RPG Updates for July

Well I didn't post that much in June because there was just too much going on. With cars and college mostly sorted out things should settle down for the rest of July. I figured I would take a minute to post my thoughts on what I've been doing and on some hopes for the rest of the year.

• All I've run the past month is D&D 5th edition and we just finished Session #3. I am happy with both the rules and my choice of campaign so things are moving along quite nicely now. We have a rotating cast of players and even added one new player, so that's been fun as well. 
• As far as new players I've been playing with mostly the same group of people for quite a few years now so I decided a few weeks ago to look for some fresh faces to mix things up. I do appreciate that having a steady group can be a rare thing but I also don't want to sink into a rut and have everything become routine. Adding someone new to the group can help avoid that. Also, with all of the schedule issues people have at times - including me - having a larger pool of players makes it that much more likely we will have enough people to pull a game together on any given weekend. 
• The Deadlands game has suffered somewhat. There's still interest but anytime my 3 players have been available other people have been available as well and we have opted to play D&D instead. I'm going to call this "a good problem to have" rather than an emergency. We will pick it back up soon enough.
• Mutants and Masterminds has suffered as well due to being unable to sync up all of the college crowd's summer schedules. I suppose it's the downside of adding some new players but the sessions we had were a lot of fun. We will probably have to leave the "crisis" hanging for a few more weeks at least. In the meantime we may just have to run some side stories if we want to get in some M&M time.
  I have also resolved to pick up the books I have not yet acquired. M&M was running at a pace of about a book a year, but with 2017 shaping up to have three books released (Hero High, Atlas of Earth Prime, and Freedom City 3E) I decided it was time to get current. I am almost there.
• The other side games like our Star Wars campaign have been quiet too as whenever the boys have been here we've been playing the new edition of 40K or doing other things. I expect we will get back to them at some point before school starts back up but they are not on any particular schedule so it's not a big concern. I'd like to play them more but there's only so much time in each week.

• New Stuff!
• The new Star Trek is officially out. Still not all that thrilled with the system but I will probably pick up the PDF at least to see the final official version and to see if we want to try it out. With some renewed interest in Trek on my part I also managed to complete my collection of Last Unicorn Trek books so now I have all of those, all of the Decipher books, and everything for FASA minus a few of the adventures and honestly those are not a high priority for me.
• DCC has a kickstarter going for scratch-off character sheets for zero-level characters. I think it's a great idea and I will be a part of this one.
• There's a new version of Top Secret for the modern era on Kickstarter. The system looks interesting and the print version is a good deal. With the original creator involved I am also jumping on to this one. I've never had a ton of success sustaining an espionage type campaign but it's also been a long time since I tried to run one. 

• Plans for the Future
• Starfinder still looks interesting but I might look at this one more as a player than a DM. I think it's a good opportunity to see if someone else wants to run rather than assuming I will be that guy.
• Really looking forward to the new Freedom City book. That may turn out to be the biggest one this year for me personally. Well, other than catching up on 5th edition D&D. As far as new books released in 2017 though I think this is the big one. 
• The rest of "the plan" is to stay on a steady schedule and keep running and playing games - that's it!