"That is not dead which never updates."

Jesus said that.

I recently made the mistake of taking life seriously. This is an affliction that affects many, and frequently results in them becoming assholes. In an effort to save myself, I'm trying to fit a lot more leisure into my over-scheduled life. Thus, more games and hopefully more frequent updates.

My local group started up again with Ned, the DM who got me back into Mentzer D&D way back in the bygone days of 2005. Ned is a thoroughly old school referee —the type that I believe would make Gary proud— and he has only the vaguest notion that the OSR exists. Ned has simply never seen the need to run anything else. He's a module guy, and we're currently playing an AD&D adventure called Ravager of Time. It's a Graeme Morris/Jim Bambra joint, and after three sessions it definitely carries the distinct vibe of the UK modules. It also has all the exposition I'd expect from TSR in 1986 but Ned has probably spared us from the worst of it.

I'm playing Ylva Eigengrau, a 9th level thief from Glantri. So far she's also served as the PR agent for our party.

It's funny how my play style has changed over the last decade. As a player in an Olde School game I used to be more procedural, poking every damn thing with a ten foot pole, the whole tunnel rat rigamarole. I became impatient with this hyper-specific, pixel bitching mode of play when I actually started running games again, and I began to move into a more swashbuckling style. Thus, Ylva has damn near gotten herself killed twice in three sessions, because as a player I would rather die instigating shit than spend a friday night being overly cautious and getting nowhere. I fully expect Ylva to die as she lived: too close to the edge, babe.

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In other news, I'm also on the hook to deliver a 5e game for another group of mostly new players. I've played a few sessions and found it to do pretty much everything I want D&D to do. It's easy to run, provides as much fiddle faddle as I care to use, and will kill your ass dead for the first few levels.

While thinking about what I want to do for that I remembered that time I used The Dungeon Dozen to make an entire campaign in 20 minutes, and I gotta say it holds up to my standard of "I would play that". I'm not 100% sold on Badger people but I am 1000% sold on Sleestaks.

So, after a dip into the Giant Evil Wizard Memorial Archives for research materials, I am currently sitting next to a pile of Devil Dinosaur, Kull the Conqueror, and Xenozoic Tales comics, 5 volumes of the Attack on Titan manga, David Icke's "Children of the Matrix" (for reptilian conspiracy content, also FML for owning this), and a complete set of Dinosaur Attacks cards.

Wine is chilling in the fridge, I made a pizza, and I jut opened a bottle of Squirt. Should be an interesting evening.

Also, I can already see that my bookshelf has a pretty serious Kaiju deficit, so I'm open to suggestions. Is there an Eyewitness-type visual guide to Toho monsters?