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