The RPG Catch-Up post

Despite the silence this month I have managed to get in some games - here's what's been going on at the beginning of the new year:

• I'm actually playing in two games! At the same time! Not literally!
• Paladin Steve's Pathfinder campaign is about to make it's 5th anniversary. We're 10th level now and even playing once a month, roughly, it does feel like a nice long continuous campaign. It's clearly going to outlive the system that spawned it ... and I don't care at all.  
• Variable Dave has been running his 50 Fathoms campaign weekly for around 10 sessions now and it's going really well. I have not played in an extended Savage Worlds game in a very long time - actually never this long - and it's cool to see the intended progression at work. Playing a squid-faced water mage and ace swordsman has been a ton of fun. People always know when I'm speaking in character because I put my hand in front of my face and wiggle my fingers like tentacles and it cracks us up every time.
• In general it's really nice to be playing in some games regularly for a change. I've been a constant DM for so long it's good to have that perspective from the other side of the table and it helps remind me of the way the fun works on that side of things too.
• The main campaign which has run mostly consistently every two weeks is the "Classic Cormyr" 5th Edition D&D game. 
• I really liked running Storm King's Thunder but I felt like I needed to focus on just running one D&D game for a while -not the 3 I was attempting- to keep on some kind of regular schedule. The players liked playing through Keep on the Borderlands and when I explained my thinking on what other old classic modules we could play through as this campaign the immediately voted to make it "the game". Most of them have not played through these old adventures because they are too young or if they did it was back in 1st or 2nd edition and it's pretty fuzzy. 
• It's fun for me because it gives me a framework to build around but the process of updating to 5th gives me some space to flex my creative muscles in tweaking the encounters and working up some hopefully memorable characters to encounter, both good and bad.
• They are now finished with the Keep and next on the agenda is The Isle of Dread which starts later this week! Down the road we will probably encounter some Giants and then likely Descend into the Depths of the Earth.
• As a holiday one-off I ran Day of the Swarm for ICONS - yes, a Supers game again! It went pretty well so I expect ICONS will show up again as an ad-hoc game.
• I also managed to run another session of our extremely intermittent Marvel Heroic game! I will write it up in the future but the start of a new Event saw the return of Hercules, new writers for Colossus and Iron Man, and the first appearance of Wolverine. It took some time to shake off the rust but we had fun and this may turn into a once-a-month game to try and keep the rust off.

For the rest of the year I would like to keep these things stable and work in more as much as I can. Hopefully SKT will drop back into the rotation at some point, Savage Rifts is still being asked for regularly, and I'd love to run another fixed-run Star Wars game. We will see but it all looks pretty promising at this point.