01559: A Saturday of Many Colors

Today is International Tabletop Day and Tobie and I are just waiting for our guests to arrive here at the Sietch. This is not one of our typical gaming groups but instead friends from the PinoyG4M forum. Gaming isn't solely for the hardcore gamers after all and things like card games and board games remain a great way to socialize with friends - something very much in theme with Tabletop Day.

It seems a wee bit weird that for this first year of the geek holiday it had to coincide with Holy Week. Then again, that also makes it an optimal time for gathering friends together since most folks have been on holiday for the last few days. So I suppose it will all balance out somehow. And with luck this will truly be a regular practice year after year.

Other than that, last night Tobie and I had a lot of fun during another night at O Bar Ortigas. The bar had opened at 01:00am after everyone was done with their Good Friday religious stuff and were ready to go back to having fun. It was a great night and despite a lot of folks being out of town, we still had some surprise friends like Tom who made the trek all the way to Ortigas to be with us. It was great.

Tobie is awesome.

On a related note with respect to gaming though, Tobie has been helping me flesh out my very first game system. It'll always be a rather daunting task to even consider running a tabletop RPG for the first time, but we've gone the extra mile of home brewing a new game system to support the story that I have in mind. This sort of comforts me since I don't feel like I will risk having players who know the system better than I do and it gives me a bit more flexibility to exert GM control over the narrative.

The basis of the system is John Wick's spin on the Fate system as seen in games like Houses of the Blooded and Blood and Honor. But we've made a few tweaks so that it can fit my somewhat Magic: the Gathering inspired story. There are bound to be instances when the game system may fail or end up being rather buggy, but at the very least we stand a decent chance of it getting through most of the major narrative hassles. Plus Tobie has created a gorgeous character sheet, which is total gravy on top at this point. That on the side is the logo that he developed precisely for this game. Huzzah for fantasy world tropes!

As much as I'm naturally nervous about running a game for the very first time tomorrow, I'm also really excited about it. Yay geeky life! Here's to hoping things turn out well.