Al-Qadim

For around the past 12 months I've been playing in a regular Tuesday group in the Al-Qadim setting. We have 5 regular players, Dan, Gareth, Jazz, Michael & myself, have lost one player Richard along the way (due to moving house out of the area) and Nathaniel is an irregular player. Ham is our DM. The group make up is quite different to most the other groups I play in as usually I am the oldest player but we have players from their 20s right through into their 50s. We play at Ham's house, around a table in his front "gaming" room and Ham kindly supplies the drinks (or at least Sophie his daughter does!) and the players supply nibbles. Sessions are 19:00 to 22:00 although we sometimes spill a little over.

I found this group via a post for another group in the East Midlands Roleplayers Gaming Group. The other group was also DMed by Ham and was looking for an extra player so I joined but after just a couple of months the group stalled due to a combination of illness and other weekend commitments. At around this time Ham started the Tuesday group so I asked if I could join this as I really wanted a regular old school group (as I was playing Pathfinder on a Wednesday at the time) and have been part of the Tuesday group ever since.

We use a Facebook group to communicate, usually just to confirm sessions and who is attending.

Although Al-Qadim is an AD&D 2e setting the Tuesday group uses an extensively home-brewed AD&D 1e rule set to play. As I cut my RPG teeth on AD&D 1e back in the early 80s this suits me as I've become increasingly disillusioned with D&D 5e as a ruleset.

In Al-Qadim I play a Sha'ir/Thief with a Djinnling Vamoosh (after Souki my first Djinnling met an untimely end). The other player's characters are:
Dan: Alard, MU & Jandolier, Cleric/Ranger
Jazz: Levandes, Paladin
Gareth: Ravi, Cleric & Azhbool, fighter
Michael: Ahmaan, Fighter
Nathaniel: Haroun, Magic User/Thief
Richard: Tze, Monk

As you can see some players have more than one character and it is expected that if any player is missing from a session another player will play their character(s). I seem to usually end up playing Haroun if Nathaniel is missing but have played Ravi, Tze & Jandolier. The characters are all around 6th level.

Ham maintains a campaign journal on Dragonsfoot, The Parsantine Expedition to The Land of Fate

We use miniature figures and each character has it's own painted figure. I believe Ham supplies & paints the figures, although it maybe that other players have brought/painted their own figures. I've no particular interest in miniatures so Ham has certainly supplied and painted mine.

The format of the games in Al-Qadim is usually Ham offers us a particular scenario via a patron or disguised genie (which my character Farouk is notoriously poor at detecting with his 25% chance to "Detect the work of genies") and we usually accept and play the scenario but occasionally we decline if we fancy exploring a different area of Al-Qadim.

We've also all met up socially as well for a few beers last Christmas and I've turned up at Ham's for a coffee and a natter on the odd occasion the game has had to be cancelled due to lack of numbers. All in all it's a great group, real old school, relaxed feel to the play with everyone committed to working as a team.

Call of Cthulhu Starter Set Sessions

The group I play Call of Cthulhu with on Friday nights is a select bunch of Che, our Keeper of Arcane knowledge, Ian & myself joined by Dave for the first time last night. Che, Ian & Dave have played as a group a while back, before I discovered the group earlier in the year. Che & Ian have been roleplaying together for around 20 years. We usually play once every two weeks & Che hosts us at his house.

I met Che via his forum posts, first via a Runequest related post and then via his excellent podcast Roleplay Rescue, which I can heartily recommend. I liked his old school approach to things and joined a short lived Castle & Crusades campaign he ran until an untimely TPK (See Vinster's Last Stand). Che will be running a new C&C campaign starting in September, once the school holidays are over as Ian & myself both have kids and between us are away for most of July & August. So the the meantime we've agreed to play some Call of Cthulhu .. Our sessions generally start around 19:30 but we tend to turn up at 19:00 so we can have a coffee and a chat for half an hour or so. The sessions end by 23:00, sometimes a little earlier.

I've played Call of Cthulhu since 2e back around 1983 & played a lot of 3e when I was at polytechnic. In fact I've written more scenarios for Call of Cthulhu than probably any other system although I've actually rarely run it. As usual, there are various reasons for this but the main one I guess was that at the time there was a much better CoC KoAK than me, Bryan, who ran some of the best RPG sessions I've ever played in.

Last night was the second session of our Call of Cthulhu 7e Starter Set scenarios. The first session was 3 weeks ago when we played "Paper Chase". Last night we started "The Edge of Darkness". In both sessions I'm playing Jessie, who is young black female history student with a reckless streak, a strong religious belief & excellent fashion sense. Probably as pretty much as far from my self as I could get. As always I take a while getting into a character, slowly building up the personality. I'm certainly not the greatest role player but I hope I do a passable job at creating interesting and memorable characters. Jessie is currently completely unconvinced about the occult and believes she is involved in a drugs war between rival gangs as the use of hallucinatory drugs seems to be the only way to explain what other people are reporting they have seen.

So far the sessions have been great. Che is a relaxed GM who encourages us to play our characters and is flexible when we go off on tangents. Ian & myself are fairly complementary players as I think it's fair to say Ian is less cautious than me and more combat/action orientated. As I've only played the once with Dave I've yet to get a feel for his preferred style but my initial thought is that he too is more direct than me. If last night's session is anything to go by the concluding session for  "The Edge of Darkness", which will likely be the last session before we break up for our summer recess  should be a blast.

Deserts And Dragons

I currently play in a D&D 5e campaign we call "Deserts & Dragons". We meet monthly over at Distinct Games, over in Belper (in Derbyshire in the UK). We have a pretty stable group but the sessions are structured so that each session we start out at a base and at the end we return to the base so there is no problem if any characters are unable to adventure in each session. I have come to appreciate this is an excellent strategy for keeping an ongoing campaign going as it easily handles not all players being available. I was unable to make last session (along with another player Glyn) but it's been the first session I've missed; we started in January 2019.

I've blogged before about this campaign, writing up the party's adventures from the perspective of Tarquin, my human bard. You can view the posts using the "Deserts & Dragons" tag.

We mainly use a Facebook chat group to communicate and have also used a full Facebook Group for another group (which one of the players uses for a campaign he is DMing) to communicate. We're all friends on Facebook (although it's not a requirement) so it makes it all very easy to communicate.

The members of our group are all reasonably local to Belper, where the game is hosted. The furthest away I think is Derby, 30 minutes on the bus or about 10 miles. When we can we organise lifts for one another. A few of us met up for a few beers a month or so back. It's all very social and laid back which really suits me.

All the players (as far as I can recall) met at Distinct Games as in 2017 Jono, our DM, setup a game as "resident GM" for the shop which was an open table where he ran loosely related one shots. I think there were around 12 of these and I joined about half way through. These were run as half day sessions and two sessions were run each day. Sometimes just one player turned up (which was still an excellent session with just me and Jono), sometimes I think we peaked at 7 players.

When Jono finished those one shots he had a break for a few months but the new campaign was started as full day (10:30 - 16:30) sessions with two groups, one was the "hard core" players from the previous sessions who had really gelled as a team and the other session was for the kids, allowing Jono to tailor the sessions accordingly. I believe there is another group  run in the week as well. Each session costs £5 and the shop keep a tab we pay at the end. They sell snacks & drinks but allow us to bring in our own food as we usually raid Birds or Greggs at lunch time.

One of the interesting things about this campaign is that the other groups play in the same world and the actions one group does are reported to the other groups so the world is fluid, even when we are not playing. The world is set after some sort of terrible apocalyptic even and all the characters live in a city in the middle of a desert. The city has reached capacity and the characters are tasked with exploring the surrounding area in the hope of finding resources for the city and possibly somewhere else to start a settlement. So its mainly a hex crawl with short encounters and is working out really well.

We usually level up after each session so I needed to level up Tarkquin to level 6 and I did so last night, choosing my local The Talbot to level Tarquin up and write him out on a new character sheet.

As with many RPG groups two of the players Chris & Glyn have also turned up to play RGQ at a separate venue, Boards & Swords.

So shortly I'll be off to Belper, catching a bus (as my car is in the garage) which takes about 30 minutes. Our session is 10:30 to approx 16:30.

Procrastination

It's been a while, over two months, since I last sat down and published a blog post. Originally, some time at the back end of a last year, when I created this blog my idea was to write an entry once or twice week. There are several reasons I have failed to do this; lack of time being a perennial problem, although strictly speaking it is not lack of time but the writing of blog entries being too low a priority for me to get them done. I have a wife, two kids, a full time job, an old house that needs work doing to it, a garden that is larger than I can easily cope with, extended family that live a fair distance away from me (a long day's round trip to see them) etc. but I do have spare time, it's just that I tend to spend it playing role playing games or drinking beer (both I am coming to realise I do to de-stress from my day to day life). However, one thing I that I have suddenly realised I have a real problem with is procrastination. It took me listening to The psychology of motivation and procrastination for this realisation to finally hit home. And looking back on my life it's become obvious to me that on and off and to varying degrees, sometimes chronically, I've suffered from this right back to school. So what is procrastination?

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline. It could be further stated as a habitual or intentional delay of starting or finishing a task despite knowing it might have negative consequences.

So I've decided to do something about this. I've started by making a list of the things I want to accomplish. Within this blog entry I'll keep it to RPG related tasks (although I'm applying it outside of RPGs too) as this blog is for RPG stuff.

1. Level up my D&D 5e character for tomorrow's session
2. Write up my RQG scenario, Bye Tore & The Snow Dog
3. Create & write up my Dragonquest scenario
4. Read up Cthulhu 3e and A Green & Pleasant Land & my old CoC scenarios
5. Develop my Wilderlands campaign 

To aid me deal with my procrastination I've sorted out a place where I feel happy working. One of the non RPG tasks I've kick started recently is clearing out my old office as we intend to extend our tiny bathroom into it. So I've relocated my computer desk into the our house's "box" room which previous was used as our boys play room. This has allowed me to dust, clean & reorganise the desk and make it a more pleasant place to work at. This appears to be working as I'm writing this blog entry!

I also intend to set aside some time as often as possible to sit down and work through the tasks I have identified as priorities. I'm going to try and do this shortly after I get home from work each day, around 16:00 and just spend as long as is practical on the task; the important thing being to keep momentum going.

Listening to Che Webster's excellent Roleplay Rescue has helped me make a few decisions to help deal with my procrastination as Che covers things like motivation within his podcasts. I can heartily recommend listening to them.