Life and Games and Such

So I didn't realize until today how long it's been since my last post.  Unfortunately, Real Life has not been kind lately, and I haven't had a ton of motivation related to gaming.  I lost both my dad and our dog within the same week, and so sadly I've been in a bit of a funk that's been a little tough to get out of, but there's enough good on the horizon to be optimistic.

So let's talk about some of that, shall we?

My home group finally had the conclusion of our multi-year Mouse Guard game before everything really hit the skids, which was wonderful.  The group ended up completing a coup of Elmoss, and our patrol leader ended up sacrificing himself for the cause.  It was all in all a wonderful game, and part of me is reluctant to let it go, but I think we were all ready to move onto new things.  Coincidentally, this has also coincided with the end of my Stars Without Numbers campaign that never really gained any traction, which is largely on me, and me dropping out of my online Mouse Guard game because of all my Real Life business.

So what other things to move onto?  Well, we originally talked about using Questlandia as a jumping off point to building a Burning Wheel campaign, which would be the ideal (at least for me).  I've also talked to my SWN group about possibly trying out Burning Wheel as well through Roll20.  I put together everything for running Twilight in the Duchy Verdorben, which is an intro collection of three adventures for Burning Wheel.  If I was more savvy about Roll20 I'd try and make the module available for people, so if anybody has tips on that feel free to let me know.  My wife has also been at me as of late to take another stab at putting together a weekend group with some of our friends who are new to roleplaying like her, so we'll see if I can get that going as well.  I'll likely keep that group to something in the Powered by the Apocolypse family for ease, although I do also have Ryuutama that I think would fit that group well enough.

While I haven't had much available scratch to throw down for new games as of late, there have been a couple of Kickstarter campaigns I've stumbled upon recently that have caught my eye.  One is Eden, a GM-less roleplaying game where players play either humans learning the ways of the world from their animal companions, or the animal companions themselves.  The game itself looks adorable, and appears to be that it would make an excellent roleplaying game to run with children.  The gameplay examples show the game to be designed in a way that the advice the animal companions give to their human friends is largely rooted in the instincts of that animal, making it both a wonderfully imaginative roleplaying game as well as a way to incorporate more science/biology into your child's play if you're into that.

The other Kickstarter I want to mention is a game called Rise Up.  This game, which I can't do justice to here, is a board game centered around protest and bringing about social change.  This is, from everything that I've seen, an incredibly profound design put together by The Toolbox for Education and Social Action, and is the first Kickstarter that I've backed at a non-reward level simply to help it see the light of day.  Please check them out, seriously.

Speaking of board games, I have Granite Games Summit coming up this weekend!  This is going to be a bit of an adventure for me, despite literally being less than four miles from my house.  I'm obviously much more of a roleplayer than a board gamer, but helping to support a gaming convention in my hometown along with being able to meet new gamers is quite exciting to me.  For whatever reason I tend to have some anxiety when it comes to gaming with strangers.  It's a very odd thing, considering I'm generally a pretty outgoing and social person in most other aspects of my life, but when it comes to gaming I tend to be very shy, hence the adventure of this particular convention.  I'm going solo, and outside of the wonderful people running G2S, I do not know anyone else attending that I'm aware of.  So how do I counter this?  With baseball!

Bottom of the 9th

Bottom of the 9th is a fantastic board game that was one of my first Kickstarters that I backed.  The game is based around playing one half inning of baseball between two players, one controlling the pitcher and the other controlling a lineup of hitters.  The game is pretty easy to learn and teach, so I'm planning on bringing it with me to G2S to try and run for some people to help try and bring me out of my shell a little bit.  Hopefully it will lead to me interacting more than I would normally at this type of thing.  Getting more comfortable with a setting like this is something I'm very keen on, and might lead to me being able to stretch out a little bit with online gaming.  I'm part of an amazing community of roleplayers online that I have as of yet played very little with, and with some more confidence from situations such as G2S I might be able to become more involved with that arena, if that makes sense.  At the very least, it'll help me play the game more, which is one of my favorites.

As always, thanks for reading my ramblings.