Last weekend, at the 5 th installment of the Roludothon - a quarterly social gaming event in Montreal, I've had a change of trying out Dread.

Dread is a very different breed of RPG than any I've ever encountered - its core mechanic revolves around Jenga.

D&D Birthday Party

DMed for a group of 12 year-olds this week-end.

I had already been DM for them 2 years ago and have been trying to schedule something with them ever since. This game was a birthday request from the birthday boy himself – a request I find myself very happy to oblige.

I decided to run a quick level 1 scenario from the Chaos Scar (you can find it Chaos Scar D&DI) a simple kill evil creatures scenario.

Before we start the game, birthday boy told me:

Eric, this time, I’ll try want to assert myself and take a more active role

Fine, I thought. This’ll be cool.

Learning to play Mouse Guard has me figuratively standing on my head, my feet helplessly flailing in the air in desperate attempts of achieving that sacrosanct performance level I always strive for.

Truth be told, from my understanding, Mouse Guard plays in the exact opposite way I have ever played RPGs.

MG is not exactly about you playing a character that reacts to its environment - its about you and your buddies working together to build a story.

This should - and could - be my holy grail for sharing narrative control.

But it seems that it also wants to be some sort of torture device aiming to make me feel inadequate at something I used to feel I was good at.

Kind of like high school.

I've been planning to come up with my own version of GameTable - now called OSU-gt - for a while.

I've actually ended up joining the dev team, but at this time, our objectives do not seem to be compatible. I planned an architectural redesign the whole thing - mainly to allow third party plugins, update to latest technology and potentially plug in a better graphics engine. They are working on stabilizing what they already have to push out a 2.0 version. They don't seem to have enough time on their hands to really look over what I plan to do.

I'm not "mr. Free Time" either, so I hate spending what time I had spare for this project on waiting to get my ideas approved... so I decided I'll branch my version out and see what happens. More details on my short-term objectives later on.

Right now, I need a name for the project.