Starting from Scratch

Moving to Baton Rouge meant leaving behind a bunch of awesome friends, including more than one gaming group.  I'm the kind of person that takes their time getting to know people or finding new friends, and being able to connect with those old friends through things like Facebook and Skype are helping make some of the transition easier, but reforming those weekend D&D games is taking longer than I expected.

Working in TV takes up a lot of my time, and with a wife studying for her PhD there's not much left over for us to get out and check out the local gaming scene.  I find myself back in the same spot I was five years ago when I first moved to Fort Smith; spending more time at home playing video games on the weekend, forlornly reading Wizards.com and other websites, and browsing through gaming shops while resisting the urge to buy a book I can't use at the moment.

Five years ago I joined a gaming message board group and managed to find some people who lived less than an hour away and needed another player.  Once or twice a month I would drive to Fayetteville to sling polyhedral dice and get to know these folks, and over time developed some great friendships.  So far those same avenues aren't paying off, so I've had to be a bit bolder.

"The Star Heart Saga"

When Farscape was on TV, I watched a lot of it.  Not necessarily every episode, but I tried to keep up with what was happening to the best of my pre-DVR ability.  And so when I sat down to think about planning a new D&D campaign set in the Astral Plane, Farscape jumped to my mind.

The campaign would revolve around the same thing the show did; a living ship.  In Farscape, human astronaut John Crichton and his ragtag band of alien outlaws banded together to free a living ship named Moya, and then traveled throughout the Uncharted Territories battling evil forces and exploring that region of the galaxy.  So, the players needed a reason to wind up stuck in the Astral, a living ship they could use to sail it, and an enemy to eventually battle with it.

The Heroic Tier


Because the Astral is intended for paragon-tier characters, I decided to slow-play the introduction of the living ship by letting the players do some tomb raiding while I feed them info about the setting's history and their eventual foes.  They get a patron that has them find and assemble an artifact, the Star Heart, which he then uses inside a dungeon at the end of the tier to reveal that the entire place is one big, big ship.  The whole thing lifts into the sky and shifts to another plane, bringing the players along for the ride.

Red Dead AWESOME

During my "extended vacation" from work I sat down to finish Red Dead Redemption's main storyline.  I had actually expected one of two endings:


A) John Marston finds out his family, who were taken by US Marshals that want him to hunt down his former outlaw buddies, were killed by the people that took them.  Marston kills everyone he sees, and rides off into the sunset and/or a shallow grave.


B)  John returns home after the last outlaw is locked up, everyone on the homestead's alive and ornery, roll credits over some spaghetti western music.


Instead, you are given an entirely new chapter of the game, doing missions to help get the ranch back up on its feet and actually meet the people you and John have been fighting for this entire time.  It made me wish Rockstar had given the beginning of the game a similar treatment; during the long train ride to the middle of nowhere, Marston falls asleep and dreams of his family being taken away while the players go through a tutorial on movement and combat, and actually experience his loss.  It would have made the end of the game even that much more poignant and satisfying.


Two moments made the hair on my neck stand up:  the first was when Marston walked through the doors of his barn toward the firing squad, and you knew you were going to get a chance to go down shooting.  The second was the final duel, when the other Marston turns away from the body of his enemy floating face-down in a Mexican creek, and then the logo pops on-screen to the guitar's twang.

To quote another vengeance-seeker, "I got bloody satisfaction."

A Matter of Perspective

I'm fortunate enough to have a spouse that's geeky about all the same things I am, and blessed that she's also become a rabid World of Warcraft fan.  Warlocks, demons and curses are her bread and butter, and pain and suffering music to her ears.

Like any good and nerdy husband I wanted to encourage this kind of behavior, so when she got a laptop a few years back and needed a mouse to go with it I suggested looking at gaming accessories instead of standard, plebian, cheaper peripherals.

What followed was an important lesson I would forget multiple times, despite my best intentions not to.

The Great Geek Yard Sale

There is a type of geek which exists called The Collector.  They find something, such as cards or action figures or old video game consoles, and they gather up as much of it as they can.  The justification for this is usually that there is an inherent value to said collectibles, and though they argue fiercely that said value is monetary, most of the world knows better.

I, however... I collect hobbies.  Board games, paintball, action figures, posters, magazines, all of the above.  When I find something new and shiny, I go after it with a vengeance and way too much of my disposable income.

It started when Decipher printed the Star Wars Collectible Card Game; I was still in middle school/junior high, and I loved Star Wars with a passion.  I bought cards whenever I had the extra money, all the way through my senior year of high school.  By that point I had picked up Magic, dabbled with some of Decipher's other games, bought a paintball gun to play with my brother, and had seriously begun looking at the emerging world of MMOs.  In college I started buying blister packs of Mechwarrior minis, then bought six of their Shadowrun action figure game cousins, convinced the local gaming group would start a league (they didn't).

'Til All Are One

There are certain touchstones of my childhood that I am reluctant to let go of; they hit me with nostalgia so deep that I get goosebumps, and my day is instantly a little better because of it.  One of those in the Transformers; I watched and re-watched episodes of them recorded on VHS tapes, followed the spinoffs, had chests full of the toys, and sold Michael Bay a small portion of my soul by going to watch his terrible movie.

That's why there was nothing on Earth that was going to stop me from diving into Transformers: The War for Cyberton when it released on Tuesday.  The only thing left to answer was would I love this game as a fun, nostalgic addition to Transformers lore, or would I be forced to hide it under the sofa next to my pirated copy of Revenge of the Fallen?

Fool me once, Michael Bay.  Fool me once.

The Open Range

Photo by Lorien, from Flickr

My friend Jeramy and I have been working off and on for about a year to build a new D&D campaign setting.  It started when we were watching Tombstone and The Quick and The Dead one day and trying to think about how we could fit D&D characters in that world of high noon duels, wide-open country, and general lawlessness. It reminded me strongly of the world Stephen King created with The Gunslinger, the world of young Roland and Arthur Eld before him.  I had a this vivid image of a knight in full armor with a lance at one end of a dusty street, and a duster-clad wizard at the other end; the two duked it out in front of a town of wide-eyed witnesses, and I knew we had to bring that place to life.