Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry for our Design A Dungeon Room contest! I’ll be distributing the submissions to the team of judges shortly and we can get started delving through your dungeon entries.

I had an incredibly busy week doing freelance work and getting ready to launch some new websites, but I think I’ll be able to get back to more regular posting of content here. It was really nice to hear from people emailing to say they’ve been enjoying the Weird West articles and were looking forward to seeing them return.

Speaking of which – last weekend we kicked off the Weird West Campaign with the players making characters and arriving in hot and dusty town of Tharsis, Arizona in the year 1874. It was good to have all the players from last year’s “old school” D&D game back at the table again. The game felt a bit more “Western” than “Weird Western” for this session, but the groundwork has been laid, and in the next session the players will find out that there are strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Of the new rules we took for a test-drive I found that dropping the 3-18 for character stats in favor of descriptive text worked very, very well. Knowing that a character was “Emotionless” was much more interesting than hearing he had 8 Charisma. Having two characters with high stats in Dexterity doesn’t say much about them, but knowing that one is a “Dead eye” and the other is “Slippery” certainly does.

Something I had forgotten from the last time I played a game with firearms is just how important range is in battles. If the players encounter an enemy at long range (which they did) then how quickly characters without long range weapons can close the distance to shooting range matters a lot. Even more for characters who want to get into close combat range. Keeping better track of range, terrain and movement – even in an abstract way, will be an important future consideration.

Finally, now that the first game session (which we’ll be posting a proper write-up and/or podcast for) is finished I’ve been working on some custom character cards for the players in place of more traditional character sheets. It was interesting to hear that Wizards of the Coast is also planning on making use of cards in their upcoming Gamma World 4e game, and that’s definitely something I think is a good idea.