My preparations for next year's campaigns have continued with a pre-session for the other campaign, Science Heroes! This is a campaign of classic superheroes in the pre-Comics Code style. The campaign year is 1932, so that I can have plots taking off from Prohibition; the location is the college town of Arkham, Massachusetts, for which I have both ( Read more... )

I just finished my final review of my current writing project, GURPS Infinite Worlds: Gotterdammerung, set on an alternate timeline where several different subducted earlier alternate histories are the sources for people with superhuman powers. I specifically wanted a superhero setting where there wasn't a generic category of "super" powers, but ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I held the pre-session for one of my upcoming campaigns for 2025, Shadowlands: a slow apocalyptic campaign where technology is gradually ceasing to work and people are turning back to magical arts. This resulted in first draft character sheets, which I've been reviewing and discussing with players. By now, nearly all the details ( Read more... )

At the start of my just completed campaign Fronteira, one of the players drew up a family tree for the family to which all of the player characters belonged. As the campaign progressed, a lot of the non-player character family members took on characterization, often starting from a random dice roll or two, or from bits of family history ( Read more... )

Just the other day, while I was talking with my friend in New South Wales, his ideas made me think of a new possible campaign. Of course it's too late to offer it to my gaming circle, who have already selected their campaigns for the new year. But I can work on it for the next cycle ( Read more... )

I see that Linda LaFlamme has just died, at 85. She was a founding member of It's a Beautiful Day and one of the composers of my favorite song of theirs, "White Bird," one of the most emotionally intense pieces of music I've heard.

Earlier this morning I was talking with C about my other new campaign for next year, Shadowlands, which she's going to play in. It's set in the United States a few years from now, with technology gradually ceasing to function for unclear reasons (unclear to the player characters, that is!). And it occurred to me that what's going on in this ( Read more... )

Recently I chose my new campaigns for next year, based on player preferences, and scheduled the pre-sessions for 23 November and 14 December, where we'll discuss campaign premises, choose a group of character concepts that fit together, and do first draft character design. The players for the campaign whose pre-session is 14 December have already ( Read more... )

Earlier this year, we received a notice from our city's hospital and medical network saying that they were no longer accepting Aetna or Humana for Medicare recipients. This caused us some concern, as we've been with Humana for supplementary insurance at least since we moved to Kansas. So I did some investigation, and found several other insurance ( Read more... )

Back in the twentieth century, I read Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy, each volume of which was set in a different parallel timeline. In one of the timelines, the president of the United States was a man named Furbish Lousewart, who was elected on a radical environmentalist program. Chapters began with excerpts from his writings-and ( Read more... )