Training, sir!
Bad news: we all have to take Office 2007 and MS Vista training; it’s not optional, even for Mac me. Good news: The company will reimburse tuition for any Microsoft certifications to which this training leads. Methinks I’d be a complete fool not to take advantage of this – extra certifications can’t hurt, right?
At the moment, Starr and I share the house with four cats, two of ours and two from her family that are on extended ‘boarding’ with us. We must put in a fair amount of effort to keep up with demands for food and clean litter! As a result, though, I woke up this morning with one cat sleeping on my lap, another nestled tight against my left hip, and a third tucked under my right armpit. It seems I make an excellent cat pillow.
Tonight, Starr works late, and my chore list includes laundry, cooking, and cleaning; our Shadowrun group meets again Monday, and I don’t intend to spend the weekend picking up. I need to chill, and take care of some happier business.
Ye Olde Abandonede Warehouse
Last night we had the complete gaming group together for the first time since the Shadowrun game started. Jesse’s razorgirl and Amy’s decker joined in as the group looked for a place to hide their rock singer. The group procured a rent-a-squat, obtained food and water, and decided to turtle up and wait out their contract.
Brief updates
- 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for “Elder” in the last couple days you have left? #
- 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
- 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr’s work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
- 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting 🙂 #
- 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
- 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #
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Back to the Seattle Sprawl
Tonight I GMed my first Shadowrun game since leaving Salem. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed doing that! Using second edition worked well, I was able to make several correct rules calls without touching the rulebook. I did find out that I need another little box of six-siders – they go fast in SR, where a combat roll can easily take 8-12 dice at once.
Back into the shadows
We began prep on the new 2nd Ed. Shadowrun campaign last night. Looks like we’ll have a core group of a detective, a freelance bodyguard, an ex-corporate enforcer, an Amerindian shaman, and a street mage; with decker and shaman ‘guest stars’. This is subject to change as the characters all get fleshed out, but it looks good. The decker’s player is moving in two weeks, and will only be able to attend by webcam, which I think is amusingly appropriate.
Two elves and three humans make up the racial mix, which is fairly standard for a new group; I don’t know yet if the guest stars will be metahuman or not. We’re off to a good start, though. I encourage weirdness in my campaigns, because I think it adds to roleplaying and tone; Jesse and Dwight have already surprised me with their character ideas. I love it.
I’m already planning to have old friends make a cameo or two. “Skid” Dersitaliantis and Mister Zeta will pop up, though I don’t yet know if I want to get the GSSC involved. Hey, TeeFive players: did you know that next year is the game’s 20th anniversary? Some of our original ‘runners should be in their forties or fifties by now.
I’m sure we’ll need at least one more character creation session, then we can get to adventuring. One thing I want to do this week is extract the old TeeFive custom character sheets from the OS 9-era PageMaker and make PDFs for the group. I have to say, from a design standpoint, that I love that I could lay out the core game mechanic in about 10 minutes last night! Naturally, I also recommended Blade Runner to everyone who hadn’t yet seen it.
We’re going to hold the game sessions at my new place. This will make my GM duties much easier, as I won’t have to haul the library back and forth. I’m also considering making the game a bit meta: for example, setting up gmail accounts for the characters to use during downtime. I wonder if the players would get into that. The decker ought to get one, right?
Thank goodness this will only be twice a month, as I could really submerge myself into this if given a chance. 🙂
Racing around
Okay. I have owed my sister a phone call for several days, and perhaps if I post it here, I will be looking at it tonight and go, “oh yeah, I really need to do that”.
We actually managed to get out of the house for a bit on Friday night – we’ve not been good at that for the last couple of weeks. It’s so easy, when one of us doesn’t get home until 7:30 or 8, to say “screw it” and vegetate for the rest of the evening, but we made ourselves go out with friends, and had a sorely-needed good time.
After a Saturday full of more moving and cleaning, Starr and I got our WoW characters each halfway to level 67, at which point they will have passed my poor gnome mage I’ve been leveling since long before The Burning Crusade. There was debate over whether we’d stick around Outland once we hit 68, and quest a bit in Shadowmoon or Netherstorm; but the urge to take off to the Great White North is strong. We’ll see.
Along those lines, I need to contact my gaming group – our session three weeks ago was cancelled due to host illness, and I never even heard whether or not we scheduled a session last week. I was prepping to start a Shadowrun for the group, and I assume there is still interest. I’ve also got a box full of giveaway gaming material from the Stuff Reduction Plan, and I’m hoping that they’ll want some of it.
Tensions are still cooling slowly on the cat front. Early this morning, Midori and Precious repeatedly chased each other up and down the house stairs, which I think may actually have been play instead of attempted murder. The welcome absence of hissing and yowling is the peg I’m hanging those hopes on.
The 45th anniversary of the Doctor Who TV show passed this weekend. I had to check out a YouTube video of the days when the Doctor was a cranky old man with a hyperintelligent granddaughter, and certain walls of the TARDIS control room were simple photographic blowups. Dig the 1962-era special effects:
Classic stuff.
In A.D. 2012 Magic Was Beginning
Oh, yeah, Sunday night I found all my old Shadowrun 2nd Ed. sourcebooks, adventures, and rulebooks. That pretty much decided me on the upcoming campaign.
I think I’ll run 2nd Ed, with a version of the 4th Ed. hacking rules spliced in, and the world timeline advanced to 4th Ed as well. That means people in my group who want to can obtain 2nd Ed. used on eBay (they’re going for $7-$8) and I can just do a handout or something of my new hacking rules.
Man, paging through all the old TeeFive characters really takes me back, though I figure we oughta start a new group. If only Tom was still gaming with us, maybe I could bribe him into a new t-shirt design. I do think I’ll be taking a page from ptownhiker‘s notebook, and worry a lot less about game mechanics and a lot more about story and character interaction. Shadowrun’s well-suited to that anyway.
Time to update the firmware?
Speaking of gaming, the WWII superhero game is over in an appropriately cool Big Boss finale. Kudos to ptownhiker for running a great campaign! But he justifiably wants a break, so we tossed around some ideas.
Next game night we’ll be sticking to quick card and board games, but after that we want to start another RPG campaign, and because I’m a crazy crazy man, I volunteered to run some Shadowrun if people were interested. (After all, I ought to do something with all these gaming books, otherwise they’re just dust catchers. Someday I want to run more Paranoia and Deadlands as well.)
Several of our group liked the idea, so now I need to return to an earlier concern from my last failed campaign attempt: which edition should I use?
2nd edition pros: I have almost every sourcebook available. I know the system backwards and forward, and could practically run it in my sleep, plus I have a raft of adventure modules from which to steal elements. Cons: This edition is long out of print, and people would be dependent on my books. Hacker characters, an integral park of cyberpunk settings, are awkward to run.
4th edition pros: This edition’s currently in print, so people can acquire rulebooks and sourcebooks simply. Hacker characters are much better integrated. Cons: I have only the core book, and might desire to add sourcebooks (they’ve gotten more expensive). I have some issues with the new rule system, it’s a tiny bit less cinematic and flexible than it once was. (OTOH, perhaps I can house-rule that.)
Hmmm, decisions. I’m really glad to be back in a gaming group; I worry that I’m getting a bit anti-social these days, not because I dislike spending time with my crowd, but because it’s just easy to slip into a constant state of being tired and busy. I don’t want to go there; the best parts of my life have involved my friends. When I look back on all the crazy stuff I’ve done in fandom, the memories inspire me: I’m determined to keep making more!
Tunic +1 to Confusion Charms
Swung by the grocery store today to pick up dinner. I was wearing my Technicon 17 (2001) t-shirt, and the cashier kept staring at it. I think kittenchan‘s catgirl in Grecian robes confused the heck out of him.
I just don’t wear the number of t-shirts I used to. At Staples, I had to wear corporate red, but at B&D, Thrifty Nickel, Decipher, and BCT, I could wear what I wanted as long as it was neat, clean, inoffensive, and gender-appropriate. I owned a LOT of t-shirts. But at NASA, polo shirts are the order of the day, so my t-shirt wear has been cut by five-sevenths, and much of my collection has felt the bite of the ongoing ‘stuff’ purge.
Kinda sucks, because I kept seeing t-shirts I like at cons – such as an excellent Jennie Breeden shirt at MarsCon – and having to tell myself, “When will you be wearing this, and how much room do you really have in the dresser?” Sigh. I have a rule that I can buy something new for every two objects of similar kind or size I purge. Maybe I need to do another t-shirt purge soon to make room. Wish I could justify doing another run of TeeFive shirts (and find the art for the back).
EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that I was wearing the TCon 18 shirt. Either I fail at reading Roman numerals upside down, or the +1 to Confusion is working better than I thought.
Fantastic Settings
The other day Starr picked up a book for me, one that I’ve been meaning to read for years: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle In the Dark. I’m enjoying it, but he’s preaching to the choir, and I’ve not yet gained any new insights from the book. On the other hand, I also finally have a copy of tltrent‘s In the Serpent’s Coils waiting in line, and I’m looking forward to reading that one. In my opinion, “Young Adult” fantasy and science fiction is where much of the good stuff is happening right now. Say what you want about Harry Potter, but Sorcerer’s Stone was a better read than many of the transcribed D&D adventures that pass for fantasy novels these days.
Speaking of transcribed D&D, Gary Gygax’s recent death caused me to drag out some of the old adventures I’d saved since the mists of First Edition, with an eye to running them again. In particular, I’m looking at the old S-series: “Tomb of Horrors”, “White Plume Mountain”, and “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” (a particular favorite).
Now, I know these were convention tournament modules, but I was struck by the lack of role-playing, or even much of a plot besides “collect loot and survive to the end”. The adventures are full of unfair puzzles, insta-deaths, and places where the GM will have to do some blatant railroading if the party’s not going to wipe (no running back from the graveyard to rez!)
If I were to run them now, and the basic concepts are juicy enough to make the idea interesting, I’d have to do some major re-writing for my audience. I’d want map revisions, monster changes, and some serious story integration. It wouldn’t be a trivial task, even discounting the problem that the adventures were designed for experienced First Edition AD&D characters. What game system do I want to use – a D&D version, Earthdawn, Herc & Xena, an alternate-universe Shadowrun? (And in most of those cases, which edition?)
Yeah. This is kinda turning into a campaign, which is too bad; I’m not sure I can spare the time right now, fun as it sounds. The urge to run “Barrier Peaks” near Roswell using the Deadlands setting may have to wait.
Addendum: The sentence “the chest contains 10,000 gold pieces” was obviously written by someone who had never counted out 10,000 quarters, say, and then tried to carry them around for any length of time.
