I did something I've never done before in September: I kicked off someone else's campaign. Ok, technically it's still my campaign, but material belongs to Pazio. The campaign is the Second Darkness adventure path, and if all goes according to plan, it will see our seven freshly-minted heroes face the ancient hidden evil of the drow in an attempt to save the world from a second apocalypse.

I've been running my own campaigns -- for D&D, Star Wars, and Savage Worlds -- for 15 years. Over that time I've made liberal use of material from a variety of source books, including more than a few one-shot adventures, but by and large I was the one writing each week's episode. It was fun ... but it was also tremendously time consuming.

When the time game to launch a new campaign, Paizo's Pathfinder Role-Playing Game was an obvious choice. It preserved the strain of Dungeons & Dragons that my gaming group preferred, and enhanced it just enough to get rid of the things that had been driving us crazy in the 3.x branch. But the challenge with Pathfinder is that it's a crunchy, rules heavy game. When we ran Star Wars, I could easily knock out non-player characters in a night, but going with Pathfinder meant a return to magic and all its inherent complexity.

It’s Game Day, and for the first time in years I’m running Dungeons & Dragons. Well, technically I’m running Pathfinder, but in all the ways that matter it’s the thematic and mechanical successor to the flavor of D&D my group liked best. 

This session is a long time coming. I’ll save the story of the road back for another post; the short version is that my group experienced a catastrophic burnout brought about by 8+ years playing D&D 3.x and the subsequent Edition Wars. For the last three years, Star Wars: Saga Edition has been a welcome refuge, providing us with a much-needed change of genre (wizards with laser swords notwithstanding).

Part of what drove us away from D&D 3.x in the first place was the “x” in 3.x; the splintering of the 3.0 and 3.5 rule set gave rise to all manner of confusion as we constantly stumbled over changes large and small.  More than one disagreement at the table was inspired by disagreements over spells that had morphed and then morphed again between microeditions (and then morphed again when Spell Compendium was released). It was this sort of thing that led us to abandon D&D 2nd Edition for 3E in the first place.

My lunchtime role-playing game campaign is now a reality. Inspired by Mike Mearls' tales of lunchtime D&D 4E campaigns, and after my coworkers jumped at an offhand tweet about a lunchtime game, I'm now running a twice-a-week The Day After Ragnarok game.

Powered by Savage Worlds, The Day After Ragnarok is a post-apocalyptic setting that takes place in 1948, after the Nazis summoned the Midgard serpent in an attempt to bring about the end of the world ... and the American's killed it by flying a nuclear bomb into its eye.

The first role-playing game I ever played was Dungeons & Dragons. The second was Star Frontiers. Saying I "played" Star Frontiers is something of a stretch; I game mastered one or two sessions in 8th grade and that was pretty much it. Except … it was much more than that. Star Frontiers grabbed the world-building part of my brain, and wouldn't let go. I created the Starrior star system, and populated it with the benevolent megacorp known as Astro Mining & Freighting (or simply AMF). I detailed the vast starfleets of the United Planetary Federation and the smaller – yet still formidable – Starrior Milita.

I filled a three-ring binder background information, fleet configurations, and star maps that depicted the growing Starrior Republic which – looking back – was a sort of proto free market republic dedicated to fighting the threats that the UPF was too cowardly to engage (namely the vile Sathar invaders).