Gaming

By which I mean role-playing, and not wargaming, much to the disgust of approximately one-third of my friends.

If you are one of those benighted souls who doesn't believe that roleplaying is art, read the Jayhawk story by Mary Kuhner. If you are not impressed, please accept my condolences and then go away.

Not that I can claim to reach such a lofty standard, mind you. Even though, after years of scattered one-shots with a variety of settings, systems, and GMs, there are finally some continuing campaigns running locally, everyone I know has at least a job, and usually Too Much Work, or a sweetie in LA, or classes, or many of the above, so campaigns tend to be one afternoon every other week at best.

Games I Am Running

Angel Bay (Mutants and Masterminds second edition)

One is a private eye who may very well be dead. The other is a spirit of vengeance with free time on his hands. They fight crime.

Games I Am Playing In

Dragonblooded run by Ken (Exalted): A mixed bag of lunatic Terrestrial Exalted are sent to excavate the ruins of Rathess and bring back riches for the Empire and ~~glory~~ reduced ignominy for themselves.
Amazon Quartet of Justice run by Sherilyn (D&D 3d Edition): Four good-aligned heroines wander the world in search of villains who need smiting and cute guys who need affection!
Adventures of Jehanne & Alazaïs run by Ken (D&D 3d Edition with a bit of houseruling): Low-level characters setting out to ~~conquer the world~~ make their fortunes and avoid a life of peasantry. (There are actually more PCs than two, but the others aren't red-headed.)
Nameless Earthdawn Game run by Ken (Earthdawn): Much like AoJ&A, only in Barsaive! And with an orc ranger, a troll combat monster, an elf swordmaster, and a human spellcaster instead of two redheads and entourage.

Games I Have Run Within Living Memory

Agon: Three heroes of ancient Hellas wandered the Mediterranean bickering and scheming for glory. The will of the gods might have been accomplished along the way, but only incidentally.
The Great Machine (slightly modified Truth & Justice): The children of Oberon, created by his own hands, try to preserve and expand a version of Amber that's severely infected with Girl Genius. This campaign died a miserable death because the GM sucked. A lot.
Monday Night Gaming (Hero 5th Edition): The avatars of Vishnu, Apollo, and Hanuman fight demons in LA. (The ill-fated successor to Heroes of Nexus, this game folded after about one and a half sessions due to scheduling difficulty and the horror of weekday nights.)
One-seventh of The Home Front (Tri-Stat dX): It's 1942, and the men are going off to war, so it's up to the women to keep LA safe from Nazi infiltraters, Commie symps, deranged occultists, and other pulp villains. Sadly, we never did figure out what our genre was, but nevertheless it was clear we would never be able to top the fight against Nazi dinosaurs, so we ended the campaign after that adventure.
Heroes of Nexus (Antihero): A fallen angel, a reformed succubus, and a djinni wander the Infinite City, doing Good.
Tokyo Tower (D&D 3d Edition): The characters began as high-school students on a trip to Tokyo Tower. Subsequent events were revealed as they eventuated, but not fast enough or in an exciting enough way to keep things moving forward.
SPD (modified BESM2): When Akushima died, I couldn't just deprive all those people of gaming, so I replaced it with SPD, which stands for (Speedy|Special|Safe|Spiffy) Package Delivery: Our Heroes are the staff of a small, elite courier company in Nexus the Infinite City. Hilarity ensued, but no long-term plot or anything.
Silkiegame (D&D 3d Edition): This is the game which the Practice Game was practice for, run as a one-shot to give Sherilyn a chance to game without kids. As should probably have been predicted, everyone clamored for more. Silkiegame is ran approximately monthly, for a few sessions, then died when almost everyone dropped out for lack of time and then the player of honor had a baby. It never did get a more descriptive name.
Akushima FKA D&D 3d Edition Practice Game(D&D 3d Edition): Started as a random game for everyone to learn the system (which is actually, finally, at long last, a system), in a whimsically psuedo-Japanese setting, and was not expected to last more than two or three sessions, but due to popular demand was turned into a pseudobiweekly campaign. After about three more sessions, however, the cracks in the kludged-together setting started to show, so the game was put on indefinite hold.
Nexans Who Matter (homebrew rules): High-powered big-name free-wheeling Nexus action. Died due to lack of player time/energy.
One-sixth of Pacific Force (Champions with ECNG House Rules and the cost of powers halved): A rotating-GM Champions campaign that died in a miserable pit after I left.
Nexus City Government Survey Team (Nexus the Infinite City): Because I had a horrible schedule and all my players had different ugly schedules, Nexus was put on indefinite hold. However, it was a lot of fun, so even if it's determined to have decayed too much by the time we can start playing again I'll probably start another similar campaign.
The Champions Campaign With No Name (variant Champions): An experiment in, possibly, too many clever ideas at once, CCWNN folded after only two sessions when Fire swore off Champions for the rest of his life and Angie quit so she could spend more time with him.

Games I Have Played In Within Living Memory

Space Pirate Zeta run by Earl (Hero 5th edition): In a distant future of exotically speciated hominids and advanced biotech, the last starship of a conquered kingdom fights against the libertarian-socialist invaders as the pirate vessel Wrath of Lemuria, finally looting the Lost Planet of the Ancients to use its forgotten technology to restore Lemuria!.
Red Room run by Earl (Hero 5th edition): Heroic mutants working for the NRO to crush mutant slime worldwide. This campaign actually finished: we defeated the homozygous clone army and uncovered the disembodied brain plot!
Six-sevenths of The Home Front (Tri-Stat dX): The other GMs/players were (in order) Adam, Chrisber, Christyber, Dave, Earl, and Jeremy.
Hounds of Balazar run by Al (Heavily mutated descendent of BRP and d20, then Hero 5th edition): Bronze-age hunter-gatherers in Glorantha. And their dog. Woof.
Amber High School run by Chrisber (variant Amber DRPG): The Queen Faiella Academy for Young Persons of Breeding, where the teenage offspring of Amberites from a variety of strange Shadows are trained to be the next generation of omniversal rulers. Camaign trailed off and died when the GM became too busy.
The Haunted Valley run by Brad (D&D v3.5): Heroic adventure, in a unique setting (which is all Gretchen's fault). Our Heroes started at first level, but there was an email phase to get them all to third level by the time the game actually starts, so they did't just die straight off. Sadly, I determined I have no time for another FtF game, and the email phase wasn't going to last forever.
Sovereign Powers run by Earl (Champions with some ECNG House Rules): High-powered superheroes doing good in Chicago. The campaign was brought to an end when the GM had told the stories he wanted to tell.
Knights of Atlantis run by Chrisber (Champions with ECNG House Rules): A Sailon-Moon-inspired game set in modern San Francisco. Cause of death: scheduling doom (seven players, yuck) and GM burnout.
Infinite Sea run by R Sean (slightly enhanced D&D 3d Edition): The setting of the Barrayar books by Lois McMaster Bujold after exposure to ionizing radiation and axe-editing to fit into D&D3.
Pacific Force (Champions with ECNG House Rules and the cost of powers halved): See above.
Blofeld Transportation Co run by Chrisber (Nexus the Infinite City): "No package too strange, no destination too far, no fee too exorbitant." A dangerous motto, in Nexus.
Thieves & Things run by Marith (Nexus without dice): A miniseries run on-line, in which two thirteen-year-olds apply the Thieve's Academy and take the entrance exam. Only problem is, they're girls.
INFOS LA run by Keely (variant In Nomine with completely new mechanics): The scheduling on this game was so erratic that it eventually slid into the 'never again' end of the bell curve. Sniff.
A Second Chance For Prometheus run by Ray (Fading Suns with a few house rules): Some people might be such great roleplayers that they can play a character smarter than themselves. I am not one of them.
Academy run by Carl Rigney (Champions): The original description of this game was "like the first twenty issues of New Mutants, only better". Having finally read the reference, I don't think Academy actually bears much resemblence to the NM (we could never conclusively prove that our headmistress was an egoist), but it was fun anyway, although I finally dropped out due to a combination of creative differences and lack of weekends.
Seasons Of Change run by Squire (Deviant Amber): A variant Amber campaign, set in a world created by Brand, and the Shadows thereof. Brand has vanished, leaving his six daughters in charge of a royal (or perhaps even divine) mess, and they're beginning to find out that ruling the world is not as easy as Brand made it look. Not, mind you, that my character Melanie concerned herself with such things. The campaign died after about a dozen sessions due to lack of attendence.
Shadowlands run by Soula (homebrew): A very strange campaign in which our heros were kidnapped into another dimension, given superpowers, and told they were massively in debt. Things went downhill from there. The campaign died from lack of direction after about half a dozen sessions.
The Huge Mage Game run by Al (Mage the Ascension): I dropped out of this campaign early because I wasn't getting into the whole White Wolf nothing-really-exists-They-just-tell-you-it-does scene, and then my character's brain was stolen and eaten by aliens from the Deep Umbra. This was somewhat distressing, since like many of the other players I was playing a version of myself, but at least I needn't worry about reconsidering my decision.

Other gaming happens once in a while, though mostly at cons now that we have regular campaigns to absorb our gaming energies in times of peace. Carl Rigney will sometimes run Feng Shui, a truly awesome game based on Hong Kong action movies. He used to run bizarrely mutated ShadowRun (and probably still does) but I've given up on that since everyone one of my ShadowRun characters without exception has been useless and lame. I don't know why this is so, when almost all of my Feng Shui characters are fine, but it does seem to be the case.

I also play a (supposedly carefully selected) few of the zillions of collectable card games out there, although I don't really count that as gaming. Currently I play (and buy)

Shadowfist, which is pretty much the CCG counterpart of Feng Shui (or maybe the other way 'round, since Shadowfist was released earlier by a year). Shadowfist is pretty swell, especially if you play fast, although it's pretty generic as CCGs go: sites, characters to defend and attack sites, special evil tricks to slime past your opponent's defenses, all that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I have no real clue how to build decks, despite much good advice on the subject, so I'm not actually any good at Shadowfist.
Mythos, the collectable card game of Cthulhoid horror. Mythos is pretty keen because, unlike the vast majority of CCGs, it doesn't play anything like Magic. I like Cthulhoid horrors anyway, which may explain the state of my fridge...
XXXenophile, which is only so-so as a game (though even more completely unlike Magic), but has very fine art and very bad puns. It is the only CCG I have ever tried to collect a complete set of, and finally, after nigh-endless searching, I managed to find the last card I needed in the possession of a cow orker, who asked a very reasonable price for it. All Praise Ermine!

I don't like most board games; they take too long, have too many fiddly pieces, and are boring. (Or, you could take the position that I don't like them because I'm not bright enough to play them well.) There are a few that I do like, though: History of the World, Die Siedler von Katan, Roborally, Creatures and Cultists.

I play at bridge, but that doesn't mean I know how.

This file was last modified at 1235 on 28Jan08 by trip@idiom.com.