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Monday, March 11, 2013

No News is... No News

Well, midterms happened, and now it's spring break.  No gaming for the last two weeks due to illness on various peoples' parts, and nobody's here this week, so not looking good for the immediate future either.  Lack of posting has been due to lack of energy, not lack of ideas.  Things kind of on the docket for when I get around to them:
  • Dwarven Muleskinner class for ACKS - explorer meets venturer by way of Dwarf Fortress
  • ACKS scripts - I wrote python scripts for automating annoying parts of ACKS (like settlement demand modifier generation) last month.  I should clean them up and put them in a repo somewhere for public consumption.
  • Traveller ships - the Traveller game that has been on sickleave recently has humans at TL10, which is insufficient for Jump 2.  I've taken it upon myself to build a Jump 1 ship or two beyond Yachts and Fat Traders.  Unfortunately, I'm bad at deckplans.
  • ACKS Wilderlands - putting domains on the map and nobles in the domains
  • Midnight - I was re-reading parts of Midnight the other day and realized that while it would be really cool to run with ACKS, it would also be very difficult, because a whole bunch of assumptions about economics are invalid in Midnight (and magic is kind of different too).  Particularly troubling is providing PCs with a market and replacements henchmen, and the complete unavailability of high-power divine magic (ie, RL&L) looks liable to spike mortality.  Sooo...  I dunno.  On the other hand, once Domains at War is out, ACKS would be really sweet for running a guerrilla campaign against the Shadow on the borders of the elven territories; Fantasy F*ckin' Vietnam meets Empire Strikes Back, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones (when the PCs go hunting for power nexuses).
  • Custom treasure tables
  • Stargrunt / Dirtside / Full Thrust - not really a creative project, but I want to play more GZG stuff.  I guess I could build Vassal plugins...  ?
I guess the real issue is that with graduation a single-digit number of weeks away and the current group scattering to the four winds, I'm leery of starting any projects too serious. For all I know I might not have time to game when I get out into the Real World with job and bills and whatnot, or the gaming scene where I'm going might not be to my taste...  So things here may remain slow for some time.  Sorry all.
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2 comments:

  1. JimMarch 11, 2013 at 2:54 PM

    GZG?

    You could run or join a one-off game on a G+ hangout. I've been keeping an eye on them, but haven't joined one yet.

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    Replies
    1. jedavisMarch 12, 2013 at 2:30 PM

      That reminds me of a decent idea I had for a post, about how one-offs are really their own structure and have very different design concerns from playing an extended game (that sometimes people don't think about, causing problems). I was kind of thinking about launching a G+ ACKS game; Blair pinged me the other day asking if I was running any online games, and Mark was interested in playing ACKS via internet during the semester (though I think he has sufficiently workload that that might be hard). Mostly the thing holding me back there is that running games with strangers is scary :P Also prep work.

      And GZG is Ground Zero Games; they're a British sci-fi minis company that puts out their rulesets for free. Stargrunt is platoon / skirmish scale, Dirtside is company to battalion scale and focused on armor (good for Hammer's Slammers-type stuff), and Full Thrust is like Starmada.

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