I have all but fallen off the grid this month.

Things are really crazy right now, with the return of my Iron Heroes game, and starting up playing in Spenser’s D&D 4e game, and Sargon’s Star Wars SAGA game.  Top that off with the writing I am doing for the GenCon talk, as well as preparing an Iron Heroes adventure for some friends at GenCon, and blog writing is taking a beating.

The good news is, that unlike the last time I was not writing, I am actually full of energy and charged up about gaming.  The downside is, I am so crunched for time, it is not funny.  That aside, I will do what I can to keep some posts out here.  I have some great ideas for some Gnome Stew articles as well, but those are on the back burner for now.

On Sunday, Sargon kicked off his Start Wars SAGA game.  He is using the WoTC published adventure arc.  I am playing a Zabrak Padawan, who has been master-less since Order 66 came down.  All in all, the SAGA system is a lot of fun to play.  The session went great, and the party is a nice balance, and clicked right away.  It was a great start, to what I hope is going to be a long campaign.

As I am down to my last 5 sessions of Iron Heroes, I am thinking more about what games I want to run next.  My current interest has drifted to Spycraft 2.0.  I am feeling like I have run enough fantasy for a while, and would like to get back to running something more modern.  I have been talking to Spenser and Sargon about it, and both of them like the idea.  So I am adding Spycraft to my shopping list for GenCon.

I would like to promise some articles this week, but I am not going to make any promises, while I am under such a crunch.  So check your feeds, I may just have something out there.

This past Sunday was the return of my Iron Heroes campaign.  The characters have fast-forwarded in time, gaining 4 levels (from 12 to 16), and on the verge of capturing the capital city of Arion’s home land.  In all the session went OK, but he had a lot of challenges.  The first was that I did not eat before the session, so by 9:30pm, in the middle of a huge combat, my blood sugar reached rock bottom, and I became quite irritable.  Sargon, had hurt his neck and was taking some Rx for it, leaving him a bit off.  That left J and Spenser to hold up the other half of the table.  Add to this, that my NPC’s that I designed were getting housed, bad, it was a rough session.

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I am actually writing this on a Sunday night, early rather than later.

Been a busy weekend around DNAphil’s house.  Mrs. DNAphil is in Chicago for a family event, with the daughter, leaving DNAphil alone with the boy for the weekend.  All in all, we did fine, and I managed to a few blog and gaming related things done this weekend.

On Tuesday, Sargon lead a demo of the Star Wars Saga game.  Very nice.  I got to play a Jedi and had a so-so combat, mostly do to some really low rolls at first.  But I like the way the SW powers work, and the Jedi was a lot of fun to play.  We also did some space combat, and I really liked it.  I have played the other d20 versions of the starship combat rules, and this one was a lot better than the past ones.  This Tuesday we do character generation for the game.  I just need to decided on what race I am going to play, because there is no way I am not going to be a Jedi.

On Friday, I did some minor upgrades to the site.  Starting with puttin the search box on the side bar.  I had this turned off when I did the initial install for the site, because the sytlesheet mangled the box and the Search button, but after a little tinkering, I was able to fix them and install them.  I also added a plugin to allow you to edit your comments, something I picked up from my good friend Philippe (aka The Chatty DM).  Finally I activated Gravatars for comments.  So if you have a Gravatar, it will show up when you post comments.

Saturday and Sunday, I worked on my brainstorming for my Iron Heroes campaign.  We are starting the final big story arc that will take this campaign to its conclusion, at the end of the year.  The pressure is on now, as each one of these sessions has to be big… big combats, big reveals, the whole works.  This is going to be a big challenge for me, but I really want this campaign to end with the intensity that it has had all along, so I am putting everything I have into it.

Sunday night, we got to play some D&D 4e.  Mmmm….mmm…good.  I created a Dragonborn Warlord, and we played the Game Day adventure.  While I have not gotten too far into my new PHB, and we stumbled a bit on the rules, the game play was awesome.  I love 4e combat.  The final combat, against the golems, was great.  Our Paladin and Ranger both went down, and yet we were able to rally the remaining party members, cover our wounded and get them back up on their feet, and complete the encounter.  It was so cool.   I will be looking forward to playing this for some time.

This week is my writing week for Iron Heroes so I will try for some short posts during the week.  I won’t be writing a Gnome Stew article until next week.  So check our feeds, as I am sure I will get some post up later this week.

Among my friends, its well known that I cannot read EN World.  It’s not that there is anything wrong with the site, but I am really not into rules arguing, in the absnence of common sense and good judgement.  Every now and then I get sneak peeks into some of the 4e “discussions” from Spenser who sends me links with some of the more enlightened “discussions”.

But to show that there are people on EN World that share my feelings (and are braver than I, since they still read EN World), HP Dreadnought has posted a great pardoy (that was posted on Wired)that pokes great fun at all the “discussions” about 4e.

Enjoy.

Hey all. Going to cross-plug my own article. I just published an article on how some RPG’s are best suited to be run once for a group, and how others can be run over and over again. The article is up on Gnome Stew and called: Why You Can’t Always Go Home Again.

Enjoy.