Gaming and other Nonsense
“Just the place for a Snark!”
Welcome to a collection of random pages about tabletop roleplaying and wargames, with a bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure. It contains campaign notes and chronicles for various games I've run and played it, design notes for game systems, and designs for armies and characters. Since some of the material dates back almost 30 years, the style may be inconsistent.
Though there is material here for both Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, it also includes Ars Magica, Traveller, Star Wars, Legend of the Five Rings, Pendragon, as well as various home brewed game systems.
Frequent updates on the games I'm currently playing can be found on my blog.
Campaigns Roleplaying Wargaming
Most of the content on here is entirely original. Some of it is based on material published by other people - e.g., game content for published RPGs or Wargames.
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
News and Updates
Spacecraft Recognition Guide
The main content being worked on at the moment is the Spacecraft Recognition Guide, where I'm putting together a collection of spaceship designs for my YAGS SciFi rules. Starting at the plausible near future, and then working forward in time with an ever increasing level of technology.
I'm making heavy use of Blender to model what the starships look like, and coming up with a starship design system that is reasonably detailed, but hopefully simplified enough that it's usable.
There are more details over on my blog.
The Sinking City
I've started putting down thoughts for a new fantasy campaign, currently titled The Sinking City. There is a full blog article available for initial details. I plan on using this with my high fantasy version of YAGS, which requires that I finish writing the magic system for that.
Other notes are also available for now over on the Eyressia page on this site, and I've added a link in the sidebar as well.
The Spires of Xin-Shalast
I've started running the final chapter of my Rise of the Runelords campaign, Spires of Xin-Shalast. As part of this, I've started a GM's commentary on the campaign over on my NotASnark blog. It won't contain spoilers for what's coming, but will contain information about plot points that have happened so far.
This campaign will take the characters up to 17th level, which is the highest we've been so far in Pathfinder. I've got ideas though for how to take things beyond this if the players want to continue on to higher levels.
Also on that blog are player accounts of Serpent's Skull and Strange Aeons campaigns, along with everything else I play (such as Delta Green).
Blog
With the coming demise of Google+, which is where most of my public posting has been done for the last eight years, I have created a new site dedicated to blog posts. This can be found at https://blog.notasnark.com/. This site will continue to be used to publish articles and information, but my usual G+ activity will be moved to the new site.
Gaming Plans for 2019
For the coming year, I'm hoping to finish at least one Pathfinder Adventure Path, and also to get in some science fiction gaming with Eclipse Phase.
On the initial front, I'm going to bring my Roll20 based game of Pathfinder to a pause. I was hoping to get it completed before the Christmas break, but various social events prevented that. There's possibly one, maybe two sessions of that before it comes to a good break point. Pausing that will allow me to take a break from GMing for a bit. Whether we fill that time slot with something else (last time we did some Delta Green) I don't know.
For our weekly tabletop session there will be more of our Strange Aeons game. When that pauses, possibly in March, I'll pick up on Rise of the Runelords for the last time, and finish off chapter 6 The Spires of Xin-Shalast. That will be the first adventure path that any of our groups have completed. It's taken about 5 years to get to this point, so it'll be good to reach completion. I've started looking at prepping it now, since there's a chunk of it which is pretty lightly detailed, and I want to flesh it out a bit.
After that, I'd like to run some science fiction, and I have Eclipse Phase in mind. I'm currently toying with some adventure ideas, and I've been reading through the 2nd edition rules. Hopefully the new edition will be complete in time for me to run a game based on them. I really like the background to Eclipse Phase, but the rules felt clunky and over complicated (says the Pathfinder player). Possibly this will get done during the Summer.
There's been some discussion about what people want to do next in our groups, and I'm tempted to run the Iron Gods adventure path much later in the year. Basically, it's Pathfinder fantasy with robots and laser guns. If it works, it could be a lot of fun.
Other than that, we'll be continuing Serpent's Skull during our monthly sessions. That is currently in the fifth chapter, so maybe we'll get to finish that next year.