What Do I Know?

I’m going to post about the Thursday night game in a few pieces, rather than my usual recap, because now that I’m a player, I want to keep a journal for my poor guardsman, for as long as he lasts.

“What’s that, now that you are a player?  But I thought you were running Edge of the Empire on Thursday night?”

Why, yes, Mythical Blog Reader, I was running Edge of the Empire on Thursday nights, and that is the tale I’ve come here to tell this day.

You see, I’m an idiot, and handed out a billion XP to my players way too early in Edge of the Empire.   I’ve used the excuse that my brain was wired for Fantasy Flight XP for the 40K games, but mainly, I didn’t read good.  So while I enjoyed the setting, the system, and the players, everything had to be amped up to challenge them.

I’ve said a few times that it too a lot of effort to challenge them.  This isn’t strictly true.  It doesn’t take nearly as much work to come up with a threat in Edge of the Empire as it did in Pathfinder or Mutants or Masterminds, where there are lots of fiddly moving parts to put in place a certain way to make something work.

However, in my OCD brain, the more I came up with insanely difficult challenges and uber NPCs, the more I was having a hard time reconciling the “reality” of the setting.  The PCs are taking on dozens of foes at once, or dealing with characters that have stats and skills that probably rival the biggest movers and shakers in the galaxy, and yet I’m trying to present them with mid level movers and shakers on the fridge of the Empire.

When it looked like the game might be out by the end of April, I started planning the end game for the campaign, and talked to the whole group about it.  Everyone was good with wrapping up the existing Beta campaign and staring fresh with new characters and a new campaign as soon as the Edge of the Empire core book came out.

Then it got pushed to July.  I was either going to have several months of some of the best the Empire has to offer being underemployed because of my stupid math errors, or we were going to reboot for a short campaign before rebooting again with the full rules.

Now, my friend is leaving us in August.  He’s been wanting to run Only War.  We talked.  We put it to the players.  We’re playing Only War now, and the crossover time between Edge of the Empire coming out and my friend leaving should give me enough time to read through Edge of the Empire and pick apart the changes from the beta.

We made characters and played a short introductory session.  We have a regiment from a penal colony, currently composed of a heavy gunner, a weapon specialist, a sergeant, a Ministorum Priest, and my medic, with two more players making characters up for the next session.

I’m excited.  I want to keep a journal for this poor ill-fated medic.  I always wanted to do a journal for Rangar, my Space Wolf Devastator marine in Deathwatch, but Rangar wasn’t really the type to write in a journal.  He’d probably sing and or orate his latest adventures, with an insane emphasis on the threat level, to whatever group was assembled to eat or drink together in the mess hall.