I'm not tagging this post, as Im sure it encompasses pretty much every tag I've got.

Life's pretty fucked up and weird for me right now. I nearly got divorced and lost the only woman who really loved/loves me. This has now been resolved, and we are stronger because of it. Mid-life crisis maybe?

The RPG group is fragmenting almost as bad. I lost 2 players to personal reasons, 1 additional player because he met an untimely death, and now being faced with 50% of the group wanting to kick out a player as he doesnt seem to fit in with their style. This year I've gained 2 players, and lost 5. There was only 5 of us at the beginning of the year!

Ive been made redundant twice in 6 months, realised working for myself doesnt work, and am now acting finance director to a young energetic printing company.

What makes it worthwhile though are my 2 daughters, and little comments from my wife... If your married you know what they are.

As for RPG, well I started a CoC campaign, Masks of Nyarlahotep, but has floundered because of player dropout, death and a player being removed. Im lost, in more ways than one. I adore RPG, but right now its not fun, and Im on the border of giving it an indefinite rest. I was 40 this year, and been gaming since I was 14...

What it says really.
Apologies for not posting much here now, as I do 90% of my posting on Facebook (boo hiss).
So if you want to follow what Im up to, send me an email

lawbag06 at gmail dot com

and Ill let you know the details to mutually add each other there

Well, in 3 weeks time, after my break, Im starting Call of the Cthulhu, running the epic Masks campaign.

Good news.

The bad news that our group have lost both a good player and a great friend. We still dont know the real reason behind his accident whilst training at kick boxing, but after sparring for the evening, he felt light-headed, fainted and never recovered.

God speed Jason...

Having a couple of months break from role-playing games, though I fear it may be a little longer due to finances and lack of home help.
At least we finished Purge the Unclean campaign for Dark Heresy, its just a shame the DM said it was unfinished and left a lot to the DM to wrap up all the loose ends...

It has been a good solid month since I last posted and a lot has gone on in my life, work wise and family wise, not all of which I have sorted out in my head yet, and sadly wont be divulging too much here until Im happy about it going public, whatever that means.

In the meantime I will tell you briefly how the Dark Heresy campaign is going, and its going a real treat. I think we are 2 big adventures into it and feel it slowly building to a crescendo.

We have fought assassins through the streets of Scintilla, fought off onslaughts of marines sent to murder us in our sleep, we have fought mechanical demons sent to eliminate us, and yet we fight on.

And now, we have finished a full sweep of a space hulk with only 15 hours to find an ancient sword, 15 hours because if we dont find our target in time, the Space Fleet will hurl warheads to destroy it. Its a deadly task which we accepted.

And still we have survived.

With almost 4,000 experience points most of the party are heading towards level 5, which is rather more rapid a progression than I thought possible.

Dark Heresy mini adventure came to a pleasant end (pleasant as in enjoyable, as opposed to the nasty ending for innocents and chaos alike).

We are about to embark on the official campaign, cant remember the name, but they guy who is running it (Wrigamortis) his wife is due to give birth to twins any time between now and April.

I've canvassed the group and all of them love the horror and investigation route. So as not to steal his thunder, Ill be running Call of Cthulhu instead.

Week 2 of playing Dark Heresy, the Warhammer 40,000 Role-Playing Game based on the Warhammer Fantasy RPG system, and its going very well. Considering our DM who hasnt run a game in a many years, and has, until recently, only played dumb warriors, this is turning out to be quite a horror-fest that reminds me so much of the love for CoC I used to have in the late 80s when I played that game every week for 4 years.

We are playing a few free adventures / PDFs off the internet to get our characters up to speed, but we fully expect to kick of the official Dark Heresy campaign, then name of which escapes me.

I dont often comment on other people's blogs, but here is a link to one that made me laugh.

www.idiottoys.com/2008/12/celebrity-holding-taylor-swift-and-her.html

technology never looked so weird.

the mechanic remark was what did it for me.

look at those nasty nails.

So Marks and Spencers profits are down. Don't fell sorry for them, they choose to set their stall out with their high prices and quality goods. If they want to maintain their market share they are going to have to know their customer better than they already do.

Ive finally gotten to the bottom of the L5R problem, and it wasnt me.
Being a bit of an empath, I was picking up on the general attitude towards the game from the other players and it was manifesting iteself into negative thoughts.

To be fair, the GM was winging the game to suit our whims within certain of his own boundaries of the overall story he wanted to tell.

So we agreed amongst the players who were attended that we should rest the game indefinitely and maybe return to it some time much later in the future.

And in its place, Im running Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition superhero campaign.

Something is going wrong with our RPG group and I dont know what.

We're still playing Legend of the Five Rings, a game I adore before we started playing earlier this year, and having played it for the first time, I still love it to death. But I have found myself for the 3rd time in as many sessions really not enjoying the session at all.

Firstly we have 2 new players, one is a go along with the crowd kind of guy who is intelligent, smart and funny, but enjoys playing the intelligent warrior type. The other player is a post university student who is careful in his actions and thought processes.

Added to this mix a turbulent few weeks, different venue for each session, plus a coupld of players finding it temporarily hard to get to the game (only short term).

My problems is I really am not enjoying it at all. Now I dont know if its ME, the new PLAYERS, the GAME/GM, or the GROUP.

I need to analyse this a little further, but I need to work fast, as at this rate, I would have clocked up almost a month's worth of gaming wherein Im not enjoying myself.

I intend to discuss this with the GM, who is also a good friend of mine too.

Last night's L5R adventure was a bit weak. Its nothing to do with the 2 new players, one last week, one this week, that have joined the game, but rather the rail-roading and paper-chase style of the night's adventure.

We are on the hunt for information from a Kuni Witch-Hunter in Crab lands. Every lord we meet has information which will lead to his whereabouts. When we meet this witch-hunter we find out that he knows nothing, but he knows someone who does, and so the paperchase hunting continues. This carried on for the entire night.

Still to cheer me up I found these 2 cats, one Ive already posted, so tough.

Quite a sensitive posting here, but I hope the few of you who do read this can understand the context I wrote this in. Firstly Im not a racist, in the same way everyone else isnt. I also have a very dark sense of humour and it is in the this vein that I write this.

The Metropolitan Police Force in London, UK has come under a lot of fire of late because of racism in the force. One particular senior chief commissioner was over looked for promotion on what he claims is at least 3 times. Now I sympathise with anyone being overlooked in any form of promotion, and when this has happened to me I have simply left the company and gone elsewhere.

This particular police commissioner was from an ethnic minority. He, I sincerely hope so, was employed on his merits not because the Metropolitan Police had ethnic quotas to fill to keep the the Equalities Boards happy.

But because of this problem surely then that highlights (a) there is racism in the police force as there are in all walks of life (b) that meeting ethnic minority quotas doesnt actually work, that racial equality in the police force isnt working, so it should be abandoned for something that did/does.

We played L5R last night, and despite the low player number (GM + 2 Players + 1 New Player) it went rather well.

4 of the players couldnt make it, all for genuine reasons. Im well aware of the summer break being a big issue for getting players back on the RPG wagon.

Still it gave me the chance to catch up on my notes, create a new character for the new player and get underway with a small side-trek to introduce combat and more background story.

One of the nice side-effects of running a smaller group of characters is that they get to perform roles they dont normally entertain. So our resident ninja/shinobi was virtually forced to fight face-to-face as opposed to sitting in the trees and picking off targets.

Next week we should be back up to our normal quota of players 7 + 1GM.

One other bit of good news was I got my hands on Legend of the Burning Sands.



Using the same system as L5R, this game has been promised for over 10 years, something the back-blurb at least is honest in mentioning. Its still in its sellophane wrap having been bought on my behalf from www.leisuregames.com. Im looking forward to a quiet evening this week to savour every page.

Our GM is ready to start running the 3rd and 4th parts of his Legend of the Five Rings campaign, with the added extra element of the recently released, Legend of the Burning Sands, an addon that AEG has been promising for over 10 years.

Its the first session after my summer break, and I cam eback to the group finding out that as usual its hard to get everyone back into the routine again.

Of the 8 of us playing, 3 are out of action due to work, holiday or family pressures, but normal service will resume. I dont mind this as it moves the emphasis around between the players. If one player/character is a little loud and likes to be the centre of attention, when they are not there for a week or so, the dynamics of the group and adventure changes, and generally for the better (only int he short term.)

Gurth, our GM for L5R, has written parts 3 & 4 back to back and will run them as such. I have been taking lots of notes as we play, as I have a terrible memory between sessions, and as the resident Scorpion, I need to keep up to date with all the intrigue going on. I am not sure I will write them up until after the campaign is over, as Im not the greatest fan of "actual play".

After a 2 week jaunt throughout the island of Corfu, Im back, and pumped up with ideas for both my MERP campaign, and also a couple of other game ideas.

Firstly because it was just me and the wife, I was able to read a lot as well as undertake lots of reading too, which in part was the inspiration for the games, but also because I was without the usual distractions of TV, the Internet, and phones as well as work, I was able to focus on writing, and lots of it. Pen and paper, no word processing here.

Although the MERP campaign has already been written, I wrote in during my barren playing days in the early 90s, it was written in a vacuum, without play-testing. As I may have previously mentioned, this is the 4th time I have attempted to run this game, and so therefore the early parts of the game are "well-oiled". So far they have enjoyed the comfort of Bree, and gotten to know the surroundings and the people rather well. Every encounter revealing a little more of the dark plot ahead. Now I am moving onto what I would class as 2nd stage of the game, and has yet to be even play-tested, let alone proof-read. Still I am sure in the intervening years I have got better at running and winging games without the facade falling away.

The next stage is therefore the apparently simple journey to the ruins of Rivendell (this is the 4th age afterall) to see the wisdom of the few that remain, and get answers to why there are many factions of orcs roaming what used to be considered safe lands. As a stream of consciousness I wrote 12 pages of A4 notes in one sitting without pause. There was quite a bit on my mind.

The other material I began work on was the early stages of a Superhero game, but I want to "poll" my group and see what they would expect or want from a superpowered game.

The other major focus on my writing was Dune. No no no. Im not one of the lucky who bought a GenCon copy or each paid out over £ 150.



I am ashamed to say I have acquired a PDF copy of the book, and what little I have read, its rather bland and uninventive. Regardless I will use it as the basis for a Dune campaign. For me, I am sufficiently happy to use a simple home-brew system using coloured counters representing traits along with a "troupe" style of play. I also possess a "printers error" copy of the Dune Encyclopedia which is all the background material I need to run a game.

See this

and then buy this

No game this week, as previously mentioned, but we did have a summer jolly last night (Saturday) and got drunk to the early hours on the morning in our cowboy and indian themed party.

During the drunk preceedings we think we maybe have recruited a new player with the lure that we dont just play fantasy and science fiction, but horror games like Vampire.

Oddly enough I passed it off as drunk ramblings, but today I have received 2 phone calls from people saying they want in on a Vampire game. WHo am I to disappoint, but there is the small matter of MERP to finish first.

So summer is here, and don't I know it in an office without air conditioning, so that means everyone is on holiday and not spending money on Ebay.

So my summer Ebay tip is now is the time to buy stuff, as most of your competition (in terms of bidders) are on holiday or are saving for the holiday or broke after the holiday, and I'm sure you will easily get a very cheap bargain.

As for me, I've stopped listing items until September, as that will give the holiday go'ers a chance to have earnt some money to waste on my stuff.