"The Ruins of New York" is a 4-hour one-shot adventure written for Ken Hite's The Day After Ragnarok, a Savage Worlds campaign setting published by Atomic Overmind Press. I'll be running this event at MEPACon Fall 2009, and since it's been a while since I ran Savage Worlds, I decided to do a playtest with my regular gaming group.

What follows is a synopsis of the adventure and my playtest notes from running it. I'll be posting my adventure notes on Friday for those who are interested it running it themselves.

Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of our D&D 4th Edition playtest.  Building on earlier versions that appeared in Spycraft and Unearthed Arcana, skill challenges provided an in-game mechanic for resolving non-combat conflicts and complex tasks.

We used it to handle the exploration a lava tube complex leading to a red dragon’s volcano and an escape from an angry horde of goblins on an ice world. In both cases, we found it really enhanced our game, turning what could have another dungeoncrawl or a case of DM fiat into a dramatic, player-driven story.

It’s a good idea, and one we’ve been eager to use in our Star Wars campaign (even our anti-4E contingent  wanted to try it). We did exactly that in our third session (“Chapter 3: The Lingering Twilight”), with equally good results.

Our Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign kicked off on Friday with our first full-fledged Knights of the Old Republic session. Since my Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Annotated Playtest went over so well  I decided to do the same for this Saga Edition.

This one will work a little differently; instead of annotating a single combat ecounter, I’m going to offer my thoughts on the game session as a whole, discussing both combat and role-playing aspects of the game. If there's enough interest, I'll also do a round-by-round combat playtest for melee and starship combat. 

Dawn on Zebulon

The adventure began on the world of Zebulon Beta, part of the binary planetary system of Zebulon in the Vargis Tau system. We joined our three young padawans in the training yards of the Citadel of Kal-Kor, home to the Unified Force Academy, under the watchful eye of Jedi Knight Lornn Varri.

Rather than just complain about how difficult high level combat is in D&D 3.5, my gaming group's decided to do something about it. We've created a playtest group who's willing to put in the extra effort it takes to play a high level game ... and to figure out what, if anything, we can do to make the process work better.

Our first crack at this was the 15th-level one-shot "The Devil-Haunted World".