On a Roll

So things have taken off!  Looks like we've pretty much got a party and are decided on the area we're playing in (California/Great Maze).  So the writing begins.  I think I've got the first of the adventures planned out, but I need to flesh out the town.  It'll be time to sit down and see if I have the tools to fill that in (With Visio, Illustrator, and my ProFantasy Suite I should).

Now since my player read here, I'm going to do my best to not throw many spoilers in this blog.  I'll mention though that the player will be inland of the Maze itself and a bit to the north.  I'm not big on the "big city" sceen, so they're not playing in anything labled on the maps (ok, they are, but only if they're scanning The Great Maze ) Fortunately its a place without much history anywhere int he game, so it gives me a pretty blank canvas to work with.  Now all I have to do is put pen to paper and get this down.

Next sessions looks to be the start of the campaign proper.  There is 1 person who needs to get a character together, and some backgrounds I want to fully work up for folks still, but I think we've got a good posse coming together (even if I had to tell them 1 more guy with both Honorable and Loyal and I'd kill em all).  The pure numbers on "magically" active characters should really set this up for an explosive start.  Nicely enough it seems that the groups backgrounds are coming together nicely, though I will have to see what Nightmares they have come up with...

On the hobby side of things, Origins was a blast!  Managed to get quite a bit of Reaper Minis, including the first 4 from the Savage World line!  Already ahve Stone up on the painting table (just remember that players...) Also managed to get some Miniature Building Authority deals as well.  Looking to expand things next with some peices from Master Maze at GenCon I hope.  Now that I have a town picked, I can start looking at more buildings for it as well.  Hopefully the booths at GenCon will have some of the other miniature lines I'm looking for, cause I'll be saving up money for that.

Also spent the week learning to better photograph minis.  I'm still pretty bad at the whole thing (and might even try another camera for it) but I did manage to get at least 1 shot I'm pretty happy with.  Plus with where we've decided to play, the mini might just be used at some point. So for now, I'll leave you something pretty to look at.  Until next time pardners!

So we drew characters the past Sunday.  Well 4 of the supposed 6 players got to anyway.  I will note here, that Eric no longer gets to draw from the Jack Daniel’s cards.  He’s gonna have to get a new deck to play with.

Unfortunately for me (as GM) I only had one play draw a Joker, and one player decide to go for Vet of the Weird West (well so far, there are a few holding on to that option).  I’m starting to get a feel for the characters as being a group of loyal and upstanding citizens.  So far in discussion it seems like everyone wants to start as a 1 town game. That give me a bit of focus now as I write some of the first adventure.  I had 3 different adventures in mind originally, and 1 adventure I had to drop with the focus on a single town (though it is still savable for later… remember that when you go for a train ride guys).  This has at least gotten me a bit more focused on looking at towns and places that the players might end up at. Next game though we’ll narrow that down, when I have everyone here.

Now we reminisce on Eric and his draw. 4 aces, 2 Kings and 4 queens… while we watched him shuffle.  His throw aways were an 8 and a 4.  He is either the trickiest card shark I know, or the luckiest S.O.B. On the plus side the Joker player and the Vet are one in the same.  He could end up being a pretty interesting character.  What I’m looking forward to is the average guy… I want to see what he does with a pretty average person card draw.  He had been spinning a few character concepts around, so we’ll see what he’s got planned when we meet up again.

On the Hobby side of things, I have set up the photo booth once to take some pics of the first mini that is related to Deadlands.  Next week I’ll post up the final shots of that, I’m working them in post-production.  Also got myself an electric paint shaker from Micro-Mark (yeah, I’m that lazy…). A few more goodies came in as well, but I’m not letting the players see those yet.  Needless to say, it’ll make the table look good when these components are out there.

On another note, Origins Game Fair is this coming week. I will be there looking for minis and accessories for my game table. I know a few of you who read this will be out that way… hoping to catch you and hang out some.  I’ll also be working for Catalyst Game Labs while I’m there, so if you don’t run into me on the floor, try and catch me in the RPG room.

Assets

So I am cleaning up the last of an adventure for another system now, hopefully it’ll head out to publication soon!  Past that though, I’m going to focus my efforts here and with Deadlands O.G. material.  (Well other than the amount of time I’ll spend at Origins doing Shadowrun… but that’s not for the home game anyway)  For this blog and my home game though, I’m going to attempt a once a week update (erratically I’m sure). 

So I’m starting this one with a look at the play area and the assets currently in place for gaming.  We use the full finished space in our basement here for any and all gaming purposes.  For this though, we’ve gotten pretty lucky in finding a great table.  There is a Big Lots right around the corner from us here in Centerville/Wash. Township, which tends to get some really great deals on nice stuff.  What you see pictured here is a 9’x3.5’ Broyhill which we managed to score so cheap I won’t even tell you (it might make you weep).  Bookcases are standard Ikea fare back there, and the whiteboard is of course just off the shelf from Office Depot.  The room and storage is in place though, and ready to roll (my players even got new lights put in this week).

Now the sound system isn’t as advanced yet (yes that’s my Droid and some Altec-Lansigns).  Currently I’m putting together some playlists for it, and training the Johnny Cash and “Wanted Dead or Alive” stations on Pandora.  Also as a note to that, Midnight Syndicate has enough on Pandora for a station, which is pretty awesome atmosphere music for gaming sessions. ). Managed to get my hands on the Weird West CD and the collection of music from the 10^th anniversary L.E. of Deadlands.  I do however really want to advance my setup some, maybe even to a full computer sound system (I’ve been looking at an open source sound effects collection recently

The last area is the most in disarray right now, the minis zone.  My hope is that we can get the other side of the basement fixed up in the coming year and really get this taking off! I have even gone as far as picking up a small photo studio to do some minis pictures as I get them painted and rolled off the rack. Mainly I’ve got some Chronoscope minis (Reaper) that I’m working on now, but as you can see from my links on the sidebar there, I’ve been looking into lots more companies.  I’m hoping a few of those will be at Origins or GenCon so that I can look over the collections.

This week the rest of the Deadlands O.G. books are rolling in.  Got the GM’s screen today, so I’m fully set to go on that front. Also got my new set of 11.5g poker chips, now I’m looking for a good saddlebag to go with it.  There are some great booths I plan to check out at Origins for it though!

This coming weekend is character creation time!  I’m looking forward to seeing what my gang comes up with.  And I believe details will be my next update!

Here we go!

So after a long hiatus from the world of longer term blogging, I've decided to return again.  This time I'm finding that I really would like to focus on one thing here though, instead of random snippets of life.  So her eit is, a blog to follow the upcoming campaign I'll soon be running in the Deadlands setting.

I decided that I would write this blog after looking over all that would be avalible to this game!  O Scale and 1:48 scale models.  All sorts of miniature companies doing some excelllent Western era minis.  Not to mention crazy things I've seen in my travels, like scale size river boats...  This seemed the perfect place to start on going completely overboard on doing an RPG.

So since my players decided that they wanted to stop the last campaign we were running (after 2 years straight), I decided that this should be the one to go overboard on.  The vote was taken and Deadlands came out the winner!  After some looking it over, the group also decided that the Original Game (hereafter refered to as O.G.- thus Deadlands O.G.) was the way they wanted to play.

To those who know my Shadowrun obsession, it will come as no surprise that the first thing I started doing was hunting books. 2 weeks into the hunt and I have managed to secure 7 of the books and have a few more shipping.  Already I have reread the Players and Marshall's books and am ready for the upcoming start of the campaign.  I already told everyone they would probably have 2 sessions to get their characters together.  So being and every opther week game, that means the next month will also be my time to prep for this undertaking.

My goal here is to share with folks what I'm going to do with this campaign, and the development of my game from start to finish.  Kind of a highlight of the many hobbies that go together to make a game go off.  Hopefully over time, I can garner a few followers who might enjoy what I have to offer here!  Those of you who do find me, I hope you'll post up some of your interesting tips and tricks for teh games you run as well!