Welcome to Monday. It was a fun weekend here at Encoded Designs. Not to ring my own bell, but Saturday was my birthday and it was a nice low-key evening, spent with family. My parents were kind enough to pre-order my 4th Edition D&D Box Set. With some birthday money, I did a little shopping at RPGNow.com and picked up Qin: The Warring States. My wife, picked me up a great new pen, that I have been obsessing over for the last few days. All in all it was a very fun Birthday, even if it signals that I am now closer to 40 than to 30.

On Sunday, after a day of Easter Egg hunts and baskets, I got together with Spenser and we played some 4th Edition D&D, that we cobbled from all the releases on the Net (thanks Critical Hits), as well as some fan-made adventure from the guys at ENWorld. My first impressions of 4th Edition are quite positive. I now understand why people are saying that playing it is not like playing “D&D”. It’s really more like playing Iron Heroes. With all the moves and powers, combat reminds me of playing Iron Heroes, which is about the best endorsement that I could give the game. We played two encounters, using the 1st level characters from D&DXP. It was the most exciting 1st level combat I have played. I am more excited for 4e now.

This week, Thom is getting together an online chat to go over his Dresden game. Then on Saturday, Sargon’s Cyberpunk game is up in the rotation. For me, this is my Brainstorming week for Iron Heroes, and I am in a good position, as my last session was all setup for the coming session, so I pretty much know what I need to do. I do need to stat out some things, and that will be my work for the week.

As for some blogging, well it seems that everything from last week got skipped. I did hear about a thread on ENWorld that may require a Rant. I also want to get some writing done about low prep gaming, something that I am actually not very good at, and am planning on working on in the next few months.

So that is it for the past week. Stop by later this week, and I will see what I can do about getting some content up.