I am becoming addicted to Spider Solitaire.

Also: I AM GETTING OLD.

The new campaign starts tonight. I still have to write up three intros, but it's looking good and I am excited for all of us.

Mike and I are also talking about merging our campaigns. At the very least I am writing all my background content with the expectation that at some point I may self-publish it. Mike tends to be very good with the crunchy bits (encounters, tactics, treasure) but weak on the storytelling end. As for me, I...I want people to sob when I tell them there's been a message from their mother, and their puppy died. Battling a pit fiend. In hell.

Oh, and that puppy was your brother. Polymorphed when he was younger. Terribly tragic.

Anyway, I may end up posting some more here about the setting after tonight. Or not. Whee.

I like 4E. I like it enough that despite the fact that I bought the Big Book of Monte, I am dropping it to create my own 4E campaign.

I'm loosely basing the game around the second-to-last world I wrote a book about. I figure I can replace some of the human cultures with the other humanoids. If I think I can do campaign notes without my players reading them, I will. They're all pretty trustworthy, so why not?

Final note...man, I wouldn't be doing this if I were actually happy with my 3E Ptolus campaign. But I'm not. My crew are all MMO players. We like a quicker pace and for everyone to be active, and 4E accomplishes that.

And though we've had some fun with the Ptolus campaigns (levels 1-4 were a good mix of excitement and intrigue), I'm not feeling the Night of Dissolution segment. The last time I ran the game, I started the evening with an encounter that was a replacement for the one in the book. And y'know, it was probably the funnest thing we'd done in five sessions.

That was the point I knew. For whatever reason, this campaign ain't fun, and I need to go my own way.

But this is also how Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil went. We had a ton of fun in the "moathouse" segment that preceded the actual temple. Then we got to the temple proper and interest went foop. Ah well.