So I recently summed up 2010 and the gaming that I did. So I thought I might as well list the plans for 2011:
Start a new campaign set in a homebrew world. I’m currently working through my ideas and am hoping to start in late February or early March. Interestingly I finally checked out True20 to see if it would fit my ideas for a low magic world, with a not too heavy system and it’s great.
Continue to get plenty of playing in. I can see one or two of my current games winding up at some stage soon and while one of those will be replaced with my own campaign I hope to fill the other with another longish term game.
Get a PC. There are heaps of good CRPGs coming out this year and I’m sick of playing on the Xbox 360. I want a PC again, rather than using my TV.
Talking of non table top games this year I’m looking forward to Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and maybe even my first MMO, The Old Republic.
I’m going to continue to LARP in one off parlour games.
Write and run a small LARP (for about 15 people). My ideas at the moment are running towards a steampunk-esque Society of Explorers.
And I think that should keep me pretty busy. What about you? Any plans for this year?
Thanks to a tip from fellow gaming blog Cyclopeatron I’ve been pointed towards an excellent article from the Economist on the Battle of Towton, during the English Wars of the Roses. For anyone running a realistic game with large scale battles, this is well worth a read. It gives some real insight into the people who faught at the time, the way the battle was faught and the consequences of loosing.
Very interesting stuff, especially if you’re at all interested in Medieval history.
So it seems that a new pilot has been ordered in the US for a show staring Sarah Michelle Geller. The AV club has a good post on it, explaining most of what seems to be known. But to recap their article,
The one-hour drama will find Gellar playing a woman on the run from the mob (still a prevalent and menacing force in TV land, apparently), and whose efforts to evade them involve pretending to be her wealthy twin sister. Unfortunately, she soon discovers that said twin sister is also being targeted…
This brief synopsis doesn’t fill me with interest, it has to be said. But it is also being written by a couple Supernatural writers. So there may be something there. Or it could just end up being lots of shots of Geller running across various American cities in different outfits to represent each character. We will just have to wait and see, but it doesn’t sound like much of a Buffy replacment to me.
There seem to be a lot of sci-fi or sci-fi inspired shows out there at the moment. My personal favorite is the current season of Fringe. It’s dark, it’s complex and it leaves me wanting more. How cool is Walter? Seriously, check out season 3 it’s great.
Over on io9.com they’ve got a heap of info on a new BBC show call Outcasts. Basically the premise is that Earth becomes uninhabitable so a brave group set off to a new world to start again, doing it right this time. Only it’s never that easy, is it? Check out the trailer and detailed synopsis. It looks good.
Do you miss the old days of PC gaming? When Sierra released games like Police Quest, King’s Quest and Space Quest (they obviously knew a good name when they saw it)? Games where you just died, no second chances? Where if you couldn’t work out which desk was yours the game ended?
Well now you can play them again! I just stumbled across Sarien.net where you can play these old games through your browser.
Or if you’re more into reliving the expirence with friends check out the Parsely Games from Momento Mori. A great way to waste half an hour or so.
Floating around somewhere is a post I did early last year saying what I wanted to acheive in gaming in 2010. I would link to it, but I can’t seem to find it. Regardless I thought I would sum it up here:
I spent the better part of 2010 writing, in collaboration with two others, a 66 person LARP called Al Shir-Ma. It’s set in an Arabian Night-esque world which borrows from Al-Qadim. It was done for the yearly KapCon gaming convention here in Wellington, and it’s first run through is happening next weekend. It’s been a really interesting experience and has I think made me a better scenario writer. But man, has it been a lot of work.
I wrapped up my campaign, using the Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire rules, in a not hugely satisfiying way. By the end I’d kind of lost interest and time, and it all got a bit too railroady. It showed me that I really want to run long term games that leverage off character backgrounds and story rather than some over arching plot I’ve come up with. Means less work for me too.
I ran Peril in King’s Landing a pre-written scenario for ASoIFRP. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually run a pre-written scenario and while I liked the low prep of it all, I found that I had the most fun when I was adding in new elements passed on player actions.
I played a lot of Xbox 360. Notably Alpha Protocol, Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout New Vegas. Some of these games, like Mass Effect, I played through for a third time so I could carry my character into the new game. Yes I am that much of a geek.
I played a lot of table top and LARP games. For the first time I played more than I GM’d and it was great.
So from a gaming perspective 2010 was great. Though as the silence from June on might have told you, other stuff wasn’t. Now though it’s time to look forward to 2011!
I’ve spent more hours than I care to think playing Dragon Age and I’m pretty excited that Dragon Age 2 is coming out in a couple of months. I have hoped to have a PC to play it on, but I may have to just stick with the old Xbox 360.
IGN have a nice preview article, outlining some of the changes made to the follow up. They all sound great to me, especially the more Mass Effect-esque character acting and dialoge.
The great people over at i09.com have released a list of the 15 best speculative fiction books of 2010. While I admit that I haven’t actually read any of these yet I think I may try to make my way through the list.
Check out the list if you’re in need of something new to read.
