Still here....

Hi everyone....

So some of you may have thought I'd disappeared, but in fact I've just been incredibly busy, with my free time taken up with working on my house, taking my D&D group through Rise of Tiamat and playing my Gnome Wizard Dafriut on Roll20 (Curse of Strahd). Thishasn't left a lot of time for anything else - including this blog and The Hub Systems. Rest asured, we haven't gone, we're just dealing with a lot of stuff!

On our house (which was built sometime around 1740), we decided to replace the grotty carpet on the stairs from the ground floor, at the same time as putting solid oak flooring through from the Kitchen, dining room and hall. When we lifted the carpet, we found the sriars were split, rotten and held together in some places by hardboard! I called a carpenter to replace the bad treads, but he said that stairs like this (its a 180 degree spiral stair) were made on site - they'd all need to be replaced...

This started a month-long saga when led to Oscar and I putting in a set of pre-made stairs (with the help of my neighbour), replastering walls, constructing cupboards....in short a massive job when we envisaged getting someone in to lay a carpet...that was Autumn gone!

In Rise of Tiamat, our group had a "rage quit" - one of the players felt he could no longer play with the group due to "differences in play style". That's fine, but I've not seen behaviour from the group I find problematic except from this player...still I respected his wishes, but then he wanted to dictate how he left the campaign, right in the middle of one of the episodes....er, no. The party now has to carry on without the almost 70,000 experience that his character represents, which is the main problem I have with a player leaving late in the campaign - if he'd left earlier then the players would be almost an entire level higher.

Still, the group feels more harmonious now, and they still have one more episode to boost them up before they face the final confrontation at the well of Dragons...let's see how they fare!

As for me, I wanted to play as well as DM, so I joined a group on Roll20 playing Curse of Strahd. We've already had 4 PC deaths, making the adventure definitely perilous and there's a palpable sense of menace, which is great. My Wizard is now 4th level, School of Divination and Lucky, giving me a lot of dice control. I thought about going for illusion, but the big kickers don't set in for that school until much higher level, and I figured I may not last that long! So far it's been a blast.

GW seem to be keeping themselves together, releasing Necromunda, more codices and models, and not too many things that look horrible - though there are a few (of course!). They seem to be increasingly interactive, which has to be a good thing, though the problem with 40k as an IGO-UGO system remains - maybe alternate activation was just too much of a mental shift for them, which is a shame since the main issue I see with the game is almost wholly down to this simple and very 20th century mechanic.

Anyway, now December is here we will endeavour to bring you a bit more both on the blog and The Hub Systems, so you can enjoy your festive feasts whilst digesting hobby-related stuff. See you soon,

Alex & Oscar