The Last Month of the First Half of 2020

...hopefully we're almost done with all that ...

Where to begin? Such a weird year. I was actually running and playing in games again and then ... POW! Nope!

Two college kids doing school from home full time, one working more (delivery), one working a lot less (retail).

Friends isolating so the only way we see each other is online. Tabletop simulator is interesting, Lords of Waterdeep is a really good group game, and we've played a lot less of the MMORPG option than I thought we would - even City of Heroes. Thank god for Steam sales, GOG sales, and the Total War series of games, especially Warhammer 1 & 2. I might be a little obsessed these days.

Working from home full time ... I worked from home a few days a week already so all I really did was slide that control over to "max" and have more time to do whatever I wanted to do. It was not a tough situation here, especially compared to a lot of other people.

RPG Talk:

As all of this hit and shut everything down I had decided it was time to push the Pathfinder 2E tryout campaign into something real. I had been running it using Frostgrave as a model for the setting and while everyone was having fun it was not all that conducive to a long term campaign - it's kind of limiting as far as social activity and general downtime fun when you're in a giant uninhabited frozen ruined city and the nearest outpost of civilization is a village like the one  in "Hardhome" in that great episode of Game of Thrones.

I had high hopes for it but quickly realized that by fairly strictly following the structure of the miniatures game's background I had crippled the potential in a lot of ways. Even worse, when I thought through what I could do to improve things it quickly turned into my Phlan campaign with more snow being the main distinction. What can I say? I kind of have a template for running a ruined city D&D game and I didn't really want to repeat myself just yet.

So I poked through the stacks and realized there was a fairly obvious thing to try: What if it's not a ruined city? What if it's a living breathing city full of interesting situations? now I've thought for a long time the next time I ran a city campaign it would be Waterdeep and all of those nice supplements they've put out covering it over the last 30 years. Nope!

They ran a kickstarter a month or three back for a D&D 5E version  of it but if I'm running it for Pathfinder 2E then I don't really need that do I? I can convert from the book that's been sitting on my shelf for 10+ years now just as easily!

So that's the plan for the Big Fantasy Game that I always seem to be running ... well, once the restrictions lift and everybody feels comfortable gathering again. More on this later.

The plan is to run a game weekly but sometimes that's not schedule-friendly so to allow some of my players to lighten the load I'm considering running two games, alternating weeks. For the second game I presented a few options but we settled on Star Wars, FFG-funky-dice-Star-Wars because I want to give it a real test. I'm adapting one of my old ideas so the actual work is small and feels like a lot of fun as I look back through it. Setitng it in the Clone Wars era opens up a nice set of options, including active Jedi types, and with official FFG support material it's pretty damn easy to put together.

Oh and now there's a 9th edition of 40K coming soon too - I'll save that for Friday.