Over a year and roundup time.

...Wow, I suck so much. I promise you that the lack of posts in the past... years has been from lack of time, and in no-wise lack of topics. So let's walk through some Roundup stuff, shall we?

Running

I'm running Liel, my D&D game, and... that's about it. I'm enjoying the hell out of it though. I like running games... maybe more than playing them. I want to talk more about this soonest, especially because we just went through about 3 sessions of the players dying, being dead, and then making themselves not dead again, which meant it was a fairly good test case for ideas I put forth in that article I guest wrote for Tribality that one time. I think it went pretty well, and it was also a nice example of a theme that bears repeating: When the players pick up all the hints and figure out what's going on, they should probably just win.

...because, y'know, I need more blog topics. Right.

Playing

Aurikesh - Harbinger's D&D 5e game. Continues to be great. I'm mostly focusing on my Blademaster 2 weapon fighter, who is level 7 now and feels like an unstoppable badass. I need to get my Tomelock and my Royal Sorcerer caught up more. That said, my main is well in the middle of accomplishing one of her major character goals, so I've got that going for me. 

Granite Sledge - Standsinfire's 5e game. Planescape on a boat! A big, rocky boat. I am playing a Lamia Monk, which is really interesting... StandsInFire created cool rules for her; I'm blood of Abraxas. The game itself is gonzo in a good way... thing

Forgotten Realms - Harbinger is also running a 5e Realms game with me and a couple of friends. I am playing a gnomish Mystic Theurge who worships the god of runes... really, I just wanted to play a Theurge. So far, I like it pretty well... it sure is a wizard who gets to use cleric spells. Not super special, except thematically. 

Over The Edge 25a - Harbinger has run a couple sessions of this, and basically, I always want more. I've said this before, but MAN do I love the playtest dice rules so far- I feel like I could run almost anything with them, particularly if I want something very light, that is heavy on the RP.

Cuphead - does anyone really play this game, or does this game play them?

Love Nikki- Yeah, I said it. But seriously, it hits all my weak points- collection, completionism, aesthetics, and exploration. It's a time and money trap like no other. If you value your cash and sanity, AVOID (but seriously, my friend code is 106448785).

Flight Rising- Yup, still. Not a ton to say about the dressup dragons except it seems the community has mellowed some, and it's gone to always-open registration, so check it out if you are so inclined! For reals though, it's a really good introduction to the culture of subgaming and in-game IRL economics beyond gold sellers (just... search on 'adoptable' sometime), and how pet games are fascinating for the econ lessons.

Pokémon Go - What? Don't you judge me, you know you're playing it too. And no, I don't have Mew yet. I'm about halfway there, still stuck looking for friggin ghost pokémon.

Writing

I wrote a Campaign Starter Kit for Unknown Armies 3 which is out to the backers now! Likely it will drop on DriveThruRPG soonish, and when that happens, I should definitely post it here, and not, y'know... forget.

For myself, I'm working on a Very Deconstructed Game called (tenatively) At What Cost, and if I actually manage to not get swamped by Day Job, I will post design diaries here, or sommat. I am hoping to have a playtestable version of it by Metatopia, assuming we're able to actually go to Metatopia this year. We'll see.

Also, I should make sure I'm not under NDA before I talk about anything else I'm writing for anyone, but Harbinger and I will be at GenCon, so there's that.

Reading

Midgard Heroes - by Kobold Press. More on this later as well, but the short version, there's a lot here I want to pick apart and feed on to grant my games strength, much like the necrophage described in its pages. Find it here. 

In the Company of Unicorns - by Rite Publishing, specifically, converted for 5e by my own dearest Harbinger. So, in the dim and tawdry days of 4e, I was working on a set of equine racial options called Pwny Island, which apparently, I actually thought was funny at the time. I never finished it, like so many things, but look! B basically has- well, at least, the unicorns- and managed to make them interesting, serious but not over-earnest, and fairly compelling. I'm actually unironically interested in playing a unicorn character after reading this book. I really want to do some sessions with it and post roundup reviews, because Yeah I do! So really, go! OBTAIN IT.

From Kickstarter, we got our copies of Epyllion, Changeling 20th, and I'll be picking up Dawning Star at GenCon this year, and I'm further waiting on too long a list to mention, so I'll make the attempt to talk about those games as I receive them. 

And that's the news. Why am I actually posting things now? 

...well, why indeed. 

Because I missed you, probably.

The Way of the Rules Chick.

So, I like rules.

The reason I like rules is because, apropos of Shieldhaven's post about Wizards, and some other stuff I've seen in games, when systems don't have comprehensive rules, they go SQUISH! and you're floundering in an undefined world where, it is reasonable to ask, "well, why don't you just teleport Frodo into Mordor" because there's nothing defining what the possibilities actually are.

This is a huge problem when we're talking about magic, but it applies to other systems too, particularly in games, where you want your magic users, your fighters, and your fighter-mages (among your other tropes) to be at about the same competence for amount of time spent building skills.  Yes, I am assuming that game/character balance is a desired thing. And I refrained from saying, of the same level to allow for systems without levels, like Ro3 LARPing, or World of Darkness Tabletop, which define advancement in other ways. 

I know a number of people, however, who do not like rules. At least, they express discomfort with rules which ranges from, "I am just not a rules person," to "I fucking hate rules because they get in the way of my ability to Just Play."

I won't get into the expectations connected with who hates rules and why, but will point out that for most people, the thing isn't that one really hates rules. One hates rules that...

• Seem arbitrary (also called, "are too obvious/visible"), 
• Are badly presented,
• Are convoluted and difficult to parse,
• Change or explode too frequently to keep up with,
• Are 'solved' (there's a right way to do things) or easy to exploit (unbalanced).

So allow me to go into some completely unsolicited advice for people who do think of themselves as Rules People, who love to design, modify, or add to rules systems for fun and/or profit.

Session Roundup #20

Brought to you by the incredible lateness of Dust to Dust Website Updates last night. You might look at the line, "Added Ancient Tales to the Codex of Dust." and think, "that doesn't sound like so much!" But if you are of that opinion, then I invite you to actually view the Ancient Tales Link and viddy what that actually involved-- namely, creating all those pages and adding the stuff. Oy. So. Sleepy.

Now, to bring you up to speed, last weekend was Arcana Evolved down in Georgia, following up the Last Session with a twelve hour marathon, in which we fought some super annoying mooks and a Rune Reaver. Full Disclosure: The mooks were annoying to me because they were also magisters, and dispelled my Clever Electrified Lair Trap. POUT. And I could have saved the 7th level slot for Spellmaster! GRAH!

Also, my rolls were crap. Fortunately, I made up the damage by giving Mirth and Ai-Wyn Ghost Weapon, which allowed them to bypass armor in their hits. So sweet.

This was especially useful, as the Rune Angel what I mentioned last time, who came to help us fight the Reaver?

Well, you might question the wisdom of enlisting the aid of a creature made of runes to fight a creature that eats runes with a touch. Well, we were too. Too late, unfortunately, to keep it from being a Rather familiar situation for those familiar with the classiest community on the internet. Still, we were triumphant, and classy enough to refrain from telling her to "OMG L2P!" to uninstall her skillset, or to cut off her hands rather than continue to heal our enemy every time she got hit, touched, or looked at funny. Instead we subjected her to over an hour of the Loresong Faen asking her world lore questions, which, I feel, was a fitting consequence.

Also! We got an item which increases the duration of Abjuration spells by 50%, which is super cool, as it could well be useful for me. Happy!

Shieldhaven has been playing Bastion lately, which has been a joy to watch, I've been playing Sudoku on my newly repaired DS, (W00t!), and we both have been playing a LOT of Echo Bazaar, which is a wonderful game with the world's shittiest server architecture. Ah well. Still worth it.

Next Friday is the First full Dust to Dust event EVAR. So if there is a not-roundup, or no roundup at all, please to be forgiving me, and I'll try to fill in the gaps with something that vaguely resembles content in the meantime.

As an FYI.

Shieldhaven posted today about LARP culture packets, what they are, ways to do them, and why we're doing them the way we are in Dust to Dust. If you're interested in LARP at all, it's definitely worth a read. Also, you'll get some small idea of what I've been doing with SO MUCH of my time lately, so that I've not been, you know... running things, or working on Dungeons, Pwnies, or anything else.

Session Roundup #16

Two weeks out of date, alas! But with good reason-- Shieldhaven and I were out of the country for a weekend, and friends getting married on a tropical island do take precedence. Not that there's been much to report, game-wise... I've gotten to disc 2 of Shadow Hearts, and Haven and I, with the help of one of his co-workers, Spirofin, managed to make it to the 3rd tier of depth in Spiral Knights. Which is a ride we are not even a little bit tall enough for. Time to work up to that 5-star gear, which will require a profound investment of time, money, or both. Which is a difference in philosophy between Haven and I-- he will Never Ever Pay Real Money For a nominally Free To Play Game, while I will apply Arcade Logic: that is to say, I am having a good enough time that I would totally feed quarters into this if I were in an arcade, so dropping 10 bucks on energy to craft faster doesn't bug me. I want to write about micro-transaction models and De Biz more, but... well. Time. We'll see.

Thank goodness it's not pinball. My Biggest Weakness!

Also, there was Arcana Evolved the weekend before last, a short session. We spent the first half-hour or so of the game addressing the question of whether we'd be charged, and how much, for using the Library of Eradnos (sp?), to which we'd finally made it last session. The answer was that they'd accept payment in trade, which, luckily, people who weren't Basel took care of, because I think they have Magisters to do... well, pretty much everything she can do.

We didn't have time to trigger the fight with the Rune Reaver before Haven and I had to leave for the Eclipse One Day, though we came up with some pretty nifty plans to fight it (three cheers for access to seventh level spells, and the Dragon Template!), so we spent the rest of the time chatting with the Rune Angel who had come to help us fight it. There was some discussion of whether or not she'd give us info as to the plot macguffin that brought us together, which boiled down to... well, sort of but not really. Self-directed... stuff isn't really the point of this game, though. It's more... well, here's the stuff that is happening, and we can react to it or not, mostly through where we decide to go. That said, helping to defeat this Rune Reaver thing is pretty cool, while I'm still at a loss as to the whole spreading cold and what we can do about it. Though we've apparently done some! Which is good! Stupid ice devils.

Which brings me to the Eclipse One Day! That was pretty darn excellent, all told. They rented Safety Wolf; a paintball facility in Conyers, GA. It used to be a cheap-o hotel, and now is a creepy, multi-room, no air-conditioning hellhole that was the perfect place to take down a horrible terrorist and yes. Of particular note were some utility boxes they set up, where mucking with them with a number of skills, including Security Counter measures, Energy-tech, and the like produced different results, and combined with info from a computer that the hackers had to get into. It was _awesome_. And there was much fighty. There had been a conversation earlier that day about how NPCs didn't use guns often enough; yeah, that was definitely not the case here. So many guns! The only thing that would have made it better would have been the lights flickering, instead of just being turned off.

Also, kneepads. I am wearing kneepads to every event from now on. My knees love me so much for it. And I need to get gel-pads for my boots. So badly.


Spacepunk Samurai Knees.

No Mage tonight, as there is too much writing to do-- this post being one thing, and much belated Website Updates for Dust to Dust. And Culture Packets. And, if I can manage it, any of the other posts I want to do. Meh.

Session Roundup #14 :(

Okay, so I... I won't say lied, exactly, but was mistaken about my ability to catch up on Roundup posts in the intervening week. Anyway, here's what we've been up to, gamewise:

Magic The Gathering: New Phyrexia Expansion: So far, all right. Spendy in terms of mana costs, not so bad as Zendikar, and having the kinda neat thing where you can spend life instead of mana at a rate of 2:1 for some cards. Need to play a few more drafts to see what I really think, but there's some fantastically gross cards therein.

Mage: The Awakening: Last night's session was short, but really fun. First of all, went to Volchik's (my character) uncle's house to do research on an abyssal artifact received last session, and to research the Prince of a Hundred Thousand Leaves, who is apparently some sort of literary Lost Carcosa-- pieces of his book intrude on other works, and if they're all assembled, the abyssal reality which _is_ the Prince will replace our own. Horrible, sure.

But also wicked awesome.

Anyway, after that was a meeting with some banishers to convince them that they needed to help us with the abyssal, cannibal, cultists of the Prince, instead of, you know, killing us for being mages. We convinced the guys we were sitting with-- who could do absolutely nothing about the other banishers lying in ambush for us, and for whom they'd baited this trap. So Tommy (who I still think of as Tod Lowry, and is played by Stands-in-Fire), turned some of the decorative plants into a swarm of locusts, while Sequela (Four Color) controlled the shadows in the room to help us escape, and I went Incognito. Also, I decided to mind control a handful of the locusts, which was really useful when we got to the back door and there were dudes hanging out to jump us.

"Feast, My Hungry Children!" indeed.

I have to say, I like collaborative research in Mage-- first, all the assistants roll, and their successes are added to the final dice pool of the main researcher. This is some value more engaging than researching in a library in our AE game, which was pretty much, "you ask a librarian, who asks another librarian..." and so on. But I'll get to AE in a moment.

Best moment of the game? Our Obrimos, Suryia (System Sans Setting) agreeing to hand over a couple of Mages from the council to the Banishers in exchange for leaving us be. Since we had to cripple a couple of their dudes, don't know how well this will stand up, but we'll see. Because THERE'S NO WAY THIS WILL COME TO HAUNT US, RITE?

Also, Sequela and Volchik managed to find a couple of Rotes in Volchik's uncle's library. So that's awesome.

Arcana Evolved: On Sunday, while in Hotlanta, we managed to get in some AE, which was a pretty good time-- it was a shorter session for that game, which, in typical 3e fashion, meant all of one combat encounter. To be fair, this game is also frequently bogged down by IRL stuff and child wrangling, and was also the day after the 2nd World Event of Dust to Dust, so this Kainenchen was in a whole world of pain. That all said, my habitually whiny character had very little to complain about, as we mostly moseyed through the ruins of this city towards the bizarre interdimensional library by taking advantage of the extremely low going rates on native guides-- as in, 1 gold apiece. This was cool, as otherwise, it probably would have been three or four more sessions before we even made the library. As it was, we only wound up in a fight at the door, where some mooks called their Rune Reaver boss to come and bash us. Fortunately, we made it into the library first, where we met the (miraculously) still living last guy who seriously schooled it. At which point, we decided to cool our heels for a while, and do some research, while we made plans to give it a final beat down and restore some Imperial Order to the city. Banditry = Got to Go, and such.

Who can hate that? Not this Rabbit.

Dust to Dust World Event II: Return of the World Event: This world event was a thousand times smoother than the first one, which doesn't mean that it went perfectly by any means. Getting things that are basic setting information across to players is a huge challenge, and one we certainly don't have a good answer for yet. I suppose it's mostly a good thing that we're, you know, not a con/salon larp, and so not actually coming up with a bunch of pre-gens all the time. That said, everyone seemed to have a really wonderful time, so yay to that! We got to test a couple of different totems, and more higher level ritualism, which is _really_ dependent on the efficiency of the rituals in play. Not that any player could know that off the bat.

But, well, it is to find out!

Session Roundup #13, part a

A week late, but I wanted to go ahead and get through this, as there is Mage and DtD Website Updates tonight, so the chance of my getting a Roundup done this evening after the game is exceptionally slim. So this will be a two-part Roundup, to make up for last week's total lack.

Last week, there was Eclipse the between-meal-minigame, and then Eclipse the actual LARP. Shieldhaven has a breakdown of the first here, where he talks about the pros and cons of this way of running between game events.

I've been chewing over the subject since the thing started steamrolling. The playerbase saw a report of some serious evil dudes attacking the Fringer planet of Taranis, and I'll admit to being one of the players who went, "Hey, I have a whole military division just cooling its heels! Can I do something!?"

And I was super jazzed when Plot said, "sure! Do it!"

This was a hugely experimental and neat thing to do on the part of plot, and will probably go much more smoothly next time (I'm certain that there will be a next time), but permit me to break down some of the sticking points along the way, and how they went.

Session Roundup #10

This week is notable for having been privy to the First Ever DtD World Event, and also session 2 of Mage: the Awakening

Saturday: Dust to Dust, Akathians vs. Ghuls-- So, this being the first event where I was, NoShitReally, a member of plot. The... circumstances of my arrival notwithstanding, it was really a lot of fun, and the players seemed to enjoy it quite a lot. We had some rough patches due to this being our first time working together, on the field, as a committee. However, it's really amazing to see something you've been working on for ages finally coming to life, and seeing what plays out as looked in your head, and what doesn't. I think Ritualism is the best example of, "OMG, that's just how it looked in my dream!" What is Ritualism, you ask?

Ritualism is how we do preparatory spellcasting in DtD. You have rituals that give you a number of charges of a given effect, which you can put in your focus. Each ritual has a rune, cost a certain amount of fatigue, and a backlash in case you fail the ritual. When you cast, you and up to 9 of your ritualist buddies pull dominoes (bones) from a bag, and attempt to make the sign of the ritual rune out of legal matches. As a wizard, you only have a certain number of bones you can pull from the bag when you begin the ritual. Fatigue reduces the number of bones that you can pull. So if you are working on a 5 bone ritual with a fatigue of 1, and you have 10 bones you can pull total, you've got 5 bones of leeway for matchmaking, and the next ritual you begin, you can only pull 9 bones total. Neat!

This encourages cooperative casting on one level, but also discourages it, based on how fatigue is divided amongst ritualists, and who actually gets the benefit of the effects. Plus, you have to have the ritual text prop to cast, so the text props are awesome treasure. Yay!

As for the parties themselves, Ghuls are nasty beasts-- horned human-looking dudes with very sharp teeth, who eat people and take their skills and memories. Bad times. a number of the Akathians did, in fact, get munched, including their leader, the Governor. Oops.

Our next event is on May 28th, at Indian Springs Pioneer camp in GA, and pretty much everyone should come, as it looks like it'll be a campover.Fun!

Thursday: Mage: The Awakening-- our Second Mage session, this was the one with the exposition. I think I want to think about this session more before I really post about it in detail, but I will say that picking up a second dot in Fate is def. on the table for things I want to do. Sometime after I go right for the fourth dot in Mind. I am not really familiar with World of Darkness advancement, so I don't know how hard it will be to get to Mind 5, but... omg, Mind 5. So awesome.

Also, I am looking forward to the next session of the game. Everyone's character feels very solid and real, which is unusual for a couple of sessions into a game. I don't think we've all figured out how we'll work with our abilities, and with each other, but that'll probably work itself out. Anyway. My gaming group is cool. And I'll talk more about mage... probably the Thursday after next, when we have our next session.

Session Roundup #2

Although a day late, as yesterday was the first round of Majour Updates for That Heap Big Thing, and I had neither time nor brain to spend on else. Anyway, we didn't have any tabletop last week, but rather had an In-Play Party and One Day for Eclipse.

So, I play Pallas Harper Kell, a space-samurai thug for the Imperium of Man, whose cousin is a muckety-muck soldier trapped in a muckety-muck noble's body. She's a good time. She also is a naive, a-type personality, quite by accident.

Anyway, a little on In-Play parties and One days vs. regular LARP events. In-Play parties are interesting, and not technically canon, except that they are. Things that happen there don't, or aren't supposed to, have plot consequences, though they make have profound character consequences. At this one, my character spent most of the night curled in a ball, utterly embarrassed, and completely smashed.

One of the most important aspects of in-play parties-- the presence of alcohol.

So... this was my first Eclipse one-day, an MJQ event. It was cool, took place in a bar, and still had combat. It didn't have a field battle, which is one of the typical features of most larp events (a heap-big battle that involves some element of strategy or boss-level difficulty), but that wasn't really expected. Mostly, there were a ton of politics, and some really neat twisting of situations so that characters who are good friends are-- in a very subtle and sidelong way-- finding themselves at cross purposes. Thusly, they must needs scramble to fix that. I was not involved in any of that directly, but Shieldhaven was. It's a thing that Eclipse has begun to do really quite well, and that I hope to see more of in the future.

Also, Stands-in-Fire and another friend, Miss L, are well on their way to becoming psionic space-demon fighting ninjas. For realz.

***

On another note, writing patch notes for a LARP website was the best idea ever, and I feel very good about it.

Finally, mostly because I am fading, Shieldhaven wrote a post today about the very topic I have neglected to maunder upon for some time, and once I've slept, done some various chores, and run my game tomorrow, I shall speak more on't.

Raison D'etre

In case you were wondering what I've been up to recently that I have been so lax in yammering on with promised yammers, this is it.

That is to say, the Dust to Dust website and rulebook are finally live. I don't care who you are or where you live, but you should Go and See.

A full and formal post of joy is here, at Shieldhaven's blog.

It is awesome, all awesome, and you can be a part of the awesome too.

Not-Roundup, #1.

So against all probability, there were no games at all this week. Instead, there was a ton of work on the LARP that I am staffing with Shieldhaven, Stands-In-Fire, Basics, and others-- Dust to Dust. I am working on the website.

What-no-link, you ask?

No. None indeed. Not for another few days, anyway, as we go live on February first.

In the meantime, we will be gone for an In-Play Party and One Day event for Eclipse this weekend. Yes, LARP events count for the weekly roundup.

So... watch this space. There may be also some discussion of the necessity of the familiar in games. Which puts me in mind of one of my lj icons for my instinctive reaction, at least.

Running around in the woods beating up your friends with foam weaponry.

So, I've some maunderings about wandering monsters and 4e that I haven't yet put into coherent form, but nu, the main thing that has been occupying my time of late has been boffer LARPing, which, as you may recall, is a Thing That I Do. It is perhaps the very breath of the obvious to say that woah, this kind of game is Completely Different from tabletop-- frequently, the things that you can get away with plotwise and characterwise in one would simply not work in the other. Now, admittedly, I am very spoiled when it comes to LARPing-- I never played Old School NERO, and the joys of counting down, as a monster, from 250 by seventees are largely unknown to me. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Lemme 'splain.

The two games in which I play (King's Gate and Eclipse) and the game that I shall be helping to run (Dust to Dust) are what are known as a) Hit Location Systems and b) SI/Chimera style.

Hit Location means that there is no concept of 'body', or ever upward spiralling hit points, that eventually reach 0, killing you. Through magic, a pc may have 'skins', usually not more than 5, that work about the same way, exceptional cases in really high build games may have 8. You can also have protectives like 'wards', 'resists', and 'shields' that block single attacks. NPCs have 'toughness', which /is/ like Hit Points in that it can be healed, though once again, this is usually a fairly low number-- 10 is a really beefy monster, even several years into a campaign. Compare with Nero/Solar style, Hit Point games, where one may have as many as 100 HP as they advance in level. I'll get to level in a minute.

Also, all one-handed weapons swing a base of 1, 2-handed weapons swing a base of 2, if you are trying to use a 3-handed weapon get the fuck off my site. This can be increased temporarily (usually 3 swings a combat) through wounding blows (a plus to damage, implying martial skilll) or strength effects. Base damage does not increase, and you never have to call damage for a base swing with a one-handed weapon. You should call '2' for a base swing with a 2-hander.

The other difference is that in Hit Location, well... where you hit the person matters. After you've blown through all the protectives you might have, you start taking wounds. A wound renders a location useless. You can take a wound to each leg and each arm, and also the torso. A torso wound renders you unconcious, at which point you have 5 minutes to be stabilized or healed, or you bleed out.

Now, the SI/Chimera difference. In NERO, you have levels and classes. In SI/Chimera, you have neither, exactly. You have build, which you get as a blanket after an event, which you may spend on various skills. Some skills lock out others, but this means that you can be a fighter and caster, and indeed, most people one would think of as primarily brute fighters have some kind of magic/psionics. You may advance in level in specific skills, but your character doesn't have 'level', like in D&D. What you have is a build total, which gives a rough idea of how many skills you may have purchased.

Further, you do not have 'mans', or lives, or souls, or whatever. When a character dies, the death is logged with plot, and the other characters attempt to ressurect them by whatever means makes sense in world. This may or may not succeed-- a fate is drawn from a specially made-up deck of cards, and bad cards = a permenant death. NPC the rest of the event, and roll up a new character. Yes, this means that you can perm on your second death or so-- usually you cannot perm on your first draw. However, you /can/ perm your first death-- if you were to remain dead, say, past sunrise or sunset, which are the in-game markers for when dead spirits leave the world.

NPCs, of course, do not work this way-- generally if you are killing blowed, you are ded. Fortunately, you can ressurect at a spawn point and get your crunchy killing on as much as you like.

Everything beyond that is pretty much flavour of the individual game, though there's some standards for magic that are /usually/ true, like having a single mana pool, and damage causing spells being called darts (1pt), arrows (2pts), lances (1 wound), blasts (1 wound to every location), and infernos (you are ash, everything you are carrying takes a destroy effect). LARP magic is handled typically by throwing packets-- cloth bundles full of birdseed-- or through voice and point effects. Most spells have multi-syllable verbals, where the length of the verbal indicates the strength of the spell.

Which is my basic-- very basic, leaving out a ton of stuff-- run down of Boffer LARP combat. I shall actually venture opinions of various topics LARP related anon, but felt that a basic overview of what I mean when I am talking about LARP things may yet prove useful. To someone. At some point.

Indecent Indexes.

For ease of reference, I shall list the recurring games in which I am participating, of all genres. Coz otherwise... ja, confusing.

4e

• B's Game (Formerly Road to Bael Turath; original world based on Dust to Dust)-- Revenant Assassin, Hane Al'Druth.
• Eberron (Armistice, run by G., who also plays in Planescape and Chessenta)-- Tiefling Artificer, Ballast.
• Planescape (The Custodians, run by Standing In Fire, who plays in B's Game and Eberron also.)-- Aasimar Psion, Sa'réja.
• Chessenta (Book of Serpents, run by Standing In Fire) -- Wilden Shaman, Kinnav Vinnet.
  
• My Game (Keep waffling on a name, Original World + Old Skool Dungeon Crawl).

3.x and variants.

• Arcana Evolved (Cloud and Shade, run by Nemo.)-- Human Magister, Basel Atullican.

LARPs

• King's Gate-- Full time NPC.
• Eclipse-- Harper Kell, Imperial Swordswoman.
• Dust to Dust (Website in Progress)-- Campaign Committee.

Also, I play a level 57 (mostly) Holy Paladin on Whisperwind in WoW. I'm not actively playing any other MMOs at the moment due to crappy computer-having, but I actually liked Age of Conan-- probably the result of playing mostly the Destiny Stuff in Tortage.

Right now, perhaps my greatest personal tragedy is that I have neither time nor money to play much Magic the Gathering, as my old Magic group was a) through my old work and b) pretty much over it when Zendikar came out. I dunno about you, but after being used to the Alara Block and the ones before it, the name of which I forget and am too lazy to look up right now, Zendikar was way too slow and (in terms of mana cost for cards) expensive. I'm curious about the Scars of Mirrodin set, but-- once again, time and funds for Drafting. Meh.

Speaking of time, there are a few other things that I'd like to either run or play, and the first of these is a Psychic/Horror Game based on the Dawning Star setting, where I am still waffling on the actual ruleset I want to use. Dawning Star was written to be a setting for D20 Modern/Future, but I am not sure that I will be able to get the right horror feel for it. Call of Cthulu has some good things about it, but the sanity/mythos mechanic isn't really appropriate here. 4e has some interesting possibilities as far as cool terrain stuff and having combat that I adore, though psionics in 4e don't fit-- look for a post about how awesome is the setting psionic mechanism, Red Truth, coming soon. Some of the White Wolf stuff (as in the Second Sight splatbook) may be good, but not sure yet. Anyway, the plan is for this to be a 3 session (or so) short-run game with pre-gen characters. We'll see how that goes.

And that's the break down, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's.

The games people play now.

So Hi. Das ist ein Kainenchen. I may have an opinion or two on things as relate to Games of various sorts. Video, board, LARP, tabletop and yeah, I really, really like 4e D&D, though I started with my dad running me and my brother through The Caverns of Quasqueton when I was 8.

Now I am running an all-girl 4e game, playing in a bunch of other 4e games and one Arcana Evolved game. Also Campaign Committee for an as-yet unreleased LARP called Dust to Dust. Also aiming to play more Arkham Horror and Battlestar Galactica Board Games, finishing up my Fallout 3 DLC and dying a lot in Bioshock 2 Multiplayer.

So that's me.

Edition wars maunderings to come.

Peace out.