Apologies for the overly long wait between posts. The holidays were nuts, and then I've been in an odd mood and not terribly motivated to do much of anything. Thinking I may have a bit of depression, since sleeping and a loss of appetite definitely describes my last month or so pretty well.
Anyway, that's entirely irrelevant to the point here. I suppose since this will be a short post, that I'll just give some updates on various items of geekery in my life.
So, first up: Minecraft! I've been playing probably way too much of this lately. My friend Joe and I were fooling around on a survival server I was running off my gaming rig, but I got bored of vanilla Minecraft and started watching videos of Feed the Beast again, so I switched over to that and have been fully stuck in it for the last month or so. I've played FtB before, maybe spring or early summer of last year? It was fun then, and still is now, though I think I prefer it now because of changes that have been made to some of the mods, Thaumcraft in particular. As it is, I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple dozen hours or more in my single-player world. Ironically, I happened to name the world Pompeii before I'd actually loaded it, and from my spawn point I could see a giant volcano not 200 blocks away from me. Thought that was pretty funny, so I've build my base within sight of the volcano, just across a small river from it. So far, I've delved pretty deeply into Thaumcraft, mined way too much, built machines for IndustrialCraft 2, Thermal Expansion, Forestry, and Buildcraft 2, and have an active quarry mining a 2x2 chunk area currently down to level 32 or so. I have more basic materials than I know what to do with, and my storage is getting entirely out of hand. I'll probably do up a full post on Minecraft, or at least my current world sometime soon.
Secondly, table-top gaming! I haven't run my game much the last few weeks because of way too much player absence. I only have four players, so if only one is gone I'm usually fine with continuing on, but if we lose a second in a given week, there's not really much point, so I cancel. Last week was one such week, a missing (presumably narcoleptic?) player combined with two of the others being sick as dogs meant that it made more sense to cancel, even if the two sick players were willing to tough it out for the couple hours. I'm crossing my fingers for tomorrow night, cause I really hate missing more than a single week at a time.
Other table-top news involves a project I've been periodically working on for the last few months that I'm calling Fukkit. Name may well (and probably will) change eventually, but it fits well. The idea of the game is that any time I've been in a fast-paced, high death-count game, it seems that the players and DM have a lot of fun; the game if much more relaxed and goofy, and things get out of control quickly, resulting in lots of laughs and some fun stories, which is really the point of gaming in the first place, right? In any case, the game is meant to be random, with extremely quick character generation, since the likelihood of surviving for long is extremely low. Instead of leveling like in traditional D&D, I have charts for each class (most have at least a first draft finished, though I have the priest class still to do from the beginning) that grant various abilities from mundane stat increases, to special combat abilities, to weird story things, and a few rolls (two or three, haven't nailed down a precise number yet) on the chart are granted each time a character would level. Again, I'll plan on a full post about this game soon-ish, since I'm hoping to have the basic charts and info ready for play testing by the end of the month. I think my players will get a HUGE kick out of a game like this, for reasons I'll explain when I do that full post.
Oh, and one last thing! If you enjoy watching gaming streams or haven't checked any out yet to decide that, please check out LoadingReadyLive. Loading Ready Run is a group of Canadian sketch-comedy guys (and gals) who've been making videos for years and specifically posting a sketch video every week for the last ten. They hit their 500th weekly video last summer and are continuing to do them through 2014, but the reason I mention them is that they now have a streaming program called LoadingReadyLive where various members of the crew stream for 3 or so hour shows each week. I think there's ten different weekly shows right now, all of various games and with different people, so the chances of finding something you'd enjoy is pretty good. You can find them at loadingreadyrun.com, search for their channels on YouTube or Twitch (LoadingReadyRun on both), and see the archives of their streaming shows either on their Twitch channel, or on YouTube, the channel there being LoadingReadyLive. Enjoy!
