depressedOne of the things I've been thinking about the last week and a half or so, in between bouts of abdominal pain and other health-related issues, has been the gaming groups. Both gaming groups have been playing the fantasy noir rpg, The Edge of Midnight, the last little while. While I've been enjoying myself tremendously with the game, and the two groups have played as regularly as they can manage, it's a weird gaming set-up. The Friday night gaming group (with the exception of last night, see below), is off for the last four weeks of December, so I have missed playing with them. They've been enjoying The Edge of Midnight campaign very much to this point, have gotten the "feel" of their characters, and have managed to get into the sensibility of the noir genre to this point exceedingly well. I'm looking forward to resuming that when we get into the new year, and this will give me some time to plot a few things out for the gaming group over the next couple of weeks or so, and that sort of thing.
Last night, the Friday nighters decided to come over and cheer me up somewhat, and I had a pretty good evening for the most part. "We've decided to come out and cheer you up, John," was SteveB's line when they arrived, "and so to distract you a bit, you're going to spend the rest of this evening creating our Hellas characters with us!" For those who don't know, Hellas: Worlds of Sun and Stone is a science fiction rpg that is based on Greek myth and legends with some interesting twists thrown into it. And that's exactly what we did. I'll be posting more about the Hellas character generation stuff with the Friday nighters at some point later today or perhaps tomorrow, but suffice it to say I had a pretty good time, and SteveB, Kathy, Nick, Tom, and Joanne came up with some interesting characters for the game.
And then there's the Sunday gaming group. Because of Real Life(tm) concerns, we haven't gamed since the beginning of December, and are planning to get together tomorrow and possibly the Sunday after (depending on everyone's plans for the holidays). While the Sunday gamers are playing The Edge of Midnight as well, their enjoyment of it has been...mixed, to say the least. While both
spross and oni_neko appear to be enjoying themselves in the game, and are willing to try and embrace the noir sensibility, Tammy is not enjoying herself too much in the game, doesn't seem to like the genre (she would prefer me to eliminate most of the noir elements and emphasize the magic side of things), and...well, you get the picture. She's not seen any film noir and doesn't really know what the genre is (do any of us, really? :), despite various talks about the subject, and some links I've shared with her), and has expressed no real desire to see any films noir as she's not fond of the "old movies". Part of the problem is that Tammy's character, the nurse, doesn't have a lot in common with spross's cabbie and oni_neko's gangster's daughter and vice versa, but this is common to the Sunday gaming group - they don't seem to ever want to sit down to create characters and actually create characters with stuff in common, preferring to leave the "common elements" up to me! I had hoped that this would change somewhat with the addition of new players (although oni_neko has helped somewhat in this regard). This has made the Sunday game of EoM less enjoyable to me, and I'm trying to get the three characters together, but the noir genre doesn't mean that it's something that necessarily has to be done quickly. Depending on how things shape up, the EoM game on Sundays may be done when I manage to finish off the current scenario (if they decide they want to continue with that). If the weather permits tomorrow, the Sunday gamers will create their characters for the Hellas, although I seriously expect them to take two four-hour sessions to do this for some reason. I guess when it comes right down to it, the two gaming groups have different sensibilities when it comes to roleplaying. In the meantime, we'll see what the future of the two gaming groups brings...
