This past weekend was a whirlwind of gaming: Friday I officially began running a homebrew Coriolis campaign. This is my first actual campaign ever so it’s been a bit nerve-wracking but the group responded positively so I’m excited to see how they like it as we move forward.
Saturday early afternoon was good old D&D and we’re currently running through the Tomb of Annihilation. So far we’ve done surprisingly well, mainly because we have a barbarian that does a ridiculous amount of damage. Every once in a while my bard pitches in, but for the most part she acts as the party’s healer since we don’t have a cleric. Really looking forward to getting through ToA to try the GM’s homebrew campaign. He’s really into it and actually put the group together in the first place. I’m excited to see what he comes up with.
Saturday evening was Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. The first and only time I tried this game before Saturday was at a convention a couple of months ago. I had signed up for it on a whim and was pleasantly surprised to find that, despite not really knowing anything about the world of Conan, it was a setting that really resonated with me. I love fantasy settings where magic is a corruptive force more than it is neutral or good. It gives it a certain amount of weight that more traditional fantasy magic just doesn’t have. I also really love a setting where the characters populating it aren’t all pure as the driven snow or obviously evil. It’s fun to play games where the characters have flaws that run the gamut between minor and serious. As characters they just feel more like real people. In any case, it was a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to the next session. I almost had to roll a new character; mine was stabbed in the back with a poisoned knife. I got my revenge though: I cut the assassin’s femoral artery and she bled out. Not bad for a horse archer from Hyrkania!
Sunday afternoon was the character-building and first session of Call of Cthulhu. This was also a game I first tried at the convention, but it wasn’t just on a whim. As a fan of horror I’ve always really liked authors like Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe. When I discovered H.P. Lovecraft I was instantly hooked. At the Mountains of Madness is probably my favorite Lovecraft piece and I’ve been sad ever since Guillermo del Toro gave up on getting the movie made. Anyway, that little session at the convention was everything I’d hoped it would be so when someone I really respect and is probably most responsible for me diving head-long into the hobby tweeted that he wanted to run Horror on the Orient Express, I really wanted to be in on it. He put a group together and now every other Sunday I’m a thirty-something archaeologist with frizzy hair and a slight occult obsession named Ellen Dern (Ellen for Ripley in Alien, and Dern for Laura Dern, who was an archaeologist in Jurassic Park – I couldn’t remember her character’s name). I’ve been debating starting a pool on how many characters I’m going to end up going through by the end.
I wasn’t lying when I said it was a lot of gaming! I’d like to throw in the occasional one-shot of new stuff, but with the schedule I have right now, I can’t commit to more than I’ve already got going on a regular basis. Plus, I’ve got a lot of stuff coming up in the future with Kickstarter releases finally showing up. So many games, so little time!
Wasteland Sniper 