Wednesday, August 31, 2011

How Are You? What the hell happened, man...

Since my last post, the flat panel display on my notebook died (since replaced). I also got sick. And I'm still fighting a very balky router, whose replacement is now on order. Posting anything of length was out of the question, and still is of a sort, which is why the historical gaming series was put on hold.

Still, here's what I've been doing lately, since I've been incommunicado for a few weeks.

What I've been reading:

After finishing A Dance With Dragons (Book Five, of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin), I've been reading the three books of S M Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy. The gist of it is that Nantucket Island, circa 1998, finds itself transported (along with the immediately surrounding waters), dropped back to the Bronze Age. It's an interesting example of what happens when you drop a very small slice of a modern society back into a different epoch, and leads to some very interesting and believable results. Worth the read.

What I've been watching:

Picked up a couple of movies on Blu Ray: The Magnificent Seven, The Adjustment Bureau (a great adaptation of yet another short story by Hollywood's go-to guy for near-future science fiction, Philip K Dick), and I'm ocntinuing to work my way slowly, with the family, through several seasons of Supernatural, Buffy, and X-Files with the family).

What I've been gaming:

Not much with the computer down.

Now that it's back up, I'm working on some more ship designs/conversions for the oft-delayed New Jedi Order Sourcebook for SWSE. I've finished the Shieldship, the Jade Sabre (Mara Jade Skywalker's ship), and the Ralroost (Bothan Assault Cruiser, pretty much saw every battle of the Yuuzhan Vong War).

I'm making preparations (read as reading the 200+ pages of the book) to run the classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu, Masks of Nyarlathotep via Skype once the new router gets up and running.

I'm also continuing to run the Alternate Timeline Star Wars "Anakin Takes a Bullet" campaign (which I promise to post about in length at a later date).

I've also been fiddling around with the Dresden Files RPG, but I'm not ready to run it yet. I scooped up a bunch of Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas Settings for 3.5 and have been reading through them. One of these days I'll get Eternal Rome on the table.

Finally, I'm getting ready to run Arc Dream Publishing's One Roll Engine film noir game, A Dirty World. It has a fascinating game mechanic and I'm rapidly becoming fond of the simplicity of running and teaching the One Roll Engine. Picked it up on RPG Now for $10 a couple of months ago, and can't wait to give it a whirl.