After a fiendishly busy January and February, I've finally had a chance to take a deep breath and spend some time reading. First up on my early spring reading list is The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell, a Halo Universe novel involving the quest to prevent the alien Covenant from securing navigation data leading to Earth.

On deck is The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, one of her last in the classic science fiction setting which features telepathic dragons and their human riders battling the alien, sky-borne menace of Thread, followed by Century Rain, near-future apocalypse/time travel/alternate reality book by Alistair Reynolds.

The Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook for the Serenity RPG provides plenty of what a body needs to stay alive in Joss Whedon’s space western universe: weapons, equipment and spaceships. My review of the book is up on GameCryer.com.

It's not an essential book, but it is a useful one as it introduces a variety of low and high tech items (livestock, new guns, cybernetics) as well as a ship floor plans and write-ups. There are also crew bios and statblocks for each ship, which are perfect as NPCs or heroes for a one-shot. While I run Serenity infrequently, I am planning on using the ship floor plans for my Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign.

After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragond 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007.

I've got mixed feelings about this.

While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through it cover to cover several times, I never had a chance to run it. Moreover, with this module we're going to continue what we started with our White Plume Mountain run by travelling back into our D&D campaign's history to the founding of the Blackrazor Guild. In White Plume Mountain, guild leader Brant Bladescream recovered the infamous soul-devouring sword Blackrazor (but lost most of his adventuring companions in the process). In The Lost Caverns, he's taking a new band of heroes into the depths of an infamous dungeon in search of even more powerful magical relics.

Good news -- Nuketown Radio Active did not see its shadow, and has emerged from its winter hiatus with an episode that looks at my new gaming room, runs down the video games I've been playing, and talks about the comic book companies you should be following on Twitter.

Spring's in the air, or it would be if only there weren't still a half-foot of snow sitting in my backyard. Baseballs are flying in Florida and somewhere in Easton, Pa. there undoubtedly a few brave daffodil shoots fighting their way to the surface.

The last two months have been hard on my geek fitness efforts; I got of to decent starts in January and February, only to have family colds, home improvement projects, and snow storms sidetrack my plans.

With March upon us, it's time to try and get back into a routine. My immediate goal is to pick up where I left off in February, and continue my morning workouts. These are exceedingly hard for me -- I'm just not a morning person -- but it's the one surefire way I have of making sure my exercise for the day gets done. As I've demonstrated time and again, it's all too easy to let exercise slide when a meeting runs late, I get caught up in a project, or a family emergency breaks out.

Paizo Publishing is launching a fiction line to support the Pathfinder RPG and Pathfinder Campaign Setting. TSR/Wizards of the Coast had good luck with this strategy, and it only makes sense that Paizo would give it a try.

The first two books on the schedule are:

• Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham (September 2010)
• Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross by Dave Gross (October 2010)

These will be "300-page mass market paperback novels", to be sold through hobby shops and book stores for $9.99, but you'll also be able to subscribe through Paizo.com. As is the case with the Pathfinder adventure paths, those who subscribe will get free digital copies of the books.

Aside from Dragonlance, I've never been one for game-related fiction and I'm still on a big science fiction kick right now. As such, I'm more likely to want to pick up one of Paizo's Planet Stories books, but I am curious to see how this new fantasy line shakes out.

Fantasy Flight Games has announced the Deathwatch Role-Playing Game, the much-anticipated third core rule book for Warhammer 40k. Players take on the role of Deathwatch Marines fighting a desperate war to restore Imperial oversight of the Jericho Reach. Space Marines are one of the most iconic aspects of the 40K universe, and I know a lot of people have been eager to get their hands on this sort of source book.

The book will use the same ruleset as Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader (so no Warhammer 3rd Edition-style-boxed sets here). It looks to be a more focused game; everyone plays some sort of Space Marine, each an elite warrior drawn from the ranks of Space Marine chapters across the galaxy.

I'm reading through Rogue Trader now, and while I think I prefer its mercantile mix of all-or-nothing trade gambles, utterly self-confident crew, and deep space horrors, Deathwatch may be a game I need to add to my library. If nothing else, I'm sure I could get my gaming group to play a one shot or two.

The redesigned version of the Griffin's Crier, my gaming group's web site, is now up and running -- you can check it out at www.griffcrier.com. The GriffCrier has been around for more than a decade; our Blackrazor Guild gaming group first launched the site in 1998 as an archive for our World of Greyhawk campaign. Over time, our gaming group's evolved and added new web apps -- we now have a dedicated forum for in and out of game conversations, the archival D&D content has been moved to a Greyhawk wiki, and we've spawned several additional blogs and wikis in support of the other RPGs we play

Over time, the role of the Griffin's Crier diminished, and it was time to bring it back. Four of us are blogging now, and even more are using Twitter. We've got two campaign blogs and two corresponding wikis, all of which are producing RSS. In recent years, the home page of the Crier had been static as content was updated elsewhere; I wanted to change that by pulling in headlines from across the Blackrazor blogosphere.

Ever since Chewbacca defeated R2-D2 in holochess, geeks have wanted a virtual table top for their games. Things have taken a major step in that direction with SurfaceScapes, a proof-of-concept app for Microsoft surface created by students at Carnegie Mellon University. It's based on the D&D 4th Edition rules, and those who've seen it are suitably impressed:

• blog.seattlepi.com: Dungeons & Dragons, Microsoft Surface are a match made in Blackmoor
• KoboldQuarterly.com: The Perfect Table: A Return to D&D SurfaceScapes

For those who haven't seen it before, Microsoft Surface is a sort of digital coffee table; it's got a large, flat touch sensitive screen (kind of like an upsized and hard-to-move iPhone. SurfaceScapes puts an interactive map on the Surface, which you can interact with by moving around specially designed miniatures. All of the rules you need to run the game (e.g. movement, powers, etc.) are built into the game, and you can interact with your character through a handheld device (e.g. an iPod touch or smart phone).

The Gamer Traveler has posted a round up of the "Games & Travel" blog carnival from January 2010. This was a cool topic, and one I wish I'd taken the time to participate in (perhaps I will, retroactively).

While I think many campaigns tend to hand-wave away travel (perhaps after one too many random wilderness encounters during their Advanced Dungeons & Dragons days) it can make for some great adventures. Heck, one of our most memorable Star Wars campaign arcs involved our heroes bouncing out of hyperspace into a proto-star nebula. They barely escaped the nebula with their lives, the ship's outer hull having been melted into what we're now calling "star forged armor".