Obsolete Your Idols

The D&D 3.5 game I run on alternate Sunday afternoons has reached a milestone. The party has traversed the first Region in the World's Largest Dungeon.

That's been, more or less, seven months of dungeon crawling to get to this point. Two original characters remain from the original party, both dwarves.

Now they're on to Region B, full of traps and goblinoids.

Perhaps now I can find time to fit in getting double duty out of the book by running it for my co-workers, as well.

I've started trying to update the board game library at work.

That's right. I get paid to think about what games I want to play at work and then I get paid to play them. You wish you were me.

This week I picked up

• Stonehenge
• Carcassonne Big Box

but I don't anticipate getting any actual time to play this week what with my lunch date at E & O Trading tomorrow. So next Monday will probably be my first chance to sit down with one of those and get my game on.

Luckily I've got a day of boardgames going on Saturday and then D&D and Ars Magica on Sunday so, yeah, I really can't complain.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Mostly, recordings of other people's RPG sessions published by Yog Sothoth and RPGMP3. It's been edifying. I do rather wish that some edits had been made to these recordings.

• I don't need to hear the 20-40 minutes of preceding table talk before the gaming actually starts
• I could do without the 5-10 digressions during the session
• so long as I'm asking for things, separate mics for the GM and the player pool might help

I greatly appreciate these recordings have been made available but I groan whenever I see how long they are, especially when I have to ignore the lengthy preludes of non-game related pop culture talk.

My employer has a nifty new game up named Dream Chronicles. I really dig it and even better I can get you a deal on it if you like it, as well. For the next week, if you use the coupon code SPRDREAM (for Windows) or SPRMDREAM (for Mac) you'll get the game for $9.95.

That's incredibly cheap for such an awesome game. But it expires June 18th so jump on it.

For lack of anywhere better to put these and to continue my streak of non-technical postings (hi, Annaliese!), some quotes from the last Ars Magica session I played.

• "It's impossible to overdose on butter cookies. Well, not from the magic in them, anyway."

• "Neither of me are attending this meeting."

The group I run D&D for has entered the World's Largest Dungeon and I've finally succumbed to the itch to buy a book for 3.5 Edition after years of fierce resistance.

Also a series of small spending sprees to obtain Forgotten Realms books. I have a fascination with the world Greenwood made which I either can't or won't justify. Especially to you!

Speaking of spending money, my copy of War on Terror arrived this week. Guess I'll be taking it to the next board game playing opportunity I have.

It's been quite a week, with my boss out of the country. But at the end of it, it's important to focus on the things which really matter. Like my lovely wife. And the board game she bought for me today.

It's called Thurn and Taxis and it looks like a lovely little German board game. It's about strategically delivering the mail. No, I don't know what that means, either. But I'm looking forward to playing it sometime when I've got a couple people with an hour to spend on it.

Coming soon, a great game for people who can maintain the concentration to play a computer game while on drugs, SpongeBob Diner Dash.

Relatively recently, I became aware of RPGnow through Atomic Sock Monkey Press's Dead Inside, mentioned repeatedly on the Unknown Armies mailing list.

After poking around for a bit, I went on a buying spree and came out of it extremely pleased with the experience. Some wacky affordable games I would never have otherwise found, some out of print supplements I've missed having around, and a painless purchasing process. You pays your money, they email you some links, you save some files, unzip, and voila. In my case, voila means burn to CD and eyeball to see what might need printing right away to scribble on and jot marginalia.

As basis of comparison, you can find many rare out-of-print gaming things auctioned off on eBay for 4-5x the cost you can find it at RPGnow. If what you're after is the data, not the physical heft, it's a no-brainer. I gather RPGnow also has a division which will sell you hardcopy versions of some of the small-press games and they'll even burn you a CD of the stuff you buy, other than TSR stuff. Many options and lots of goodies you won't feel bad about buying afterwards.

There must be a thousand ways to play it.

From the Unknown Armies Mailing List: a collection of images and text descriptions of creepy places. Good for Call of Cthulhu or UA, one supposes.

Scott Kim's site and another collection of puzzles by him. Additionally, here's the Looksmart directory of puzzles.

On many Sundays, I run sessions of what used to be called 7th Sea and is now termed Swashbucking Adventures and has thrown out their rather funny original mechanics system in favor of the ubiquitous and flavorless d20 system. Not that I'm bitter.

OK, I'm bitter. But it's only because I sank hundreds of dollars in to the CCG and RPG line. I really fell in love with the world and the system didn't get in my way. But the point is, I run this gaming session and here's some photographic proof. Shot with Heath's camphone, once again.

Update to remove bad picture links.

Vylar brought this set of mechanics suitable for roleplaying Wuthering Heights style tragedies, should that be the kind of thing you're in to. Reminds me of something lloyd or Josh would be pleased by.