Thursday Night Punctuated Equilibrium

The Hereticwerks blog was the host for January's RPG Blog Carnival. The theme this month was Transitions, whether in games, campaigns, or gaming groups. My regular Twin Cities Thursday night group has experienced plenty of transitions in the past couple of years, and we are looking forward to a great new transition starting next week.

More on that in a bit.

Transitions in our gaming group tend to follow a sort of punctuated equilibrium: we'll play a short campaign or multisession scenario, followed by a number of one shots of various Indie RPGs and storygames.

Recent campaigns/scenarios have included:

• A Blade & Crown campaign run by Eric Gilbertson; this is the first B&C campaign I have played in that wasn't run by the game's designer, Rachel Kronick. I think she had as much fun as I did finally getting to play her own game. I played my Eric Stoltz-inspired assassin, Stabber, with great gusto in that campaign.
• The Alwyn Campaign, an episodic campaign I ran using Fate Accelerated Edition. The setting was the future ruined Earth of the Babylon 5 universe. We could come back to this campaign at some point. It was fun researching locations in the Twin Cities, and then extrapolating how they would look as far future ruins.
• A playtest of a scenario for my forthcoming Fate product series, Project Generations which will be published by Modiphius Productions. We used Starblazer Adventures for the playtest!
• Rachel Kronick ran a playtest of a forthcoming scenario for Blade & Crown. I had a lot of fun running a callow, brutal young mage in that one!
• A playtest of Fate of Tekumel (TM) scenario that I will be publishing professionally some time in the next year. This will be a Tekumel Foundation-licensed Approved for Tekumel product, with wonderful art by Juan Ochoa.

Interspersed between these scenarios/mini-campaigns were numerous one shot games using a plethora of different systems including:

• OG, Robin Laws' caveman game. We did a few different one-shots of this game
• Lost Days of Memories and Madness, which our group calls the "elf memory game"
• The Quiet Year, a wonderful storygame involving mapping a community and what happens to it during its final year before the Frost Shepherds come.  
• Monsterhearts, your friendly neighborhood angsty let's all play high school monsters RPG. 
• Heirs to the Lost World, Chad Davidson's wonderful alternate history RPG with pirates, Mayans, Aztecs, and more in the 17th Century Caribbean.
• Durance, Jason Morningstar's "Botany Bay in space" storygame.

There's probably several more one-shots that I am missing.

So where are we headed in 2014? 

Next up is a campaign of Night's Black Agents, Ken Hite's RPG of espionage and vampire conspiracies. It should be pretty cool, as the GM is running the game in Eastern Europe, where he worked in the Foreign Service. We'll be doing a test drive of this GUMSHOE system RPG next week, and the campaign-proper will launch as soon as we all recover from Con of the North, where we're collectively running numerous games, as the House of Indie Games! 

Whew!