pleasedAnd by "played", I actually mean that I *played*. As my birthday present, Nick Roberts runs a game for the month of July so that I can actually get out from behind the GM Screen and play in a game with the others while he GMs. Last night, Nick started his "2014 run".
We all assembled for gaming around 7:10 pm at my place, and the neat thing was that none of us knew what game Nick was going to run, as he'd been pretty coy about things all week. We were all quite surprised, and I have to say that I was pleased, when Nick took out the game books from his satchel, and he announced that he was going to run Hollow Earth Expedition! HEX has been one of my favourite roleplaying games over the past decade or so, and I ran the game for quite some time. I came to the realisation that I just don't have the chops for running Pulp action-adventure games per seacute;, so I stopped running the game, but I have wanted to play in a game of HEX for the longest time. While
spross ran the game a few times in July exercises, he never ran a full scenario and all, so I was pretty pleased with Nick's choice of game. Once Nick as ready to go, we started in on Hollow Earth Expedition character generation. He talked to us a bit about his vision of the game world, some of the limitations he was setting on the characters, and the basics of the rules and character generation, and then started in on the characters with us. I created a British character named Archibald Weatherby, a bit of a pilot and mechanic with a devil-may-care attitude, and a love for women and adventure. The other players created a good mix of characters, and Joanne decided that she wanted her character, a spy character named Francis Rose Davis, to have had an affair with my character at some point in the past; I could see the potential for character interaction there, and so we talked about how the relationship went and all and added that to the basic backgrounds.
Character generation took just over two hours, so Nick was able to devote the rest of the game session to having us go through examples using the rules, and then ran some sample combats. The game mechanics and combat system came back to me pretty quickly, and I spent an enjoyable evening killing a few Nazis and engaging in a bar fight with some bare-knuckle boxing. Lots of fun!
Nick will be starting the adventure when we pick up again. I'm looking forward to next week's game session.