The year is 1936 and there are strange happenings afoot in the world. Corners of the map that remain unexplored. Creatures from out of legend that hunger for human blood. Artifacts of great power that could change the shape of the world. There are those who would exploit these strange things to rule over the world of man ... and there are those who would stop them. The National Exploration Society is comprised of the latter. Working in cooperation with the Gotham Museum of Art and Antiquity in New York City, New York, they travel the world seeking the weird, the odd and the priceless ... and to stop those who might use such finds for evil.

This is the setup for my gaming group's new Pulp Weird campaign. It's being powered by the Savage Worlds Explorers Edition rules (read the review or buy it from Amazon), which is a slim tome that nonetheless manages to pack in almost all the rules and information we need to run this particular game. The campaign's being run once a month through the summer, and will likely run 5-6 sessions depending on interest and time. I'm co-gming the campaign with my friend Erilar, who'll be kicking things off with tonight's first session

Mongoose Publishing's latest edition of its homegrown magazine Signs & Portents is out. Issue #56 of the role-playing/wargaming magazine includes "An introduction to 760 Patrons" detailing a new mission-oriented source book for Traveller, "Conan Combat Styles", two alternative campaigns for Babylon 5 Call to Arms, "Cthulhutech Spells" and much more.

Our long-discussed, long-delayed Weird Pulp campaign should invade our gaming table sometime this month or next. The game will feature myself and occasional Nuketown commenter Erilar team-GMing a 5-6 episode campaign set in the mid-1930s. The Nazi threat is only just beginning to rear its head, and full-out war still hasn't broken out in Europe.

A group of adventurers attached to a National Geographic-style exploration society are racing around the world investigating lost ruins, battling unspeakable evils, and -- of course -- battling with fascists hell bent on world domination. The whole thing will be powered by Savage Worlds, which half our group fell in love with at GenCon 2007.

I write too much.

This is not a new or sudden revelation. I've known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night's game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I'd written. That’s grossly inefficient, but it was no big deal. I had the time, what I wrote would eventually get recycled into some other adventure, and even if it didn't, that was ok too. After all, it's about journey, not the destination right?

Except now I don't have the time. The hours I used to spend crafting my Dungeons & Dragons campaign are gone, devoured by two fun little monsters for whom quiet time is the villain and bed time the enemy. What I used to spend three weeknights putting together must now be accomplished in an hour, two if I'm lucky. My initial solution to the problem wasn't a solution at all: I simply stopped game mastering.

Wizards of the Coast has announced the D&D 4th Edition Game System License. This license replaces the old d20 license, and appears to take a different tact from D&D 3.x's Open Gaming License. Exactly how different is hard to tell from the announcement; if nothing else what used to be separate procedures and policies for d20 licensing vs. OGL licensing seem to have been combined into one set of rules.

Exactly what these new rules will allow you to do isn't spelled out -- the press release says it will let companies create fantasy-based games based on the 4E ruleset, and spell out what rules can be used in their games, but it doesn't say what rules can't be used. Which makes me wonder if we'll see the old d20 hamstringing carried over to the new edition (namely, if you want the d20 logo, then you have to rely on the core rules for leveling up characters, gaining experience, etc., as opposed to using the OGL, which lost you the logo, but let you create a self-contained games).

Jumping into Second Life is like jumping into a void, albeit one populated with the remnants of a half million flea markets. Moving around is awkward, and not just because your avatar inevitably looks like its been nailed to a set of wooden planks. The world's interface makes it difficult to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, and once you've stumbled upon how to make the jump, more often than not Point B wasn't worth the effort in the first place.

And then you dig a little deeper and start finding more interesting things. Like a hidden Stargate network joining dozens of regions together. Or a community of Firefly afficidoes who's raised their own town. Or people attending virtual church services. Or biker bars with live rock music.

There are tantalizing potentials lurking to Second Life, but finding them, and exploiting them, well, that's the challenge.

The heroes of Freedom City will once again take to the skies tonight as my gaming group returns to our Infinity Storm campaign for Mutants & Masterminds

Player schedules -- both mine and the groups -- have played havoc with the campaign, and as a result the campaign's been on something of a hiatus since Issue #6: White Knight, Green Hero back in February. In a perfect world I would have filled that void with some play-by-post sessions, but alas, the world has been less then perfect.

It’s no secret to my gaming group that I’m getting burned out playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve wanted to try something new for years now, but as D&D 3.5’s variant rules (and even core rules) have proliferated with its end-of-edition publishing spasms, my desire to try something different has intensified.

The Battlestar Galactica RPG was one one of those different things.

My gaming group’s been playing in the World of Greyhawk for more than a decade. Greyhawk’s a traditional fantasy setting, one of the first for D&D, and it’s very much inspired by the likes of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s a sword and sorcery realm in which the story revolves around rank-and-file adventurers, rather than the antics of super-powered heroics of uber-mages or unstoppable drow warriors.

The setting, and our campaign, has a lot of history. We’re not eager to give up either.

Our group has a long history of playing board games, and an equally long history of saying we need to play more of them. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, our Board Game Night seems to fall through the crack after a few months of Risk 2210, Settlers of Catan or some new game. This Friday we aimed to get things back on schedule with two new games, the zombie survival game Mall of Horror and transcontinental railroad-traveling Ticket to Ride.