After a Brief Intermission…
Well, it’s been too long since I last posted. I’ve been Doing Other Things, a lot of it related to my day job, but also a lot of it just not having anything to do with this site. (Ironically, despite the dearth of Spes Magna activity for weeks and weeks, my on-line sales are up.) So, what have I been doing that’s gaming-related?
I’ve been gaming, mostly via virtual meetings, but some face-to-face as well. Every other Saturday, Terry runs a post-apoc Savage Worlds game set in and around Hot Springs, Arkansas. We’ve got two players: me and Eric. I’m running the Kid Avenger, an athletic teenager who has learned just about everything he knows about the pre-apoc U.S. from reading his grandfather’s collection of comic books. He has a shield, recites the Avenger’s Oath, and has become very concerned with doing process because he’s heard “do process” was an important part of the Bill of Rights. Eric runs Slate, a pre-apoc android doing “his” best to understand humans and maintain a facade of normalcy. This two-person Hot Springs Avengers team has been aided a bit when my wife Katrina and daughter Adrienne sat in a couple of sessions, but they’re not regular players. So far, most of the action involved defeating a degenerate cannibal cult in Little Rock and establishing diplomatic relations with a society of intelligent gorillas.
Every other Sunday, we play 5E D&D with everyone except my son Christopher joining in remotely. Christopher sits across the table from me. I’m the DM for the Sunday game. It’ll switch off to another DM after a few more sessions. We’ve got a homebrew campaign slowly emerging from vague hints to concrete details as the heroes travel around, trying to do good. The group I’m running has five players ranging in ages from about 12 to Much Older. I had been running the players through AD&D’s Slave Pits of the Under City, but the heroes met their match, and each of them died, butchered by orcs.
We picked back up last Sunday. Three players opted to have their characters some survive. The other two players made up new characters. All of the characters woke up covered in sacrificial sigils related to Wastri, Lloth, and Blibdoolpoolp. Along with them were several captured townsfolk. Everyone was naked and without equipment of any kind. They were also stranded on a small rocky island, which Morgan the Warlock figured was somewhere in the large central lake of the campaign’s setting. Then the froghemoth attacked.
Most of the NPCs died horribly. Christopher’s druid took some serious damage and only escaped the froghemoth’s clutches by wild-shaping into a crocodile. The survivors escaped down a staircase hidden at the base of a strange altar, and they’re now encamped at the edge of a huge cavern system some distance beneath the lake’s bed. They’ve also escaped into another AD&D module, which I’ll not mention at this moment, but making it the fourth AD&D module used for our 5E D&D Sunday game. (Terry ran a one-shot one Sunday that might have been AD&D-related originally, but I couldn’t attend that session because I was down with an insomnia-induced migraine.)
I’ve also GMed remotely one session of a superhero game using a homebrewed system that started heavily based on TSR’s original Marvel Super Heroes but which has now mutated to include an action resolution system glommed from the third edition of the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game published by Mayfair Games in 1993. I’m also pulling in at least one element from TSR’s later Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, which is the one that used the deck of cards for action resolution and hero creation.
The heroes the first session were Christopher’s Owlman and Terry’s Starlight, who teamed up to destroy Chemo after that DC Comics monster-villain showed up during a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Houston’s Hermann Park. Our next session is scheduled for this coming Wednesday evening, during which Owlman and Starlight will likely be joined by the mysterious Presence (played by Eric).
What else? Well, there’s Sunnesci, a semi-Stone-Age campaign setting that is still system neutral. Check out the adjacent pictures, both of which embiggen when clicked.
Sunnesci sits on what might be a peninsula between an ocean and a gulf. It is populated by humans and humanoids races based on alligators, flamingos, and nutria. I’m going a sort of scrapbook route, drawing and coloring the maps into a graph-paper composition book and cut-and-pasting word-processed text into the book. It’s not exactly coming along like gangbusters, but I find the activity strangely relaxing. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Sunnesci. It might end up getting used for a game. It might just remain a side project. Maybe both? If I ever get it done, perhaps I can raffle it off, and some lucky person can end up owning the only copy of Sunnesci in the world.
Interwoven in all of this has been the end of a stressful third quarter and start of the final quarter of the 2020-2021 school year. My 7th and 8th grade boys are reading their final novels, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, respectively. I’m looking forward to the end of the school year. We’ve been on-campus almost all of the school year, working within the parameters of some sensible COVID-based restrictions, but even sensible restrictions begin to wear on the nerves after several months. The administration has done an excellent job, and the students have handled the weirdness of the year like troopers, but everyone looks forward to a return to normalcy.
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