And I'm back.

I hope you all had a good Gameblog-free week. Big thanks to Zachary over at the newly spiffed-up RPGblog2 for taking care of yesterday's Shatnerday post! I've spent a fair amount of time I'd normally be blogging watching Futurama with my lil' sweetpea (she thinks Leela is cool) and doing some reading. I re-read R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth for the first time in forever. I highly recommend it for any referee wanting to run a Star Trek game where the Federation is a genuine Roddenberrian hippy-dippy utopia. I also started Michael Hanlon's 10 Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet), a light but entertaining pop science book.

I also spent some time doing more research for my Saikaido campaign concept. I've been grasping at exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this whole schlameel, but reading this excellent post helped me zero in on the target. Saikaido is a straight swords & sorcery/weird fantasy game that happens to be set in southwest Japan circa 1275 instead of Hyboria or Atlantis or whatever. That's it. That's the whole concept. What can I say? I like starting with dirt simple elevator pitches and building from there.

Another item I worked on was "Welcome to Slimy Lake", a mini-sandbox for Mutant Future that I hope to see published in the next issue of Fight On! magazine. Gameblog reader and all-around cool guy VacuumJockey kindly did a sweet computerified map based upon my hastily scribbled one. This I guarantee: there will be a bear with laser eyes.

The big bummer of the past week was the Wednesday game session was a no-go. The gamer known as Squirrel has dropped out of the local gaming scene to deal with some sort of personal issue, and he was responsible for bringing two of my other three regulars to the table. So Carl is now my only regular player for the World of Cinder campaign. If next run he's the only other person at the table I may shelve the campaign and try something else for a while. We'll see what develops.