Picking up the Scattered Pieces

Well, this past couple months have been a bit scattered as I work on various projects:

• D&D: S. and I played some on Omri's line this weekend. I spent a day hacking B.'s OpenRPG XML tree to streamline play on Dragonwars. And last night I put in a bit of dungeon crawling on Tellurian Tales--though nothing major to report there yet.

I also got to check out the new 4E books at Borders. I only had time to flip through the PHB, but I was pretty happy with what I saw. Interesting decision to cut alignment down to LG, G, N (unaligned), E, and CE. The new gods seem cool. A lot of things like skills have been nicely simplified (often mirroring changes I've made in Drudge), but things are a bit more complicated with characters in other areas, as there are so many powers to choose from at each level now. I think it was a nice idea to turn a lot of the spells into character powers for spellcasters, except for rituals which take too long to be cast in combat. Still, with all the other stuff I have going on right now, I probably won't buy the books for a while. (But the SRD is probably out there somewhere.... Oh, foul temptation!)

• Zludge/Drudge: I've been rereading the Fudge SRD straight through, just to make sure I've covered everything I should and to pull any missed good ideas for Zludge. I also combined the 3dF of Fluffy and the 4dF of Zludge Prime into a single 3dF progression for both systems. Zludge is getting more streamlined, and I'm quite happy with it on paper. I still haven't had a chance to playtest it much yet, of course.

I've also been checking out diceless games, and I've been hacking out some co-GMing rules. Hopefully those details will make it up here soon.

• Lite Gaming: Reading Fudge's magic system got me thinking about my "non-Scrabble" magic system and so I pulled that out again late last night.

• Inspiriation: I went ahead and bought the Iron Kingdoms World Guide off eBay. So far, it's made for nice bathroom reading. I plan to work their history into my general Tellurian history document; doesn't look like it will be too painful.

• IN Research: I've also finally gotten back into my IN research by reviewing my two big spiral sketchbooks of notes, writing up a Table of Contents/Summary for each.

Anyway, this is just an overview. A lot of these projects will turn into links as more of the details get posted.