As one of my new year's resolutions I plan to spend a lot more time playing the other non-D&D games I neglect too much. Part of the reason is because I really want to play them (durh) and the other is because I am finally admitting that I am pretty burned out on D&D in general...and if it weren't for 5th edition I might be moving away from it all together. Not even poor 13th Age can fully stave off my sense of ennui toward the D&D-genre right now; I just need a break....or just a change of pace periodically. Yes, it is possible to get sick of chocolate if you eat too much of it for too long!
Luckily, I have the following staggeringly awesome games to focus on for 2015, and I plan to run campaigns and one-shots for each this year:
Goal: to run at least 1 BRP and/or CoC game each month between D&D sessions.
Goal: to run a short 1-3 session mini campaign for both Void Core and Astounding Adventures; I may waffle and use Cthulhu Rising/Jovian Nightmares instead of Void, though....we'll see.
Goal: to revisit my world of Pergerron with Magic World and to run at least one session of Blood Tide to see if the group has enough interest.
Goal: to run another 4-8 session Savage Worlds Sci Fi campaign in the Savage Space universe and to run at least one of the four published modules for Interface Zero 2. 0 that I picked up (and do more if my players like it)
Mutant Year Zero is freaking me out with how cool it is. My local group isn't as gung-ho about post-apocalypse as I am, but if I have my way we'll run at least one full length campaign in this system sometime in 2015.
Goal: see if I can actually get this thing read and find inspiration to run it.
For 2014 I managed to run Dungeons & Dragons 5E weekly from its date of release, as well as wrap up ongoing Pathfinder campaigns. I got a lot of 13th Age in with three distinct campaigns, and I also managed to get a good Magic World campaign in, as well as a lengthy Savage World Sci-Fi campaign. So all told not too shabby. Will I be able to run as many--or more!--than I did last year? Well.....that's the goal.... and there's at least one or two not on the list I'd like to hit too, but don't want to over-commit to (i.e. Fantasy Hero Sixth Edition, the mythical Deluxe T&T if it comes out in 2015, and The Strange RPG).
As always, any of the product of this gaming addiction shall be liberally sprinkled throughout this blog!
While I understand your feelings towards everything D&D-ish (I love the OSR movement and its wacky themes), and while I deem the BRP system much superior to the D&D rules system, I have found satisfaction with the Monsters & Magic system: on the surface it looks D&D-ish but it's actually more like a narrative rpg in actual play. You should give it a try.
ReplyDeleteI actually have Monsters & Magic, but haven't really done anything with it....I'll dig it out and take a look again. As I recall it looked interesting but served as a sort of "rules system overlay" for OSR games.
DeleteIt's a fully-fledged game, it's not an overlay. You should try and create a party of characters and run them through an old D&D adventure. You'll realise how different the game is in actual 'gameplay' even though it shares the same vocabulary with the D&D-esque games.
DeleteI am intrigued! I'm dragging my PDF around to read up on M&M now.
DeleteOkay, just to make sure there isn't a newer edition out there, but the Monsters & Magic I have is definitely an "overlay" game. It's only got a few levels of content, and specifically states you need to pick your favorite OSR system and use it for additional spells, classes and monsters.
DeleteOK, it does need other OSR books for monsters and spells, but the system itself is standalone.
DeleteIf you use it with an old published adventure (which I understand was Sarah's idea in the 1st place) then all the monster descriptions are already there, and then honestly only the spell descriptions are missing.
I have been running a M&M campaign game for about 1 year and a half, and it certainly feels like its own game.
And if you use Ebon Gryphon Games' M&M supplements (http://ebongryphon.com/main/), then the game really becomes independent, because you have a bestiary and a spellbook.
Ebon Gryphon looks like the resource I need....also, I noticed it looks like mordiphius took M&M up a published since I purchased it from Mindjammer a while ago.
DeleteThere's a lot of neat ideas in this book, need to present it to my group.