Just Happy to Have Made It to the End of the Week

Work has really been getting in the way of the fun stuff lately - 50-hour weeks are not conducive to posting or playing. I'm not all that upset about it as I know I'm fortunate enough to work indoors where it's air conditioned as opposed to being a roofer in Texas in July, but I'm usually better at making time for fun stuff than this. I'm still trying to figure out who decided to make the major Q2 release in June and the major Q3 release in July, and why they thought that was a good idea.

We're also moving into a new house at the end of this month and if any of you are fortunate enough to own a gaming hoard as well then you know what kind of work that can be. Those books and boxes look real nice lined up on the shelves and all but each shelf can fill 2 or 3 or 4 boxes - heavy boxes - and Lady Blacksteel and the apprentices are not shy with the comments. Some people just don't understand - even though I've only played Rolemaster once it makes all kinds of sense to keep the books for it because I might need to/want to/have the chance to play it again sometime! I know a group over in Dallas who still play it - if I hit a drought they might be my only option! I know some of you out there get this...

I did lighten the load a bit - I sold a car! I'm pretty sure the 3000+ pounds it weighed is more than my gaming stuff. Pretty sure ... anyway getting it ready to go took additional time out of the fun time budget. So farewell to the Mighty Thunderstang, faithful steed for over a decade - sniff.

It's also a chance to notice the vast number of unpainted, half-painted, and painted-but-now-broken miniatures in the collection. I'm going to need a serious amount of glue after this one.

Besides our Pathfinder experiments I also managed to get the Apprentices fired up about Mutants and Masterminds (I'm going to try the Emerald City Knights adventures with them), and help them to make up some new characters of their own only to run out of time to actually play it with them. It's a busy month. The main 4E game has been bumped for two weeks now too, so nobody's happy right now.

It impacts more than just the fun time budget too - Civil War is "after the move", further Pathfinder expansion is "after the move", 40K 6th is "after the move", filling in the last few gaps in the 4E collection is "after the move", etc.

Now besides all this whining about too much job and gaming stuff and a new house (yeah I get it - "I can't complain but sometimes I still do") I am working on a little something I like to think of as "Heresy Week" and I will post it all up if I can pull it all together, probably the last week of the month. It's kind of an anniversary thing too but I don't want to wait until September (3 years of rambling here!) to do it.

Some Pathfinder Adventure Path Notes

Since we're exploring the low levels of Pathfinder I started reading through some of the adventure paths that have been published and I have three main thoughts:

• They don't go to 20?! I thought that was the whole point! I know Savage Tide did, and I thought Age of Worms and Shackled City did too, and that was back when they had to share a magazine! Now we get almost 600 pages of adventure and some of them only get the party to 15th level? I feel let down.
• One module per month for 6 months - I like the schedule. I like that they've gone to making the player guides for each one a free PDF. I like that there's plenty of supporting material about the setting. I like that the first one contains a summary of each of the subsequent adventures. I just wish it only took us 6 months to play through one of them.
• So...much...backstory! My old school roots may be showing here, but I don't need to know that the main villainess had a bad childhood and an unhappy relationship that led to her swearing an oath to an evil goddess and deciding that burning her hometown down was a good idea - I don't need to see extensive justification for the actions of a crazy person! She's doing bad things and she needs to be dealt with - good enough for me! I'm seeing space used for this kind of thing (and there are quite a few villains with a whole lot of backstory in Runelords at least) that could have been used for short side encounters in the wilderness or some more notes (or maps) of places around town. It's not a huge negative thing but does anyone remember that we used to do interesting adventures in 16 pages? When my players see a chick with a demon arm standing in an evil temple pulling monsters out of a summoning circle they aren't going to have much of a conversation about her personal chance for redemption - at most it's going to be dueling monologues and then a throwdown. I wonder if the writers sometimes forget that this is a game (and a world) where party members can quickly and reliably scan for evil - PING! - "Yep she's evil - take her down!" - no confusion, no debate.

That's the initial take anyway. I've read the initial adventure of several paths now and between the backstory and the plots - some of which make supervillain plots to take over the world look concise - there's a lot to read through and I don't know how much of it is going to come out at the game table. I do like a lot of them though so they will probably make an appearance at the table down the road.

But who's going to ...

...bring Hawke home now?

...and help Snake find his way around town?



Plus don't forget he spent ten years in the Navy during wartime before he chose the life we all remember him for.

Thank you for all of those parts Mr. Borgnine.

Motivational Monday

Non-Vacation

No I haven't disappeared. This was supposed to be a bit of a vacation week but with a work project on fire that's not really happening. It's also not leaving much time for blog posts either. Trying to actually do something with the Apprentices is taking priority, as is fixing the laptop, desktop, and U-Verse box that have all been borked this past week. So although the posting has temporarily declined things should get back to more normal next week.

Motivational Independence Day

Motivational Monday

40K Friday: Rynn's World

This is a pretty good one. It's a 40K Space Marine Novel, but it's not completely wrapped up in the glorious exploits of one legendary character. Nor is it littered with constant temptations by Chaos. Nor does it feature conspiracies by cultists, inquisitors, or traitors. Instead, it focuses on a legendary battle that's a straight up face-off between the Crimson Fists and an Ork invasion - of their homeworld.

One of the refreshing things about the book is that the marines begin as somewhat arrogant and detached from the world they call home, have their arrogance thrust into their face but are defiant nonetheless, then there is a terrible accident and the Fists are on their heels for the rest of the story, fighting to survive as a chapter. They have doubts, they have fears, they experience failure on a massive scale and in the most personal of ways.

Of course being marines they still fight on but there are some actual interesting debates over vengeance vs. duty, short term vs. long term, and the need to fight vs. the need to preserve the chapter for the future and the larger struggle to defend the imperium.  Don't get me wrong, there's no lack of skull-exploding bolter head-shots and powerfists crushing bodies in close combat but there are some interesting problems being faced alongside the action.

Additional freshness: the marines don't win every fight, even the on-screen ones. Their big heroes don't even win every fight. Near the end of the story the embarrassment of needing help to defend their own homeworld is even mentioned. Overall, most of this book covers a situation we don't see very often with space marine stories - desperation and failure. Some of the pivotal events are due to sheer bad luck and circumstance - again, not traitors or conspiracies or psykers or warpstorms or anything else. Longtime 40K players know all about rolling a "1" - sometimes random chance can have some pretty devastating consequences. Reading along as the marines are rocked back on their heels and struggling to keep it together makes for a pretty good story.

Hell on Earth Reloaded!

I had not been following this one as I wasn't sure it would ever come out - remember Savage Worlds came about about 9 years ago, Deadlands Reloaded 6 years ago - but it is out now in PDF form with hardcopy books soon to follow. Apparently there will be a separate plot point campaign book as well. I am a pretty happy camper as this is one of my favorites: some Gamma World, some Twilight 2000, some Supers, and of course some Deadlands, and it's all mixed together into a very cool package. The original system was pretty crunchy and as much as I liked it there were times when combat bogged down a bit. Now with full support for a Savage Worlds version I'm extremely interested and it's going on the "play" list for later this year - once the big summer project is over.

She looks a little different up above - and I'm OK with that

An Update from the Past, Present, and Far Future

It's been a little quiet here this week - the short version:

• The main game continues but for the Apprentices this is the lull before July when all of them are here pretty much all of the time. So less to discuss.
• Current work is in an extremely busy period so less time to play, think and post.
• Lots of other major changes on the horizon which are taking a great deal of time and consideration, cutting into the meanderings of the gaming mind. This month I'm counting myself fortunate to run and read and still get some sleep in between everything else.

It's not all business and distractions though  - I found this email from, well:

Traveller5 is nearly complete. Its full of material: Character Generation, Androids, Robots, Clones, Worlds, Starships, Small Craft, Adventures, and more.

Monday, December 10, 2007 12:17 AM

 

We're sending you this because you have ordered the Traveller science-fiction role-playing game from Far Future.net in the past.

Traveller5 is nearly complete. Its full of material: Character Generation, Androids, Robots, Clones, Worlds, Starships, Small Craft, Adventures, and more.

come see more at our web page www.farfuture.net

 

We are in the last stages of completing an extensive initial CDROM version of T5 by Jan 31 totaling about 1000 electronic pages. Order now, and we'll send you our special offer now and the CDROM as soon as it rolls of the press.

We have a special offer on the web site. Come see what we have.

www.farfuture.net 

So, if I ordered this in 2007 am I automatically in on the kickstarter? Were people able to order this back then? How did this work out, exactly? I pretty much stopped following it once I got interested in the Mongoose version so I'm a little curious about it.