Our fresh Deadlands Reloaded campaign has been a lot of fun. Last time we set an ambush for a posse of outlaws and mowed them down in a blazing gunfight.

In keeping with the Savage World philopsophy, we've been using miniatures (which is rare for our group). So far, it's been cheap paper miniatures, but now I've started painting as metal minis to at least represent our characters. It's the first time I'm painting Wild West figures, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done half the party by now.

( Take a peek if you want to see the minis... )

The third session is tonight, and it looks like for the first time we might face the supernatural part of the setting. Looking forward to it.

I saw the new Star Trek movie yesterday, but unfortunately I feel disappointed.

It was just too loud, fast, and hectic for me to enjoy. Am I getting to old for this? I feel like the surfer who tried to ride a perfect wave, but slipped and got washed upon the shore. The wave may have been great, but getting tumbled around within it, I couldn't enjoy the ride.

Monday evening, first game session of Deadlands: Reloaded coming up...



I had just too much fun with the Whitewash City paper model set by Eric Hotz. More images can be found in my Deadlands gallery.

Wenn ihr bei der Online-Petition gegen das neue Gesetz zur Sperrung und Indizierung von Internetseiten mitmachen wollt, könnt ihr das auf bundestag.de machen.

In diesem Moment sind schon fast 43.000 Stimmen gesammelt. Meine Stimme ist dabei.

Yesterday I finally had the chance to play some 3-16: Carnage among the Stars at a small convention in Essen, run by members of the DnDGate forum. I picked it up at Dragonmeet last year and have been itching to try it ever since.

So after playing in A Burning Wheel session, getting some food and bagging a copy of the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition in a round of "Wichteln", I grabbed three players and off we went on our first ( bug hunt ).

The session took about two and a half hours including rules explanation and character generation. It went very well, although we were still feeling our way around the style and detail of the game. For example I was a bit hazy on the movement rules, and we missed the opportunity to move the troopers on the chart a few times. I had planned to run a second mission if the first went quickly and smoothly (which it did), but felt a bit tired from the day of gaming and not quite up to GMing again. Luckily one of the players (Trooper Daker) offered to take a shot at GMing a session himself, and I was happy to do a second session as a player. Another latecomer to the con showed up, and we drafted him into the game too. We rolled up a planet and off we went on the ( mission to the volcanic planet of the apes ).

Overall we had about 3.5 hours of of good fun. The game was definitely "about the missions", as expected for a starting game of 3:16. But I can see that it might develop into a very different direction with time. Unfortunately this was only a convention game, and we'll be unable to continue the story of Sergeant Bicker, Corporals Dox, Daker and Payne, and Trooper Crusher.

Last night we had princeofcairo's mega-health edition Tom Yum Kai recipe for our now-traditional Thursday night family dinner (my sister, her husband momosnyx, Stef and yours truly). It was as exquisite as so eloquently advertised, and we should now be sufficiently fortified against any assaults of the Mexican flu.

It took a number of trips to the various if few sources of Asian foodstuffs in the area to gather the ingredients, but particularly the substitution of fresh for dried galangal improved on an already delightful dish.

In exchange I'll post one of my favorite soup recipes, which is quick enough to prepare of a night's rpg session, if you have a little time beforehand. It's a recipe by Ken Hom, who's cookbooks on Asian and particularly Thai cuisine opened up a whole new world for me.

( North Thai Chicken-Noodle-Soup (serves 4) )

Good stuff.

You know how I came across his site? When doing research for my Congo-based Esoterrorists adventure I ran in 2007, I stumbled upon another article on war crimes in Congo of his. Read at your own risk. Truth is more horrible than fiction.

As Simon posted on his blog, we'll be releasing two free new mapping styles for registered CC3 users next week. It occurred to us that at least one of these should come with a "mapping guide", as we do for the Cartographer Annual styles. This is the map that I created while writing the mapping guide:


(Click on the map to see a larger version)

The mapping guide will be included with the download of the new CC3 styles next week.

A few weeks ago, Simon came across a beautiful piece of cartography work in the Cartographer's Guild forum by Pär Lindström. It was done in Photoshop, but when asked he was happy to provide us with the source image, so we could transfer it to a CC3 mapping style. He even volunteered to produce more bitmap artwork for us, to make it a complete new bitmap style.

It was a very interesting process to convert his work into CC3 format and I like the result a lot. It will be released next month as the April Annual issue.
( Take a peek behind the cut to see a comparison between the work in Photoshop and in CC3.  )

Just recently I became aware of boxninja's game "3:16 - Carnage among the stars", a small press rpg about space troopers fighting a never-ending war among the stars - obviously inspired by classics like Starship Troopers, Traveller, Aliens, Warhammer 40k, Space Crusade and others.

I read the the short-but-intriguing session report by robin-d-laws and consequently picked up a copy at Dragonmeet. I read it through on the train back home and really liked what I saw. Hopefully I'll get a session together here soon.

I really dug the combat system and the neat range placement mat. And of course the cartographer kicked in, itching to create a CC3 version. So I took the star system template from October's Annual issue and played around with some effect settings to create this little thing (posted with Gregor's permission).



I think it came out pretty nice. Click below to download the large version and see a shot of the printed map with some old Space Crusade minis I dug up.

( Click for more pictures )