Grab-Bag II: The Follow-Up

I put up a post about some new arrivals last week and since there was some discussion around it I thought I would follow it up this week with the next chapter in the story:

I really like the Mekton II covers - there's no question as to what these books are about, unlike some RPGs that seem determined to keep that a secret until you open up the book.

That wraps up the core of Mekton II. I know there's an adventure or two and I believe the techbook was for Mekton II but I always thought of these three books as giving you the main system, an option for a smaller scale game in Roadstriker, and an option to blow it wide open with Empire.

As far as actual campaigns I've never run or played more than a session or two of Mekton. I have had what I thought were some pretty solid ideas for campaigns years ago but I think I tossed my notes when I sold off the books so I'm starting with a blank slate at this point. I have been rolling a few ideas around in my head:

• Star Wars with mecha instead of fighters and ground vehicles. Not terribly original but I think it would be fun. The trick is making it different enough while keeping it at least somewhat familiar.
• Take a western like Silverado or Tombstone (or one of the older classics) and use that as a plot and character outline but dress it with tech. Throw in some Firefly for good measure.  
• Space cruiser on a long quest with mecha as it's main means of interaction with planets and other spacecraft - a mix-up of Star Trek (probably a lot of Voyager, which is not my favorite but it could work here), Star Blazers (the first series), and Battlestar Galactica. I need to work on this one some more but I think I could make something of it, and lord knows there are a lot of resources out there for planets and races. I might use Stars Without Number for some of the sandbox system.

There's not a lot of danger of any of these ideas being called into service in the next few weeks so I have time to work them out. I may have a need for them one of these days as I think I have 2-3 players now who are interested enough to at least give the game a try. I may put together a "pilot" that would take a session or three to play through and see what kind of reception it gets. WHo knows where it might lead?

Anyway that's the latest on the gaming front here. More to come.

5E: A Review of Hoard of the Dragon Queen

As a DM who runs a fair number of published adventures I knew I would be picking this up and I wanted to write out my thoughts on it as an adventure I might run. I did not read any other reviews of this to avoid groupthink, but I have read some since I finished it and I have links to those at the end.

 I read it, thought about it, read parts of it again and ... I'm just not particularly excited about it. It's nicely presented in full-color hardback but it's the same length as a single Pathfinder AP installment so it feels a little light as "half" of what is supposed to be the first big published campaign for 5th edition.

At a big picture level, Tiamat has been the center of Red Hand of Doom and War of Scales, so she's not exactly underused when it comes to big D&D adventures. I've run all but a final wrap-up of RHoD converted to 4E so I've seen plenty of dragon cultists. That doesn't automatically mean the theme is tired - there's a lot you can do with dragons & cultists - but I'd like to see something new & interesting.

I'll break it down by chapter:

Chapter 1
New party arrives in a new town, which is under attack by dragon cultists and a dragon.This is presented reasonably well, timing and various environmental conditions are covered and there is a random encounter table to help show the chaos of a town being raided. Instead of feeling like a mini-sandbox though it feels very structured as the governor directs the PC's to accomplish various missions around town. There is also the dragon who doesn't engage directly but performs drive-by breath weapon shots that can kill a starting character in one shot. I'd probably run this a little differently as I don't like the heavily scripted feel to it but I think a party with some initiative won't need the heavy direction the adventure somewhat assumes. I also think an old school group, if less heroic in some ways, is going to watch from a distance until the whole thing blows over.

Chapter 2
Party is recruited to go after the raiders to get information and to rescue a missing citizen. It ends up leading to a bandit camp type encounter. This is interesting as options are discussed from stealth to infiltration to straight-up combat. This seems pretty thorough but it continues the heavy emphasis on NPC's as the rescued NPC has an agenda of his own and an ongoing role in the adventure.

Chapter 3
Party is asked to return to the place they just left where they find the camp mostly empty but discover another "level" to be explored. I don't like the backtracking part of this. It leads to the first true dungeon of the campaign, but I suspect many parties will investigate both the camp and the cave in one trip.

At this point the characters are spending levels 1-3 roaming around one smallish area but there is not much information on the town they are using as a base once the attack is over and the whole adventure so far could happen in about 3-4 days. It's not a lengthy period of time but a little more town development would have been nice for the first adventure of the new edition. There is also no "area map" that covers this region in nay detail other than the large-scale map at the beginning of the adventure that shows the entire Sword Coast

Chapter 4
The party heads out on the road for a lengthy trip up the Sword Coast. First in another town (un-detailed but has important NPC interactions), then on to Baldur's Gate where they join a caravan for a two-month trip to Waterdeep. BG gets a whole paragraph of detail but there are other sources out there is one wants some official material. The meat of this chapter is the setup for the caravan trip. There is quite a bit of information on who else is a part of the caravan (both backgrounds and cargo carried) and there are encounters to be found along the way. There are also some set events which are interesting and could have consequences for the future. Despite the amount of time that will be spent here there is no detailed map of the route, just the large scale map.

Chapter 5
The caravan arrives in Waterdeep, disbands, but the cultists the party is following are headed even further north towards Neverwinter (yes it's a grand tour of "Famous D&D cities" alright) so the PC's join up with another (smaller) caravan headed north. This is all of 3 pages and the primary goal here is to let the PC's discover a secret tunnel leading into a swamp and a trail that leads to a ruined castle. If the players aren't watching things pretty closely then this could turn into a dead end pretty quickly. I see a real chance for the PC's to be at a loss and the DM to have scramble to come up with a way to connect the end of the caravan to the ruined castle.

Chapter 6
This section is a trip through a swamp to the ruined castle which is a good-sized dungeon full of several different creature types. There is dissension between some of the various power groups so allies can be found and deals can be made. There's no area map of the swamp so the assumption is a fairly linear journey following a trail or being guided to the castle. This is probably the most traditional D&D part of the whole adventure. It seems fine in general. The bottom level has a teleportation portal that leads to a hunting lodge in some mountains that are quite a distance away.

Chapter 7
The hunting lodge is both a crossroads for several other portals and serves as an HQ for part of the cult. Theoretically there is a chance to talk to a major villain, possibly cut a deal with a cult leader, and otherwise take advantage of internal cult politics. What it looks like to me is that the first combat will bring everything in the lodge down on the party in a massive melee brawl. There is another tenuous link to the next chapter here as well.

Chapter 8
The party proceeds to a village nearby which is more detailed as far as NPC interactions than the first village in the adventure. This is an odd choice, because the real goal of the party is outside the village and the PCs are only expected to spend an hour in the place!

Outside the village is a flying ice castle built by cloud giants, sitting on the ground making preparations to leave with a load of treasure for the cult. Once aboard the party will encounter a wild mix of exotic foes including giants, undead, wizards, and dragons, along with some powerful cult leaders. This is a potentially spectacular finale as the characters could end up dead, in charge of a flying castle, or bailing out as it crashes into a mountaintop, depending on how things go. Even here there are allies to be made so wholesale slaughter is not the only option.

The Next Book
There's a little bit of information about what happens in the next book and it looks like it commits the major sin of assuming the PCs fail at stopping the cult's activities in order to keep it's big finale intact. I hope that it doesn't, or that it has some good reasoning as to why. There's no real clue as to how the next adventure will pick up, so for now a DM won't know if there's anything particularly plot-important that needs to be taken into account. Most likely the party ends up in the Spine of the World, waiting for book 2 to begin.

A few overall points:

• There are detailed maps of each action location, from the first village being raided to the bandit camps and each of the buildings, This is good, even if you don't play with a grid.
• There is a serious lack of regional maps for an adventure that involves so much travel. There's no detail for the starting area in chapters 1-3, there's no map of the caravan's travel route in chapter 4 or chapter 5, there's no map of the swamp in chapter 6, nor of the area around chapters 7&8. Players sometimes wander, and if you're going to include some random and some set encounters for an area, it would be nice to have a map to help focus on the travel and exploration parts of the adventure.
• The maps have some missing keys, a pet peeve of mine as it plagues way too many published adventures. This could have been a lot better.
• The monsters for chapters 1-6 are fairly mundane - I suspect players will be pretty tired of fighting cultists and kobolds. There are other creatures in the mix in different chapters but these two things are constant. For a dragon-focused adventure, there's not a lot of actual "dragon" in this one, basically one at the beginning and one at the end. In most other editions of the game dragons come in different sizes, so an encounter somewhere with a smallish one might have livened things up.
• There is a lot of repetition in this adventure. Chapter 3 is "go back to chapter 2." Chapter 5 repeats some of chapter 4. Chapter 6 is a castle full of bad guys, chapter 7 is a house full of bad guys, and chapter 8 is a flying castle full of bad guys. Some kind of NPC meetup or visit to a friendly town (for longer than an hour) would help break this up.
• There is also railroading. A lot of NPC type railroading, where NPC's either make offers that must be accepted or possess information that must be acquired for the rest of the adventure to make sense. Most of this I think I could handle in play well enough but that doesn't make it right. There are a lot of places where assumptions are made, particularly regarding NPC's, and those are tough sometimes. If you have a contrarian PC (or player), or an anti-authority type, or a no-compromising-with-evil type (none of these are particularly wrong or particularly uncommon) then they may shoot off of the rails pretty quickly. 

Modifications I Would Make

• I would encourage the party to hit the camp and the cave in one go.
• I don't think the village at the beginning of chapter 8 is necessary.  I would just have the castle grounded near the lodge -or- I would just have a teleport link from the lodge to the castle directly.
• There are weak links between chapters 5&6 and 7&8 so those need to be shored up or handled in a very different way. They're far enough in that I would have to play it on the fly and given the right party this might be a total non-issue. The 7-8 link is easier to handle - just let the party see the thing landing near the lodge or give them a clue that one of the teleport gates leads to it.
• Magic items seem pretty weak and pretty boring for a party that's supposed to be hitting 8th level at the end but that's easy enough to solve. The big showpiece from a dragon's hoard at that point shouldn't be a +1 sword - bleah. Give it a name and a description, at least. 

Conclusion
I wanted to like this adventure but it takes an interesting premise and doesn't really do anything exciting with it. The flying castle at the end is the coolest part but you have 6-7 levels worth of  "blah" leading up to it. I'm looking at it now asking myself  what parts of this are going to generate stories we will be telling years from now? I can't see anything other than maybe the finale. The Sunless Citadel for 3E is not my favorite adventure but at least it had Meepo and the dragon hatchling that a lot of people seemed to enjoy. With the Kobold Press name being thrown about I expected more than this.

I think the structure is a big limiting factor. instead of having NPCs ask or tell the PCs to go and do things how about letting players discover some clues in Chapter 2 & 3 that lead them to other areas in whatever order they choose, even if they're spread all over the Sword Coast? Let the players have some say in where they go and what they do. With the new mechanics and "bounded accuracy" of 5E a more sandboxy approach should be easier, as the system is more forgiving of level differences.

My main feeling about this is "missed opportunity" and that's a shame.

Other reviews (looks like I'm a month behind but oh well):

• Tenfootpole
• Alexandrian
• ENWorld

Motivational Monday

The Old Game Bag

I try to cover the Big Topics here on the blog - I've talked about dice, I've talked about notebooks, I'e talked about binders - clearly all very important topics. Today I thought I'd bid a fond farewell to an old friend that I have not mentioned on the blog before - the gaming bag.

The picture above is what's left of my old reliable bag that I have used since the late 80's. From sometime in high school, through college, through the first real job, and on through singlehood, married-hood, and fatherhood it's been the Main Bag. When it was time for a game, I loaded up the bag and headed out.

It's seen a lot of miles, a lot of houses, apartments, and dorms - mostly on the floor.

It's been stepped on by people many times. Animals too - dogs, cats, gerbils, ferrets, a hedgehog, and at least one falcon.

It's transported many books, notebooks, character sheets, dice, snacks, drinks, pens, sheet protectors, markers, miniatures, and probably some other things I'm forgetting at the moment.

It's been overstuffed, probably more often than not.

It's been transported in at least 10 different cars over the years, mine and others - possibly a bus too.

It's had a long and very useful life but the last few years have not been kind to it. In the last move it was pressed into service as an emergency transport for last minute stuff and it's spent the last couple of years in semi-retirement in the garage and in the closet. Age has finally caught up to it and it's coming apart. Something leaked inside it, staining it. The inner layer is falling apart, and the previously nigh-invulnerable exterior has ripped in several places, the zipper on the external pocket has come apart, and it's clear that it is no longer up to the role of Main Bag or even really Reserve Bag.

It's time for one last ride - to the trash can.

So thank you Great Grey Bag of Gaming! I don't know what brand you were nor do I remember exactly what birthday or graduation marked your arrival, but I deeply appreciate your long and reliable service.

Grab-Bag - Recent Arrivals

I've had an interesting mix of old stuff (below) and new stuff (mostly Pathfinder and D&D 5E) arriving lately. They've been stacking up though so I'm going to have to pause and spend some time reading them. This round looks like I've subscribed to the Barking Alien Collection for some reason.

First up: More Star Trek!

Now I have written about LUG Trek before and the short version is that I wanted to like it but the mechanics just didn't do it for me then, being a die-hard fan of FASA Trek. The last few years though I have become a lot more interested in simpler mechanics and I've come back around on this game. In light of that I am rebuilding my collection of these books.

• I owned the Original Trek by the end of the week it came out back about 15 years ago and it suffered even more in comparison to FASA because it was covering the same ground. I sold it too somewhere along the way, but now I have it again and I am reading it with a different attitude than I had then. So far so good, but I think I could run a better game with it using a lot of the material from the FASA system - setting, species, ships, etc. It's on the one-of-these-days list.
• I never owned the DS9 game but as the third incarnation of the rules I figured I ought to get it, plus it adds some new material for a Next Generation era campaign. I've only flipped through it at the moment but I'll be hitting it eventually. I can;t see running a specific DS9 campaign, but as an extension of a TNG campaign using a new ship and crew I think it should be useful.
• The Players Guide is another one I have not read previously but I like what I see in side it. More of everything is good, right? It's another resource for the GM when a player wants to play something unusual.

Mekton!I actually owned a pretty solid set of Mekton II and Mekton Zeta books about 10-15 years ago but just never could get anyone interested in playing and so I eventually got rid of them (it happens occasionally). With the Apprentices I might have some interest in a giant robot game so why not grab a copy? I had Roadstriker and Empire as well so those may find their way back onto the shelf sometime soon too. I have a rough idea for a campaign here but it needs some refining before I would try to do anything. I'd probably run something short or a one-shot to see if there's any interest first.  

Ars Magica - Never owned it, read it, played it, or saw it being played, but I've been hearing good things about it from people whose opinions I respect for years. I decided I should pick up a copy and see it for myself. There seem to be about a half-dozen editions and a pretty good pile of supplements for each one. I have no idea what the optimal set of those would look like so I picked a fairly inexpensive copy of the core book for 4th edition as my entry point. 

In a way, all of these are more about filling in the bookshelf with things that interest me than any immediate plans for a campaign, but that's part of the fun. Sometimes it takes time for things to percolate and develop into something that says "run me!" at the right time. It's good to have options. One of these days someone may offer to run one of them online and now I am prepared!

Spirit of 77 - Game & Kickstarter

I had a post last week about some other RPG Kickstarters but for this one I wanted to showcase it solo.

Kickstarter is here.

I really like this one. The overall approach from the style of writing to the look of the game to the kickstarter video - take a look at it - is just really well done. The Atari cover on the extra book just kills me. They mention everything from the Dukes of Hazard to the Six Million Dollar Man to Smokey and the Bandit and Columbo as influences. It looks like a lot of fun.

I downloaded the sample adventure which has quite a bit of rules material as well, enough to run a game, and it's pretty interesting. It's more in the FATE/Marvel Heroic school of design than Hero or Pathfinder, but there are still dice to be rolled, fights to be had, and things to be jumped over in cars. I don't know how quickly we will be trying it out. It's set on a cruise ship where interesting things start to happen. Among the sample characters is the "captain of the Texas Tornados cheerleaders" and I have to say I cannot recall the last time I saw something like that presented as a viable character choice in an RPG. They also note that down the road they will be doing conversion rules for FATE and Savage Worlds too if that floats your boat.

Anyway, I think it's cool and there are still a few days left to jump in if you're interested too.

Motivational Monday

Heck of an animal companion.

Fun with Crowdfunding - Four Current Projects

An easy one:


 I have a fair amount of stuff for the original edition though I've run it all of ... once. Ah well, it's still cool though this one is a little pricey if you want an actual book. It's already done and just waiting to be published, apparently. I have no worries about this one getting out the door.

Another easy one:



It looks interesting and it's Savage Worlds so I'm probably there on this one.Pinnacle has delivered on all of its Kickstarters, so no worries there, but the physical book level seems a little pricey here too.


I noticed something else about these:

• Atlas Games: 1st created, 24 backed
• Shane Hensley: 4 created, 65 backed

These two are pretty regularly involved in crowdfunding.

This one has been popping up in various RPG Facebook groups: Dragonwars of Trayth

• Kickstarter - wait, they cancelled that one
• Current Kickstarter
• Home Page

Wow, that home page looks like a 90's website. "2 created, 0 backed" - that's not a good sign. The bio:

"Epic Quest publishing is a group of experienced RPG game designers, artists, and authors who work as a team to bring Epic adventures in many versions of RPG products."

That's pretty generic. Watching the video the whole thing looks tremendously 90's. They have a lot of pledge levels that don't have anything to do with the actual adventures - lanyards, water bottles, and T-Shirts. A character sketch or a painted mini at $200 seems ... optimistic. Ernie Gygax seems to have some involvement, presumably tied to the museum funding stretch goal once it goes over $35k. This one seems all over the place to me. Oh, and this:

"Between all of our employees, we have over 30 years experience in the RPG world..."

So that's a total for the whole team? Of at least 4 people? I'm not sure this is a feature. What else have they done? The bio mentions "experienced RPG game designers" - experienced on what? This is a good way to draw in fans of other material if you can point to something else out there that you had a hand in making.

I'm also curious about the repeated "never been done before" type claims. It seems like a series of 25 adventures taking characters to 30th level is supposed to be unprecedented. Well, Scales of War for D&D 4E was published in Dungeon magazine with 18 adventures taking characters from 1st to 30th level, and this was in a system that actually had rules for going to 30th level, unlike some of the systems they are using. Pathfinder AP's also seem like something that might warrant a comparison. Claims like this make me wonder how in touch they creators are with what's going on in RPG's now.
At the very least it will be interesting to watch.

ANKUR: A gofundme project to publish a setting and system that I'm still trying to figure out. Home page is here, request for money is here. I've never heard of the author but he's put a fair amount of background info out there, just not much in the way of mechanics.

From the home page:

"There are five player character races to choose from in the game world of ANKUR. Choose between standard humans, a race of pigmies, Neanderthals, highly intelligent coneheads, or powerful Yeti"

Not sure what to make of that. 

The world of ANKUR attempts to immerse you in a setting that puts a distinctly sci-fi spin on various ancient world mythologies. The game’s setting is largely based on ancient Sumerian mythology and is further inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Maurice Chatalain, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Zacharia Sitchin. The game’s timeline takes place on Earth (known as Ki) just after the Great Flood, some 25,000 years in the past. A race of Alien beings from the planet Nibir, in the farthest reaches of our own solar system, come to earth to mine gold for the production of Mana. Through genetic manipulation, they create a variety of humanoid slave races to mine the gold. A series of cataclysms and power struggles, set in motion events that will entwine the destinies of these races forever!

That is a whole lot to chew on. Most of the site past the home page is blank so it's not looking too good here.  I'll give it this - it's not a cookie cutter setting.

That's probably enough for now. I'll take another stroll through these down the road and see where they are and what else is out there.

Getting into a Well-Supported RPG

Does anyone run games from just the "Core Rules" for a given game anymore? I will say that I have for some games, usually smaller games like ICONS. It seems like that used to be more of a thing, but now if a game has been out for any length of time it's likely to have a set of supplementary material from the "Advanced" book or "Player's Guide" with some extra crunchy stuff to the inevitable "GM's Guide"to a whole pile of adventures. If you're coming in late, where do you start? I did this recently with Pathfinder, and it probably has more "stuff" available than any other in-print game right now,  so I'll share my plan and experience with that.

First, you need the main rulebook. I knew I was going to be playing with the Apprentices so I picked up the PF Core Rulebook and the Beginner Box at the same time. One for them, one for me. We played through the adventures in the box and I decided we should look at a full campaign.

The heart of the whole Pathfinder system is the Adventure Paths. You know the idea by now - each AP is a full campaign from Level 1 to level 13+ in six installments released once a month. The *fifteenth* of these is being released now and the 16th has been announced for early 2016. That's a lot of options, and that's on top of standalone modules, third-party adventures, and of course doing your own. Your choice here will drive some of how you tackle the rest of the system so I think it's important to make this call fairly early. Example: The "Kingmaker" AP features building and ruling a kingdom - the Ultimate Campaign book is useful here. The "Wrath of the Righteous" AP assumes that the Mythic Adventures book is in use. Then of course every AP is supported by a regional supplement and a player's option type supplement, a map pack, some cards, and maybe more. You don't really need any of that extra material, but if it interests you or the players choosing an AP lets you focus on a smaller set of the options.

Creating your own adventures might mean you need some non-traditional races - there's an Advanced Race Guide with all of the mechanical details for doing that. Want non-traditional classes? There's an Advanced Class Guide with that kind of thing too.

So the idea is to decide what kind of campaign you want to run after reading the basic/core rules, and letting that guide your early acquisitions. If nothing really inspires you, wait. Set it aside. The moment will come.

The other consideration is players. Have a few that like to play wizards and clerics? Plan on getting Ultimate Magic. Lots of focus on combat? The Ultimate Combat book is probably in your future. Rangers or Druids a guarantee? The "Animal Archive" is a good idea.

For me, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with the game but I knew even more character options would be welcome so I added the Advanced Players Guide as my first book. More classes, feats, spells, etc. - that was an easy choice. I grabbed "Paths of Prestige" too to add even more options as we advanced.

Setting-wise I realized there were a ton of area books out for different parts of Golarion, many tied to a particular AP. I had no idea where to begin so I started with the Inner Sea World Guide, the big book that covers the whole setting. After reading that, I was up to speed and had the big picture.

I still had not decided what kind of campaign to run and then they announced the "paladins and clerics vs. demon invasion" campaign and I knew I had a winner. One of my players is a paladin fan and this one had his name on it as soon as I read about it. So then it was a matter of watching for the specific books that added to this one campaign and that's worked out very nicely. I had a couple of hardbacks, a few softcover player and DM books, and I was ready to roll. I did not need the entire PF product line to run this campaign.

Now I have added more books since I started running this last year. Partly because I like to have options, partly because I started playing in another game, and partly because over the course of the campaign things just naturally come up where supplement X might be handy to have. Playing in a campaign certainly modified my perspective as I became a lot more interested in some of those player companion books. If you're going to invest in a system, might as well get everything out of it that you can.

Pathfinder is a little different in that most of the rules material is covered by the OGL and is available online, meaning you don't need to purchase a lot of the rulebooks to run a particular situation. For myself, I like to have them if I think something will be a regular part of the game, but it's possible to run just about anything from one of the SRD sites.Setting material is not a part of this, so if you're using the campaign world that might make that material a higher priority than the big rule books.

The main area of impact for me with this is with the monster books - I already know what most D&D type monsters look like, and the numbers are freely available, so the "Bestiary" books are not a priority at all for me. I'm sure I'll end up with a few of them sooner or later but I haven't felt the lack thus far.

I have most of the big rulebooks now, I've been both running and playing the game, and I have a fair number of the smaller regional and player books. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the system, I like it, and now I'm just picking up what looks interesting and what might be useful in a future campaign, particularly APs I've acquired along the way. I do check reviews at times, but those are a secondary consideration at best.

Anyway, that's how I did it, for what it's worth. The short version:

• Get the core rules to the game
• Figure out a campaign concept or at least an adventure idea
• Pick up a supplement or two that enrich that particular idea
• Listen to your players, see if they're interested in something covered by a particular book
• As the game goes on, add material as it makes sense

Final thought: Never assume that you need "everything" to start your game. Some kind of rules and an adventure idea is all you really "need". Online discussions will often assert that you can't run X without a particular book, or you really need Y to have fun with a certain adventure - ignore that. Get a game going, then worry about the add-ons.

Current Events & Coming Attractions - Pathfinder, D&D, etc.

Felt like summarizing what's going on here game-wise:

• Just ran the 18th session of the Wrath of the Righteous Pathfinder campaign and having a ton of fun. The Mythic rules add a lot of options that feel a little like 4E powers and add a lot of flexibility for the PC's. There a lot fewer "can't do that" moments where important skill checks are failed, a big melee strike misses, or a caster doesn't have access to the right spell. I'm starting to think I might keep them around for any future PF campaigns for just that reason. The oldest characters just hit 6th level and are still only Tier 1 Mythic so it could get crazy later on but right now it feels more flexible, not so much more powerful numerically.
• The "catch-up phase" of my Pathfinder experience is wrapping up. Lots of books on the shelf and PDF's on the tablet now. I've been trying to keep a rule of "no ordering the next rulebook til I've read the last one and it's worked fairly well so far. I'll probably have more on this later this week.
• Reading the new D&D 5E big campaign book and so far ... I'm not all that impressed. Size-wise it's directly comparable to a single adventure path installment. It's nice that it's hardcover, but at $23 vs. $30 I don't think it's all that much better physically - though I have had AP's split their binding. Content-wise, I'm just not that excited about what I'm reading. I'll post something about this later too.
• Refreshing my knowledge of Freedom City for a Mutants and Masterminds game coming up. It looks like I'm actually going to run some supers in the near future. Definitely more on that coming later. 
•  Continuing to make notes for a "one of those days" Star Trek game. I don't know when or who will play, but I'm working on it. I've had notes floating around for years but this is an idea for a new run with a set scenario, not just an open-ended campaign. It could turn into one, certainly, but I think the only way I get people to play Trek here is to present set "missions" kind of like I did with Star Wars years ago. I'll probably have more on that once I feel like I have something worth sharing.  System-wise it's going to be LUG Trek as I want to give that system another chance. 
• I'm also toying around with an idea for a D6 Star Wars game. I like Saga just fine but I'd like to give the older system a spin for the first time in a while and I have an idea that fits it well, I think. We'll see. 

Well, that explains the stack of books on the bedside table ... on to the next post!