(Yeah, that’s right. Not a word on Watchmen. Everyone else has already commented, and it’s too late by now.)
Busybusybusy. I’ve been stuck late at work a lot of late. Not ’til the deep of night or anything, but with the TTC, it adds up. And when I’m not at work, I’ve been (over)preparing for my first crack at GMing a game in person. I’ll be running D&D, 3.5 Ed.. My players are all roleplaying n00bs – Jon, my fellow-poster at this blog; JL, and DG. Gonna run ’em through a couple of classic, old modules, which more experienced players might already know.
I’m developing a sweet – and hopefully effective – gaming setup. I have a nice broad, slightly low IKEA coffee table, 36″ by 48″, with a shelf underneath. I’ve got an end-table nearby for GM notes, the laptop, tokens, etc..
I picked up two battle-grid mats, each 20″ by 30″, which should do nicely. I picked up a variety of glass beads, polished stones, and mosaic tiles at the dollar store, for us as monsters and whatnot. I’m still looking for appropriate markers for the mats – wet-erase, black, chisel-tipped. All the wet-erase markers I’ve found have either (1) been in kids’ rainbow-packs, or (2) been astonishingly expensive. I did hit on what seems an effective contingency plan, though – while I was at the dollar store, I found they sold little ingots of coloured glass in quantity, and in a test run those did nicely to represent dungeon walls.
Speaking of test run: I had Jon run his PC through a sample dungeon (generated by the invaluable Demonweb random dungeon generator), and it went well. He showed the good sense not to antagonize a Deep Gnome for no reason, and the similarly good sense to flee like a little girl from a dire rat that had taken off half his health with a single bite.
I’ll post some pictures of the whole setup once I’ve got a game session in full swing, so you can see the full effect.
My brother’s comment, on discovering this blog, was “I came to the conclusion that somehow you have raised your level of weirdness over the past few years. I thought for sure you had peaked out at around age 17. I was wrong.” Win.