Saturday, April 28, 2012

My Quest for the ultimate d100 Fantasy

Last year I was all about d100 gaming.  I was playing in a Call of Cthulhu game PBEM and having a great time of it.  In addition, I switched my PbP Greyhawk game over to Open Quest.  How did I decide on Open Quest...

First I purchased the following d100 books over the last two years:

1.  Chaosium Basic Roleplaying
2.  Stormbringer 4th ed
3.  Stormbringer 5th ed
4.  Elric Dark fantasy RPG
5.  Rolemaster Classic RM2.
6.  Open Quest.
7.  Legend System (Mongoose)
8.  Runequest SRD (Mongoose)

First of all, why did I need so many.  Each of these has points I like and points I don't like.  Open Quest was the one I finally settled on.  Unfortunately it was the last one i picked up...

In the next couple of posts on this site I'd like to discuss some of the differences between each edition and describe how I ended up picking Open Quest.


Thursday, April 26, 2012

A Fantasy Novel to Write Home about...

Coming off reading "A Clash of Kings" by GRRM I've been looking for another fantasy novel to read.  I haven't read many fantasy full length novels since the mid 90's, but the Song of Ice and Fire series (2 down so far) has wetted my appetite and I don't want to ravenously read through them so fast that I'll be 3 or 4 books in front of the fantastic HBO series.

I tried starting "Gardens of The Moon" by Erikson but hit a snag.  I'm roughly 12% into the novel according to my kindle and it hasn't really grabbed me yet.  From all the reviews online this series is supposed to rock, so why isn't it yanking me down the rabbit hole?  If anybody reads this, what do you suggest... should I carry on?

So in the meantime, I'm also in the market for a new Fantasy (or sci fi) novel to read.  Any suggestions?  I'm reading the free Amazon excerpts from "Winterbirth" and "The Name of the Wind" right now so maybe one of those will grab my fancy.

I looked at "the Way of Kings" and "Mistborn" series from Brandon Sanderson, however, I became suspicious by the page counts.  I turned away from Robert Jordan due to his wordy ways - I really do appreciate an economy of words in a novel.  Although I'm really happy with A Song of Ice and Fire even though they are mammoth texts so maybe I should give them another chance.


Tuesday, April 24, 2012

What have I been up to.

I know it has been a long, long time since I posted here. I've been overwhelmed at work as usual :)

Here is what has been going on in gaming over the last 6-9 months....

1. We tentatively finished up our Decade of Darkness, call of cthulhu campaign with Dungeon Mum, Daddy G, and O4E. We had three GM's in all and I had a rollicking blast!

2. My PBEM Greyhawk campaign has somehow been resurrected. I still have four of my players, but we have completely switched systems. I really wasn't happy with the Castles and Crusades system for PBEM. We have switched to the Open Quest d100 system from d101 games and I couldn't be happier. This PBEM site has been open now for 3 years (although the game in this setting has only been going for about 5-6 months now.

3. I haven't played a tabletop game in about 4 months now (since christmas time)... I'm planning on continuing my BX DnD game whenever I get that gaming group together again, although my plan is to skip the Master of the Desert Nomads adventure and move directly to Temple of Death.

Also, I've been thinking a lot about what attributes I look for in a game. More on that to follow sometime... hopefully in less than 6 months from now. Maybe if I can get some time again I could start regularly blogging again!