Did I say, next week? I meant in under six years.

So... that was long gap between posts.

Real life has a way of putting things aside. Gaming and blogging about gaming just happened to be one of the many things that I wasn't able to do for a while.

Things have started to improve personally. I'm back living in Illinois and close to family again. I receieved my PE (Professional Engineer) license a few years back and am working at a job that I find rewarding. And despite COVID shutting down nearly everything, I have managed to get an actual face-to-face group to play HackMaster on a mostly weekly basis.

Since I am gaming again (Well, GMing anyway), I should get back to blogging about gaming again. So starting tomorrow I'm going to get in a few quick posts to catch everyone up on my campaign. After that will be a semi-regular posting about the campaign and whatever thoughts I have on GMing and writing adventure ideas.

GaryCon V Recap Post- Part III: The Weekend

Ladies and gentlemen, sorry about the delay. This is Michael here, and I kinda agreed a while back to write up my last two days of GaryCon to get the lead-in to Dave's last two days. Sadly, I've been having a host of issues, so I've kept things delayed... a few months. I really need to finish this up. SO! Where were we?

Saturday started pretty well honestly. It was the one day Dave and I were going to be sharing two games, and the first game was Mutant Future. Or to be more accurate, using the Mutant Future setting to play out an episode of THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN! Ah, nostalgia and kids' shows. And the GM honestly rocked. ( +Tim Snider of The Savage Afterworld- Dave) I won't go too heavy into details, god knows Dave might want to, but this was a GREAT game, with the GM playing up the motif with the opening credits played on his laptop, as well as a commercial break. Lots of fun, imaginative playing of the setting, and honestly we really abused some of the opportunities we got. Great game and great start. I think we kinda beat it a bit early, got handed free settings books for if we wanted to do Thundarr ourselves, and went off to eat some before our next game. (Long story short, I managed to quadruplicate Ookla to defeat the enemy. -Dave)

Again, that was intended to be our first game, and I was looking forward to my second as well. See, the followup was a game of Dungeon! I really love that game, and I do need to get a copy of it myself. (I got one! -Dave) Wizards of the Coast did a reprint of the game so if you like board games, pick it up. Again, it was hosted by the creator of the game, who's name escapes me, Dave will probably correct it in. (David Megarry -Dave) And he told again the story of the game, showing the first edition and the tables it was originally played on. Very cool stuff. Sadly, I got to feeling unwell by the time the history was told, and had to excuse myself. So I got to miss out on the actual game itself. Went back to my room and rested most of Saturday away, using my laptop to keep in contact with people online and post some in forums. Even sick, I did some role-playing. Shush.

And that takes me to Sunday, and the last game on my list. The one I'd been looking forward to all con. Call of Cthulhu. Honestly, I'd never played it and I'd wanted to for SO LONG. I love the Lovecraftian setting and I really had been looking forward to it. By the time I got there, there were about five other players waiting, and more showing up as we settled in to talk and chat. Friends and people I'd met from prior cons, I was really looking forward to the game!

And the GM never showed up. Nobody knew what happened to him, where he was. Talked to the con staff, they had no idea what was going on. Table was bleeding players as people went to try and see if there were openings in second pick games when yet again the awesome con staff came through. There was someone with some experience in Call who was willing to GM for us. Great man, I REALLY wish I could remember his name (I am HORRIBLE with names) (Don't ask me, I was playing Traveler at the time- Dave) who more or less ran us through a condensed form of one of his basic sessions. Dave came along during the game, his own game plans kinda shot, and he sat to watch a good deal of the fun as we tried to investigate through a mysterious death and tragic murder. (No, my game went pretty well actually -Dave) All of it looked to lead up to an occult conspiracy and a plan to summon an elder god, and two of our impromptu group got captured by cultists and held in a prison under their base. The rest of us came in, not knowing they were trapped, and confronted the leader of the cult...

And I will admit part of this was my just being kinda tired and feeling ready to head home, but... When the cult leader asked us if there was anything he could say to get us on his side? I sold everyone out, kinda. I'd been hired, NOT paid, and had been working this nonsense without any hope of recompense. I think it rather tickled the GM that I was more than happy to be paid off, and my detective left the rest of them behind to cash his check and get on the first ship he could find to France, get as FAR away from all that nonsense as he could. Honestly? Great end to my last day.

Dave and I had already packed up the car so, we left. Got lunch at a nice out of the way place with... Crap. Dave, tell the rest of the story, my brain is pudding for names.

Afterwards we hung out with +Christopher Stogdill, +Carolyn Stogdill, +Paul Raasch and +Scott Schwartz at Hogs & Kisses in Lake Geneva for lunch before heading home. Overall, it was a great time.

In related news, GaryCon VI has officially been announced for March 27-30, 2014. For more information go to garycon.com

51 Days Till GaryCon! Halfway There.

It's hard to believe that I'm already halfway through this thing. I remember last month when I was trying to come up with an excuse to blog. By sheer luck I decided to catch up on Susannah Breslin's blog on Forbes.com and found she had done a 30 days series blogging non-stop about doing freelance work. One topic was about answering questions about being a writer. If you're not familiar with Ms. Breslin's work on Forbes she blogs mainly about three things: her recent battle with breast cancer, porn, and being a writer. In the case of the latter, she usually shows tough love towards 'aspiring writers'. In a nutshell, 'if you want to be a writer, then write' seems to be her philosophy. But it is true, people who want to write will write. People who want to be writers will fret and worry about getting started and never do any writing.

So it was on December 4th of 2012 that I was reading Ms. Breslin's work and wondering why I still had any blog let alone this one. I have had two blogs before this, both dealing with personal stuff with the occasional gaming topic. I started Weekend Wizardry because I hoped that having a single topic, gaming, would give me a focus for posting. And like most blogs it started well and then petered off after a while with short spikes in posting here and there for the April A-Z Challenge and the September of Short Adventures. The I realized two things: if I was going to have a blog then I should be writing, and if I couldn't find a challenge to blog for, I should make one up. By luck December 4th was 100 days prior to GaryCon. And hence the 100 Days Till GaryCon Challenge began.

Now I admit that at times I have scraped the bottom of the barrel for a topic these past 50 days. Some days I have something to write about, other days I write because I am supposed to. A lot of days I seem to write for nothing. And then there are moments where I find that my post from four days ago is one of the more popular things I have ever written.

I guess in the end, the important thing is that I have a reason to write again, even if it is just a bit if fluff here and there. So here is to the past 50 days of blogging, the next 50 days to come and that I continue to blog for even longer after this personal challenge is done.

Take care apprentices.

Dave

71 Days Till GaryCon! Inspiration in a World of Mass Communications.

As I mentioned in my review of The Hobbit, I never read any of Tolkien's books. In fact, outside of the first three Dragonlance novels, I never really read any fantasy fiction. Most of my exposure to fantasy came from television and movies. Thundarr the Barbarian, Beastmaster, Willow, those were the stories that I looked to for fantasy adventure. I got into D&D around the same time The Legend of Zelda came out for the NES. Not surprisingly, my first attempt at being a Dungeon Master involved trying to recreate the dungeons of that game.

It's one of those things that has left me feeling a bit excluded from the 'OSR' as it were. I know Conan The Barbarian from the Schwarzenegger films, while most other gamers have read Robert E. Howard's books. My exposure to Lovecraft came from an episode of The Real Ghostbusters. And frankly, I am more likely to quite season one of The Transformers than The Silmarillion. In fact I am more of a fan of science fiction than fantasy, despite my love for fantasy role-playing games. And I find myself looking to film and television more and more for ideas than the written works of my contemporaries.

So here's the question I have for everyone. Am I the only person like this? Am I the only one that looks at Ocean's Eleven and sees it as a Shadowrun campaign? Or wants to port the plot of Alien to a galleon on the high seas in D&D? Am I the only one that developed FASERIP stats for Optimus Prime? Heck, I'm running a play-by-post game inspired by a show on The Discovery Channel for crying out loud!

And in the future, as communications technology allows more and more people to develop their own creative worlds, what will the next step in creative inspiration come from?