Roleplaying resumed

As you can see, it's been quiet for a while. But 1920s Cthulhu continued this week and we sailed to Chile and eventually Easter Island. Jack is in Crusade Mode now and was very disappointed when the Chilean occupying forces confiscated most of our firearms. A single revolver just doesn't cut it when the final confrontation is approaching! At least we weren't shot as spies or thrown in jail.

We are trying to finish Shadows of Yog-Sothoth in May, hopefully that works out as planned. It is currently my only steadily ongoing game, so I better get working on those summer gaming plans one of these days. I am not holding my breath while waiting for Buffy or Delta Green to resume.

Game Count: 27/52

More downs

Looks like this will be the first week this year without a single roleplaying session. It's a pity, but I had a pretty good run, I guess.

Delta Green is indeed going on a break until late spring or early summer because of scheduling conflicts. By that time who knows if all the players still want to continue. So that lasted for 4 sessions, if I'm not mistaken.

The Buffy game is going to lose a player. As her character was the slayer, we are now looking for a replacement player, which will cause a break of yet undetermined length. Hopefully it's not the end of the campaign.

Not a good week for roleplaying.

Ups and downs

Buffy continued this week. We laid the smack down on a few cultists, a byakhee and a smallish flying polyp - I'd like to see that happening in Call of Cthulhu! My character's social life got more complicated again, thanks to an unfortunately timed hug from a fellow student (a computer geek like him, and a cheerleader) which Will's girlfriend witnessed.

Delta Green's future is uncertain. It is really difficult to find a time that suits everyone, and I don't want to run a game where some player is missing almost every time. It might be summer before we can even finish up the current scenario.

On a tangent: the Most Impressive Game In A Good Long While award goes out to Company of Heroes, the PC wargame which came out in 2006 but which I tried only now. It looks surprisingly good on my dated machine, and the gameplay is captivating enough to have pushed me to buy another gigabyte of RAM and a new graphics card. This upgrade should take me past the Recommended hardware into the realm of Damn Pretty. I thought I wouldn't be updating this old warhorse anymore; shows what I know.

Game Count: 22/52

I can sleep!

I don't know if it is because of the melatonin pills I was prescribed or for some other reason, but I can now sleep properly at night. That's a boost for morale, let me tell you.

In other news, Delta Green continued with the investigators flying to the East Coast in the adventure A Victim of the Art. The first session was low-key, mostly gathering clues and interviewing people.

My friend kept his promise to start running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay... finally. :) I had never played it so I was quite curious. We got off to a rousing start, hacking down a group of mutants but failing to capture a mysterious sniper who had shot at Captain Schiller. My Student was surprisingly effective with his sword, although luck played her part there. The system and campaign world seemed quite all right on this first glance.

Game Count: 19/52

On slayer hunters and tiny space aliens

This week on The Roleplaying Channel:

The second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Cthulhu Crossover! In which our heroes discover a grisly corpse in the high school basement, run into a teacher who carries a first edition copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten in his bag, hunt for information on a yeti/fly/alien creature, and finally find an old church under the school, complete with a crazy caretaker and the abovementioned monster. Enter a mysterious German girl who claims that an apocalypse can only be averted by killing the slayer! TO BE CONTINUED

The final installment of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, our first Delta Green adventure! The agents organize a manhunt and finally track Master Sergeant Santana into an old mine, abandoned a century ago. Well-armed search parties enter, and six FBI and state police men die before Santana is literally shot to pieces and collapses. US Army INSCOM and CIC officers show up and take custody of the curious orb Santana was carrying. The forensics experts of the team perform an autopsy on his corpse at the FBI Phoenix laboratory, and finally meet the Traveler face to face. It paralyzes Winifred Dashner and Maxwell Blinn barely escapes a similar fate. He runs to get help and they arrive just in time: the alien has slit Winifred's belly open and is about to enter its new host when a hail of bullets cuts it down messily. I know I went kind of soft on the investigators, only hospitalizing one and traumatizing another, but this was the first adventure, after all.

Game Count: 9/52

Deck of Many Games

My New Year's promise to myself was to try and have some roleplaying activity once a week, every week, in 2008. I'm allowing myself two things to make it remotely possible:

• As long as the number of games is 52 when the year ends, it doesn't matter if there have been two games on a given week and none on the following week, for example.
• MMORPGs do not count. But Neverwinter Nights multiplayer games do (see the previous post for more on that).

The second week of the year started less than one hour ago, and so far I've ran Delta Green once and played NWN once. We're hoping to continue Delta Green already this week and 1920s Cthulhu is scheduled for the next. So, thus far it looks promising. But I have no doubt that there will be bumps on the road later on.

It's a nice dream.

Game Count: 2/52

Eyes Only

The long-awaited reprint of the Delta Green: Eyes Only chapbooks hit my mailbox this week. A pretty thing it is, too. They've made it a hardcover book which not only contains all three Eyes Only booklets of old, but also brand new material in the form of two scenarios and some supplemental writing. Daniel Solis worked on the layout, so it is the best looking of the three main Delta Green books. Not that the previous two were shabby in any way.

I only owned the Project Rainbow chapbook previously, so most of the old text is new to me, too. I haven't had a chance to properly read any chapter yet, but initial glances promise much. I did manage to read the short Tradecraft section, and it was very useful information for players and Keepers.

My Delta Green campaign is only beginning: the second session of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, which we are starting with, was supposed to take place this week. Sadly I had to cancel it because a bout of cold took away most of my voice. It might be good for the mood of a horror game if the Keeper sounded like the Cryptkeeper of Tales from the Crypt, but it would not help me get better, I think. So we will return to San Carlos in January. I am not planning an indefinitely long campaign in any case; if we get through 5-6 scenarios I'll be happy. If we can get to the end with, say, half of the original investigators (we have four players) it would be a nice surprise.

Now, if only Detwiller, Glancy et al would find the time to write a proper update of the Delta Green world for the post-9/11, Iraq war era... At least this book is selling well: the thousand-copy print run is almost sold out now, which is very respectable for a small-press RPG product available only via mail order. I would even settle for a PDF supplement. Fingers crossed!

Old dog, new tricks, and so forth

This is my first actual blog entry if one doesn't count some journal entries on Last.fm. So bear with me while I learn.

It recently occurred to me that I haven't done this much roleplaying since the glory days of high school when all the players lived very close to each other and were usually available whenever somebody wanted to GM. I am currently running Delta Green and playing in a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game and a D&D Ptolus campaign. Moreover, I'll be a player in a Buffy game slated to start some time after the New Year and I have a hankering to run another game myself. Too much of a good thing will possibly be a bad thing, but we shall see. Maybe it will be an extraordinarily good thing. :)

About the title: no big story there. I just thought that this, more so than ever before, is a time of gaming in my life. My groups include some old players, some new, and some in-between, which I guess is an ideal mix. And the same applies to the games we play. Call of Cthulhu is an old hat. 3rd edition D&D is quite familiar by now, but CoC has it beaten by more than a decade. Finally, Buffy I have yet to play, even though I have owned the books for several years. Again, the selection couldn't be much better.

Enough rambling for now; time to hit Publish Post and get this show on the road! A small step for me, and even smaller for mankind.