I've been writing this blog for almost seventeen years now. Yet I've rarely addressed any questions to you, the human beings who look at these posts from time to time. But I'm curious about who actually visits this place (aside from the bots). I'm interested to know what game(s) you play.
As I explained in my previous post, the roleplaying games that I've been playing have shifted over the past two decades. Early on, I was focused primarily on "Old School Renaissance" games like Swords and Wizardry (and developed some house rules for it, many of which were later integrated into Crypts & Things, which I also played back in the day) and 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons/OSRIC. I also occasionally ran Call of Cthulhu.
Then, in spring 2011, I started playing in a "Young Kingdoms campaign" that used the Runequest II (MRQII) rules. (How could I refuse? The Gamemaster was one of the co-authors of the system!) This started a long period -- continuing to this day with Lyonesse -- of playing versions of the game that is now called Mythras (MRQII and Runequest 6 were the immediate ancestors of Mythras -- all written by Lawrence Whitaker and Pete Nash). I also continued to run Call of Cthulhu from time to time (winding up a sporadic campaign in 2017). And in 2017-2018 I ran an Adventures in Middle-earth campaign.
For a few years I ran a campaign using Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition in the "Gygax version" of the World of Greyhawk. (I eventually switched to the 5e-based Into the Unknown system, but ItU is close enough to 5e that I regard the whole campaign as my "5e" one.) I wanted to properly "try out" the current version of D&D and we ended up continuing until the characters reached 6th level. While that campaign was fun, I realized by the end of it that I had no desire to ever run 5e D&D again, at least for an extended period of time (I did run a couple of sessions of 5e for some kids last fall -- one of my few "charitable acts" as a RPGer).
Over the past few years, as GM, I've primarily run Against the Darkmaster. One campaign, set in Middle-earth, wrapped up a few months ago (although I have a "epilogue" set of adventures planned for the same characters sometime in the future). The other, set in my homebrew world of "Ukrasia," is still going strong.
So these days, I mainly GM Against the Darkmaster and I mainly play Mythras (I'm leaving out various "one shots" of different systems here). I would like to try out Dragonbane sometime, as it strikes me as similar to Mythras in many ways but is much "lighter" in terms of both rules and tone (the similarity shouldn't be that surprising, since both games are descendants of the "Basic Roleplaying" system created by Chaosium almost five decades ago).
What about you? What games do you play these days, either as GM or player? What game(s) do you want to play?
