Hell's Bells!

This month has been pretty crazy, and not necessarily in a good way.

Gaming schedules have been pretty much tossed out of whack.  So far, only my Saturday gaming group has survived the chaos, though we've not gotten to do a whole lot of playing, though hopefully tonight will be a return to form, though in an unusual method (more on that later).

Back when Chris and Dave of the Order 66 podcast were doing their Kickstarter, I'd pledged enough to get to play in a Skype game run by Chris.  Well, through a comedy of errors on both our ends, that session got delayed a fair bit with my finally able to join in on a Saturday game session.  And to be honest... it was worth the wait.  I had never gamed with any of the other folks that were playing, but we came together pretty well as a team.  The adventure in question, "Dead Man's Hand" was fun to play, and even fun to run as I got the chance to run a demo game for some folks last night, and opted to use that one.  Sadly, the players I had weren't quite as creative with their actions, though I suspect most of that had to do with just not being familiar with the dice mechanic that FFG used for their Star Wars system.

The Wednesday D&D game has gone belly-up, due in no small part to just general lack of interest.  The GM had something going as far as a storyline, but that eventually just fell apart and fell into the "go fight stuff and swipe their loot" rut that has been the death of more than one D&D game I'm sure.

On a positive note, a suggestion I made on the FFG Age of Rebellion Beta forums, to rename the Knowledge (Galactic Civil War) skill to the more general Knowledge (Warfare) has made it into the Beta Updates, so hooray me.  Most of the changes made so far to the AoR Beta have been fairly minor, with the biggest changes for the Week 2 update being the addition of some new talents for the Gunner and Commando specializations.

I've been chugging along with articles for the Gamer Security Agency, though my day job hasn't left me as much mental bandwidth as I'd like.

I'm also gonna call an audible here, in regards to the backer reward adventure that I'm to write as part of the Order 66 Kickstarter.  I've had some tech issues, and several files got corrupted... including the adventure I was writing.  I've got an older back-up copy, so the entire thing wasn't lost, but I did lose all of Act 3 and a fair amount of formatting, so that puts my way behind schedule, as I'd hoped to have it done by the end of October.

In other dour news, fellow gamer, Star Wars fan, and d20 Radio's resident furry Rikoshi had to reluctantly bow out of the Sunday Skype game that I play in.  While I can understand why he did it, having seen the crapfest that his life has unfairly become over the past few months, it still sucks to lose such a fun member of one's gaming group.  His antics as the Squib scoundrel Kirkinnery-tovante was always entertaining, jaunty hat and all.  Hopefully he can get things in order and turned around for the better sooner rather than later.

There's an update for the Unofficial Species Menagerie in the works, prodded into higher gear due to events I'm not going to go into detail on.  Hopefully, a few new things are in place on the updated version to avoid that sort of mess in the future.  The species that have gotten official stats or are due to have them very soon have been removed, mostly as I want to play nice with FFG when and where I can.  I've still got the versions that Ben and I came up with, but I can't say if they'll show up someplace else at a later date, though I know that a few of Ben's can be found over at the d20 Radio forums in the FFG Star Wars RPG section.

I've also been invited to partake in a paganesque ceremony on behalf of some good friends in the not-to-distant future.  It's nothing crazy or criminal, but given the circumstances behind it I'm quite honored to have been asked to attend.

As for the Saturday gaming group, we're going to break out an old and rather unexpected RPG for a one-shot session, mostly as something to break away from our usual games.  The game in question?  The Dragonball Z Anime Adventure RPG by R. Talsorian.  I was quite amused when the suggestion came up, having played a very short campaign of that game many years ago, and remember the main rulebook being an atrocious example of poor layout; it took the third book to make the came well and truly playable as well as providing a number of sensible rules patches to cut down on the curb-stomp battles that could occur all too frequently (particularly where extra actions were involved).  It should be interesting if nothing else.  I doubt there will be anyone with a Power Level that's over 9000 or people's hair turning gold from their extreme power, which is for the best.