On 19 November, 2010, I created this blog and posted about the games I was running and playing. Things have changed an awful lot for me since then, with six months of unemployment followed by a new job, friends moving away, and the beginning of Dust to Dust.

Games I’m Running

1. Dust to Dust: We’ve now run two World Events and two three-day events. We released our rules and our culture packets in a timely manner and before the beginning of the campaign, which are causes for pride in themselves. We’ve released a towering amount of content since then, with a great deal more on the way. This is the most labor-intensive thing I have ever personally attempted.
2. Mage: the Awakening. This is the second chronicle of new Mage that I’ve ever run, and overall it has an edgier, more political tone than the first. We’re now thirteen sessions in.

I’m not regularly running anything else these days, though I’m pondering a heavily hacked game using the Song of Ice and Fire rules.

Games I’m Playing

1. Eclipse: I feel that the game has evolved a great deal in the last year, with a staff that seeks to explore boundaries of what’s possible in LARPing, particularly when given a tightly-knit playerbase.
2. Arcana Evolved: This game continues much as it has for the past seven years; our characters have reached 14th level, with the concomitant headaches of high-level 3.x-like D&D. It looks like our level of importance in world events may be on the rise.
3. Smallville: At the risk of giving away Samhaine’s next game for review, we’re planning to play several sessions of Smallville, but set in the Marvel Universe as described here. Our character-creation session was as much fun as a very good session of a tabletop game.
4. Arkham City: I’ve just finished my first playthrough of Arkham City on Normal Mode, and now I’m continuing into my New Game Plus. I loved this game; my only criticism is that many of the times that I wanted to explore the city and play side missions, the game prevented me from doing so, leading to the game feeling very short (because I’d played so little of its content). I’ll be correcting this in my New Game Plus playthrough. I will probably post about this game in detail at some point soon. It feels very much like someone took Arkham Asylum and applied it to Prototype, resulting in an open-world setting with a hero I actually like.
5. Heroes of Neverwinter: This Facebook game is a simplified version of D&D. The thing that sets it apart from other Facebook games is that it actually feels like a game.
6. Dragon Age: Legends: This G+ game has better miscellaneous features (castle construction) than Heroes of Neverwinter, but Heroes of Neverwinter has much more interesting core gameplay and story.
7. Magic: the Gathering: We’ve gotten back into playing Magic, not in any serious competitive way, but just as a way to pass an evening. It’s been good fun, and not too difficult to return to after many, many years away from it.

D&D 4e is conspicuously absent from these lists, as my Road to Bael Turath campaign ended just three sessions after I mentioned it in last year’s Games I’m Running, Games I’m Playing post, and the games I was playing ended at about the same time. Long-time readers of this blog will be well aware that I have a lot of things I still want to do with 4e rules, but I’ve become frustrated with the direction that WotC has taken their design of the game.

King’s Gate, which was a significant part of my life from its inception in ’01 to its conclusion, came to a satisfying and thrilling end in January of 2011. The creative debt that DtD owes to KG, and its predecessor Shattered Isles, is very great. By any reasonable measure, this LARP was a great success, and I am glad to have played in it.

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