Run Amok Blog

It's been so long since I updated this blog that I've gone from Wizards of the Coast, back to Paizo, and then back to Wizards of the Coast again (where I now manage the D&D game design team, a fantastic group of very talented creatives!). As an update, here's a kind of post I used to make from time to time: the games I'm playing now! Most of these are every-other-week, or even once a month. For a change, I'm currently playing in a lot more games than I'm running.

1. (D&D, DM) I'm running a Planescape game for some friends; the characters started at level 1 but just barely hit level 3, so we haven't been playing for long. This isn't the 5th edition D&D Planescape adventure--which I previously ran and enjoyed--but a campaign where I'm using the old AD&D adventures updated to the 5.5 rules. I'm giving the PCs a lot of choice about where they go, but the factions they're in are a big part of the game and I plan to eventually culminate in the Faction War adventure. So far, I've run the first adventure in The Great Modron March to pull the party together, then The Eternal Boundary to nearly incinerate them, and now they're in an adventure in the Mazes from Well of Worlds. They're pretty deep in a political predicament and they haven't even yet reached the supernatural maze at the heart of that adventure.

2. (Pathfinder 2E, Player) I'm in a survival horror Pathfinder game with a great group and the a GM who really knows horror and how to turn up the tension at the table. This isn't a published game, but a homebrew campaign that's wholly sprung from the mind of our GM. I'm playing a human guardian--a fairly new class at the time we started--and I love taking big hits while protecting the team. The amount of time my character spends at maximum Hit Points is really, really small. We're about to hit 5th level, and we're only just getting the rough shape of the cosmic horror we need to prevent--which will require us to figure out how to leave the island where we've been shipwrecked since the first session!

3. (D&D, DM) I'm running a monthly game with a fun group up at a local medieval village. We play in a reconstruction of a 13th century inn, so the atmosphere can't be beat! I'm running the Pathfinder adventure path Stolen Fate, converted to D&D rules, and the players are about to finish the first book--that is, the first third of the campaign. Since we only play monthly, this is taking a long time, but it's a delight to run. The campaign is all about collecting cards from a magical fortune-telling deck; the cards are powerful, but they are the only magic items in the game, so collecting and trading the cards themselves is a big part of the game's immersion.

4. (13th Age, Player) I've been playing in a long-running 13th Age game with an every-other-week group. How long-running? I was playing this back in my last "what I'm playing" post in 2022! After a tragic character death, I'm no longer playing my halfling pirate sorcerer, but instead playing a self-important human wizard. There are big, dramatic forces in motion and our GM is great at giving a sense of a world in a delicate balance that we can tip based on our heroics.

5. (13th Age, Player) I just starting a game with a group of coworkers, and we decided to play...13th Age! I'm excited about playing a completely different character (a forgeborn rogue) in a system that I can say, after many years, I...really only sort of know.

6. (Torg Eternity, Player) I've been playing Torg Eternity with my friends from high school for so long that I hardly remember a time when I wasn't playing with them. This is the same group that used to play BECMI D&D in my basement back in high school, and it's wonderful to keep in touch with such good friends--especially since we get to play Torg, one of my very favorite RPGs.

7. (Pathfinder 1E, Player) I'm playing a half-orc warpriest, captain of the pirate ship Damnation, in the Skull & Shackles campaign. We only play monthly, but the weekend sessions are twice as long as my usual weeknight sessions, so each session feels like it packs in a lot of story. We're at the start of the sixth book (of six) in the campaign, so we're nearing the conclusion of this years-long journey!

8. (D&D, Player) I just joined a friend's D&D game that promises a lot of unpredictable fun. It's set in the Forgotten Realms and the GM has gone out of his way to make a sprawling, immersive plot, but most characters are chaos magnets with their own agendas only loosely connected to the overall story, so even one session in, it's a wild ride. My level 5 Halfling Fighter/Rogue is, with only mild exaggeration, absolutely the best archer in the world.

9. (Pathfinder 2E, Player) I'm in an actual play of the Hellbreakers adventure path from Paizo, and our GM is one of the authors. It's a ton of fun, and my character is a gnome lawyer (oh, and a witch)--one of the most fun characters I'm currently playing. We're trying to save the nation of Isger from diabolic evil and do as much good as we can along the way. We're only 2nd level now, so this campaign is still in its early stages, but I'm enjoying it a lot.

10. (Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG, Player) I joined a playtest group last March, while the game was still being designed, mostly so I could do better work in writing for it. Although the campaign skipped around a lot in levels and locations for the first few months--as is the nature of playtesting a game whose rules aren't yet set in stone--we've settled into a pretty consistent story recently. My character, Greg, became a dragon-person necromancer (as one sometimes does in the offbeat world of Dungeon Crawler Carl). I've been a player in this game so far, but the GM wants a chance to play, too, so I'll probably rotate in to run this for a few sessions in the new year.