The hot seat

It looks like I might be GMing again. It has been a while, and most of my attempts have been very short campaigns, but this is going to be something longer term.

The gaming group that I joined when I recently moved to London has a policy of swapping campaign (and GMs) every six weeks, the choice of game being determined by a vote on those proposed by people willing to run them. I think this is an excellent idea:

• It allows players to avoid getting bored of one campaign through simply playing it for two long
• It prevents GM burnout
• It gives GMs time to plan while someone else runs a different game

Still, as in any group, there are far more people who want to play then want to GM; which is fair enough, GMing is hard work and requires a lot more commitment then the few hours a week that a player has to invest.

Unsurprisingly, someone popped the question – did I want to propose a game? Well, I have to confess that I do.

I’ve got a couple of games I’d like to run. The first is Spirit of the Century, a Pulp game based around the FUDGE rules. This would be something along the lines of some of my favourite (if cheesy in most cases) movies:

• The Shadow
• The Phantom
• The Rocketeer
• Indiana Jones (Trilogy)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

There are just two problems with me running that.

1. I haven’t a clue how I’d manage to come up with six weeks worth of plot
2. I’d much rather play SotC then run it (I wonder if I can persuade someone else at the club to run a game?)

Which brings me to the other game – Babylon 5.

I’ve been a fan of B5 for a very long time. A decade or so ago, my father had a job which meant he was working in Germany, so I was living there. The day we moved back to the UK we were staying in a little B&B near Reading, and I turned on the TV to find a season one episode of Babylon 5 on – and I loved it.

Years later, and little has changed on that front (other then it going from something I loved and looked forward to each week to something I know very well indeed).

I’ve run Babylon 5 games in the past, and they’ve been amongst my most successful attempts at GMing, so I’m going to dig it out again and run some more.

This time I’m going to take a slightly different approach on the setting I put things in, but I’ll post in more detail about my plans for the campaign later.

In the meantime I’m busy rewatching season one (I’ve discovered that my phone is pretty good for watching TV on), reading timelines, working out plot, planning a trip back to Swindon to collect some books, and working out which extra books I need to get my hands on, as Mongoose have had a busy release schedule which I’ve been lax on keeping up with of late.