Lets you and me talk about games...

Hey gang! I said I'd make a post about the games I play, so here it is. Now, I do a lot of gaming. Most of my friends are gamers of one stripe or another. Hell, even my wife is a gamer, and a good one at that. I'm currently playing in three games, and of the three, one is a setting without rules, one is an Indie Press Revolution game and the third is Shadowrun. I'll break it down by days:



First and Third Thursdays is Harn. Harn is a middle ages setting with an extremely strong back story and no game system. Munin, our Game Master, runs Harn on the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules and they fit the setting pretty well. I play a former siege engineer and Ramala Legion officer, Sir Bail of Ordh, who has fallen on hard times. Sir Bail turned up in Coranan, think Rome crossed with middle ages London, penniless and with only his tools, armor and the clothes on his back looking for work. Through a twisted series of events, Sir Bail has taken up with a gang of thieves, cutthroats and muggers who are a "crew" working for a larger organized crime syndicate or thief's guild. It's like a middle-ages version of The Sopranos or The Godfather. Sir Bail has a certain bitterness that has translated into moral ambiguity, and he's been drawn further and further into the crew's business. We're pretty much reprehensible human beings, and our comings and goings can be followed here.

Second and Fourth Thursdays is Shadowrun. The Shadowrun group is made up of the same group of guys from Harn with Munin as GM. The game is the standard 3rd ed. Shadowrun with a little twist. Our group of thugs and paranormal investigators has become involved in an effort to stop a world-wide group of cultists from raising the city of R'lyeh from its watery grave and awakening C'thulhu! Yes, Shadowrun and Cthlulhu, two great tastes that taste great together. We're working with angels and demons, and neither are particularly nice to be around. I'm playing Yuri Radomirovich Zobchak, aka Alexei Zucharov, aka Piotor Sinkovich, aka Igor Vassillivich Kurchatov, aka others. Yuri is formerly of Moscow and currently hiding from the Russian mob in Detroit. Yuri is a devout Russian Orthodox Christian and a borderline cyber-psycho who makes his living as a housebreaker, safe cracker, mad bomber and paranormal investigator when not impersonating a Croatian civil engineer. Currently we've been dragooned by an coalition of the Vatican, the Royal Navy and UCAS to, well, to kill renegade angels who are working with the Cthulhu people. It's crazytown.

Every other Friday is our Battlestar Galactica game! Our BSG game is run by Zorak, a veteran of the Shadowrun game and a devotee of indie games. He uses the rule system from the IPR game The Shadow of Yesterday to tell the story of the Battlestar Actaeon and the small fleet of refugees she's surrounded herself with. Actaeon's a Pegasus class Battlestar, and hadn't even been commissioned when the Cylons hit. Most of her systems are offline, the gunners have to aim by sight and deckhands in vac suits with lights and paddles have to bring the Raptors and Vipers home after every engagement.

Everyone in this game plays three characters. When we made characters, we each made a main and two secondaries that could be found in the circles where the main moved (CIC, flight deck, civilian ship, etc). On our first night, we tossed all the secondaries on the table, then proceeded to auction them all off. This left all of us playing some characters we didn't make, which is fun and pretty challenging. My main is Jackson Severus, a pacifist civilian pilot dragooned into the Colonial Fleet when after the Cylon attacks. He's a conscientious objector, and he flies recon Raptors. My secondaries are Det. Luther Korsa, former Taurean inspector and currently chief of the President's security, and Molly Hephaestia, an accident prone CPO who has recently become Chief of the Deck. My wife plays in this game as well, as a hot-shit Viper pilot, the President's chief of staff and the captain of the ship's Marines, along with ace GM Munin and a couple other veterans from the other games.There's a lot of PvP in this game, with players plotting against one another and much wheeling and dealing. Out of all the games I play, this is the one with the most potential for intentional (and unintentional) hilarity.

So, that's it. I play a lot but I'm not currently running anything. If I get a chance, some of my friends have shown interest in playing my Cold War Super Hero/Super Spy game called AEGIS vs. SPIDER. If that happens, you guys will be the first to know.