On the boardgames front: January is OxCon month and all of my boardgaming too place there.

I gave Civ a try only to remember that I’d played it once before when I was half way through the game. (It is quite fun, but I’m still not sure that it is a good game as it feels too much like a game of “Who will blink first”).

I got in a rare game of Seafarers which I proceeded to win by a large margin after discovering a 6 gold and a 5 gold next to each other on the same turn.

I also managed to play half a dozen games of Dead Rising which I’m growing increasingly fond of. The expansions have arrived now so I’m going to have to try it with some other races and custom warbands.

I entered the Settlers tournament and managed to come third (after new rules were invented to tie break the tied tie break for second place). I’ve now managed to come consistently near the top for a few years, so I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

Finally an honourable mention to Cities, an interesting tile laying game. Sadly it completely lacks interaction. A collection of tiles are selected in a random order, but each turn each player gets an identical tile and places it in their own play area.

Next up, RPGs: A GMing heavy month for me, I’ve been running Fantasy Craft with a Mythic Roman setting on Tuesdays. I’ve been very happy with my players as they’ve taken the plot in directions I hadn’t imagined and kept me on my toes. I think I’m getting better at improvisation. I’ll try to get a proper write up done after the final session next week.

The monthly Traveler game continues. We broke into a disturbingly insecure military base to sabotage the Giant Ancient Anti-Hyperspace Weapon Of Doom.

Finally I ran the adventure from the new D&D Red Box. It went down reasonably well, although one player was unimpressed with the dungeon crawl slog making things somewhat boring for his character (the party tank).

On to wargaming: No plays this month, but great success with my New Year Resolution, which I have so far failed to break.

If I have a quiet evening in, then I will do some painting.

Some nights I manage 10 minutes, some I manage 2 hours (and quite I lot I’m out and thus not subject to the resolution). It has meant that I’ve got through a couple of dozen skeletons, mostly finished a dozen elves, and have another dozen skeletons almost ready for the QuickShade stage. Decent photos coming soon!

I’ve also half assembled the Magnus the Traitor starter set for Warmachine after two people asked me to start playing the game enough times.

Q-workshop present dice set for the third part of series released by Paizo Publishing – Pathfinder Chronicles: Second Darkness. Dice in our new colour scheme – purple & silver – vividly reflect the devious nature of Dark Elves, their cunning, secrecy and

… but, for whatever reason, trail off.

I wonder how that sentence is supposed to end?

Having given it some thought, I suspect it should be: squinty eyes that are cursed to suffer reading spidery script in low light conditions. (I confess, I like to be able to read my dice).

Can you do better?

I’ve been looking around for software to run an online game, mostly focusing on video conferencing software. My efforts haven’t been all that fruitful though, every time I find something that looks suitable, it turns out to need a monthly fee to unlock essential features (such as supporting more then three people in the call).

So, since I think a few people are actually reading this blog now (thanks to RPG Bloggers), I thought I’d ask the community.

I think voice support is essential, as is support for at least five people. Video would be nice. A whiteboard, file sharing and dice rolling would be bonuses. I’d like to avoid paying money, but would be less annoyed by a one-off fee then something recurring. That said, if something is good and has a monthly fee, don’t be afraid to mention it.

What can you recommend? (Comments below please!). Thanks!

Still, we got there in the end and Adam was pleased to receive the Xbox 360 that Simon had collected for him. We were saved from suffering through people playing on it all night by virtue of the absence of any games for it.

Saturday dawned.

Several hours later we got up and found some breakfast before recapping York by Night. The trouble with late starts is that lunchtime arrives before you know it, and the pub is far too close to places which sell video games.

Andy prompted fled to retrieve his jumper from the pub, while the game was played.

WoD began in earnest when he returned. I won’t provide any details, since I know Andy is working on a proper write-up, but suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, and we players were driven sufficiently insane.

Sadly, it was the last session of York by Night, but we’ll be kicking off York Unveiled sometime next year so we spent a fair chunk of the weekend tossing around character ideas (and playing Halo 3).

Sunday was a relaxed wind down with a number of games of Infernal Contraption and a little bit of fighting over Mage: The Awakening books. We finished off the day with Ingenius! but came to the conclusion that we were playing it with too much focus on scoring points and not enough on blocking other players. According to the rulebook scoring 18 on every track should happen “very rarely” but it is how I won the game on my first attempt, with at least two other players coming very close to matching the score.

Sadly the trip home was less than fun. The weather turned so the drive back to Kent took so long that I was stranded in Tonbridge for the night. Happily the commute to the office from there is only marginally longer then from my current address so the major consequences were a slightly more expensive train ticket, and turning up at the office with a large rucksack full of my gear for the weekend. I think this is scuppering my plan to collect some times to take home tonight – I’ve too much to carry already.

Photo credit: Jumping the ‘phant by Neil Crosby, Ingenious! by Jon Bristow

This made it easier to get to and eliminated the usual fight for parking with Saturday morning shoppers, but an echoy room doesn’t lend itself very well to demos of RPGs (which involve lots of talking).

With the extra space, Mongoose was able to open up to some third party vendors who dangled some very tempting goodies in front of me. I was tempted to pick up some scenery models, but forced myself to resist the urge until after I’ve finished moving home.

Unfortunately, the event seemed smaller (in terms of attendance) than previous years. I’m not sure if this was to do with the room simply being bigger, or if people pulled out after Claudia Christian gave her apologies and spent the time filming episodes of Nip/Tuck.

There might not have been all that many people there, but there was plenty to see. Mongoose unveiled their shiny new license – Traveller. It is a game I’ve heard a great deal of praise for, but never actually got around to playing.

The new Conan book is out (running to something in the order of 460 pages) and using art appropriate to the tradition (kids, don’t show this one to your mothers, at least not without slicing out the outside margin on every left hand page).

A Call To Arms second edition is out, and looks nice. I didn’t get much time to look at it in the end, but it sounds like fighters have been made rather less useless.

There were also plenty of demo games going on. Since I’d arrived, looked up, and found Sam and Louise parked next to me, we ended up in a trio for most of the day, and we’d barely made it trough the door before being roped into a game of Paranoia by Ian.

A lowly team of troubleshooters we were not! No, we were destined for greater things and our BLUE clearance officers were responsible for the smooth running of an entire sector. We were, of course, suitable grateful to Friend Computer for the honour (“Oh ****!”).

If you don’t know Paranoia then “responsible for the smooth running” is code for “responsible for everything that goes wrong”.

Still, we managed to come out of it in one piece, even if we did have a reactor explode, a High Programmer drugged into insensibility, and unleashed a batch of scrubbots on our neighbours with orders to leak oil in treasonous patterns all over the neighbouring sector, and steal more oil when they ran out. Their poor little bot brains couldn’t cope and they went insane (and not in a good way, at least not if you’re anywhere near them).

Umm, obviously FEMB sector was being run by traitors and we only planted the evidence to expedite due process. Honest.

Kudos to Gareth Hanrahan for running a highly entertaining game.

Old Bear was running Kerakhistan Race of Death, a car racing game with machine guns based on the Battlefield Evolution rules. It was good fun, although I think the victory conditions need tweaking (people who have scored points in previous rounds are better off trying to end the race rather then score more points), but it was good fun overall.

Unfortunately, the race followed by lunch made it too late for us to join in any of the afternoon games, but it gave us a chance to look at all the goodies. Sam and Louise had a game of ACTA and I wandered around and did some catching up with people I haven’t had much contact with since moving away from Swindon.

Overall, it was a good day out.

It has a fair bit of crunch (game mechanics), but most of the content is fluff (setting information) which is how I like it. I have access to more then enough D&D game mechanics already so I’d rather have inspiration for plots then anything else (and I’ll confess to finding fluff more enjoyable to read than tables of combat statistics).

Having a high fluff content has the added bonus of making it handy for people who are running non-D&D games with a sword and sorcery setting (I know at least one person planning a RuneQuest game in a D&Desque setting).

One feature I’m happy to see is the Ecology of series, which was one of my favourite bits of the late Dragon magazine.

If you like RPGs then I suggest you pick up a subscription. At $16/year it is pretty inexpensive and is aimed at both DMs and players (although, it seems slightly more suited to the former).

I’d managed to come up with a description of a location (and the journey to get to it) that I was pretty happy with, and then someone came up with a map which contradicted it. There were two choices, either the description needed to be changed or the map did.

I didn’t want to add an ocean voyage so I set about amending the map so I could make my proposal for the general layout of the world. It was soon after that that I realized my error. The start of the journey that was described was in a temperate region, while the end was in a desert, and they were at the same Latitude. That, combined with their closeness, mean that the weather simply didn’t make sense.

In future, I’ll always draw a map to make sure that where I put things makes sense.

The gaming group that I joined when I recently moved to London has a policy of swapping campaign (and GMs) every six weeks, the choice of game being determined by a vote on those proposed by people willing to run them. I think this is an excellent idea:

• It allows players to avoid getting bored of one campaign through simply playing it for two long
• It prevents GM burnout
• It gives GMs time to plan while someone else runs a different game

Still, as in any group, there are far more people who want to play then want to GM; which is fair enough, GMing is hard work and requires a lot more commitment then the few hours a week that a player has to invest.

Unsurprisingly, someone popped the question – did I want to propose a game? Well, I have to confess that I do.

I’ve got a couple of games I’d like to run. The first is Spirit of the Century, a Pulp game based around the FUDGE rules. This would be something along the lines of some of my favourite (if cheesy in most cases) movies:

• The Shadow
• The Phantom
• The Rocketeer
• Indiana Jones (Trilogy)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

There are just two problems with me running that.

1. I haven’t a clue how I’d manage to come up with six weeks worth of plot
2. I’d much rather play SotC then run it (I wonder if I can persuade someone else at the club to run a game?)

Which brings me to the other game – Babylon 5.

I’ve been a fan of B5 for a very long time. A decade or so ago, my father had a job which meant he was working in Germany, so I was living there. The day we moved back to the UK we were staying in a little B&B near Reading, and I turned on the TV to find a season one episode of Babylon 5 on – and I loved it.

Years later, and little has changed on that front (other then it going from something I loved and looked forward to each week to something I know very well indeed).

I’ve run Babylon 5 games in the past, and they’ve been amongst my most successful attempts at GMing, so I’m going to dig it out again and run some more.

This time I’m going to take a slightly different approach on the setting I put things in, but I’ll post in more detail about my plans for the campaign later.

In the meantime I’m busy rewatching season one (I’ve discovered that my phone is pretty good for watching TV on), reading timelines, working out plot, planning a trip back to Swindon to collect some books, and working out which extra books I need to get my hands on, as Mongoose have had a busy release schedule which I’ve been lax on keeping up with of late.

Happily, I found myself in contact with a new group before I’d so much as left that delightful place known as Swindon. This pleasant turn of events is due, in no small part, to Nearby Gamers which I heartily recommend.

Nearby Gamers is based around Google Maps and allows you to indicate your general location on the map (anywhere in the worth), and list games that you play. You can then use it to find other people who play those games near you.