Need to find my groove

This whole writing-for-a-purpose thing is not clicking for me just yet. Since taking on the Foe File gig I've written far less this week than when I was just bullshitting on this blog. I think I need to develop a definite routine, like maybe get up early each day expressly for writing. I'm going to try to jumpstart the whole process by taking a day off work this week and devote at least half the day just to writing villains. I got some good ideas a-swirling in my head, I just need to bare down and get them typed up. (I've had some ideas for my Planetbrokers! card game and an 3.5SRD based little product, too. I'm so flighty, sometimes it's hard staying focused on just one project.)

Last week's Monday night group introduced me to two new games (no Bohnanza!), first we played a couple round of Tigris & Euphrates, a tile-laying German game. Great stuff. I won one of the rounds on beginner's luck alone. I'll need to play this one several more time before I know what I'm doing. The harder game for the night was one of those rail games in which you draw the tracks on the map with a crayon. I can't quite remember the title, American Rails maybe? I'd play that sort of thing again. Though once again my lame geography skills show through: I'm supposed to pick up goods in Boise? Where the hell is Boise? Basically I spend a lot of time quietly scanning the map for the cities I'm trying to locate, hoping not to look too foolish in the process.

My sister and I played about 5 games of Carcassonne over Thanksgiving. She's getting pretty darn good at it too. She won three games and tied me on a fourth. I think I played too agressively and wasted a lot of effort trying to steal cities from her. I get that way when playing my little sis. We're both very competitive when gaming against each other. That sibling rivalry of old just plays out on the tabletop.

Pat was over yesterday for our usual BS session. Towards the end of the night we got talking about the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. That book has some really neat stuff in it, like the prestige variants of the core classes (Prestige Paladin, Prestige Ranger, Prestige Bard) and the generic classes. I need to take another long look at that book, and maybe doing something with it.

Wednesday night is pancake house night. Dennis is still not quite done with his group playing Everknight for Savage Worlds, so the rest of us are in a holding pattern. Maybe Dave will bring his X-box or I'll bring something boardgamey. I hate to let good roleplaying time go to pasture like that, but I don't have enough prep time at this point to run anything. Pity. If I had the time I'd run the starting adventure in the back of Mutants & Masterminds or something simple for d20 Modern. Maybe I could do one of those on the 15th, assuming Everknight doesn't end on Wednesday.

One of my prospective players for the Blue Rose Fast Play is apparently ignoring my e-mail invitation to play. Assuming I drag Dave Hoover along for this thing (hi, Dave!), that gives me 3 players for a 4-player adventure. I need a fourth player and ideally that player should be female. Unfortunately, I don't know many gamer grrlz.

I've been thinking about what sort of games to run in the immediate future. I've decided to run my Occult Crimes Taskforce idea as a Winter War game, instead of a mini-campaign with the pancake house crew. Frankly, given my committment to this game outfit I ought to be running some OGL stuff. I could run D&D 3.5 (with Unearthed Arcana-based weirdness) or d20 Modern using canned mini-modules. Assuming I get a copy of d20 Future, I could do a sort of Traveller and Battletech inspired mercenary campaign, as a prelude to my Hardy's Hardlucks project. And then there's Mutants & Masterminds. For that I could restart my Home Team "limited series" or build a new little campaign world from the ground up. Decisions, decisions...

(Wow. This post is link-tastic! It's also longer than my work so far on Foe File #1. Le sigh.)