Resurrection (again)

I've been busy this past year finishing up my PhD work. There were few gaming thoughts to report during that time. That work is all behind me now, though, so hopefully I'll get back into things here.

In the past year, I've been working on zilch some more. It has split into two components now: a very lite simple nearly-boardgame core and then a number of cleanly modular optional rules to turn it into more of a lite RPG system. The core portion is pretty much done, though it hasn't been tested much yet. The RPG portion is fairly well sketched out but still largely in pieces.

Last month, B. and I sat down one night after a couple beers and whipped up a quick session. We only made it through a couple combats, but things went fairly smoothly there. I was also trying a card-based dungeon generation idea I had (which is also still largely in pieces). An hour or so wasn't enough to tell whether either zilch or the generation system are any good, but at least they didn't seem obvious broken. (We did have to fix the default zilch character generation rules a bit, though.)

B. and I have also been playing D&D by email. I've found this works out quite well. It takes about 1 hour per round/email. I always group his characters together in the initiative order (which is fine, as they only differ by +1 anyway). Once B. decides what Lacane and Gwulf are doing, the rest of the round is in my hands. The only thing I need to do is actually sit down and do this more often!

I have a couple stray backlog details I've been meaning to report, which I'll post soon. Then I'll report on some of my more recent endeavors.