Checking In

I'm out in Santa Fe for two and a half weeks, visiting my folks and generally relaxing, so things have been a bit quiet on the gaming front. Here's what I've been up to:

• Preparing for the GURPS campaign I'll be starting up when I get back. I can't wait--it should be a real blast.
• Reading over Supplement V: Carcosa, which I ordered and had sent here, since I couldn't wait to get home to take a look at it. JimLOTFP nicely encapsulates both the awesomeness of the product and the ridiculousness of the "controversy" that's surrounded its release. My buddy Alex is set to run an infrequent sandbox campaign using Swords & Wizardry and Carcosa after I get back. I can't wait.
• Speaking of infrequent gaming with Alex, I started running a sort of hex crawl* Rifts campaign for him last month. We've only got one session under our belts so far, but it's shaping up to be a lot of good old fashioned science-fantasy monster bashing.
• And speaking of good gaming blogs, Sham's Grog n' Blog has been running an amazing series of glimpses into his mind-bogglingly awesome mega-dungeon. Check it out for an example of dungeoneering at its finest!

*For the Rifts hex crawl, I simply super-imposed a hex grid over a map of Rifts North America, made a chart to roll on for each new hex entered that will determine chance of encounter, type of encounter (some are keyed, some are totally random), terrain, and climate, and said, "Here's your starting point--where do you want to go?" After the highly-structured format of the Great Pendragon Campaign, it's been a real breath of fresh air to take such a "seat of your pants" approach; a lot of lessons of how to pull off such an endeavor--like the importance of having a list of NPC names to consult when an unexpected meeting took place--were quickly re-learned in that first session.