August Updates

By the time of this post, all the cayennes turned a nice, bright red

Well the pics tell the tale really, I've been pulling a lot of stuff out of the garden towards the end of the summer here. Other than that, I've been in a bit of a funk going into August in general, not just gaming, or otherwise, just an overall 'bleh'. I know that starts this off on a down note, so let's focus on the good stuff happening around here.

We've really ramped up the roleplaying, more so than it has been in years, literally. The pendulum usually swings one way or the other, but for a while there it was heavy on the minis and there was little to no roleplaying at all. Our queue is starting to stack up too, so there's no shortage of games to try out and new genres to explore.


A single 'pull' one day from the backyard

Our 4e campaign is officially underway, and although I've had a lot of fun with it, I just can't get sold on a character class or concept. For my birthday (which was a brilliant white light of happiness amidst my gloom) I received the PHB2. In there I was intrigued with all kinds of new options and mechanics, especially the 'primal' heroes. I toyed around with either the Drow Rogue, or Dwarf Summoner as my secondary characters, but the Druid class really appeals to me, plus I have a neat twist planned for both my characters.

We've gotten more than few games of Zombie Cinema under our belts too and the more I play that game the more I love it. If you've got a laid back group with a fair amount of creative juices and a penchant for a system with hardly any structure, then I'd recommend it for you. We tried a couple of mechanics this last time which I thought really added to the game, at least it made the game much more enjoyable for me personally. We also took it in a new direction and instead of zombies, we put it smack dab in the middle of Cameron's Aliens film and mirrored closely an LV426 type colony besieged by acid-for-blood critters. It was a lot of fun, and we rolled through the game at a fast pace given the familiarity we all had with the setting. Also I think the new rules variations we tried contributed to this.


These little puppies are all bright orange now...and delicious!

After all the talk of 3:16 here lately, we've been getting into that as well. I've recently posted a couple of 'mission briefings' and I'm hoping to add to those with player-written accounts of the action through their character's perspective. I haven't run a game in a long time, and I completely floundered out of the box halfway through the first session. I did recover, and it went well after that. We played a second game and I felt I had my sea legs finally. The game is great, but really it's what you and the players make it together, it doesn't give you a whole lot to go on, so it takes interaction on everyone's part. Also for my birthday I ordered a slew of Brickarms weapons to properly outfit the PC's for their next mission.

As you can see, I've done a whole page here of talking about nothing but roleplaying! The pendulum has definitely swung in that direction. We've just kicked off a new Dark Heresy campaign on a trial-run basis, not to mention the Rogue Trader book comes out this month. Savage Worlds has garnered a lot of interest with the group as of late, and we've always got Spirit of the Century to go to as well, which is one of my faves.

In the miniatures department there's a lot of cricket chirping going on. I have a mere two figs in my immediate queue to paint, and they're easy ones at that, and yet they sit their in their lonely white primer doing nothing. The creator of PKowboys is talking of doing a second edition and looking for playtesters. I played a lot of the first edition, and enjoyed it thoroughly, so I think we may get in on the playtest for second. We've also been looking at some very small scale fantasy miniatures to do, and next week will try out Chain Reaction's free Swordplay rules. Hopefully like their cousin 5150, they'll be fun.

That's it for now, I'll keep y'all posted with more geeky goodness...