I'm falling behind on keeping this blog up to date. I said when I started it that I wanted to post three times a week. I'm falling down to the one and a half range, but posting that much is an improvement to my previous attempts at doing this. Sometimes I sit down and stare at the computer screen and think "I should really put something on the blog... but what would I write?" and I end up not writing anything.

*5 minutes pass*

Ok so I have typed about ten different sentences then removed them. Apparently talking about writers block creates writers block, much like yawning causes more yawning.

I have been up to a lot of things lately. I have been running a campaign for the local Warmachine/Hordes guys which entails creating scenarios to play, writing the plot line, and playing in it myself. I have been playing lots of other games just to get practiced up for the tournament on June 14th. Tonight I played two games and gave a demo of the game to two kids. As I lamented earlier on this blog I was having a serious loosing streak and that streak did not end after my personal pity party. I went 0-4 last week giving me seven straight losses and making me wonder why I even play the game. Fortunately for my bruised ego I won the two games I played today. It's a good thing too, I was about to break out the balloons and confetti and have an uber pity party.

My Wednesday night gaming group has finished all of our current campaigns and we are going to be playing a Savage Worlds game so that I can better learn the rules for the gaming convention in July. I have decided, and my players agreed, that the game should be set in the Thundarr the Barbarian setting. This is really only a temporary campaign until we move on to the game I had originally planned, but the concept of a post-apocalyptic earth with some weird science, mutants and magic is pretty darn cool. It's a complete wonder to me that the cartoon ever got canceled! It was only on for a couple years but it was easily my favorite Saturday morning cartoon while it was on. Anyway, we are suppose to be making characters for this short campaign tomorrow and I haven't even started figuring out the special rules for the playable character races in the setting. Who knows when I'm going to get around to doing that, but I better start soon considering I need to have it done by tomorrow evening.

My Saturday night group has completed Something Rotten in Kislev of The Enemy Within campaign and are now moving on to Empire at War (a fan made replacement for Empire in Flames). So sometime between now and then I need to read a quite a bit of back story and plot and prepare for four hours of gaming for Saturday night. This is coming on such a crappy week I have no clue when I am going to do this prep work. However, it's somewhat comforting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and know that the campaign will be coming to a close soon. It feels really good to finish a long term campaign and have it feel like it was a success and the players who played through it all enjoyed it. So while I will miss the campaign, when its finished and we have moved on to the next game, it will still feel pretty good to have completed it.

In my spare time I have been working on a gunstock for a Ruger 77/17 that I purchased from my dad probably two years ago. I rebarreled it with a Clark Customs barrel and then purchased an unfinished stock from Richard's Microfit Gunstocks. The stock is made of grade A claro walnut with a rosewood tip and cap; its a pretty piece of wood. Anyway it's been a labor of love for a long time and if I had known how much work it was going to be to fix the inletting, sand it, and finish the stock I probably would have skipped the whole deal. Yet it's strangely satisfying to creating something with your own hands out of wood that is so beautiful you just enjoy looking at it. So as soon as I have completed it I will definitely be posting some pictures of the gun here. Maybe you won't feel it's as neat as I do, but to me its pretty spiffy.

Today was my last test for finals week at school. I have one more test to take but its taken online and I can take it at my leisure. It feels good to be finished with this year of school and only have one more to go. Hopefully next year will be as good scholastically as this year has been.

I would like to thank everyone who has expressed concern and sympathy for my dog. Its been a few days now and other then his eating habits not being back to normal he is very active and quickly returning to full health. He is obviously still sore and we have to be careful with his wounds but his attitude and personality have returned. For the first couple of days if we put him in the back yard for him to relieve himself he would just stare at us like he was being punished so he had to be taken to the front yard. Now he has become more comfortable with the back yard again and is willing to walk around and explore.

Tonight is my Wednesday night gaming group and we are going to be starting something new. We finished our World of Darkness campaign a couple weeks ago and it will be missed a little. I think my players will miss it more then I will, but regardless it was a lot of fun. We played the game for several years and it covered a very broad range of events and the players went from being highly secretive government employees to highly sought after fugitives. In the player characters travels they covered most of the United States then went to places like Copenhagen, Moscow, Ulan Bator, Lhasa and finally the Himalayan mountains. The characters personalities developed significantly in that time and I think we all enjoyed the story immensely.

But now that the campaign is complete we are going to play a short campaign using the Savage Worlds game rules. It will probably only be one or two adventures long and will be centered on time travel. As I have said before in this blog I want to eventually make a time travel RPG, and this foray into the genre will give me a lot of insight into possible problems and issues I might face. In this short campaign the players will be forced to travel through time and I'm starting to wonder if that's not a better solution for a game overall. Motivation in a role playing game can make player characters do some odd things and the problem I keep returning to in a time travel sense is: If you could travel through time, would you? Ethically it brings a lot to the table. Just attempting it could destroy the universe as we know it. Would knowing that your current lives and world around you might not ever be the same again stop you from attempting to travel back in time? You may never see your loved ones again. Your interference with the past might change the course of humanity forever. (see Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder)

However if the player characters are shoved back in time without any understanding of how long they will be there or even why they are there it provides them a situation that they must deal with. It's unfortunately a bit of what some gamers like to call "railroading". However it makes for a great storytelling device and a great television show. So I am going to try it and see how it goes. If the players are trapped in the past leaping from time to time solving problems I think it will solve all of the moral issues with time travel and why in so many time travel settings there is a need for time police (although players being time travel police is also a great option for a time travel game).