One of Those Days...

Or rather two, in a row. Yesterday I had a tire inexplicably just explosively deflate at a stoplight, it was a rear tire and I honestly wasn't sure what had happened at first. When the light changed I drove through and pulled into a parking lot and got out to check and my passenger side rear tire was just flat. I figured if it had to happen at least I was in the city and right in front of a store, so I went in to buy a can of fix-a-flat. It didn't work, which indicated to me that there was some fairly serious tire damage, as I suspected from a rapid, explosive deflation, but fix-a-flat is relatively cheap and I was in a hurry. It was cold out and kind of raining and I was taking my daughter to a doctors appointment, so, rather than screw around with the tiny donut spare and crappy scissor jack that come standard with minivans, I called AAA for a tow to a shop for a new tire, and my dad, who lives about 2 miles from my house and about 12 miles from the city, for a ride to the appointment and back home. That all went off fairly well and quickly and my daughter was only about 15 minutes late, which was pretty good considering. We had planned on doing some grocery shopping on the way home, which is why my wife was really with us, and my dad was happy to oblige us in that regard too. We stopped off at the garage before leaving the city and made sure they had all the proper contact information and everything and they said they'd most likely get back to me before they closed shop for the evening. They did not.

When I get home I read through my blog roll and buy a copy of Tim Shorts' module "Knowledge Illuminates", I skim through it too. I like it. I will probably run it to kick off a campaign eventually. I'll alter it to fit my campaign world, but I always do.

I had a doctors appointment this morning, no big deal- just a check up, but my daughter also has another appointment moved to today, because doctors offices, at least around here, expect that you can rearrange your schedule at a moments notice. So I have to call my dad for a ride into town again. Mona comes along for the ride with us too and forwards the house calls to her cell phone. We go through all the appointments without any word from the garage. So I go back to the garage and talk to the people in the service department, apparently they don't have any tires in my minivan's size (15"), which strikes me as odd because the last time I had a flat tire they had a used one there for me, but whatever; not only do they not have any 15's, there aren't any in the entire city of Oswego. They have to special order me a tire and it won't be there until tomorrow, and this single tire is going to cost $97 and change. They tried telling me that nobody uses 15s anymore, but my dad's minivan is essentially the same as mine, only newer, it's 4 years old now and it has 15s on it.

So now I am kind of ranting about totally non-gaming related stuff on a primarily gaming blog, I have some cool topics lined up, but I am too tired to write about them coherently. I didn't get anything done on Obsidian Portal either yesterday or today. I am still trying to decide whether or not to go back to my original vision of Garnia with the (mostly) Celtic people, the sole exception being the Saxons in Wodanslund; which I am leaning towards, or to just throw in everything including the kitchen sink and retcon everything. I still haven't given myself a good reason to include Halflings in the setting, the only reason that they are there now is that they are an AD&D 1st edition player character race from the Players Handbook and they appeared in the Monster Manual. My wife says that I make too big a deal out of trying to make sense out these things, I say that these things need to make sense to me for me to make them real to my players, verisimilitude. Hobbits worked with the verisimilitude of Tolkien's Middle Earth, I fear they work against my Garnia by making it an imitation.

Anyway, here's some stuff that came in the mail today-



Shinobi Ryu for the Sengoku RPG, now I really have all of the stuff for this game. Sadly, I will most likely never play it.



Graduation Exercise for the Task Force Games version of Prime Directive, oddly, I believe this marks the final item in this game's inventory too. I will actually try to convince people to play this one, but I am not holding out a lot of hope, probably as a one-shot, if at all.



West End Games Star Wars Rebel Alliance Sourcebook for the 1st edition of the game, it's a first printing too, and in pretty fine shape. I played some Star Wars back in the day, or I should say, I GMed it, apparently we quit before this book came out because I never saw it. I flipped through it, it seems pretty cool like most of the D6 Star Wars stuff the WEG put out, although I heard that the 2nd edition of the game, while technically superior, lost a lot of it's heart; I haven't really seen a lot of the 2nd edition products, and the ones I have are real peripheral material, not core products, so I couldn't really make that assessment.