River of heaven, Pathfinder 2E, Basic Roleplaying and Other Stuff

 No sooner do I find myself thinking I have free time once more than my schedule goes belly up, and before I know it December has arrived. Fear not, the blog is not dead (nor the blogger!), just once more neglected due to the perambulations of time. 

In the last few weeks I've had a few noteworthy items to discuss. Each topic deserves more blog time, but in brief...

Pathfinder 2E version 2 has arrived! I spent some amount of the Thanksgiving weekend diving in to the new Player Core and GM Core books, which together are the first two books of the four book core set. I can say the following on a read through: there are some changes, but it is mostly explanatory/cosmetic. This new iteration of the system is more retrocomptable than, say, D&D 3.5 was with 3.0, perhaps even more so than AD&D  2E was with AD&D 1E. I feel comfortable in using existing PF books with these new ones. What the books do exceedingly well is twofold: they purge whatever Paizo felt was too "OGL" or IP-specific from their game, and they (most importantly of all) do some significant reorganization and a certain amount of rewriting to clean up how they present their rules....this is a much easier presentation of the PF2E system than the first books were, hands down. There are other little tweaks and changes, and some (while noteworthy) still aren't significant in terms of compatibility. Overall.....about what we should have expected.

I Snagged a copy of River of Heaven, Refreshed. Still reading it, but this is by far the best attempt at a D100 powered science fiction system. It's based on OpenQuest, which of course exists as a nice fantasy alternate to Mythras and BRP/Runequest. I will write more on this soon, hopefully.

While securing and reading those books, I have been running an ongoing Basic Roleplaying campaign in a scifi/cyberpunk future using the newest edition of BRP. It's gone well! The newest edition of the book is overall not too terribly different from the older BGB (Big Gold Book), but its slight refinements, corrections and revisions have made for a generally improved experience. I have plans for several more genre variants powered by BRP in the works as a result.

Beyond that....it's been a rough month! Hopefully I'll be returning to some more normal form in my periodic blogging. I have thought a bit about moving to a new, more popular platform such as Substack, may well look in to that. Indeed, I really need to see if substack has an RPG wing over there, because most of what I see at substack appears to mostly be wannabe journalists and topical writers. Maybe substack isn't meant for this kind for more casual fare? Will have to investigate.   

A Correction! And on Getting Old.

 A few days back I complained about Onebookshelf ending an agreement with me. I was wrong! So wrong that when I went to re-read the email notice I realized, after thinking about it, that the notice was from Warehouse 23, the online venue for Steve Jackson Games. That honestly makes a lot more sense....I only recall I had anything at their site when I get an occasional notice that they have owed me $7 for the last two years. Their site is not optimized for finding content, and it is easy to never notice anything on their store outside of the most recent products, and SJ Games products in particular. With their recent move to a new sight design this only got worse, so yeah, this totally makes sense.

So...for those looking for my stuff on Drivethrurpg, looks like I am just getting old and easily confused, that stuff will continue to be there. I have gone ahead and deleted that post, to replace it with this one admitting my brain sometimes misses important details these days. Sigh....!

Having fun with Basic Roleplaying

The revised edition of Basic Roleplaying is a lovely book, it changes just enough to make it more useful and efficient, while still being the system I've been enjoying for going on 43 years now. I didn't have much to say in this post, but amidst a year of GM burnout, a developed fascination for minimalist zine games, and a lot of work interrupting play, it's been nice to get my hands on the new BRP hardcover and start experimenting with what I can do with it. In every way this book feels just a bit more like what I need to generate some interesting scenarios and campaigns. I'll post some soon, once I've sorted out what I won't use, or end up using (to avoid spoilers for my players). I will say that I have a near-future hard SF campaign ready, as well as that long-awaited ancient Egypt campaign in the works, and some developing ideas on a new Strange Apocalypse style supers campaign.

That's it! Just a short comment to let everyone know I exist and will be back on track for posting soon, things are returning to normal for me again.