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

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.

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.

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.

The Dark City A Team campaign (and we really do need to come up with a better designation for the upper level characters) resumes tonight after the unexpected death of the entire B Team at the hands of the Kobold King last week. Before we do so though, we'll be running through a playtest of Berin Kinsman's lightweight tabletop miniatures game Toybox Wars.

Friday's game day was supposed to see our lower-level Dark City campaign characters' wrap up Paizo's Crown of the Kobold King module and then return to our home city of Obsidian Bay for some much needed down time.

And then ... Total Party Kill.

It was our own fault. We went up against a dozen or so kobolds, and while we were able to defeat them, they depleted all of our magical resources, and greatly weakened all of the characters save my swordsage, Zilanderan (Zil having the unique Book of Nine Swords ability to heal damage whenever he recovers maneuvers). Immediatey after that fight, we found the kobold king, his bodyguards, and a kobold sorcerer. Instead of falling back to rest and recover (and knowing that a young child might be sacrificed to the kobold's god if we didn't act) we charged in.

Gary Gygax passed away this week, shocking the geek world and sending a cascade of remembrances surging across the web. My gaming group is no less saddened by this, and in honor of Gygax, we took a one-week break from our campaign to run the classic 1st edition module, White Plume Mountain.

Technically, we’re not running that exact module. Instead, I’m going to use the 3rd edition conversion that Wizards of the Coast posted to their web site a while back. We'd originally thought of doing it using 1st edition rules, but with me at DrupalCon all week I didn't have time to re-read the 1st edition ruleset and prep the dungeon.

This week's Game Day sees us returning to the Dark City campaign to wrap-up our quest to save a bunch of kidnapped kids from some dungeon-dwelling kobolds. It's a fun adventure, but I find myself straining to connect it to a Game Day column. So instead I'm going to stick with the semi-random rambling approuch that I took last time around.

I just discovered GamerBling earlier this week; digging through the site turned up a review of Q-Workshop dice. In short, they like the dice, but have issues with clarity and inking. Now that I own two sets (Elvish and Cthulhu), I'll agree with the clarity issue. While these are beautiful dice, some sets -- like the Elvish runes -- can be hard to read once you start throwing them around the table. I prefer my yellow-lettering-on-black-background Cthulhu dice, which are far easier on the eyes.

I didn't have enough time for a full-fledged Game Day column this week, so here are some random thoughts relating to Mutants & Masterminds inspired by Friday’s session.

The new Infinity Storm blog is coming along nicely. I’ve got an HTML mock-up mostly working in Safari and Firefox; Internet Explorer still has issues (but really, when does it not?) Don’t be too impressed by our artwork – it’s all lifted from Mutants & Masterminds source books (or rather, be impressed with Green Ronin rather than me). Once I nail down the formatting problems in IE, I’ll be converting the mockup to a WordPress template and moving the entire site over to a subdomain on GriffCrier.com. I’m making the move because a) I need to learn how to do WordPress templates b) Wordpress is much more flexible than Blogger.