Thinkin’ about campaigns for 2011

November always seems to be the time I start to look towards what will pan out for the game group in the coming year.

I’ve been doing pretty much the same 1st edition campaign for over two years now. So, with maybe three or four games left for my AD&D Night Below campaign (actually, the first few months of gaming in this group had nothing to do with the NB, I hadn’t originally planned for the party to end up in that grinder of a setting) I have to start thinking of what to do next.

A part of me wants to get right into a new D&D campaign. It has now literally been years since I ran for a group of low level characters, and it would be fun to start something fresh after all this time steering the destinies of higher level PC’s. But really, I love running other games besides D&D, and I want to have an opportunity to do more of that without it just being an alternate. So what I will do is take a break from running D&D for the first few months of 2011 (with the exception perhaps of the occasional White Box game) and do something entirely different.

Big Ben has been running his AD&D elf-centric game here and there, but I think for the first couple months of the year we’ll play a bit more of that, plus Terry has expressed interest in revisiting her old 2nd edition game world so we will maybe be doing a bit of that as well. So D&D, which Andy and I basically started the group to play, will be well represented without me actually running it. But run something regularly I will, but what?

As much as I love Call of Cthulhu, I’m still not sure this is the right group for it. Role playing abounds with these guys, but lots of combat also seems to be a big preference. That just don’t happen in CoC. I have done a few street level Champions games with Terry, Andy, and Paul, but I’m not sure that doing that or full blown superheroes will fit the bill for what I want from the group right now (I find Hero System, like all crunchy systems, to be best for small groups).

Basically, I have recently that I would do a space game of some sort for next year’s early months. But what would these guys like? Star Wars? Dune? Aliens/Firefly/Traveller type settings? Anyway, I posted those choices on our Yahoo Groups page, and out of the five who voted so far, Star Wars is the clear favorite. So I think I will do a short SW campaign. This is good for a couple of reasons:

One, I really have a bad attitude about Star Wars. All the Muppets and the childish, unfunny humor. The three prequels that put a bullet in the franchise for me. Sure, I find them watchable on TV here and there, but have zero desire to live in that universe or to know any of the people in it. What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, as much as I think much about the films are lame, I love the Knights of The Old Republic setting with a passion, based mostly on my experience with the XBOX game of that same name. 4,000 years before the hubris of George Lucas. And less Muppets because less Outer Rim planets have been discovered. Lots of epic things happening too, like the end of the brutal Madalorian War, and the beginning of the Jedi Civil War. Jedi and Sith are all over the place, and Lightsabers more plentiful than empty beer cans on the floor of a Culver City bus. No stupid “Rule of Two.” Really, there are a million reasons why it is a great Sci Fi setting despite the silly films.

And reason two, well, I had a pretty shitty experience with running this game last year for a group of middle-aged Star Wars freaks who treated me like an employee and stuck around when I left to discuss my game performance at the end of the day (yeah, I know, much more to that tale but I have pretty much moved on from just another negative experience in a fairly overall shitty year). What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, yeah. I like my regular group, and I put a lot of work, time, effort, and a certain amount of money (I owned no Star Wars books when I accepted the “assignment”) into the few games I ran for that Hollywood group. I think we can have a lot of fun with it, and light Sci Fi is something I can practically phone in like my D&D games.

So Knights of the Old Republic it is, for the first three or four months of the year, anyway. Besides the KOTOR games, I will of course throw out that odd OD&D White box dungeon crawl as an alternate, as well as some bits of Champions when the group is lacking players on a game night. I’ll alternate my games with whoever does some of their D&D. I’ll let Big Ben and Terry slug it out for those slots.

I just gotta finish up the year, and finish up this damn Night Below campaign. Fun, but jeez, it’s starting to feel like I’ve been walking uphill with this setting over my shoulder forever. Gotta wrap it up (and kill some characters if at all possible). Stay tuned for details on that (finally back to AD&D next week).