No, I did not die with my mother-in-law back in April. However, my life has undergone some huge upheavals. We spend six weeks in a remodel of my late mother-in-law’s house so it could be sold to decide we’d rather live here and sell the house in Waco. So we spent a month packing up and moving from Waco. The house there has just come on the market and we are back in Garland slowly unpacking and trying to fit two houses worth of stuff in one house. Needless to say, a lot of stuff has already been sold (generally for peanuts) or donated to charity groups for their “garage sales”. As you might expect, I haven’t got much else done, but life is slowly returning to normal. Here is a progress report on my various gaming projects and activities.

Wilderlands Campaign: I’m happy to say that the Wilderlands campaign I ran in Waco for about four years is still going strong. It is now two campaigns, however, as none of the players in the campaign willing to GM could handle 8 players. There are now two smaller groups, one using Microlite74 and the other using Microlite81, playing in the same world. They are even taking steps to keep the time line coordinated so events in one group can affect the other. Everyone seems to be having a good time and I even got to play in one session while I was in Waco. The first time I’ve ever played in one of my own settings. It was fun — but felt very weird at the same time.

DFW Campaign: While it will still be a couple of months before I have time for a regular campaign, one is in the works. Due to physical space limitations, it will be limited to 4 players — and it is already full. One of the regular readers of this blog got in touch with me in early June wanting to know if i had time to run any pickup old school games while I was in the Dallas area. I didn’t, but I got to talking with him and his friends. Once my wife and I decided to move up here, they started lobbying for me to run a campaign up here. It looks like I’ll be writing a special set of variant Microlite81 rules for it with only three classes (Fighter, Sorcerer [a fighter/mu combo], and Wizard) with everything else including race handled by backgrounds and with some of the stuff from Microlite74 Swords and Sorcery (like the White/Grey/Black magic system). I hope to start playing sometime in October (or late September if we’re lucky).

Microlite81, Microlite78, and Other Design Projects: I have not made much progress on these. As you might expect I have not had a lot of computer time the last few months and most of what time I did have on the computer had to be devoted to doing work for my clients. I’m gradually getting more time and hope to be able to resume actually typing up rules soon. The goal for Microlite78 was not reached — not surprising when I disappeared from the Net for over three months. However, a lot of the work for a draft is done, so I will likely go ahead and do it anyway, especially given that a lot of people really want to see it.

5e: I’ve been asked (a lot) about my opinion of the upcoming 5e. Until I actually see the 5e PH, MM, and DMG, I can’t really say much. However, from what I’ve seen there are so many changes from TSR D&D (a “sleep” spell that only lasts a couple of minutes, for example) that I would have to heavily rewrite my campaign settings to make them work with 5e. I see no reason to do so since the rules they were designed for still work just fine. Unlike 3.x and 4e, however, 5e looks like a system I could enjoy playing given an old school style GM and group of players, so while I will probably not ever GM a campaign using the 5e rules, I could seeing myself as a player in an appropriate 5e campaign.

With luck, it will not be another three months before my next post. 🙂