Geeking out!

Today I became aware of Dungeons and Dragons Essentials, an update to 4th Edition.

Here is a really good post.  I’ve read a lot about it today, but most of it is second hand information.  Sadly, I’m not happy with what I’ve read so far.  I’ll post more when we have definite information.

I’m currently planning 2 (technically 3) games. And it’s great. I just need some more downtime so that I can actually have time to write. I have agreed to run a one-shot in June and I’m running a Friday night game going forward. I haven’t had a good chance to sit down and write and be creative in a while, and it isn’t easy to do that. I should schedule some writing sessions for myself so that I actually have time set aside for that.

The summer is by no means over, but I have gotten past the two biggest weekends unscathed (and I had a lot of fun).  I got to see lots of family and friends and spend some quality time with everyone.  I hope everyone else had a good time and I hope that I’ll get to see everyone there next year (and maybe a few more).

I am definitely feeling some winddown after all that, but I’m also feeling some windup for the upcoming wedding (my own).  More on that as it develops.

One of the things that I’m working on a bit is trying to figure out my gaming schedule for the fall.  It looks like Friday night and Sunday afternoon are going to be  the good days, but there’s still more to come.

There’s a dragon article about religion in Eberron over at the wizards website. This article doesn’t require a DnDi account, so go read up.

First a couple of links for you:

http://wave.google.com

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/google-wave-mashes-communication-collaboration-together.ars

http://lifehacker.com/5272048/google-wave-is-what-email-would-look-like-if-it-were-invented-today

So google has given us a nice multi-month advanced preview of a new technology called “wave”.   It sounds pretty neat and I’m happy to be excited about it.  It seems rather similar to several “groupware” offering that are currently available but most of those require more patience/resources than I have the ability to produce.  I’m a little worried than “wave” will be nothing more than facebook2: the electric boogaloo.  I think that for wave to succeed as a technology long term (to achieve this “email next” they seem to want to claim) it needs to be an open protocol and allow for interoperable servers running on different networks (i.e. decentralized, it cant just be google; yahoo, microsoft and whoever else needs to be able to use this tech), much the way email does right now.  It needs to be scaleable, important functionality needs to be accessable on a multitude of devices e.g. cellphones, and operating systems.  It looks like most of this is in place, I’m excited to see it in action.

In the meantime I have signed up for sandbox access.  I kind of think there might be an opportunity to make a RPG platform on wave, and I’m going to do some serious looking into it.

Thought I would just make a note here that I’ve put up the second of my D&D campaign blogs.  One night in Khorvaire is where I will be posting stuff about the next game I plan on running.  It will be a D&D 4th edition game, and that’s about as specific as I can get right now.  I’m looking forward to Eberron in 4th edition because I think the gameplay has exactly the right feel for the Eberron setting.  The campaign books come out in June and July and I hope to be able to start sometime around there, but we’ll see how things are (getting married in the fall so I might be feeling the crunch).  I probably won’t start posting on that blog until the campaign book comes out, but I’ll try to note it here if I do.

I’m currently running Unbearable Truth on Friday nights.  Links to both games can be found on my blog as long as they are running.