Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Much has changed since my last blog post.  To list...

My long-running Forgotten Realms campaign came to a self-imposed screeching halt.  If you remember my last blog post, Changing the Toner Cartridge, one of the players had decided that he was getting tired of the character he had played for over 2 years and had another idea he wanted to explore.  After a month of thinking about it (and discussing things with a few other players, I decided that I was going to put that campaign on hiatus.  I just didn't feel comfortable changing the dynamic of the campaign for one, but the bigger reason is that I didn't want the campaign to end without that character, that had been there from the beginning, to not be a part of the end of it.

My second campaign, an old school TSR Marvel Super Heroes campaign, I also cancelled.  I was enjoying it immensely, as it was a spectacular change of pace from having run 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder campaigns for the last 13 odd years.  Somehow I'm going to run an old 2E game again, yes I will...  But the reason I quit this plays into the third thing that changed since the last post...

I have gamed on Tuesday nights for I honestly don't know how long.  I know that it goes back to when I lived in Maryland.  I remember trying to decide if we should run our game on 9/11, as I had a very good friend and another guy I knew who worked at the Pentagon.  My friend didn't go there that day, and we waited a long time for the other guy we knew to get home safely.  We decided to play, but that didn't mean that we didn't spend the first hour discussing the events of that day.  But it goes back further than that.  I want to say it was in the late 90's when I first set up my Tuesday night game sessions.

After some discussions with my wife (and I'll admit, she mentioned this years ago and I fought it as I am very much a creature of habit), I decided to change my games to every other Sunday.  On Tuesday, we would hopefully get started around 6:30 and play until say 10, maybe 11.  If it was a night of a big battle, or a tense session, we would push midnight.  But most nights it was, at most 4 and a half hours of gaming, which is then reduced by witty banter, out of game conversations, retelling old war stories, etc.  And one of my players can only show up every other week, which was another consideration into playing two separate games.

So we switched it up to every other Sunday.  Now we start at 2 in the afternoon and play until at least 11.  We do still have our issues with distractions in the game (and I will include having to watch football while we play), but now we get 18 hours of gaming in during a month, as compared to only 8 before (if you consider the Realms game as our primary campaign).  Everyone seems to be happy and satisfied with the change so far.

And that means that I've started a new game.  This one is taking place during the Reclamation Wars of Tethyr in the mid 1360's Dalereckoning.  The group is getting caught up in the battles of Zaranda Star against the petty nobles of the kingdom.  Ultimately, they'll decide if they want to play a part in Tethyr after the Wars and become nobles of that fair country, or if they'll accept a commission from the queen and found their own kingdom (with it's own set of problems) and using the Kingmaker rules from Paizo.  I'm dead set on finally playing and using all of the Kingmaker rules damnit!  But the players will make that decision.

Finally, I'm going to start writing short stories.  I mean, I've done that before, but that was for my games.  Scene-setting sort of things, or moments of foreshadowing.  But only stuff that was for the consumption of my players.  This now is something I'm going to do for others to read.  It's a little intimidating to think about others reading my work.  I guess in a way this blog works the same way, but it's only friends reading it now...  As Tom Petty once sang, "Into the great, wide open..."