What Have I Been Up to?

It's been a while since I've updated this blog, so here's a brief apology and explanation of what I've been up to instead:

I've been playing a bunch of 5e. Broad strokes, I'm in one weekly campaign, and one campaign that is going from biweekly to three-times a month. The former is Al-Qadim meets Dark Sun, the latter Dark Ages Arthuriana. I don't really love 5e as a system, and I'm skeptical of D&DOne as an improvement on it, but good groups can make even a mediocre system serve as the basis for a great campaign.

I was running a Pathfinder 2e campaign, but a leak in my upstairs neighbours' apartment damaged the computer I had everything written out on, so it's on hold until I can get it fixed. Unfortunately, the money that I would normally have to do so went to paying out of pocket for veterinary care for two of my cats, one of whom has cancer. The other one is fine, but was stressed out - possibly by her lifelong friend having cancer. It cost me CAD 1,200 per cat to sort this out. This all came right before Christmas and the time of year I have to renew everything from my license to car insurance to my healthcard, which meant I'm tapped out until April.

Pathfinder 2e is great, and very fun to run as a referee, but just complicated enough that when you lose all of your notes for it, it's a non-trivial cost to replace them. I have them backed up in the cloud, but a key encounter planning tool has a computer-specific cookie it uses in place of a login, and until I can get the computer fixed, it's inaccessible. 

I will be running a game shortly. For the Arthuriana 5e campaign, we are doing character preludes where PCs take turns running sessions for the other players covering off one another's backstories. It's quite fun, basically a one-shot interlude. If you've never done it, it has the interesting side-effect of making PCs invest in one another' since you've got to plan an adventure based around someone else's backstory and then run it. I'm running a hunt for a white stag set in Scotland's Cheviot Hills where an aristocrat's bastard son will save the life of his older brother, the legitimate heir, and begin his journey to becoming a hero.

I also got a third cat, a now-eight-month-old kitten, a female ginger tabby (somewhat uncommon), the only survivor of her litter, who is a perfect blend of mischevious and good-natured. Her favoured class is definitely rogue, as her great delight is to run off with chopsticks, bits of paper, pieces of my wife's house plants (all cat-safe), stuffed mice, and other detritus making a sort of cackling trilling noise. She recently acquired fleas, despite being an indoor cat, and is undergoing her first course of flea killer. Here's a photo of the little trouble baby as she carouses in her pursuit of enough XP to get to level 2:

Ancestry: Goblin; Class: Rogue; Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

My upstairs neighbours (of the aforementioned leak) are also interested in playing "Dungeons and Dragons" at some point. I gave one of them my copy of Blades in the Dark to read over because I think it might be their speed, after my initial proposal to play Quantum Starfarer (an ultra-light version of Cepheus) was turned down. They're more interested in fantasy than in science fiction. They've never tried RPGs before, so I'm going to run an introductory game for them and their friends at some point this year. More on that when it happens.

Lastly, I'm changing jobs. I've been extremely busy with work over the past year, which is one of the major reasons I haven't been blogging. I'm hoping the new job comes with an improved work-life balance which will allow me to blog more this year.