OK, I haven't blogged in a few days

First my dad was in the hospital for the last day of the April A-Z challenge, which I guess means I won't be getting a spiffy award for completion this year; then I got sick with the same bug that's hit the rest of my family, I swear children are plague-bearers, this never happened to me before I had kids. After that I guess it's just the laziness about blogging that sets in when you skip a few days, it just gets harder and harder to get back in the saddle; you keep finding excuses. I didn't even have good ones, like "There's a bunch of work to be done outside!", because the weather has been so rainy here.

I actually figured when I got back to blogging it'd be either about my Mongol fixation or about my Oriental Adventures project, still working. I actually tried to entice my D&D group to get back to OA to playtest some of my new stuff, and I have been reading a lot of eastern philosophy, Asian RPG and Miniature game rules sets and novels set in Feudal Japan during my recovery from illness. Actually, the Mongol and feudal Japanese and eastern philosophy all kind of go together for the same project anyway.

On to gaming, we decided, since Lance's work schedule has made his attendance spotty, and since Audra is a new gamer and his girlfriend, so she really only comes to the games he does, and Lee Ann was in San Francisco for some reason; we'd give Star Wars a shot since it was a Star Wars holiday weekend (May the Fourth be with you, Revenge of the Fifth), although our game was technically on the sixth, so I guess you could extend that out to "Revenge of the Sixth"? Too much? Anyway, I decided to GM, despite my desperate desire to actually PLAY in a Star Wars game*. Like many decisions I've made in my life I put off choosing which system to use until the absolute last possible second, the moments leading up to character creation.

WEG D6 system lost out to WotC's D20 system for the sole reason that everyone in the group already knows how to play D&D, and has at least a little bit of experience with 3rd edition D&D. I also have more copies of the rulebooks to pass around for character creation. I went with the D20 revised edition, because I had more stuff for it, and I figured that it probably corrected some issues with the original core rules. My later research on the web seems to indicate that I was right, but that edition would have been a better choice still, but I don't have a lot of Saga edition books and they are stupid expensive on both Amazon and Ebay.

Anyway, I am still going to convert a bunch of my stuff from the D6 system to the D20 system, and a lot of the old WEG stuff is ind of rules-lite anyway. I am setting the campaign during the Rebellion, shortly after the destruction of Alderaan, in fact all of the current PCs are Alderaanians that just happened to be off world when the Death Star destroyed their home world. Now, we know that Alderaan was a peaceful planet with no weapons, yet it was still a hotbed of rebel activity. My take on this is that the average Alderaanian is taught to be like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., it's all about non-violent resistance, right? I figure that this diverse group of survivors, many of whom may have had pro-rebellion sympathies before their home world was destroyed by the Empire, decided to be a little less like Dr. King and a little more like Malcolm X. Passive resistance was no longer an option, it was time for a more active role in their resistance to the Empire.

All of the current PCs are Human, one is a Noble, one is a Soldier (just completed Imperial Flight School!), one is a Force Adept, I assume from some sect of non-Jedi sometimes Force-Sensitive religious cult on Alderaan, and the last is a Scout who had the wanderlust.

Next I got some stuff in the mail-

The Manor was a great little zine and I thoroughly enjoyed every page of it, which is something I can't say about any professionally produced magazine I have bought in a long time. I bought it the day it became available, and I have had it for a few days now, but didn't really get a chance to sit down and read it cover to cover until today. Well worth the money.

Secrets of the Scorpion. I know I swore off buying Legend of the Five Rings stuff as a New Years resolution, but it was such a bargain and I still hold out hope that I may eventually play that game. Plus I fell off the Ebay wagon pretty hard this month, indulging in all of my hobby whims pretty indiscriminately; perhaps not the best idea since my wife's birthday is Friday, followed by Mother's Day on Sunday.

Fortunes and Winds. Another Legends of the Five Rings Score, I don't even know what this book is about, except that I can ALMOST convince myself that it will be useful for my OA project because it is one of the Dual-Statted L5R 2nd edition RPG/3e D&D OA books.

Plus I have probably been thinking about Rokugan lately because my Lion clan just lost a major battle to the Dragon clan in the Emerald Empire game I play on Facebook.

*or a Star Trek game, or a D&D game, I am not picky.