Recruiting for UA-LC DCC game

Under the auspices of UA-LC I am going to run a 2 session arc of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It will start with a home-brew funnel and then probably a level 1 adventure. To simplify things people should use http://purplesorcerer.com/create.htm to generate their 4 0's (feel free to discard and try again if you don't like your results) and we will go from there.

I am looking at two Thursday nights, 7/12 and 7/19, from 8:00pm-11:00pm EDT on G+ (we will probably use twiddla for mapping).

There are four or five slots available (one slot is reserved if that person is available and still wants it). Comment here or at the post on UA-LC and if there are not enough slots I will determine who gets them randomly (hopefully tomorrow).

Gamer ADD

The email I just sent off to my players:

Hi guys,

My interest in prepping/running SWN is waning already. This is a really bad sign. I feel guilty for dropping the game(s) we have been playing so quickly after starting them but if I'm not feeling it I know that it will not take long before it reflects in the quality of what I have prepared, etc.

I think the problem I've been facing this past year is that in an effort to please the most people I am not DMing the games that I actually feel excited about playing. Because I would actually like to run a sustained campaign I need to stop that.

So . . . I am going to drop SWN.

I am going to try to run an old school fantasy game: I'd be interested in running Labyrinth Lord (B/X - AD&D retroclone), Swords & Wizardry (0ed retroclone), or Dungeon Crawl Classics (rules light d20 with old school flavor)). If you are not interested in playing I 100% understand and I will take no offense whatsoever.

That being said, after starting a new game, I will commit (to myself - and to you) to run at least 10 sessions before switching to a new system.

Please let me know if you are interested and if you have a system preference.

Again sorry for the ADD.

I hate switching things around all the time and I feel enormously guilty about doing it to players. But if I am going to put in the many hours of work to run a game, I really ought to be having fun.

The Sector

Final (GMs) sector map:

As full descriptions are written for each world (they are just outlines right now) I will post them.

Decision! (And Time-Keeping in Space)

I have decided! After much flip-flopping I've decided that I will run a fantasy game online to scratch that itch and keep Stars Without Number to the table-top. That also saves me from having to deal with meticulous, AD&D DMG style time keeping in my table-top game and frees me up to post more here.

I realized that time-keeping in an AD&D style SWN game is really problematic when the party traveled to a planet 2 hexes away. They were traveling in a spike drive-1 ship so it took 16 days (2 to reach the edge of the solar system, 6 for each hex, 2 to get back in to the next planet). Traveling from one edge of the sector to the other in a slow ship would suddenly add many weeks to one party's timeline. Now, strict time-keeping does not matter for most purposes, but part of the point of running a multi-party SWN campaign was to allow them all to influence the world equally, which is hard to do without time-keeping.

Sand in the Stars

So to cure my burnout on Pathfinder and to reinvigorate both myself and the group we will be playing Stars Without Number. I had been hoping to run a game of it over the summer and so it will be. Hopefully by the fall the game will still be going and all of the groundwork will be done. I have decided that as a build our sandbox I will post the goods here.

The first thing is the sector map:

I used the cosmic tool-set of hexographer. We have a few good star clusters and a couple of isolated star systems.

As this is a far-future game, my chosen constraint is that everything must be digital. Also, I will try to post as much as possible of the material I create in the hopes of turning this blog from random blathering to actual useful content.

EDIT

I am leaning towards running a SWN for UA-LC  so I don't want to spoil things online. So I have replaced the sector map with the players version. I guess that also means if it ends up happening I won't post secret information. Still if you are reading this you can look forward to plenty of SWN stuff.

Fizzle

It seems that my regular game has fizzled. Does anyone else have a hard time as an adult trying to keep a regular game sustained? Once upon a time campaigns lasted 6 months, a year, now it seems like we struggle to keep anything going for more than a few sessions. I've experimented with larger groups to try to ameliorate attendance problems, but it is difficult to find enough high-quality players in my area.  I'm hoping that with summer around the corner I will be able to start up my planned Stars Without Number game soon. One possible advantage of SWN is that we may not be quite so dependent on having people show up regularly - there is no reason it cannot be played with just two (or even one!) player.

I'm also thinking about running something online - and definitely something as part of UA-LC. The question is now . . . what? The advantage of UA-LC is that I could play around with short term arcs of this and that. Currently considering DCC, SWN, LL, or S&W.