Ok, so here’s the deal. For the past two years I’ve run a little game near the anniversary of the death of Gary Gygax. The first year it was on a complete whim and we used Castles & Crusades to get through roughly 50% of the very enjoyable Dungeon Crawl Classics module #31 The Transmuter’s Last Touch.

The group featured my wife, Kira, who played some D&D when she was a kid and is very understanding of my geekitude. Also involved were one of my regular geek friends (Parker) and his wife (Chloe), who’d never touched a d20 in her life. Fun was had, and when the pizza delivery guy arrived he saw what we were up to and asked if it was a regular thing or was specifically in honor of Gary. I love this town.

The next year (2009), we got together again with the intent of continuing the module, but we added a new person – Ren, a friend of Parker’s – and so decided to start fresh rather than shoehorning him into the middle of a module. Once again we used C&C, though with a number of tweaks to make it even more old school (no thieves!) and I decided to try out DCC #28, Into The Wilds. We bashed our way through precious little of the module itself – thanks to the players going in an utterly unexpected direction – but still had tons o’ fun. We vowed that we’d continue it sooner rather than later, but for various reasons (including the birth of a child to Parker & Chloe) we didn’t.

Late last year (or was it early this year? who can remember?) Parker decided to run a game of Mutant Future for the same group (blame me, I gave him a copy of MF after he’d related what a fan of Gamma World he’d been). We played two sessions of that marvelous game, finishing an adventure and learning just how deadly a giant poisonous chicken can be. This, naturally, brought us back around to trying to “finish” what we’d started last March.

So here we are, on the eve of our own personal GaryCon ’10. The date and time are set. Dice will be thrown. The only hitch is that we’re switching over to Labyrinth Lord so that there’s a bit of rules continuity from the MF game (to assist the not-really-gamer types – oh, and because I loves me some LL while at the same time I’ve become quite disenchanted with C&C).

What this means in practice is that I’ve got to do some work on character conversion (started, but not finished) and possibly a little bit of prep in re-reading the module, doing some stat work, and figuring out just how much I’m going to use from it at all, given the wildly off course position we’ll find ourselves at the beginning of the game.

“So, Venomous Pao, what are you getting at?” you ask.

Well, all of this long-winded junk is just a way of saying that I’m not sure, given the limited time I have in a day, how much stuff I’ll be churning out for Strange Stones this week.

I know, I know. You’re waiting (impatiently) for the next round of entries in the Demons Of Adad Untash. You’re hoping for more posts in the LL/AEC Rogues Gallery. Or maybe you’re just jonesing for some more Barbarians of Lemuria content. And believe me, I want to give you such things (I’m a giver, after all). And I will. But right this minute I wanted to prep you (my small but adoring audience) for what may turn out to be a very quiet week ’round here.

What I will almost certainly do in my offline work this week is put together a Labyrinth Lord DM’s screen for use at my game. And unless I somehow don’t do that (unlikely – I love playing with InDesign), I’ll be sure to post it here for people to grab. Think of it as a bribe for not giving up on me while I’m working on stuff for an actual game.

Thank you for your patience and support, amigos. Wish me luck in the actual play!