Our first full-blown session of Savage Worlds took place last night as our Weird Pulp campaign got underway. The game began with the characters gathering at the Gotham Museum of Art and Antiquity as part of the National Exploration Society to learn of a planned expedition to British Honduras. As we were being briefed, German operatives burst into the museum wielding submachine guns, smashed a display case, and stole a South American dagger that had been recovered, in of all places, Egypt.

The Germans then fled the scene, and once our characters were no longer held helpless by enemy guns, we followed them. A car chase -- using the Savage Worlds "Chase" rules followed. This was our first car chase in perhaps a dozen years of gaming together as a group, and that should tell you something about the nature of the Savage Worlds rules right there -- vehicle rules in d20 games tend to be crazily complicated, but the "Chase" rules in SW are simple enough that you can have a chase without it bogging down the game.

Toybox Wars is a table-top miniatures game in which the inhabitants of your toybox rise up to fight each other to the death. The core mechanic is simple. Each toy -- be it a miniature car, squad of army men, teddybear -- is represented by 10 six-sided dice divided into one of three pools: Dodge Dice, Attack Dice, Floating Dice. At the start of every turn, players allocate their dice between the pools, depending on whether they want to focus on offense or defense, or hedge their bets with the floating dice, which can be used for both.

The Lehigh Valley’s annual Celtic Festival is underway in Bethlehem, which means that most of my friends chose to drink, eat and listen to great music rather than game.

That said, two of us were still able to get a little gaming in, namely a playtest of the new Halo ActionClix collectible miniatures game from WizKids Games. That provided a lead into even more Halo, as I fired up my newly-purchased cpy of Halo 3 and tried (and largely failed) to get into match making with my Geezer Gamer clanmates.

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.

My friends and I ran our first playtest of the combat system in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition. It was a productive test, and we learned a lot about the game's mechanics ... and how to design a more effective heroes. Here's what we learned in the first go round, featuring four battle-suited, Power Level 10 combatants:

1) The rules are as cool as they seem, and once you get the base mechanic down. We had a little confusion understanding how the Protection (Invulnerability) power worked, but eventually figured out it was soaking a certain amount of the damage bonus each round, and how to defeat (or at least, weaken) characters with such powers by making power attacks (which increase the damage bonus by sacrificing the attack bonus).