Happy Halodays!

Howdy, everyone! I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season. 

The boys got some fun gaming stuff for Christmas this year, including D&D miniatures, a copy of the new 5.5 Player's Handbook for each of them, and the cool new Halo miniatures game. We also played through one of the adventures from the Cypher System Starter Set, which required a lot of deep dives into the rulebook, but it turned out pretty well. We're still a long way from starting a new campaign using this system, but at least it's another step in the right direction!

Imperial Hymn

The boys and I aren't really into Warhammer stuff these days, but this video was just flat-out awesome...

Phase 1 Underway!

I mentioned last month that I've elected to use the Cypher System for my upcoming Vanguard sci-fi campaign and, ideally, all new campaigns in the Front Porch Multiverse going forward. (Side note: Big thank-you to my good friend Matt for really diving into the Cypher System rules!) One of the advantages of this system is that it's genre-agnostic, so it can be used for fantasy, modern, cyberpunk, or whatever. With a single ruleset, it will be super-duper easy for PCs and NPCs alike to cross over from one campaign to another. 

That got me thinking that I should pull together my notes from various campaigns -- names, places, storylines, adventure summaries, and the like -- and put them all into a single spreadsheet like the enormous one I created for the Druid Cycle campaign world. I have really great documentation from campaigns of the last few years -- Dark Enigma, Doctor Who, Tales of the Ternion -- so Phase 1 of my project is just to grab all that stuff and put it into one file. That's the easy part. 

Phase 2 is to go back to the not-so-well-documented campaigns of yesteryear, such as the Cyberwars series, and comb through my remaining notes for all the relevant info I can find. (Tim W, prepare to have your brain wracked!) The goal isn't to track down every last NPC name or obscure location, but essentially to mine those disparate records for anything that might help enrich future Front Porch Multiverse campaigns. 

Phase 3? I don't even want to think about it yet, but the final step is surely to merge the sheet created in the first two phases with the existing Druid Cycle spreadsheet to create one definitive repository of campaign data.

A Stark Victory

With Matthew at a swim meet in Arizona this weekend, Amy, Nathaniel, and I kept busy with a lengthy Game of Thrones board game session that took us a pretty good chunk of the weekend to complete. Nathaniel played as House Stark, Amy was House Baratheon, and I was House Lannister. I was in the lead for much of the game, or at least tied with Nathaniel, and it all came down to the final turn, when Amy seized one of my castles, which gave Nathaniel sole position of the lead in victory points. So I guess Bran Stark ended up on the Iron Throne after all, just like in the show! How it all played out was quite different; for one thing, the standard version of the game omits those pesky Targaryens...