Circle of Dar Janix

The party began session 9 huddled in their camouflaged ship, recovering from their battle with the pyramid droids and the Imperial Special Forces. The giant beam was still firing through the lens on top of the pyramid, so they decided to determine where it might be pointing. After some discussion Tarn, the smuggler, informed them that since the planet was rotating, and all of the heavenly bodies involved were moving in relation to each other, they would only be able to determine a series of planes swept through space by the beam on which the Dyson Sphere could lie. They would need to find the other two pyramids and see where the beams intersected in order to determine where the Dyson Sphere was located. 

Since the group is pretty stable, I thought I would take the chance to give a quick rundown of the party members: Neelo: a mechanic Anoon: a twi'lek politico Kal: a Mandalorian marauder Tarn: a human smuggler IG-13: a droid assassin  Lockett: a human scoundrel Sal: a hired gun Caitlin: a slicer Caitlin and Sal are the most recent additions to the group and I realized that I do not have all of their character details, even though they are late-comers to the group they have been good additions both in person and in game. The game plays very well with eight players, it really helps that everyone is very professional. We have a lot of fun joking around at the table, but all of the players are always ready to go when their turn comes up. I do play a little bit looser with the rules to keep things moving, but the game seems designed with this in mind.

Last month Dark Horse began a new Star Wars comic series based on a very old Star Wars. "The Star Wars" is based on George Lucas's original script for Star Wars, a script that is very different from what we eventually saw on the screen. It is set in a galaxy that is at once familiar and completely new, as many of the names, and concepts were in an earlier form during this version of the script. 

Tom Vasel and the Dice Tower guys are one of my favorite parts of the internet. I find his enthusiasm for games to be really infectious and genuine. I had the chance to meet him, briefly, at GenCon this year and he seems to be just as nice in person. In fact, Tom was the very first person I saw at GenCon this year, bright and early Thursday morning, I knew GenCon was off to a good start.

On the way back from Merissee the party talked to Mia and determined that she felt that The Seekers had been responsible for her kidnapping. When the party returned to Elrood they learned that students and the robot mining union were rioting over the recently revealed bugging of the union office. The party decided to spend this session working off their debt and took a job from Paz Nor to fix a fight for the Arena Battles Championship. Paz Nor wanted the Elrood System Champion, Starchild, to defeat the current Galactic Champion, Karl Bruno. 

A few years ago I purchased the Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games. These games are both set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe, and share a common system that is a close relative of the earlier editions of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system. Both books are very well produced, as expected from FFG, and are massive RPG tomes topping out around 400 pages each.

I intend to use these Wrestling History posts to examine some of the best feuds in wrestling history. Sometimes, a feud will be encapsulated in a single post, other times I will spread a feud across several posts. I will try to group posts into chucks that tell a logical story, even across a few feuds. I have a reason for posting this to a RPG blog, there are a lot of things GMs can learn from prowrestling about serial storytelling, character development, building heat for villains, and promotion. I was inspired by John Wick's (yes the designer of Legend of the Five Rings) Wrestling Sunday School podcast.  

As I mentioned in an earlier post, on of my goals for this year is to run a Rifts campaign. I intend to play it straight, I am not planning on running a tongue in cheek, campy Rifts campaign. I am planning on running a serious, well thought out Rifts campaign. I already had this goal in mind when I went to GenCon. At that point, based on what I had heard about Rifts over the years (and my own minor personal experience), I was not even sure that was possible. I picked up Rifts Ultimate Edition at GenCon and I have read through it, the Gamemasters Guide, and the Adventure Guide, as these were recommended to me as the core books (along with Rifts Magic). After reading them, I think that this is a sound recommendation and I would repeat it for others interested in getting started in Rifts. Below are my first impressions of the Rules and the Setting:

Below are the listings for my eBay sales

I had a busy week last week and got sick, I did not have a chance to check the blog, and I just noticed that I did not use the scheduled publishing feature correctly. This means I have a bit of a backlog of posts to get out over the next few days.  Last night I ran a game session that climaxed with a submarine battle, today Tom Clancy died. I was a huge fan of Tom Clancy as a child and young adult. In his early novels, Clancy painted a picture of the United States where men in uniform, civil servants, and industry worked together to achieve the goals of the nation. He also went into painstaking technical detail on submarine and anti-submarine weapons systems. Both of these had an enormous impact on me.  In my mind The Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal of the Kremlin are two of the greatest spy/military thrillers ever written. There was no sign of the ridiculous camp or silly paranoia of the 1970s spy thrillers to be found, just regular people working together t...

My Edge of Empire group did not get to meet last week because I was sick, but we were back in full swing this week. The group was focused on rescuing Mia and Zann from the Loag assassins that had kidnapped them at the end of the last session. They were concerned that her visions indicated that she was force sensitive and she might fall into the wrong hands.