Ken Newquist 
It’s November. Summer is long gone, and so is my summer reading list.
There were 15 books and four graphic novels on my official Summer 2014 reading list. I read 13 of the novels and five graphic novels, beating last year’s total of 11 novels and an equal number of graphic novels.
The last time my gaming group ran a regular Dungeons & Dragons game was in 2008. It was our Dark City campaign, set in our homegrown city of Obsidian Bay and using the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules.
Summer is winding down, which means the chances that my gaming group will have a full gaming session are going up. This week saw six of us get together to continue our Weird Pulp campaign, which had been stalled since June.
I’ve started running. Not well. Not quickly. Not for long. But I am running … and slowly making progress (where “progress” is defined as no longer feeling like I’m going to collapse after running for three blocks).
Running was never my thing. My sister’s thing, yes, but never mine. I was more about cycling — I was happy to go on on a meandering 20-mile ride and have fun trying to find my way back home.
I’m back from GenCon 2014. As always it was an exhausting-but-fun four days of gaming, preceded by a few days visiting with my wife’s relatives relatives in southern and central Indiana. Adventuring with D&D 5th Edition My Dungeons & Dragons 5e events were decent — I played a pre-gen wizard who I was able to … Read more
One of the big reasons I come to GenCon is to play games, but it’s not the only reason: shopping is another. In 2000 I bought my first Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook there, in 2014 I’ll by my first 5th Edition PHB. This is where I got my Battlestar Galactica and Serenity RPG books, as well as more d20 sourcebooks than I care to mention.
I’m on the road to GenCon 2014. In seven hours I’ll be in Indianapolis, rendezvousing with friends, checking into the hotel, picking up my registration pack … and getting reading to roll some dice. As I wrote a few months ago, this is my first trip to GenCon since 2007. A lot has changed since then — from what I’ve heard, the convention has gotten even bigger than it was then (and it was hella big then, having outgrown Milwaukee a few years earlier).
My annual vacation to Lake Champlain is still a ways off, but I’ve begun attacking my summer reading list with a vengeance. I’ve completed one book — Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold — have have launched into two more: Fractions by Ken MacLeod and Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve also found one of the books on my list is caught in the Amazon/Hachette crossfire.
I’ve been creating campaign websites for most of the Blackrazor Guild websites since 1996. We have an extensive wiki for our Greyhawk campaign and experimented with blogs for our Mutants & Masterminds and Star Wars campaigns. Blogs had been difficult to use because they’re oriented more towards serial writing and less about publishing (and extensively … Read more
Summer is coming. It’s bringing with it alien worlds, starship battles, ancient mysteries, and sequels. Lots of sequels. No, I’m not talking about movies — I’m talking books, specifically my Summer Reading List for 2014.