Running two games, for me at least, presents some logistical issues. Fortunately, one game is every other week at the most, and as I am no longer running the weekly Fantasy Trip game for reasons, I just have the 2 games for the moment.
Cowboys And Dinos
I have something mostly prepared for the next Cowboy game, at least an encounter. But I also recognize I need to expand it a bit, and get some details mixed in there. The diary, the MacGuffin piece, actually has more than just some salacious notes: she has notes on things that could bring down a number of people in Copper Peak. And am I worried about my players reading my game notes: not really as they only read the blogs when I post the game recaps and I point them to that. Could be wrong, and even if I am, they are also good RPG players and can separate what they know vs what their characters know. I also have to see about that week journey north-west to New Harmony: do we want to do a day at a time, run random encounters, or just "a week later you find yourselves at the outskirts of town". I have an entire book, Wondrous Expeditions: Forests (and wonder if they will ever do any more in that series) but as much as my group loves getting game books, they really don't seem to want to use any of the mechanics for things outside the core processes. I have a lot of books as I like books, but if I don't use them and barely read them, I have to wonder at myself a lot. Of course, I say this same thing every few posts as well! Anyways - figure that the cabin in the woods will take most of the next game night, so I need to plan a bit more beyond that. It is a Saturday, and they will investigate either late Saturday night or Sunday in daylight, and then whatever happens, back to Copper Peak probably Sunday. They are wanting to visit the land office to check on Hambone's land, so I need to have some potential dialog and ideas there.
And running a cowboy game is a bit hard for me - I am not personally a fan of westerns. They are okay, but just not something I have a lot of experience with. But one of the players loves the old west and rarely gets to play in those games, and I do like to make people happy.
Character Art Diversion
And the image above brings to mind a discussion we've had playing. I have one player who prefers photos of real people for his characters and NPCs. I prefer art and not real people. Part of it is, I think, is that art allows for more imagination, similar to why I prefer the old-line drawings for RPGs. A real person, an actor or whatever, is a real person and I feel very uncomfortable using a real person in a game. Even if we are just using the image, it is a photo of a real human being and it just feels wrong for me to "use" someone, even if it is harmless and more a reference than the actual person. One of these days I may have to dig into why I don't like using real people as characters and NPCs. Could be some nascent social anxiety I fear I may have (what, a gamer with social issues, say it ain't so!)
The Fantasy Trip
I've laid the seeds for the next few sessions honestly. And fantasy is a lot easier to run for me. I've actually re-read
The Adventurers Guide to the Yol'Najj Forest and will be borrowing parts of that. They need to finish questioning the cultist, who now has eyes for our hapless Clyde. Who may have eyes for her even though she was willing to sacrifice him to the demon. Neither of these two are particularly intelligent. But while at the village of
Bresselwythe, the village head, a Goblin named Ceteern Gur, has mentioned that not only are young men going missing thanks to the cult as we've found, but also goats seem to be getting stolen by the harpies up the mountains a bit. And how this feeds into the overall arch: some of the harpies are getting odd crystallin growths and they start acting odd. The forest at one time I thought I placed south of Edge City, but as I never used it, it is now below the Wizard's Mount up in the Terror Lands. Bad magics are corrupting things as far south now as Bresselwythe. I need to re-read it a bit more and take some notes as there are a host of NPCs and plots I can use as the group gets closer to Stubboons Last Stand, where they hope to find the Orc's Fist (if they have not forgotten the reason for the current quest already!) And weave that into the various plot lines as well. And how they handle the harpies is open to a lot possibilities. And harpies as for some reason I have a lot of harpy minis and actually have painted them (yes, sometimes I
do finish a project!)
Sadly, I moved the software for Campaign Cartographer and some of my older maps no longer load correctly. So I no longer have the ability to update this map. And I really need to take the time and follow some tutorials so I can get better at maps.
Traveller 5.10 Overview
I'll continue that series as well. Hopefully someone may find it somewhat useful. And I am thinking about getting the Mongoose World Builder book. Even though I swore off of Mongoose, it has had some pretty good reactions over on COTI. Do I need it - no. Will I use it - maybe? It is just so expensive: one of my gripes with Mongoose is the sheer cost of their stuff and to me the lack of quality in their physical books. However, that is pretty much what all books cost now, as there is a lot of work that goes into making a book regardless of it being a PDF or actual physical book. Even though I think Mongoose basically copies a lot of existing stuff and then passes it off as their own for Traveller (some of their books are straight-up copies of earlier books so not as much work getting those done). Same with the JTAS which sadly I have also purchased - more than half is just a reprint of the original stuff. And I did back the last set, and I've not even read the previous volumes yet. And do NOT get me started on what they consider Aslan look like. Lipstick? Really? Really?! And to paraphrase a member of COTI: I don't mind changes, but I don't like the Bobby Ewing approach (reference to a season of Dallas they essentially said was all a dream so did not matter). Meaning Mongoose is completely rewriting things and making wholesale changes. Which honestly is okay as you can still get the original stuff, but it really changes a lot of Traveller and not well in my opinion. But I am old, and I am not the target audience.
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