Lots of Gaming, Advice given, finally some time on the player side of the board

Okay, so this is late. I'm still in a simi-permanent state of exhaustion. So meh.

Anyway, I still haven't been able to read more than a single chapter in a sitting on Prince of Wolves. Infact I'm having a hard time staying interested enough to finish a whole chapter per sitting. It's getting predictable and bleh...

I did however get some gaming in this weekend. More work (playtesting) on my personal setting. I should have the ending dungeon for the first module/chapter of adventure path flushed out quite soon. Go Me!

I also got some advice kinda threw at me that I've now heard several times.

"You through too much thought and backstory into a pickup game!!"

Hmm... perhaps he's right... after all he ran a pickup game for me and the other player (this is a pair that I thought were going to be the base of a good group that started fighting... for those that remember that post... they're not fighting anymore... but one's talking about Egypt in January and the other's talking about Oregon in December... WHY!!!???????)

Damn real life.

I'm getting side tracked. He was able to get us going fairly quickly... Back story was quick, but not really that much quicker than mine... the bit that was different was that the first NPC he threw at us didn't do a whole lot of explaining details the players hadn't seen... I'll have to think about this. Also, when we did get NPC's to talk to... I found myself asking all the questions his NPCs didn't volunteer information that mine tend to do. So it could all be a difference in play style.

Any way... now there's three games going with a person who I barely get to see once a month, two of which require someone else I only get to see twice a month, and getting all three of us together in the same place seems to happen once every three months... Ouch. But we enjoyed it all...

I need to get in gear about taking another stab at making maptool behave. Which means finishing my blasted computer rebuild. Next weekend I go back home, so we'll see what happens there.

Wolves, Witches, Hradani and a lack of gamers

Well, several chapters into Prince of Wolves... The story's good, but for the people who know my typical reading habits... I've not finished this book yet. Thats typically not a good sign. It really is how the story is presented that's bugging me. The chapters about Radovan aren't bad. But reading Varian's letters to his friend is just off.

The final pathfinder Witch class. I like some of the final changes. You pick a familiar, and then pick a patron these patrons aren't described beyond a basic type of power it grants the witch, so it could be anything from another way a god provides power to nature to some other being supernatural or mundane. The familiar is still the channel, but not the granter, and the patron choice determines what extra spells you get, not the familiar type itself. Much more flexible, and better from a use-the-class-to-create-the-story point of view.

David Weber has promised more Bahzell soon. Details I don't know, I'll check the bar over the next two weeks and see if he's left anything out there to describe his tweet in detail. While I hope we get our HH anthology soon, more Hradani stories is a good thing.

Didn't get any gaming in with the people who expected some, and still haven't had any luck locally. I apparently just missed a group talking at the shop that's talking about expanding into the gaming universe, so we shall see.

I know this post is kinda bleh and "more of the same" but I've never been good at keeping any kind of journal... Let me get into the habit, both of jotting down things to talk about that happen to me, and remembering that I need to look at things to talk to others about.

Pathfinder Tales, Advanced Players Guide, and Life

First: Life has been a freaking crazy roller-coaster inside a dungeon on a planet with random changes in gravity... But things have started to calm down. I'm back to a single apartment... My brother's married and off to Dublin... The job has reached a stage where I don't feel 30 weeks behind in what needs to be done... The drama between friends/family has been sifted out... All in all a crazy summer that looks to be followed by a quiet fall...

But enough of that, off to the new things that came in the mail.

I can't say much about either the Player's Guide or the new novel at this point. I've skimmed the players guide, the artwork's fantastic, the books nice and thick, and the material seems to be arranged well. I can't wait to play a witch or an oracle, unfortunately i'm stuck in no-gamer-ville for the foreseeable future. Although I am making an attempt to remedy that (not moving, shaping the town). The new novel, well I've made it to chapter two. If you've been reading the web fiction, its about the same quality of work so far, its also the same characters, and POV. I don't know if I'm going to like lots of first person pov for novels. It's not bad, but I'm really hoping that this is something for these characters, expecting it to be Mr. Gross's stick, and worried its something to expect out of all PF fiction.

So that's about it. I hope to be a) more consistent with my posting here in the future, and b) have more worthwhile things to say from now on. We shall see.

Also on a side note: I finally moved in to the age of smartphones, I'm loving the Captivate, so I'll probably be able to post more often as well.