Heroes, arise from your grave!

I made some progress this week on converting the PCs of my Home Team campaign from the archaic Heroes Unlimited rules that we had been using over to Mutants & Masterminds, the hot new system on the block. For reasons that I cannot fully explain, MnM got me working on a campaign with much more enthusiasm than Silver Age Sentinels ever did. Was it the slimmer, less intimidating-looking book? The use of levels? Certainly one of the reasons I went with HU initially was the use of levels as an easy way to gauge character growth. Conberting the PCs has been reasonably problem free. The Dingo, Cyborg, and Radarman are pretty much the same guys. Sue's PC (Jill Montgomery, Agent of SHIELD) is a little tougher. The breadth of Jill's core abilities (chemist, acrobat, blackbelt, SHIELD-trained operative armed with advanced SHIELD technology) makes it difficult to squeeze her into the same points as the rest of the team while retaining useful power levels. I think the best solution will probably be to allow her to start with more points but then give her half xp until the others catch up to her. That shouldn't take too long, since I'm continuing to utilize a fast-track advancement policy. After I get all the PCs squared away I then need to stat up some villains. I've got something of a plot for the next Home Team session already going on in my head. It builds off the fact that Radarman is in New York looking for the man who gunned down his brother.

Wednesday last week turned out to be a night of cardgames. First we attempted to play a game called Beer: the Card Game. Maybe it plays better when you actually have beers to consume. To the sober geeks playing it at the Pancake Hut, it was just a badly written cardgame. Then we played a couple quick games of Chrononauts. While it isn't my favorite Looney Labs game, it's still pretty darn fun. We then tried to play Star Munchkin, but I'm not entirely convinced that the game proceeded exactly as the rules dictate. Still, it was a good, silly game. I'm now kinda of the opinion that the Munchkin line of games is over-hyped, but I had a good time nonetheless. The last card game of the night was an ad hoc session of "What campaign am I in again?" Dennis's group finally finished the Evernight campaign, so it's time to break out some new campaigns. (I was about to drop a linky for Evernight in the last sentence, but apparently Shane Hensley likes to hide his pages from Google.) Dave put the names of everyone but Joe and he on some index cards and drew from them to randomly assign people to either Joe's embryonic Mekton Z campaign or Dave's TBA (to be announced) campaign. Pat and I both ended up in Dave's group, along with Ray, Barb, and Shawn. I'm hoping to hear from Dave soon as to what we are going to be doing on Wednesday next week.

Sunday the whole family went to my sister Jenn's house with Pat along for the ride. Jenn had three other friends over for a little boardgaming. We played a couple of hands of Bohnanza and a round of Carcassonne and tried to play some Illuminati. I had a pretty good time despite the fact that Jenn's friend Brian was making me crazy (overly agressive play does not make for a fun game, IMHO) and despite Jenn's furnace going out and then the power on her block blacking out! It was an interesting day. Pat made some yummy pie. Yay!

Monday night was boardgaming night as usual. We played more Bohnanza (I won one hand, yippee for me!) and yet another railroad game. I'm at a lose to report the title of the one we played. Union Pacific, maybe? Between Santa Fe, Santa Fe Rails, Ticket to Ride, American Rails, and maybe another rail game or two, I have positively lost track of which train game is which. Whatever we were playing, I was absolutely terrible at it. It was a fun game, but I stunk. Dead last place.

I'm later this week to get some more work done on the Foe File project. The last week has seen little progress on that front, save for some work on the art notes for Dennis. Also I need to get cracking on my Winter War games. (The pre-registration listing is up, by the way.) I've got 6 PCs done for Catch Me When You Can, my Jack the Ripper themed Call of Cthulhu scenario. And as I've said many a time in relation to con games, if you've got charsheets you can make the rest up. Occult Crimes Taskforce, my Savage Worlds game, remains an unfocused idea with no real work done on it. My idea of running through the Blue Rose Fast Play will probably have to wait until the first of the year or, more probably, until after the con. I need to remember to let all the interested parties in on this fact.