his backside with a loud thunk.

From inside the cavern, a nasty orc barbarian glanced up and saw Adel there.  Adel jumped up, grinned and backed back down the tunnel in a hurry, all the way back to the fork in the tunnel.  As the orc comes charging up the tunnel, party members step forward to engage.

Hearing commotion down the other tunnel, Adel decides to assist Ky, the female elf, as she is the only member down the tunnel.  However, as Adel comes to assist Ky against the hobgoblin, he finds that the nasty little guy isn't interested in fighting, just making googly eyes at Ky.  Being the evil little enchantress she is, she then proceeds to roll a crit and rip the hobgoblin's still beating heart from his chest and laughing stomp on it with her boot.  Well, not really, but a critical was rolled and the poor nasty was felled by the one he thought he loved.

The fighting progressed onward, with the Hand of Bane joining in the battle in the far tunnel.  Much cursing and banter took place between those party members facing the Hand and the Hand.  It seems that, prior to Adel joining the party, the party had faced the Hand of Bane before and the Hand had embarrassed the dragonborn and had taken the party's lunch-money, so to speak.  And unfortunately, the Hand was still giving poor Oren a hard time.

While one half of the party was dealing with the Hand, the other half was confronting an Orc chieftain of some sort.  Unfortunately, the space was confined and it was becoming very difficult to maneuver.  The chieftain was having difficulty landing a good blow due to Adel getting in his face and blinding him with his rapier, but every time we thought we had started to beat him down and he got bloodied, he'd heal back up.

However, the battle does continue on.  We had to pause about a 1/2 hour earlier due to the DM's recurring problem with his router resetting his IP address.  Or at least, that is what I think the issue is, I'm not really up to speed on connectivity issues.

Still not on the list - I declare a FLAME WAR!

Cyclopeatron has posted the latest list of hot Olde Skool blogs on the interwebs, ranked by number of followers.  There is also a list based on follower gain over the past three weeks.  I left him a message that I have two followers, if you count myself and that I am old.

Cyclopeatron did reply, stating that inclusion on the list required that this here blog needed to 'Old School' covering pre-1985 gaming.  I'm old school though, even if I don't focus on pre-'85 gaming.  Why?  I'm not sure, but I think its because I am older and the game changed during the period I had to take my hiatus from gaming and the mindset of the younger gamers is just different.

Earlier this year, while trying out a new to me game group and learning 4E, I had one of the regulars tell me I was doing it wrong.  And in my current 4E game on Fantasy Grounds, I get the feeling that goofy Adel is the only playing in character.  I just think that the current mindset is to not roleplay at all.  Now if I had to choose whether to play a game with no roleplaying versus a game where the bard had to be able to compose and sing ballads, I'd definitely choose the first choice.

So in the effort to increase traffic, please flame me in the comments section for being or not being sufficiently 'Old School'.  Thank you, come again.

The further adventures of Adelbert Vaksmann, Part III

We've had a few issues with our Sunday night game over the last few weeks, illness, visitors, hardware difficulties and software issues, but last night we had a full party and outside of one or two crashes, we had a full, fun session.

Tonight found the party in the room that housed the hell-hounds, where the party had ended the prior session taking a short rest.  Adelbert was about 75% of max hit points, but had all of his daily-ies, so he wasn't terribly concerned when he checked the door opposite of the entrance to the current room and found that it was both locked and trapped.  With Zeril, the Deva, poking him to go faster and being a general nuisance, Adel goofed somewhere (not sure how bad, the DM uses a tower and I wasn't privy to Adel's roll) and received a needle to his cheek and the poison was enough to bloody him.

Adel finished removing the trap and unlocking the door and let the others lead the way into the adjacent room.  Within a few feet of the door, black curtains hung from ceiling to floor and a terrible corpse-rotting stench emanated from the room.  Oren, our dragon-born warrior, strode into the room, followed by the pain-in-the-ass Deva, Zeril.  Zeril feeling brave stuck his head through the curtain and saw a room with four mirrors, an altar and a statue of a well muscled human.  Zeril immediately withdrew his head and exited the room, complaining of a weird feeling.  Those watching saw a misty essence in the shape of Zeril tear away from him as he exited the room and then the essence disappeared through the curtain.

The party then debated if we should enter the room.  We reminded ourselves that we had told the ghostly Duke that we would not disturb anymore crypts except in the removal of the orcs and cultists in exchange for the undead leaving us alone.  Despite the hell hounds presence, the party decided that the room probably didn't have anything to do with orcs and cultists, not wanting to chance distrubing the ghouls again.

We re-entered the main hallway again and proceed to continue in the direction we were originally travelling.  Adel was leading the way, trying to peer around the corner with Zeril poking and proding him to hurry up.  We made the turn and realized the hallway was sloping upwards and we started to worry that we missed the entrance to the lower lever when we saw a door up ahead on our right.

Seeing weak light and hearing some noise, Adel opened the door, sees a long hallway and crept inside.  Suddenly Oren comes storming through the door, pushing Adel aside.  Oren turns into one of the crypt alcoves where some light is coming from and runs into some Hobgoblin minions.  Next thing, bugbears and orcs come streaming out of the doors further down the hallway and battle is underway.

Due to the narrowness of the hallway, Adel spent most of the combat watching the action, but did find a chance towards the end to sneak in and get a whack at a bugbear.  When the last one finally fell, we searched the room at the end of the hallway and found a mirror-esque type device whose reflection showed the room with the black curtains.  While the party contemplated the meaing of the mirror, Adel and Kys were searching the crypts and a tunnel was found.  Therefore the party decided to take an extended rest before proceeding down the tunnel.

So, that is where we left it.  The DM said we'd pick it up at the decision so we could check for randon encounters during the extended rest.

In the news

Not much gaming of late.  Last Thursday I was supossed to be gaming with Clash and Tim, beta-ing Clash's Starcluster3.  Unfortunately, I was under the weather (my diabetes is acting up), Clash was late and I was exhausted.  Sunday's 4E game got cancelled due to the DM having technical difficulties with his port settings on his new computer.  Tuesday's WFRP game got cancelled because I only had one player show up.

So last night after Elizabeth's field hockey game got called due to weather, I went and picked up my birthday present, the Orcs & Goblins Brigade from Games Workshop.  I haven't finished painting the Battle for Skull Pass set I got last year for my birthday and when I opened this set and realized just how big it was, I know I've got a lot of work ahead of me.  Hopefully I'll finish them and be ready to play before the 9th edition comes out. 

Ashes of Middenheim, Prolouge Part II

No session last night.  We'd had one drop, our unplayed apprentice wizard, due to course load at school, one drop because they didn't want to spend money to upgrade their Fantasy Grounds software, and one couldn't make it due to work.  So with only one making it last night, we stayed on and chatted a bit waiting to see if the two that had expressed interest, but hadn't contacted me to make characters would show.  No dice, so I packed it up for the night and went to bed.

We'll try again next week.

Ashes of Middenheim, Prolouge.

I haven't GM-ed a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game since the early 90s, which of course was 1st edition WFRP, not the 2nd edition I'm currently using.  Additionally, this is my first foray into GM-ing any game on Fantasy Grounds II.  And since I've got back into gaming about 3 years ago, this is only the third game I've run, two being one-shot Traveller adventures.

In order to make sure I am up to speed, both with the RPG and Fantasy Grounds, I am running the initial scenario that comes with the 2nd edition rulebook which preludes the separate campaign, Ashes of Middenheim.  So far the party consists of  a dwarf hunter named Grimbor Ironmane, a human thief named Bastien Beckenbauer, and another human Erasmus, a militiaman.  We not really sure how these folks got together, but we know why:

All of you grew up listening to stories of the Great War Against Chaos. The Tale of Magus the Pious and his victory over the armies of chaos is well known. While there have been wars and threats in the 200 years since, there has been nothing on that scale. Until now. This year Chaos Lord Archaon invaded the Empire with five mighty armies. They swept down from the Chaos Wastes, ranks filled with mutant warriors, nightmarish monsters, and power-mad sorcerers. Flagellants and other prophets of doom declared these the End Times. And as these armies pillaged and burned their way through the northern provinces of the Empire, it was easy to believe.

You've heard endless stories over the past few months. They say that Sigmar once again walked the earth. They say an army of wolves attacked the Kislevian city of Erengrad. They say the dead rose from their graves to defend the Empire. They say a mighty victory was won at Middenheim. They say a plague has choked the streets of Talabheim with bloated corpses.

You can only believe what is in front of your eyes. your are in the town of Untergard in the Drakwald Forest. A nine-day battle took place here, as Beastmen tried to force their way across the town's great bridge. They were rebuffed but the price was high. The town is in ruins and its remaining citizens struggle to survive. The Imperial army has long since moved on from Untergard, leaving behind only its dead. You've heard tell of more battles up north but the war here seems over. Or so you hope.

The players have been in town for a few days, just passing through, but stuck because of the bad weather.  They awake to find a commotion at the nearby plaza and upon investigation understand that a special announcement was planned among other rumors and such (all the players rolled terribly when it came to making their gossip checks, so a little help was necessary).  As the watch captain, the nominal leader of the remainder of the town's citizens, announced to those in attendance that the Baron of Middenheim had sent some bread and wine to the town, mutants attacked from across the river.  The watch captain and two watchmen, with major help from the PCs, quickly dispatched three of the mutants, making the fourth scurry back across the bridge and flee through the ruins.

As the excitement ended, word arrives from the town's main gate that they were also attacked at the same time, but were able to beat it back with minimal losses.  It would seem that the bridge attack was a diversion, but thanks to the PCs, forces needed at the main gate were not diverted to the bridge.  But bad news shortly followed, as Hans, a local woodsman that had been gone for about week, arrived with survivors from nearby villages and farms with news that a 200-strong herd of Beastmen were heading thier way.

After heated debate, the watch captain has decided to evacuate town for Middenheim, some 6 days away.  The townsfolk are told to enjoy what the Baron has provided, for in the morning, they are leaving at first light.  The PCs find themselves in the position to either help, or depart on thier merry way.

We also had a player make an apprentice wizard, but he wasn't available for Wednesday night.  And we are still getting interest by a few people, so maybe we'll have 6 for the next session.

I'm a bad boy.

I've been promising posts and updates and I'm just too busy lazy to keep up with a hectic life.  I started my first Fantasy Grounds II campaign, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition game.  I'm working on the post now and hopefully will have it up tonight or tomorrow.

I've also been doing a beta test of Starcluster 3, a sci-fi RPG with the writer, Clash, on Thursdays.  Hopefully I'll get around to writing about it this weekend.

What Levels Mean.

I was perusing my copy of Gangbusters and came across this little gem (page 20):

A first level policeman is a rookie, and will spend
most of his time dealing with other PCs and NPCs who also are
first level. A fifth level policeman deserves much more respect,
will handle tougher cases and will be able to associate more
easily with social and political leaders. Law enforcement officers
who reach 10th level or higher are living legends, and the
mere mention of their name will strike terror into lower-level
criminals.

I've played with too many players that with 1st level characters, they'll already living legends in thier mind.  I'll have to remember to keep knocking them down until they really are at that level.

Now back to watching tutorials for Fantasy Grounds.

Maintenance

Well, I'm about two weeks behind on the adventures of Adelbert the Rogue.  Its coming, soon.  My Battletech/Stargrunt game for tomorrow is cancelled; half of the crew had something come up, so I'll probably just be tinkering around with my Traveller Sandbox or the homework I have to do for my Starcluster3 Beta session on Thursday.  Its either that or go catch up on yardwork that has been neglected for the last couple of weeks (thank you real life, i.e. job).

I've got feelers out for both a Traveller sandbox game on Pen and Paper Games Chat and a Warhammer Fantasy roleplay game on Fantasy Grounds II.  And I'm toying with the notion of running a pre-4E Forgotton Realms 4E game on Fantasy Grounds II.

More sometime today or tomorrow.

FYI - This is a gaming blog

Perusing the various sites and blogs out there, I am surprised of the number of fellow bloggers that mix real world politics with their gaming discussions.  While I can be quite passionate about my politics, I am of the firm belief that politics doesn't mix well with anything and I refuse to discuss politics with fellow gamers to the best of my ability. 

Besides, when it comes to politics, everyone else besides me is just plain wrong!

Finally, a busy gaming schedule, sort of.

Now that I've got some free time with work finally slacking off, I've got a pretty full plate of gaming coming up:

• My weekly Sunday night 4E game on Fantasy Grounds II
• monthly face-to-face Battletech game is now doable
• I'm possibly running a Mongoose Traveller chat campaign, Secrets of the Ancients
• I might try to restart my pbp WFRP game that I had to abandon before the first session last year
• and I just got a starting spot in a pbp 1st/2nd edition Forgotten Realms game.

And considering that the little one decided she would rather play field hockey than soccer this fall, I'm not going to coach, I should be able to keep my gaming schedule pretty open until lacrosse season next spring.

Update - and I almost forgot, I'm going to beta test a sci-fi game written by clash over at I Fly by Night also.

Sunday night recap: Part: Duex or The further adventures of Adelbert Vaksmann

Well, adventure Adelbert did this past Sunday night.  However, due to the player hitting the adult beverage heavily to take his mind off his upcoming annual audit at work, the player doesn't really have anything coherent to say.  Additionally, being the self-centered type anyway, Adelbert would really only want to discuss himself with little mention of the others in the party, except where it made himself look good.

Having dispatched the young, blue dragon during the previous session, Adelbert led his merry band further into the cavern system intent on finding the leaders of the cult we were hunting down.  Don't ask me why, Adelbert just joined this party and I'm too lazy to read all of the background.  Besides Adelbert doesn't care, he is just looking to get paid without having a real job.  So after mop up operations on the remaining hobgoblin forces, Adel and company headed back to Winterhaven, our base of operations for some R&R and restocking before heading to the haunted keep to track down the cult leader.

So that is where we pretty much left it when we wrapped the session, Adel regaling the local bar wench with his exploits against the dragon, looking for a free pint and a warm lass to share his bed.

We had all six players for this session and it worked well.  I need to remember to take a screen shot or two and post it for any visitors to see.

Sunday night recap: Part: The First

Adelbert Vaksmann

Tonight's session found the intrepid party still locked in combat with the young Blue Dragon with the dragon's handlers about to join in the fray.  Adelbert the Rogue found himself a little too close to the dragon and his hoard was suffering from both dragon's lightning breath attack and the scarab beetles guarding his coinage.

Adel started to disengage himself from the fight when someone landed the killing blow.  The Hobgoblin captain and his bugbear troops were rushing to the scene as the dragon fell.  As he was running the captain was barking instructions (a pretty cool app for Fantasy Grounds II has characters only being able to read the languages listed on their sheets, and since Adel only speaks Common and Dragon, he had no clue what the hobgoblin was saying), and being the flamboyant, wise ass that he is, Adel starts to shout in a bunch of gobbleydeegook, imitating the hobgoblin.  Bad mistake.

The next thing Adel notices is the spear shaft protruding from his stomach with a pissed hobgoblin on the other end.  Adel drops and it looks like curtains for the rogue.  But today the Lady brought Adel weal, not woe and faster than you can say, 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die', Adel with a little healing help (and DM dice roll fudging, wink, wink) jumps back up with 1 hp left and sneak attacks the flank hobgoblin captian and scores a crit. 

Shortly, the battles over and the good guys (that's us) start looking the the dead bodies for goodies, took an extended rest and headed further into the natural cavern complex looking for the leaders of the cult.

Time to catch up

Over a month from my last post....what can I say, life happens.

The family and I went down to St. Pete's, actually Maderia Beach, for a little r&r.  The mother-in-law had found a place on the beach that wasn't terrible, not far from our friends vacation home.  They made it down the day before we left, so we hung out and let the kids play the night before.  Between the little one's eye infection and weather that didn't cooperate, the vacation was a little bit of a wash.  That and the fact that the Wife's grandmother is temporarily in an assisted living place and is in pretty bad shape (in fact, they told her this week that they feel it is time to make it permanent).

Work is crazy as usual.  Between board meetings, personnel issues, the close of the CDC grant year and the close of our fiscal year, I've been kept pretty busy.  Between now and early August I have to finish closing the books and writing the financial statements.  Then it is time for the audit fieldwork and we should slow back down again by the later part of the month.

In addition to all the work stuff, I've been trying to set up a EZ setup pool we purchased in early June.  There has been nothing easy in the process at all.  After two attempts to level the ground and fill the pool, we ended up hiring someone with a bobcat to level us some ground for the pool.  We eventually got the pool up running this past weekend.

After getting back from vacation, I joined my first game using a VTT, or virtual tabletop.  I had played around with maptools and openrpg, but liked the professional ones a little better and picked up Fantasy Grounds II.  Being the non-internet/java/codemonkey that I am, I was having a hard time figuring out how to use it, so I looked for a game to join to get my feet wet.  We are using the 4E ruleset for Fantasy Grounds II.

The group will regularly meet on Sunday evenings, even though we had a session tonight to make up for one we missed due to the DM travelling for work.  So after two sessions I really like FGII and I really can't complain about 4E at all.  I'm playing a rogue this time, so there is a little adjustment from playing the defender.  But both the players and DM have been patient and I'm feeling pretty good about the opportunities to game more often to continue to expand.

With the Wife and Little One going to NJ for the weekend, I've got a poker game at my sister's tomorrow night, an all day Battletech game Saturday and the next session for 4E Sunday evening.  I'm in gaming heaven, at least for a weekend.

Character Generation part I

I stumbled over a few comments about character generation at a few blogs, that currently slip my mind, that got me thinking about character generation.

I've probably rolled up more characters for games never played than characters for actual games.  There is something about the creation process I love.  It must be my inner accountant.

The Traveller chargen is probably the easiest for straight randomness, with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Mechwarrior close on its heels.  There may be other systems similiar to Traveller, but I've not yet encounter such.  I know that with Traveller chargen there is usually a good chance of death and with Mechwarrior some short of uncool injury or addiction was 90% going to rear its ugly head.

Why is this all important?  Because I think this is a fundemental way to approach the game - play the role of the character that you are given/rolled, don't try to create your alter ego, ala The Matrix.

My introduction to D&D was at the Hilsmere public library.  I was visiting my grandfather and  wandered into the library and found a group playing.  They offered to let me play handing me one of the henchmen and the rest is history.  This is why I prefer to play anything and really don't care too much about party balance and other esoteric gaming concepts; I want to see if what happens when you play your character to type.

Two days home, sick, not much accomplished.

I came home early on Wednesday ill.  I pretty much had my assistant make corrections on her data entry and cut accounts payable checks and then went home.  Pretty miserable.  Didn't make it to work on Thursday (not like I had to commute far, just downstairs to my home office/man cave).  Made it into the office today despite not being 100% and I realize with all that free time I didn't get much done.

Outside of setting up the new pool (a cheapie from Toys r Us) I've got the weekend free.  Maybe I'll get around to working more on the Fantasy Grounds II software.

Unbreaking the Interwebs and beyond

It took me a few days and another call to Verizon FIOS tech support* and I got my router reset and then was able to fiddle for a few more days and got my port forwarding correct to handle Fantasy Grounds II.

Now I just need to figure out how to populate a character sheet!  I'm sure I'll figure it out, it is just a pain to figure out so much crap.  Just like when I used to know the DOS commands and knew how to manually use Lotus123, todays' users understand all of the hotkeys.  I'll have to print out a few cheat sheets and post them around my desk for help.

I'm trying to join a Sunday evening game and I've posted for interest about a Wednesday night game on both the FGII forums and over at Pen and Paper Games.

Plus I found a very nice retro-clone game for free call Dark Dungeons.  I'll post more later, as I'm still on the clock.  :)


* Verizon FIOS tech support is generally good and my biggest gripe is the automated system at the beginning of the call; I have no complaints about the techs themselves.  (Note Verizon - If you like that friendly plug, how about a little donation my way?  :) )

I broke the interwebs!

At least from my computer it seemed that way.  I'm trying to adjust my port settings so I can host a game using Fantasy Grounds and I did something to my router.  At least the tech support call with Verizon Fios didn't take too long.

I still don't know how to adjust my port forwarding though.

I miss the good olde days of DOS 5.xx

Long time no update.

Life can suck.  Especially when you have to work to pay the bills and that interfers with having fun.

Since the last time I posted, I've joined a group and played 4E for the first time.  I've realized that Friday nights aren't good - I'm too tired after a long week of work and coaching my daughter's LAX team.  Discussed having the group move to another day - the DM's wife wasn't happy with Friday nights either as her schedule on Fridays and Saturdays interferred.  Then we decided to switch to Saturdays and before we could play a Saturday game, I realized that my wife had a problem with a weekly Saturday early afternoon game.

So I had to drop the 4E group. 

I have to say that my only complaint about D&D 4E is the non-human-centric nature of the setting.  I don't think one of the 7 characters were human and I also believe there were only two characters that shared a race.  The sad part about the two elves, only one liked being and elf and the other was shape-shifted as a dog most of the time.

This is one of the reasons why I don't care for high fantasy too much any more.

I just purchased Fantasy Grounds II the other night and will spend some time learning it this weekend and post more shortly.

Busy, busy, busy...

I am a procrastinator.  I had to postpone my February one-shot Traveller adventure and am scheduled to run it this coming Sunday and I am nowhere near ready.  Instead I've been playing with Obsidian Portal trying to setup my own Pendragon campaign.

Finding a new game group

Long story short (I started to write my entire gaming life story), after years of not have a face-to-face non-XBox gaming group, I've been looking for one when time allows for the past 3 years. Last year I received an invitation to game with the Hero's Guild of Maryland at a mini-con they were hosting at the FLGS. They were attempting to broaden the local gaming pool with both people and different games. It has been pretty successful and I've enjoyed the sessions I've been able to make it too; I'm even running a Traveller game for the April mini-con.


The problem I've run into though is that while the FLGS is only about 30 minutes away just outside the south side of Baltimore, most of the gamers I am meeting reside in Baltimore or on the north side. This has made finding a group most difficult, I drive enough for my daily commute, I really don't want to drive an hour to and an hour back from a game. (This is why unfortunately I stopped going to my monthly Battletech game, 1 hour there, 10 to 12 hours of gaming and then 1 hour home).
About a month ago, I found a group in Odenton, about 10 miles away (15 minutes due to crossing over major traffic arteries) and they were looking for players. So far so great; you couldn't ask for a nicer group of people. However, it is high-fantasy and 4E.
Now, I don't have any true opinion in the Version Wars, so I'm not a hater just ranting about how I remember the old days and this new stuff sucks. Well, that isn't entirely true, even though I wasn't gaming at the time, I did pick up the 3E Core books and D20 Modern shortly after they first issued, and I hated the D&D books. Absolutely hated them; too PC, who ever heard of a female Paladin, etc., etc. D20 Modern didn't bother me, but for some reason the D&D ones did.
Well anyway, the only gripe I have with 4E is trying to find stuff. It doesn't feel familiar, but I guess that will grow. I love the art work and the books look nice (if not pricey).
But for some reason, I am just not getting into the game. I've been perusing my copy of Pendragon 5E and the Great Pendragon Campaign wishing I had a local group to play it with. I think my days of playing the gritty Warhammer Fantasy has really tempered me or I'm just turning into an over the hill curmudgeon.

Introductions

Hello and welcome to my little corner of the interwebs.  This here dairy, er journal is a place to discuss, usually with myself, and make note of gaming that I have some interest.  Please feel free to browse and comment on any topic or email me correspondence.

I've always liked games; cards, dice, boardgames, wargames, roleplaying games, pinball machines, and video games.  Simulations would also have to be included in this category, but I know that many do not consider them games.  As for genre, I'd have to say that I don't really have a favorite, but as I've aged I have found a few that I don't care for much anymore.

Being old and crusty, I've found that High Fantasy just doesn't seem to cut it anymore.  And I've never been much of a horror fan.  But anything else is pretty much fair game as I never fail to, and probably never will, get excited by the new and shiny.