One year O'Blogging

I've been at this for a year now, well almost, it'll be a year in 2 days but why wait and bring it up then?

In a year of gaming I've laid to rest an 18month to 2 year long campaign that crawled through and mixed and matched too many versions of D&D and OSR games to keep track of. We were playing in the 3.x release of the Wilderlands, I was using the old ready ref sheets from judges guild, we started playing with BFRPG, started adding in options to that, incorporated stuff from d20 versions until we were playing 3.5 (gad it was beastly, I only pretended to play 3.5 really), we used B2, Temple of Elemental Evil & Rappan Athuak. It all collapsed under it's own weight for me as DM.

After that to cleanse our palette we played Mutant Future, I had intended to make it a sandbox and it pretty much was. The players were a little lost, I blame myself I did a poor job of presenting the setting never really doing a good job of nailing it down (it wandered about too much from gritty, to comic book, from canticle for leibowitz to deathlands followed by some Kammandi), the rules worked fine however and I'm tempted to give it a go again without a doubt I just have to be more focused and a GM when I do so. I didn't even get a chance to use a fair bit of the stuff I posted here as much as I would have liked and that's just a crime.

The whole time all that went on I was playing one off games (sometimes with the same characters) of S&W WhiteBox in a hinted at setting with a different mix of PC races (Common Men, Amazons, Pygmies and Cyclops) instead of the default dungeon crawl pseudo Tolkien mix and they were fun. Also played in 2 different WoD campaigns (that didn't suck oddly enough) and a CoC campaign.

Some of this of course was reported the blog and there are things I want to develop more that you can find in my older postings. Fomorgard is is still in the works...now I know why the real Castle Greyhawk never made it to print however.

We played some houserules shake and bake playtest sessions for a while. I've been spending a lot of time developing those rules and I'm hitting the wall and wondering If I really want to bother. I have more fun developing additions and twiddly bits. I've been working on a medieval fantasy sandbox as well but I think I've strayed into the OCD school of DMing and am worrying about elements and features I'll never really end up using.... arggh. In my recent Tekumel underworld crawls I can see what is working and isn't working for my players there and where I have room for improvement.

As can be seen from this here blog I like myself the OSR. It's not about any sort of weird statement other then enjoying a home-brew and do what you like atmosphere. There is just a fancy free and open spirit to old school games that works for me. I do like myself picky details also but the older I get the more I realize those picky details work better if I can keep track of them.

In the real world my oldest child is starting highschool after this summer. My youngest will be a year old in about a month. I'm still happily married to my second wife. I need a good job in my career path or something entirely new. I want to improve my home so I can unload it and move into a bigger place (with a dedicated game room).

So what's all this about? I suppose just a reaffirmation that I'm a RPG player who has been doing this for a long time and I plan on continuing to show how I play and provide little bits and fiddly things for other GMs and players to enjoy. RPG is part of my life and has been for a long time I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.