Tekumel

I've acquired a copy of Gardasiyal: Adventures on Tekumel, and I've been considering trying out a game of Tekumel to see what it's like.  I've been doing a lot of reading about the setting and what people who've run it have to say.

It does sound interesting, so a long-time gaming buddy and I have got the notion to go through character generation as a test drive.  I've also been reading Dave Morris' Tirikelu rules for Tekumel, they look concise and seem to have the flavour of the game built-in, perhaps they'll work better than Gardaiyal.  We'll find out soon.

Fizzle

The fall gaming thing fizzled out after a few weeks, largely my own fault -- I simply didn't have the energy to put into it.  We played a multi-session one-shot of Stuart Robertson's Citadel of Evil mini-module using the Swords & Wizardry White Box rules.

Everyone had a lot of fun and it was great to rediscover the joys of playing an rpg that fit into less pages than the character generation section of many "modern" rpgs.  Seyoung, my wife, had never played a role playing game before; she had a lot of fun and thought she'd enjoy more.

We had started generating characters for Traveller (Classic) and were ready to begin, but it kind of got lost pre-Christmas.  I'll have to see about firing it up again sometime during the summer for a session or two.

Back to the Table/Bamboo Dice Tower

We've recently started playing a loosely organized series of one-shots. My idea was to try out a bunch of different, largely old-school or old-school inspired, role-playing games.
Over the past couple of decades of gaming we've mostly been playing while sitting around the living room on couches, etc. People were always distracted and would start reading magazines or playing with smartphones, etc. during a game, so I decided that when running my games we'd play around the table, no electronics. Just paper, pencils and dice.
It's been working. So far we've had three or four solid sessions with no distractions and everyone playing with their full attention. This led me to look into means of keeping dice from ricocheting around the table and onto the floor.
I bought a number of cheap bamboo pencil holders from the local dollar store, hacked them apart and rebuilt them into a dice tower. It makes a nice clatter that's almost musical and it just looks really nice. Total cost $6 (plus a few nights of hacking, gluing and clamping, then a coat of tung oil.)
If you haven't been doing it, or haven't done it in a while, try going back to the table and leaving the gizmos behind. It's really brought the focus back to the people at the table and the game that they're playing.

Come jump the wall

I've been thinking about doing a blog about old-school gaming for a while now. Here's a toast to first efforts at public blogging. EDIT: The blog title comes from a Walter Mapes verse (links to the Latin verse with English translation): "Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori." == "I propose to end my days in a tavern"