I Don't Know How Long This Will Last...

... but I might as well give this blog another try as long as I am stuck in the house.

What Have I Been Up To?

It has been a couple of years since I last posted. As usual, the more I actually manage to game, the less I manage to post, and I have been gaming a lot.

Miniatures Gaming

One of the biggest changes over the last few years is the amount of miniature wargames I play now. I started playing with the Second Saturday Scrum Group a while back, and we generally play a new wargame every month. 

In addition to regular gaming, we have put on a local gaming convention for the last two Februaries. ScrumCon, our convention, is split 50/50 between 

Several of my fellow Scum Club members also have blogs where you can learn more about the games we have been playing and our conventions:

Joe

John

Walt

Zach (Many of you will already be familiar with his blog, Zenopus Archives)

Jared

Roleplaying Games

Call of Cthulhu

While I have not done much playing or refereeing in CoC over the last year, Jared did publish one of my adventures, "Easier to Fill the Ocean with Stones" in the first issue of his magazine, Bayt Al Azif. This adventure takes place during the Viet Nam war.

Stonehell

I wrapped up my long running (9+ years) Stonehell campaign at GenCon last year. As many of you know, I ran a persistent version of Stonehell since shortly after its release. Many different groups of adventurers braved this version of Stonehell over the years, in home games, convention games, and at in-store game days. I do not have an accurate count of how many sessions of Stonehell I ran, or how many players took part, but I know there I ran over 50 sessions at conventions and game days alone. The home game sessions far outnumber these.

While I fully intended to set Stonehell aside forever, the reports of its death were slightly exaggerated. At Scrum Con this year, a last minute cancellation left us with a slot to fill. My extreme familiarity with Stonehell allowed me to get it to the table with no preparation, although I ran it from the book instead of persistent version. Perhaps I will throw open the ogre-mouth gates from time to time. 

Tekumel

After setting aside Stonehell, I picked up Tekumel. Similar to my Stonehell game, I am now running a persistent-across-all-games version of Tekumel using a modified version of Empire of the Petal Throne. In September, I started a Roll20 game that serves as the main home game for the campaign. There is another group that meets irregularly in person, and I have run several convention games. I am happy to report that it is going well so far, and there has already been cross over of characters between groups. We have managed to miss very few meetings since starting, which is encouraging.  

Stars Without Number

In the Fall of 2018, I started a Thursday night Stars Without Number group on Roll20. We wrapped up our first campaign early this year, and kicked off our second campaign a couple of weeks ago. While this group hasn't managed to meet as frequently as the Tekumel group, we still average around two meetings a month (and frequently achieve quite a bit more).

If I can keep this blog going again, I plan to spend quite a bit of time talking about the games I am playing, especially Tekumel and SWN. Tekumel is rich for mining from a lore standpoint, and SWN offers a lot to talk about on the system side.

As I type this, Maryland and Virginia (I am in the DC Metro Area) have just entered the lockdown phase of coronavirus mediation. I am planning on starting a third series of Roll20 games to fill this time. I will be calling this Moldy Oldies, with the intention of playing some games that are usually left on the shelf. The first one will be MERP.