Happy Belated Thanksgiving and Happy Anniversary Mona

I hate when I take a break from blogging, it always seems harder to get back to it than if I'd just kept going. Here in the US, of course, we had Thanksgiving on Thursday. We've also had a house guest for Thanksgiving, our family friend Michael, who comes up several times a year from New Jersey, apparently for the peace, quiet and fresh air. Sickness, in the form of some virulent plague, also paid us a visit. John brought it home with him from wrestling practice on Tuesday evening after school and it has since passed through the rest of us, Mona is sick now, and probably has it worse than anyone else but John had it. I had it and my iron constitution shook it off pretty easily. Sadly for Mona, today is our wedding anniversary; we've been legally married for seven years now. Here's a fun trivia fact- our wedding anniversary is on the same date as the anniversary of the day that we had our first date, way back in 1993; purely by coincidence.

Gaming-wise it's been an unusual time for me too. I created a Steppe Warriors tribute page on Facebook, for those of you that don't remember, or haven't been following the blog long enough to have seen the stories; the Steppe Warriors are a Mongol warrior roleplaying guild created in 1996 for the original Neverwinter Nights on AOL. This led me to talk to Darryl today, first via email, then over the phone, for the first time in a few years. I guess we'll see where this takes us. Darryl and I have a relationship that goes back decades and has been filled with great partnerships and great clashes of vision. In some ways I think we are like central NY RPG gaming's version of Lennon and McCartney, take your pick on which of us is which. We talked for like 2 hours, he told me he read my blog. Turns out he recognized one of my blog followers as a guy from one of his gaming groups, small world.

Today he tried to convince me that Fudge is a better system than AD&D or D&D, again; which I find amusing because that makes him the anti-version of his dad, who was always looking to make a more simulationist wargame-ey RPG. I think Big Darryl would still hate 3rd and 4th edition D&D, despite their more tactical and rules heavy nature, because they aren't simulationist enough, but he might consider them a step in the right direction; or he might just think they were piling on even more errors onto a bad chassis, it's hard to tell. Darryl, on the other hand, wants more rules light than I do. I am comfortable playing the same game I grew up playing, that everyone I play with already knows the rules for and I can DM with little to no preparation, I might consider other rules systems to break myself out of a rut, but I am unlikely to give up on D&D as my workhorse of choice. It may not be simple, elegant or new, but it is tried, proven and everyone understands it.

I also saw Lance yesterday and played a game of Munchkin with him and his new girlfriend here at my house, that was nice. He came bearing gifts too, although not really out of the kindness of his heart (or so he said), but because he didn't have anyplace to store them and wanted them to go somewhere they'd see some use. The gifts were a huge box of paints and washes for miniatures, old issues of The Dragon and Polyhedron and some old Miniatures, mostly older citadel Dwarves and some other stuff. I recognized some Grenadier Kobolds in there too, for instance. I haven't inventoried the whole box yet. The oldest Dragon I spotted on a quick check was #87. Does every old gamer have a huge box of old issues of The Dragon? I do, mine goes back to #49.