2016: What a Year (and It's Still Not Over)

It's been a long time since I last updated this blog—nearly a year in fact! The Spring 2016 semester turned out to be just as labor-intensive as the Fall 2015 semester, and then my mother broke her right hip at the end of Finals Week. Summer 2016 was thus devoted to figuring out where my parents were going to be living (end result: in my house for 75% of the year) and then getting their stuff sold and/or packed for the move. I've only just been able to get back into the office, well over a month into what was supposed to be a research leave.

But ... my parents are settling in, my wife and kids and I are adjusting to the 50% increase in the size of our household, I'm starting to get work done, and I'm still gaming:

Barbarians of Lemuria

My Thursday night group is playing BoL whenever we don't have a sufficient quorum for Supers! Revised. The character I'm playing is a Mythic Edition update of Quaris the Fallen, the Legendary Edition character who was the subject of the very first post on this blog. It's a nice change to be playing a BoL hero instead of their opposition for once.

Supers! Revised

Our Supers! Revised GM (also the BoL GM) wasn't feeling the vibe with our Earthside campaign, so he retired it (along with Brute Squad, my duplicating brick hero, and a newer character, the arrogant Sasquatch geneticist Big Thought). The new campaign is set in outer space, and my new hero is a tribute to Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity Mesklinites:

"Legs," as his teammates call him, is a sentient millipede the size of a mastiff. His already substantial strength and toughness (he's a heavy-worlder) have been amplified by an ancient ritual, so all of his many limbs pack a powerful punch.

Uncharted Worlds

I've been doing a great deal of science fiction reading for the last several months, and my thoughts turned to SF gaming as a result (aided and abetted by the Supers! campaign). A little research into available, rules-lite SF TTRPGs turned up Sean Gomes's Uncharted Worlds, a Powered by the Apocalypse system that occupies (for me) a happy medium between traditional RPGs and the more thematic, story-driven games that epitomize the PbtA ludosphere. I was actually able to play in a G+ Hangouts game while I was closing up my parents' house at the end of August, a one-shot that ended with my shady astrophysicist activating an experimental hyperdrive and (with the aid of a roll of snake-eyes) killing the entire party in the process. Huzzah! I'm now thinking of how to go about running an UW campaign of my own ... I hope to post more along these lines soon!