Except when I'm away on business our group of 6 players (The League of Ordinary Gentlemen*) gathers around my dining room table every Wednesday evening for about 3 hours. This year's sessions have been starting in a peculiarly civilized fashion as my fiancee has taken to practising on her Grand Piano just before we begin - are we perhaps the only gaming group with such a live music prelude?
* This was going to be the title of my blog but is already being used seems by an American political blog - not linked since I can't be bothered to check they aren't a bunch of nutters.
The year started with a continuation of my Savage Worlds* post-apocalyptic campaign, otherwise known as the "post-apocalyptic nonsense". Though initially I'd intended this to be a gritty, Mad Max influenced campaign, a lack of prep time and the dearth of off-the-shelf material had transformed it into Darwin's World without beneficial mutations (except for selected NPCs). We've used some scenarios from the Exodus RPG, worked our way through Against the Wastelords and New World Order and are now on The Last God. These are published for Darwin's World d20 and are pretty good except for some inconsistencies in the scenario timelines that are difficult to reconcile. In addition The Last God, which is quite a complex sandbox adventure, has some some significant plot holes. Ultimately one of these plot holes, and my improvisational failings as a GM caused this game to stall by the beginning of autumn. It's my hope that we will return to this game, but it might need a rewind or reboot.
* Savage Worlds has been our go-to game for several years but we're rather burnt out on it now. Personally I'm no longer enamoured by its fundamental mechanics and find that "acing" in particular leads to a style of play where either the GM or players are perpetually firefighting the results of extreme dice rolls.
After a few weeks of boardgames and a couple of interesting sessions of a post-war Berlin horror game, our other principal GM kicked off a Mongoose RuneQuest II / Legend Glorantha game that kept us entertained for the last quarter of the year. I've enjoyed this, but several of the characters have ended up feeling rather similar and lifeless which I think might be a weakness of the system when in the hands of frequently tired and not particularly talented "role" players such as ourselves. We've also struggled a bit with determining which combat rolls are "opposed" and with a certain sameness in combat maneuvers: choose location head, bypass armour, maximise damage ;-)
At the end of our last session of the year we decided that in 2013 we will be continuing with the RQ as our principal campaign and that someone else will fill in with some Flaming Carrot inspired superheroes using an as yet undecided system. In theory I'll be taking a break.
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