Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I end this week with a poetic little idea I just had:

Heavy Metal Bands,
Using Blossoms are Falling:
Duel of Verse – Throw horns!

I know I’ve mentioned this game a few times before, but I’d like to take some time out right now to put some spotlight on one of my small handful of ongoing projects. The campaign I call “Timiro Nights” started as an extended playtest for my now-abandoned KnownWorld Palladium RPG rules hack. After only three sessions, I had grown tired of the cumbersome mentality of the mechanical source material – no matter how you package or rearrange its numbers, the Palladium RPG system is just a sad sack of unbalanced hackneyed crap.

But damn me if I can’t shrug off my love for the core fantasy setting! It’s straight-up old school fantasy excitement, and my love for it is nigh boundless. The lands are rich with adventure, the gods come down and fuck with mortal pawns like it ain’t no thang, social conflict and strife are everywhere, and ancient beings of infinite malignant power lie slumbering beneath the world’s surface. It’s just plain rad, if you ask me. Of course it also helps that this was the setting I first ever “officially” tabletopp’d in, way back in my middle school years.

Anyway, long story short: KnownWorld was getting old, Palladium’s core system blows hobos, and we switched to Burning Wheel. We’ve had a much better time since then. So allow me to introduce our heroes! Read more

This past weekend, I finally made the official complete switch, fully translating the events, characters, and setting from my KnownWorld “Timiro Nights” campaign into the Burning Wheel game system. This particular campaign is relatively new (only a handful of sessions so far since inception), but it has been a consistent source of gaming joy for me since getting the group together. It’s been a while since I’ve had a group this responsive, and this eager to extend the game talk well into our downtime. I’m glad to say that so far, the conversion to the new rules has been a success. I’d like to take a few here and talk about the juicy technical bits behind that conversion, and my own ideas of how the Burning Wheel system should work. Read more

This weekend’s gaming holds much promise. Starting tonight, I’ll be making my sixth attempt at running a Burning Wheel game. For the past few months, I’ve been running a “meet when we can” adventure campaign set in the Palladium Fantasy setting. Until now we’ve been using the KnownWorld house rules posted elsewhere on this site. However, I realized that as the game progressed, it was being played (at least by me) more and more like Burning Wheel, so I finally made the call: we’re switching. After I ported over all the characters (which was surprisingly simple), tonight we’re giving it our first go.

I am extremely hopeful. This will be my sixth attempt at getting a Burning Wheel game going, each of the priors being stymied by any number of organizational or game-idealogical setbacks. This time, it seems most everyone is on board. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow night, the gaming continues with my first ever all-girls game night. I know a surprising numbers of lady gamers who rarely, if ever, get a chance to play. I figured this would be a great opportunity to get them together and let them play without dealing with “The Dudes” who usually grace the table, myself excluded. And given my own *ahem* tendencies, I am slightly less part of that latter crowd than most. I’ll be kicking it off with a one-shot of Cannibal Contagion, with the hopes of gauging their individual gaming styles while having a plain old good fun time. It’s my hope that this can be a semi-regular thing, maybe even allowing me to get my feet wet running 4E for the first time.

Also, Mass Effect 2? Fuck. Yeah.

I sadly suspect that my planned upcoming Burning Wheel game set in our homebrew “Undiscovered Countries” setting will never see the light of day. The game has been doomed from the start, and I’ve been fighting it. Three player drop-outs so far (two replacements acquired), and one no-call no-show. I really want to run this game, but fate seems stacked against it.

Grrr.

- NPC