It is Settled (for now): Mothership and Tales of the Valiant

 So I have at last wrapped the D&D 5.5 campaign (we have loose plot threads, so who knows, maybe it will be revisited eventually) and Wednesday night formally begins with a Mothership ongoing campaign. I am plotting for around 5-10 sessions, but maybe we'll get more out of it; who knows! Mothership is a very fun game, but it is easier to do one shots and short campaigns with it than it is to do protracted campaigns....similar to Call of Cthulhu, the group can only sustain so much horror before it transitions from spooky fun to "wow how aren't we dead yet."*

I have had an infrequent Friday group as well, which my son was occasionally running Pathfinder for (and I ran Shadowdark for them before that). The group expanded to six players with last week's return to form, and I began running Tales of the Valiant at long last! It was a good session 0.5, with some char gen followed by a bit of gaming. I am introducing the variant concepts to them as we go (such as lineages and heritages, luck, doom, dread and so forth) bit by bit, in a completely new world setting I devised jut for TotV. I had initially planned to use preprinted modules but after reading through everything I had I decided most of them sucked for purposes of my GM style and what I wanted out of the game, and so I devised my own low level intro campaign module instead. I meticulously followed the encounter design rules outlined in the Gamemaster's Guide and have so far found them more satisfying than 5e/5.5E's traditionally more vibe-based guidelines.

Anyway, this mix seems to work for now! I have plans soon to try out Cairn 2E, Fabula Ultima, Outgunned, The Electric State** and possibly a return to Savage World's Pathfinder edition. We shall see.....but the important thing is, lots of options that require no further engagement with D&D 5.5.  

*Or, alternatively, "We have all lost multiple PCs, does anyone have a living PC who remembers why we landed on this haunted space station in the first place?"

**RPG and the original book only, we will not speak of the Netflix movie.