Back on track

This week we continued Ptolus and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, wrapping up in California in the latter game. It was nice to have a pretty straightforward case to investigate after Cannich. Foolhardy Jack almost perished in the final fight with spectral hunters, but our Native American guide Anoki arrived just in time to save his bacon.

Game Count: 24/52

One shots

Until I get another regular game going to replace Delta Green, it seems that one shot efforts are going to be the order of the day. I already mentioned the Godlike "demo" a while back; these are some of the other candidates.

• Call of Cthulhu: Tatterdemallion (from Fatal Experiments). I've ran this once and had a great time. Investigator casualties were high but not total, and I recall it actually ended fairly well - for the world at large, if not the surviving heroes. In a one shot this is, of course, not so important... if no one gets out alive, the players cannot pester me into continuing the story! I can only hope my Carcosan Pallid Dice arrive from Chaosium before we play.
• D&D: Underdark. I was asked to run a mini campaign (okay, technically not one shot; so sue me) featuring the archetypal underground races such duergar and drow as PCs. I did not promise anything (and if the person in question happens to read this, I'm still not promising anything), but it could be interesting. However, I don't have an Idea for such a game yet.
• That Western Game. My "Serenity Project" is not intended to be a one shot either, but it could begin with one to familiarize people with the rules and give them a chance to fine-tune their characters before kicking off the actual story. Perhaps a prequel set during the Civil War?

What to do, what to do...

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

Seems it's always Sunday when I update

This week we continued Ptolus (narrowly avoiding a TPK) and 1920s Cthulhu (in which the group traveled to Hollywood to investigate the strange death of a famous director).

In other news, I have a hankering to run a "demo game" of Godlike to see how the system works in actual play. Right now I'm thinking about a scenario set during the early war, possibly during the Phoney War period. For this I'd use characters without any superpowers, both because it would be easier for players with no One Roll Engine experience (and for me, too) and because if I later run another game with powers, their significance would perhaps stand out better. This is slowly percolating in the back of my mind with the Serenity in the West project...

Game Count: 21/52

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