Festivals

There is a lot of talk about Cinco de Mayo today. I’m not sure why it happens on May 5th, every year. 😉

It got me to thinking about festivals and celebrations in-game. Be it a religious or secular celebration, like a founding of a great temple, or the founding of a city.

It has to fit into the game and can provide opportunities for players to do city/town adventures.

An interesting twist could be the festival/celebration/human sacrifice of an evil religion, whether it be humans, orcs, etc. What if the adventurers come upon it in the caverns/dungeon?

May the 4th be With You.

I had thought about a Star Wars Marathon today, but I no longer have my old videotapes or a VCR to watch them.

I might have one DVD somewhere.

I did not find any Star Wars movies on Netflix. There is the Clone Wars series, but I was not in the mood for that.

Instead I watched season 1 of Continuum and the first 3 episodes of season 2.

I don’t have cable, so I am not up on a lot of shows.

I found it to be pretty good, but it does move fast, like most types of shows anymore.

It seems like a lot of series are into the story and tying everything together. They all try so hard to build the story to get the fan base behind them.

It seems like they are all trying to avoid leaving the characters stranded in a situation left by a cancelled show.

Not all achieve the success of Star Trek and resurrect via movies and follow on series.

Continuum deals with issues of time travel to explain how one character does not cease to exist when his grandmother is killed. It must be a new thread of time, or our models of time travel don’t know all they need to to explain it.

In general, I am very leery of time travel. It seems like all the Star Trek movies and series after a certain point came to rely on time travel. They made it too easy. Some of their stretches to make it work made it difficult at times to suspend disbelief to get into the story. So far, Continuum has done a good job with it.

There are a lot of “flashbacks” to the future to help explain the action in the current episode and it helps fill in gaps for prior episodes. There is a major trend in flashbacks in a lot of TV shows. I guess that is one way to fill in the back story for those who want more. So far, I think it works for Continuum. We’ll see how long it takes me to finish the rest of season 2.

Weekly D&D Game

Wednesday night is the AD&D 1st edition campaign I play in. We all just hit second level after we roll played selling loot and dealing with the aftermath of being famous, and getting training. A lot of loot is now gone thanks to training, so back to the adventuring life! We go from 8:00 PM to about midnight Eastern. Tonight was our 7th session.

We get 150 XP for a session write-up and take turns for that. We just started getting 10 XP for each NPC and location/business when add to the campaign Google+ site.

Google+ Hangouts and Roll20 is what we use. We use theater of the mind instead of maps. We use tokens for characters and monster placement. We use the whiteboard pen to mark where things are, but not mapping.

It has worked rather well.

We lost one player after two or three sessions, and another player dropped out a few hours just before our session. So we are looking for two new players. The DM is in charge of that. Hopefully, we get someone who fits the group.

Last week it looked like we were headed for a TPK, but we started to roll just good enough to win.

One Page Dungeon Contest – 2014

I had thought about doing an entry this year. I had several ideas, but just could not get it to come together to match the high quality so many others will have.

I also found it frustrating that others were posting what they did. I ignored what they had, so it wouldn’t cloud my own efforts.

It’s now after midnight, so I missed it.

I’m not upset. I did the A to Z challenge this year, I play in a regular weekly online D&D game that just had it’s seventh session. I have maintained my other activities and interests and going to work everyday.

Life is good. I also have to start fitting in lawn mowing and gardening into my schedule now that my part of Michigan is warming and greening. If it doesn’t rain, I need to mow tomorrow.

I am looking forward to warmer weather so I can get back out in my kayak.

I can probably make my one page dungeon entry at any time before next April, so that I have it. I could even do more than one.

I like looking at all the entries, and all the maps, and ideas. I just wish that I had time to use them all. Now THAT would be fun!

April, 2014 A to Z

Well, I made it. Doing 26 posts is not too hard. The hardest part was coming up with a topic for each letter of the alphabet. I did not have a them, other than RPGs for this blog and genealogy for my genealogy blog.

I scheduled each letter ahead of time, so if I did not have a topic, I could add it when I got to it.

I had my RPG blog done well before the end of April. My genealogy blog I had a couple I let slip up on me and I did them that day.

I should have kept a backlog in my scheduled postings, but I did not. Now to build up a buffer to tide me over for the days I am busy.