The RPG Update at the End of October

Since posting has been spotty this month I wanted to put together a general update for my own sake as we head into the holiday season of the year and collect my thoughts on where our games stand.

• Superheroes: It's been months since we've played a Supers game of any kind but I am not unhappy about it. Our superhero games have been intermittent rather than a sustained campaign for years anyway so it's not a surprise and with some of my primary players moving out of the house and others getting their first jobs it's really cut into the extra time where we would work in a session of ICONS or Marvel Heroic. 
• If I can drag the college crew back to the house for the day after Thanksgiving it would be the one-year anniversary of our Time of Crisis marathon session and maybe - MAYBE! - we could finish it! 
• With Freedom City 3E coming out I'd really like to dig back into an ongoing superhero game, I just don't know when we will work it in.
• Speaking of settings I still really like Emerald City too and would be really happy if I could find a way to run a game there as well. 
• I've been looking at my ICONS material and notes and thinking we need to dust that game off too.
• My homebrew "Atomic City" setting - so many plans, so little attention over the last year. Need to get in some time there, whether it's M&M3 or ICONS or something else.

• Star Wars: Still a setting I really enjoy running.
• Red Sabers has been dormant since March but it has come up in conversation with the boys recently so we may get in another session or two during the holidays. This is the game that's turned Blaster into a d6 die-hard. He's not terribly interested in the FFG game because he thinks d6 is better. 
• Beyond the Rim has been stalled with schedule issues since August but we will get back to it now that high school band and football season are wrapping up here. Even beyond this one adventure (ha!) I have some things I want to do with this system and some adventures I want to try so i expect it will stay in the rotation thru 2018 as well. 
• I still have notes for the old Volturnus Space campaign and the Dawn of Defiance campaign and an Old Republic campaign. Regardless of system, I have a lot of Star Wars stuff I want to do and players who are interested. It's really just a Schedule Challenge to work it in on a regular basis.

• D&D: Digging deeper into 5th really has me in a pretty happy place with this.
• The new Forgotten Realms game has me re-reading a bunch of old material on the region and re-reading the newer stuff on the Realms as well.
• I realized I could easily run an entire campaign inside Waterdeep alone, and another one inside Neverwinter, and still keep them all in this same region of Faerun. One of these days...
• I did end up moving the "classics" game from Greyhawk to the Scarred Lands so I'm reading some of those books as well (in between everything else) and remembering how much I liked this world. It also had me going through my old campaign notes and recalling how much fun we had in that game too. More on that later.
• My preliminary looks at the Cormyr option for moving the campaign also generated enough interest for me that I'm going to continue working out an outline to see what I could do with that option. If someone wants a Realms game that isn't tied to the big campaign adventure, this would be a great region to go with a separate run.
• Honorable Mention: Pathfinder.  I'm not running it right now, and haven't this year, but I am still playing in Paladin Steve's Kingmaker campaign and I thoroughly enjoy it. I've brought up finishing Wrath of the Righteous with  my players but we haven't committed to anything yet. More on that later too!

So there are the three main streams here. The rest:

• Deadlands is on hold because I've had trouble getting my three players together at the same time and when we did they wanted to play D&D instead  - mainly to finish Keep on the Borderlands. 
• DCC was fun with 0-level characters but it's not going to replace 5th edition now that "real" D&D has taken hold. I do still have some hope for MCC when I get the physical book here, but it will likely be an occasional one-shot game rather than an ongoing campaign.
• Shadowrun - one of these days
• Runequest - we will get in a session 2 one of these days!
• Star Trek - regardless of system it's just not a setting most of my guys get excited about enough to bump something else aside and that's what it would take to really get it going,

The Wild Card: Savage Rifts. We all want to play it, the question is do we want to skip something else to do it? Yes, I pretty much live in a world of Opportunity Cost when it comes to gaming time these days. I think the holiday breaks will give us a chance to try it so I am looking at putting together a one-shot or more likely (since we have to make characters too) a "two-shot" setup type session and short run to give us a taste of how it will work, and then maybe we work it into the rotation for next year. 

Overall I am really happy with the way the games are going. Running it down like this I end up enumerating more  of what we aren't playing than what we are but that's because we've gotten to play a lot of different games over the last couple of years. I'd like to be more consistent or focused but this is how it has worked out and playing a wider variety of games is quite a bit of fun too.