Resumes are being hurtled at New York City until something sticks and I can join my lady-friend in the City that Never Sleeps. Every game feels like it could be the last or could keep on keepin’ on for a good long while.
Burning Wheel, O’Declan Brewing Company: In which two dwarves, a gambler and a drunk, run a brewing company in MoBu City.
I love this game something terrible. Dwarves are my favorite stock in Burning Wheel and I love the way MoBu City takes all of the stocks and tosses them into close quarters so that their Tolkien lineage is blurred with a pinch of potent New Crobuzon spice. The whole rhythm of this game feels odd to me and I dig it.
Also, it is great to be back at weekly gaming with Aaron and Pete. We were having real trouble finding momentum and ending the Forgotten Realms point at our fine stopping point and moving on helped, as did our schedules changing for the better.
Apocalypse World, Just Outside the City: In which mayhem and commerce are perpetrated in the Hudson River Valley.
Knowing that 2011 would be my last year in Ithaca, I wanted to get together and game with some friends I hadn’t seen regularly and hadn’t gamed with in a while. It has been splendid to both see them again and raise a fictional ruckus alongside them.
Apocalypse World, Lights of Hoover: In which a doc, his ambulance driver and a psychic girl find their place in Hoover.
Our roommate game has been a victim of our hectic schedules and a real desire to only play when all four of us are at the table but when we do the game is amazing. The group doesn’t have a go-to playbook for violence. No Battlebabe, Gunlugger nor Chopper to shoot mofo’s in the head and it has led to an interesting campaign that is a fascinating contrast to the bullets in brains that has defined the Hudson River Valley. The game’s still brutal but it doesn’t feel like a bulletocracy.
Houses of the Blooded, The Thousand Dooms of the Blood-smith: In which a young ven smith artisan schemes and crafts.
If there were 14 days in a week, I’d have a HotB game going with Pete and Aaron and probably the rest of my roommates. As it was, I got a hankering to see chargen in action and hoped that it would become a game me and Pete could drag out when we both found ourselves up late at night. Despite day-dreaming about the character a bit, we haven’t actually sat down to play yet. This could have something to do with Pete being a hard-working single-dad and me being out of the house a whole lot.
Between conducting a long distance relationship, finishing my masters degree and just the lives of busy gamers with careers, school and kids the games have been sporadic. It looks like there are 3 weekly games going but the Hudson River Valley game is more monthly than weekly and even our O’Declan brew is only sipped bi-weekly or so, though we’ve had a solid weekly run, which is nice.
Ending these games is going to be a sad thing; I’ll save my maudlin crap for when I depart.
What is on your summer gaming table?
Githyanki Diaspora 
I envy you your multiple games and groups. I don’t have any gaming on the go right now, and haven’t since March or April. As heretical as this sounds, I tend to get burned out on gaming by the time summer rolls around. Might run one game for some friends in August, though, and I’m sure thing’ll get moving again come September.
Congrats again on your Master’s, Judd! I hope you can get yourself situated in the city soon. Best of luck!
Thanks for the congrats and well wishes, Patrick.
We’ll see if the AW game I ran will pick up again or if we’re going to leave it as a one shot. I’m trying to see if I can coordinate a 4E game with a friend who’s only in town for the summer.
Given that 2 members of my gaming group are on vacation for another week, it’ll be a minute before we re-orient to what’s next on the gaming plate.
Yeah, summer and winter holidays are odd times for coordinating schedules. I hear ya.
And, it looks like we’ll have someone else running an AW game that I’ll get to play in. WIN. I’m going for a Gunlugger because sometimes the simple answer is the right one.
I have but one gaming group now, a new group of guys with whom I play… BURNING WHEEL. Yes, my first regular game of BW, ever. I could not be happier.
Plus, I did an 8-hour marathon of Burning Empires at ENWorld Chicago Gameday 29 this past weekend. There’s a writeup of the action over on the BW forums.
Then, as I was hanging out with people at the end of Gameday, an attendee said he really wanted to play some Mouse Guard.
2011 has been the year of BW for me; it’s like a dream.
That 8 hour marathon game looked keen.
What’s the BW game about?
Congrats on happy gaming.
Thanks!
The BW game is about an ancient, Cthulhu-ish city that gets occupied by four nations (two of Men, and Elves and Dwarves) as a staging point for the Big Orc War far to the south. Military and all kinds of guilds and camp followers have flocked there, looking to get a piece of the city-building action. But… the Roden were there first! The PCs are lieutenants to the multi-racial council that’s been put in charge of everything.
Notes are on the wiki in Campaigns -> The Battle of Concord.
Ask again when we can live at our apartment. (Short version: Fire in building while we were away. Two people injured-but-recovering in burn unit. Our stuff mostly intact, some structural damage filed under Firemen Gotta Do What Firemen Gotta Do, superintendent finally given the go ahead by Powers That Be (insurance, building association, public assessor) to make repairs to our side of the building.)
That said, I got in a lot of good gaming at Origins and DexCon.
Good luck with relocating and have fun at the summer cons.
Thanks! Here’s hoping relocating won’t be necessary and the crashing-at-friends can end well before their patience does.
Long-time reader, first time commenter (as they say on the radio). I’ve got two groups going:
A group of guys who haven’t played since junior high (with the exception of me) and a first-time DM playing a remarkably fun game of D&D4E. We’ve developed what one person calls the “double down” style of adventure: we get in trouble, then we figure out a way that’s twice as risky to get out of it, and when that fails we double down and try something twice as risky to get out of that. Add in two players who have characters willfully misunderstand things (“Follow him” pointing to the guy we’re spying on, “Kill him? Okay!”), and we’ve got a lively dynamic going in spite of the system.
The seconding was a Spirit of the Century group with a mix of newbie, regular, and returning gamers. After a successful run os SotC, we’re taking a break, and one guy is running–of all things–a Warhammer FRP game. It’s largely nostalgia for several of us who played the original in junior high, but we’re also having fun with all the fiddly bits. Makes an interesting contrast to SotC.
In the future, one guy wants to run some Leverage RPG and another is looking at Ashen Stars when it comes out. So there should be some fun experiments in the future.
Me? I’m just waiting for the Fateful Day. Then, I should be playing fuck-all! For now, I’m enjoying the O’Declan game and the Lights of Hoover. More on this as it develops.
I’ll be running 2 Mouse Guard games! One will be my regular weekly group which will focus on the mundane and adventurous day-in, day-out trials of a patrol. We’ll really get to know this group of mice and the world!
The other will be a seasonal game which tells the story of the Black Cloaks! Gwendolyn has denied their existence, but there are rumors…