This is a catch-up post because I have been out of action
for a bit. I do apologize but life got the better of me for a bit. I was (and
still am) working three jobs, taking some Masters level Applied Ethics classes,
dealing with my son’s school issues due to his special needs, and having a
minor health crisis that almost landed me in the hospital. Enough about my
personal life let’s talk about my game life, which is another form of crisis. I
basically due to all the stuff going on had to shelf a lot of my games. The
games club that I ran at my school is limping along, and are running games
amongst themselves with little assistance from me. My hope is that with the new
semester coming up, a few things are happening. 1) I am not teaching next term,
so that is one less job. This is good and bad, stress-wise it helps, but
fiscally it hurts a bit. 2) I am taking a term off of school and focusing a bit
more on health stuff. 3) I am going to start writing more again. I still have
plans to produce an Old School Essentials book in some form, I just need to
tackle some software and get the stuff out there, which is the scariest part.
I want
to take a moment to talk about the ever expanding OSE community which I have
come to love quite a bit. If you are not a member of at least one of the major social
media platforms it is active on, you are missing out. The three that are very
active are the Facebook Old School Essentials Group, the MeWe Necrotic GnomeGroup, and the Necrotic Gnome Discord group. All of these channels are quite
active, especially since the books have started shipping. I am still waiting on
mine, hopefully this week they will be in though. I really want to be able to
finger through the pages and just soak it all in as I have been an avid fan
since the Kickstarter went through.
As for
the gaming front I plan to start a new campaign in the next year. I would love
to do Barrowmaze because I heard it is very good. I don’t like the price
though, and I have a few qualms professionally with a professor making students
buy his expensive books for class and therefore profiting off students directly.
I know he is not the first professor to do it, but it is not my cup of tea. I
am trying to find possibly a used copy, I’d love to buy one off one of his
students complaining that they have to own it. If anyone knows of someone
selling a copy of the OSR version, I’d love to talk to them.
I want
to keep running WEG Star Wars too. I have a true passion for this game and I
have reacquired a large portion of my old collection. I plan to do a review or
two of some of the older books and let people have a glance at my growing
collection. In fact I just won a SUPER cheap copy of Tramp Freighters for $17
via the Facebook group RPG Auctions. Considering they average eBay price is
around $60, I was thrilled. I have managed to get many of the books for under
$5 and even printed the REUP version of the rules via Lulu.
 |
| REUP Rule are amazing |
To sum
up, I know it has been awhile, but I am back in the saddle and will be pushing
content soon enough. One final paper and I am done with school for a while.
I went ahead and created a Facebook group for the blog, if you are interested the link is here.
I went ahead and created a Facebook group for the blog, if you are interested the link is here.
I know Barrowmaze is expensive, but it does give a lot for the money. We're 18 months into a Barrowmaze campaign (also using OSE) and I know that we've only scratched the surface. We've only covered about a tenth of the map. In addition, it's prompted other roleplay - the party started interacting with the inhabitants of the base town, and has built a stronghold. I personally would reccommend it. You can save some money by not buying the book of illustrations (great though they are).
ReplyDeleteI see the value, but it is still VERY expensive. As I stated above too, I kind of disagree with the author on some principles as an educator in higher ed too. This is why I was hoping to find one of his students trying to sell their copy.
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