Coming Out of the Basement

We’ve been pretty poor at updating the Basement, and for that I apologize. I’ll try to do some more posts, particularly since I’ve recently found myself scrutinizing the RPG industry quite a bit, recently. I’m in three games at the moment, and even at 1/mo each, it’s a lot to balance with work and school and publishing and all that jazz. Gaming wise, I’m in two 4E Dark Sun campaigns, and I’ll soon be running a Pathfinder game. Some interesting things in recent days:

*WotC’s character builder is going online-only in a Silverlight based application tomorrow. I have the luxury of being a yearly subscriber, for now, and this change doesn’t really directly affect me. It does affect other people in my gaming group, however, and I’m not sure what they’re going to do. (And Silverlight? Really?) Judging from the posts on WotC’s and some other sites, a lot of people aren’t very happy about this change. Even I have to agree that WotC’s communication has been pretty abysmal. I’m pretty sure this is due to Hasbro’s corporate structure, but I have to say I prefer the communication from Paizo. Speaking of Paizo…

*I don’t know if I wrote about this before, but I had been running a game for the females in one of my groups of friends, who decided to ditch the guys and do their own thing for awhile. It was a 4E game, and I like to think it was pretty successful. A new baby/move and work have taken two of the six players, and we’ve gotten one new player in the game. With that change, we decided to start a new game, and we’re going with Pathfinder. I’ve been dying to play Pathfinder for awhile now, and the CB change has made it so that they don’t feel that they’re particularly tied to 4E. I started a campaign site on Obsidian Portal; you can see it if you’re my friend there. I picked up a whole lot of Pathfinder RPG material in the last few days, after subscribing to their latest Adventure Path- and that is a fascinating business model that I’ll ask you all about some time. It looks like I’ll be mixing in some Arcana Unearthed/Evolved in the game as well. Speaking of Arcana Unearthed…

*Met Monte Cook again at an event hosted by Dragon’s Lair this past weekend. Qyandri often accuses me of being a Monte Cook fanboy, and as I was trying to decide which books of his to take to DL for him to sign, I had to somewhat agree. =P (I decided on Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved, Monte Cook’s World of Darkness, and Ptolus.) I also expected our very own Basement’s Michael to show up with his and Derek’s AE publications at some point. ;) Monte Cook was quite nice, and I also met or saw a host of other game designers that are apparently living in Austin. Chris Pramas, Adam Daigle, Brandon Hodge- all seemed like very cool folk. Speaking of Monte Cook…

*I unfortunately hadn’t been paying enough attention to my dungeonaday.com charter membership since I hadn’t been running anything regularly, but went back to it in preparation for the PF game. It looks like Stan! and the folk over at Super Genius Games are taking over a lot of the day to day activities there. Monte Cook assures everyone that he’s still contributing and ultimately going over everything, but I wonder what that particular change portends, if anything… Speaking of changes…

*Playing WoW again, in the library guild on the Aerie Peak server, with Qyandri. We’ve also brought along our housemate and a bunch of other friends, so Austin is currently a bit overrepresented in the library guild. ;) The Cataclysm changes have us worried, though, so we’ll see how that goes…