So that plan I had for GenCon to hit the gym every morning before my games started? Yeah, that didn't work out so well. Combined with 11 days of family vacation including lots of good food, but not a lot of hard exercise, GenCon saw me gain six pounds.

The Hellion-class heavy cruiser Cerberus took flight Friday night as my gaming group put the Battlestar Galactica RPG through its paces. As I wrote in my earlier Game Day column, the players took on the role of members of the Hellfire Aces, an elite squad of Marines and pilots attached to the Cerberus, a decommissioned cruiser brought back to life after the genocidal Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies.

Their mission was to investigate an icy world lightyears from the Colonies in search of clues that would lead them to the Gates of Hell, a prison world where the Lords of Kobol exiled Phobos, the son of one of the Lords and thousands of his followers. The crew of the Cerberus hope that by finding the descendents of this exile Lord, they might also find the weapons they need to defeat, or at least drive back, the Cylons.

The session went well -- we were able to complete the entire adventure, which isn't something I can always say of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, particularly when combat is involved.  The role-playing mechanics built into the game were excellent, but the combat rules gave our d20-centric brains some trouble, and might just be too fast and deadly for my group's tastes.