Hello all.  I am on a little vacation, but had some time to get a weekend update together.  Last night, we played Star Wars SAGA, and had a great time.  I nearly lost my Padwan to a gernade and some Stormtroopers, but we managed to pull out a hard fought victory.  The game is a blast, and I am fully enjoying my character and the SAGA mechanics.  Having played all the d20 versions of SW, I have to say that the SAGA ones are by far the easiest to use, and give the most SW feel during the game.

While on vacation, I have also been writing my Iron Heroes game that I am gonig to run for my friends, on Sunday afternoon at GenCon.  I did this last year, for some friends, and it was great.  I created a one-shot adventure, that was part of my main IH campaign.  The outcome of the one-shot plays right into my main campaign story line.

At last years game, one of the players captured a Fiend, rather than killing, leading to some very unexpected, but very cool consquences in my main campaign.  With my main IH game down to its last 4 sessions, the outcome of this session will not as may long lasting effects, but will help to kick off the final 4 sessions that will end my campaign.

I am also brainstorming the IH session that I need to run, the Sunday before GenCon.  Normally I would have waived off a game this close to GenCon, but it will be part of the One-Shot, so I wanted to get it run.  I will be writing it all next week, after my vacation is done.

As for the GM-Fu workshop, all the writing is done and our editor Vicki, is putting all the text together, and doing the layout.  The book will go to press (at Kinko’s) next week.  We are working out a few more details for another surprise.  This has the makings of being quite an interesting workshop.

I will not be writing again this week, I am going to be on holiday for the rest of the week, and will be taking full advantage of it.  I will talk to you again next week.

I have all but fallen off the grid this month.

Things are really crazy right now, with the return of my Iron Heroes game, and starting up playing in Spenser’s D&D 4e game, and Sargon’s Star Wars SAGA game.  Top that off with the writing I am doing for the GenCon talk, as well as preparing an Iron Heroes adventure for some friends at GenCon, and blog writing is taking a beating.

The good news is, that unlike the last time I was not writing, I am actually full of energy and charged up about gaming.  The downside is, I am so crunched for time, it is not funny.  That aside, I will do what I can to keep some posts out here.  I have some great ideas for some Gnome Stew articles as well, but those are on the back burner for now.

On Sunday, Sargon kicked off his Start Wars SAGA game.  He is using the WoTC published adventure arc.  I am playing a Zabrak Padawan, who has been master-less since Order 66 came down.  All in all, the SAGA system is a lot of fun to play.  The session went great, and the party is a nice balance, and clicked right away.  It was a great start, to what I hope is going to be a long campaign.

As I am down to my last 5 sessions of Iron Heroes, I am thinking more about what games I want to run next.  My current interest has drifted to Spycraft 2.0.  I am feeling like I have run enough fantasy for a while, and would like to get back to running something more modern.  I have been talking to Spenser and Sargon about it, and both of them like the idea.  So I am adding Spycraft to my shopping list for GenCon.

I would like to promise some articles this week, but I am not going to make any promises, while I am under such a crunch.  So check your feeds, I may just have something out there.

This past Sunday was the return of my Iron Heroes campaign.  The characters have fast-forwarded in time, gaining 4 levels (from 12 to 16), and on the verge of capturing the capital city of Arion’s home land.  In all the session went OK, but he had a lot of challenges.  The first was that I did not eat before the session, so by 9:30pm, in the middle of a huge combat, my blood sugar reached rock bottom, and I became quite irritable.  Sargon, had hurt his neck and was taking some Rx for it, leaving him a bit off.  That left J and Spenser to hold up the other half of the table.  Add to this, that my NPC’s that I designed were getting housed, bad, it was a rough session.

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I am actually writing this on a Sunday night, early rather than later.

Been a busy weekend around DNAphil’s house.  Mrs. DNAphil is in Chicago for a family event, with the daughter, leaving DNAphil alone with the boy for the weekend.  All in all, we did fine, and I managed to a few blog and gaming related things done this weekend.

On Tuesday, Sargon lead a demo of the Star Wars Saga game.  Very nice.  I got to play a Jedi and had a so-so combat, mostly do to some really low rolls at first.  But I like the way the SW powers work, and the Jedi was a lot of fun to play.  We also did some space combat, and I really liked it.  I have played the other d20 versions of the starship combat rules, and this one was a lot better than the past ones.  This Tuesday we do character generation for the game.  I just need to decided on what race I am going to play, because there is no way I am not going to be a Jedi.

On Friday, I did some minor upgrades to the site.  Starting with puttin the search box on the side bar.  I had this turned off when I did the initial install for the site, because the sytlesheet mangled the box and the Search button, but after a little tinkering, I was able to fix them and install them.  I also added a plugin to allow you to edit your comments, something I picked up from my good friend Philippe (aka The Chatty DM).  Finally I activated Gravatars for comments.  So if you have a Gravatar, it will show up when you post comments.

Saturday and Sunday, I worked on my brainstorming for my Iron Heroes campaign.  We are starting the final big story arc that will take this campaign to its conclusion, at the end of the year.  The pressure is on now, as each one of these sessions has to be big… big combats, big reveals, the whole works.  This is going to be a big challenge for me, but I really want this campaign to end with the intensity that it has had all along, so I am putting everything I have into it.

Sunday night, we got to play some D&D 4e.  Mmmm….mmm…good.  I created a Dragonborn Warlord, and we played the Game Day adventure.  While I have not gotten too far into my new PHB, and we stumbled a bit on the rules, the game play was awesome.  I love 4e combat.  The final combat, against the golems, was great.  Our Paladin and Ranger both went down, and yet we were able to rally the remaining party members, cover our wounded and get them back up on their feet, and complete the encounter.  It was so cool.   I will be looking forward to playing this for some time.

This week is my writing week for Iron Heroes so I will try for some short posts during the week.  I won’t be writing a Gnome Stew article until next week.  So check our feeds, as I am sure I will get some post up later this week.

No gaming this weekend, due to Father’s Day, which I spent with my wife and kids. It was a very nice day.

Last week, I spent Thursday and Friday fighting with Amazon.com over my 4e Boxed Set. My Parents had pre-ordered the Boxed Set in March, as a birthday gift for me. On the release date (June 6th), there was a message that my set would be delayed until the 12th. Annoying, but I can wait. By the 12th there was no indication my set has shipped, so that night I called customer support, where I was told that the set was ready to ship, and I should see something on the website in the morning.

I got to work, the next morning, and checked Amazon, only to find my order had been delayed until JULY 18th !!!!!! At lunchtime I called Amazon again, and after some negotiating, I had them send me the three Core books as separates, with 2-day shipping, for the same price my Parents paid for the boxed set. After all the attractive slip cover was not the reason I wanted the books.

So last night I checked UPS and my books arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon, and should be out on the truck for delivery. I have my fingers crossed.

Over the weekend, I gave some thought about my slumping productivity at work and especially at home. I have started to put some things in place to help increase my productivity. At home, I have decided that it would be best if I focused my energies on one category of tasks each night. I divided up my efforts into the following areas:

• RPG’s (my campaigns)
• RPG’s (I am playing in)
• Blogging
• Computers

I have two nights were I do gaming, so those nights are used up.  That leaves me 4 topics in 5 nights.  So the 5th night is an open night where I work on other types of tasks/projects.   My goal is that each night, I work on that night’s topic for 1 hour, no interruptions, no distractions.  This way by the end of the week, I have advanced in each of those areas.

In addition to that, I have decided to reduce my level of noise, by hiding my RSS feeds, as they have become a very easy distraction.  I have also increased my sleep, as I was getting far too little of it, making me too fatigued to do the harder work.

We will see how the changes work.

As for this week, I will be finishing up a Gnome Stew post on Wednesday, and I will try to get another post out on DNAphil this week as well.

Have a good week, and good gaming to you.

In light of the news of the passing of Erick Wujick, on Monday, I wanted to delay my weekend update post until after Monday, so the article on his passing would remain at the top of my feeds.  But so that I don’t completely forget how to write on this blog….

I had a good gaming weekend.  It was my night to run Iron Heroes, but rather than running a normal session, we changed things up a bit.  First,  a bit of back story.  At my last session of IH, it became clear that the end of the campaign was in the horizon.  We had completed most of the PC’s personal stories, and all the groundwork for the coming war had been laid.  It was decided about a month ago, that no one had the time to do a d20 Mass Combat campaign to play out the war, so we were left with a gap in the story, before the final story arc could take place.

So rather than just narrating the war as the opening to a session, I decided to enlist my players to help describe how the war went, and what events transpired before we resumed playing.  I cobbled together some quick rules, inspired by Universalis, and came up with a simple, coin driven narrative mechanic.  I got the players on board, and on Sunday night, we gathered around the table, with our stack of poker chips and began to collaboratively tell the story of how the war progressed, what happened to the players during that time, and how did they come to be on the steps of liberating Arion’s country, Kotkala.

The session was a success, and the ideas generated were excellent and far more detailed than had I sat and worked out the narrative on my own.  I captured the whole process on our campaign wiki, and am in the process of cleaning the text up.  When it is done, it will server as not only the historical account of how the War for Kotkala went, but it is seeded with ideas for things to weave into the final story arc of the campaign.

So that was Sunday, last night, Sargon and Spenser came over and we worked more on our Global Frequency rules.  Work on this had taken a back seat with the arrival of 4e (of which I have not yet received my box set Amazon!), and the launch of Sargon’s Star Wars Saga campaign.  But last night, we had time to do some work on it, so after some amazing Indian food, we headed down to the Gaming Lounge (read: Basement) and in about 90 minutes got through the material we needed to.  Now I will turn the notes on my dry erase board into some more rules, and then prepare for one more round of play testing.

One last RPG update, I finished reading Corporation just in time for the late arrival of my 4e core books.  I will post my thoughts about Corporation later, but I liked the rules well enough to buy the starter adventure, and will be running it for Sargon, Spenser, and some friends, in a few weeks.

This week, I will be writing a post for Gnome Stew, on the replay-ability of certain RPG’s.  I will also get my thoughts about Corporation up as well.  So update your RSS feeds and keep an eye out.