Today the last regular post to Ten Years on Terra went up, the weekdaily blog I've been keeping of the A Time of War (MechWarrior) tabletop I've been running for the last year. Writing that has been a major contributing factor to the lack of posts on this LJ -- most of my content creation effort has been going there, trying very hard to keep up with the once-a-weekday schedule I was holding myself to. The first three weeks were definitely the hardest, but anytime the frontlog dropped below three entries or so was stressful.

On the other hand, maintaining the log was a tremendous boon to my as a gamemaster, and made sure that I spent at least a few hours a week thinking about the game, even if I wasn't running that particular week. I think I may make this a regular feature of my GMing style -- perhaps not publicly (this one was partially done as a service to the rest of the BattleTech community) but the public exposure definitely motivated me to keep writing.

I could make comments on the game itself, but I've already done so (quite exhaustively) there.

In an effort to get more content here, I asked darkoni42 to provide me with seven topics to talk about. I believe the rules of this meme obligate me to pay these topics forward on request, but I expect everyone who reads this and is likely to participate has already gotten a goodly set of topics for themselves.

So, without further ado, ( I'll strain to remember how to use an lj-cutCollapse )

ELO just came down. Tomorrow at 0355 I lift for Nevada, and stay there for 8 days. Figures this happens the day before my winter Battleforce campaign is supposed to start. Fortunately, I have compotent and well-versed players, and not much should happen the first week. Anybody going to be in Reno this weekend?

I spent a good chunk of today with noble_resonance fleshing out a mini-campaign to run at Gaming Weekend on Saturday. I'm fairly happy with how its turned out, but there is still much work to be done. It ended up far more on the tactical end of the tactical/logistic curve than I originally planned, but I think that's fine. Logistical play is well and good, but without the "test", the engagements between bouts of repairs, there's only so much decision-making. Really digging into the campaign rules would require, well, a campaign.

Today I spent working out of my "home office", i.e., a desk with a scanner and a printer, and my cell phone. I got an astonishing amount done, though. I finally got all caught up on my overseas T&E, supported 3 different installations and got my marching orders for early August. Huzzah! On top of everything else, between calls, I also finally painted my little McKenna miniature that I bought at TE on Friday.

( Pictures Behind The CutCollapse )

I've spent a fair amount of my free time this week making intial prepartions for a BattleTech Strategic Game in 2006. I've been getting a lot of interest in the game, and its made it clear to me that I'm going to have to have an automated data gathering and distribution system -- manually running the turns the way I did in 2004 isn't going to fly. On the plus side, I have the BSG rules set from FanPro now, which will help a lot in preventing some of the excessive complexity of the last game.

( Discussion of MechanicsCollapse )

I hope to launch the BT2006 game shortly after the start of C-Term if there's sufficient interest in it.

I am so falling back into Battletech.

I actually bought the latest sourcebook online as a PDF, which is a first for me. Now that I'm on the road as much as I am, carrying books around is somewhat cumbersome (and adds to my already 50+ lbs of luggage), so the PDFs seem to make sense. Also, being able to full-text search a 150-page sourcebook for a random entry I half-remember is so incredibly useful I wonder how I got away without it before. Ironically, because PDFs are only available through a single distributor (BattleCorps), the PDFs cost $18 a pop, as opposed to $24 for the printed version. That's not so bad (figure $18 of that price is R&D and $6 is production costs), but if you purchase the same book through Amazon, it comes to $16, cheaper than the PDF.

I am fascinated by this new method of distributing RPG material, and wish to explore it further.

So last night I decided to go forth and find a copy of Dawn of the Jihad. I'm in Manhattan, so I figured somewhere must have it. It was slightly discouraging that Classic Battletech didn't list any distributors in NYC, but I plugged up "games stores" on the handy-dandy Intar-Web-O-Matic, and found a shop at Union Square called Forbidden Planet that seemed to be quite sizable. I took off across the city after work to check that place out. Alas, the store was overly focused on Comic Books, which although nifty, wasn't what I was out for. For any of my friends, though, who are into comic books, I'm in the city the rest of the week and I know how to get back there, so let me know if you need any particular piece of comic book merchandise -- they seem to have quite a selection, going back a rather long ways.

Oh, and for fans of L33t D00d, the Fourth Coming has arrived.