Wednesday, April 24, 2013

State of the Gamist, 24 April

Graduation looms.  Went travelling last weekend for apartment-hunting; found a nice place, but not yet sure about the gaming culture in the area.  There seems to be a Games Workshop store nearby, and a group running Living Forgotten Realms at a nearby college...  so I may have a good time hewing out an OSR niche (especially with Next in the pipe...  blech market fragmentation).

There is a weekly ACKS game here, though, wherein I am running a 5th-level MU (hopefully to make 6th next session, whereupon I can pick up Magical Engineering and start ID'ing some of the magic stuff we've been avoiding using because we're not sure if it's cursed).  So far we have befriended some water nymphs (awwww yeah) and an undead king (also awesome, but for different reasons), raided two tomb complexes, sunk one boat (unfortunately, we were in it at the time), recovered an ancient golden data storage device, slain or driven off 30 ghouls (22 of which were ghoul monkeys), explored three towers, and located a region of dimensional instability rife with holes to a bejungled pocket dimension.  Also to date we have suffered no casualties, though I expect that may also end next session as we delve deeper into the dimensional pocket.  We do not yet have a party name, though since we adopted as standard practice the wearing of bandanas over our mouths after a run-in with a yellow musk creeper last session, I may propose something like "the masked miscreants" or similar.

As a result of playing, I have not been looking so much at DM-side things or rules recently.  I do, however, really wish we had rules for copying-times for spellbooks so I could make a backup before we end up in the drink next time (I was fortunate to have a slot to levitate my way out of that, but if I'd been tapped out, it would've been bad news).  A spell that copies pages would be a very nice utility to have around for this purpose (and its reverse, Erase, would be quite a scary spell for wizard-duelling...).

Also, Domains at War!  Read through both Battles and Campaigns and they both look like things I wish I had had during the campaign I ran.  Considering upgrading my pledge to get softcover copies (and printing and binding a copy of the Player's Companion, so I'd have everything in paper).  We're looking to play some Battles after finals, but for now people are mostly swamped with projects.  Such as...

The main reason I haven't been posting much recently - picoCTF.  It's a high-school computer security competition that we've been putting together for a couple of months.  If you happen to have highschool-age children, or know any who might be interested, the competition runs for the next two weeks with minimal / flexible time commitment and requires no prior experience (though APCS or similar programming familiarity will be helpful).  Mostly we want to show people that playing with computers (hacking) can be a lot of fun; hell, I dismissed 'computer security' as a field until my sophomore year of college, because I thought it would just be writing firewalls and antivirus tools.

Anyway, I should get back to that.

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