Fifty-Sixth

I'm cream-crackered again. For some unknown reason when I was 'tidying' the hard drive on my PC, I reinstalled Rome: Total War, and I've been playing it for the past couple of nights. Not hardcore you understand, but I'll log on after I've had dinner and chilled out for a while, and play it right up to 11 or 12, then start getting ready for bed.

I did the same thing last night, and jumped into bed just after midnight. Then I made the huge mistake of jumping online with my iBook to send a quick email to one of my friends about an idea he'd had for a Warhammer 40K RPG game.

Bit of background first - I used to run a wargames club in my home town. It's closed now, it kind of ran out of steam after a while and we decided to fold it up. We started off focusing on just Warhammer 40000 and Warhammer Fantasy from Games Workshop, with a couple of other random systems thrown in for good measure. Eventually we graduated to trying out a little D&D, and later moved on to the Star Wars RPG, which I picked up after getting sucked right in to KOTOR on the PC. We had a great time, and a lot of the guys I met there are still really good friends of mine, even though we only really talk with each other online. We all ended up hooking up again a few weeks back at a graduation party, and we were all talking about how much fun we had playing the Star Wars RPG, with me as GM, and how we should hook up again to get some games going.
Easier said than done, as we're all living in different towns now, and working different days of the week. Still, we're wanting to get something sorted out, as we did really enjoy it. I have to admit, I was surprised at how much the other guys were still interested in hooking up, I knew that I really enjoyed it, but I wasn't really prepared for the good thingd the others weree saying. I'm not ashamed to admit that I did get a little misty-eyed. I had had a good few pints, and a couple of Jacks and coke by that point though, so that's my excuse.

Anyway, the guys were pretty unanimous on wanting to get back into a Star Wars campaign, which suited me, as we're all familiar with the setting. Like I said above though, we all started off playing 40K, and as it turns out, there's a 40K RPG in the works as well. It's not due out until February next year, but the company producing it will be giving a sneak peek at Gen Con Indy next month, after which they'll be releasing a preview of the rules online, which is good news for us. I'd imagine that it'll just be basic movement, combat, character creation and progression rules; enough to start off with, and we'll have to extrapolate the rest. Suits me fine, it gets my creative juices flowing.

Speaking with one of my friends about it though, he wanted to come up with a slightly different kind of 40K RPG, one that's got a bit more cinematic/action influenced, dungeon crawl kind of feel to it. So last night we were trying to come up with some ideas for using an existing ruleset for the game. We spent a  good couple of hours about it, with me mostly recommending rulesets like D20 Future or GURPS, and later started looking into Games Workshop's Inquisitor or Necromunda rulesets. The Star Wars RPG uses the D20 ruleset, so we're familiar with that, GURPS looks pretty good, easy to adapt to the situation, but we don't have any experience with it unfortunately. Inquisitor seems like it's well-suited, but the physical scale is much larger, and the rules are pretty complicated, so we'd need to simplify them, and Necromunda seems maybe a bit too simple at first glance.

So, much back and forth ensued, with little real progress until I realised it was almost 2 in the morning, and I had to get up 4 hours later.

I'll be hitting my thrid espresso of the morning shortly.