I’ve tried to start a couple to no avail, alas ;-)
Oh yes :-D
Aside from wrapping up the recent second season of the Qt3 Tabletop RPG Virtual Book Club (hey @mtthwcmpbll will we see a 3rd season? Oh I hope so!), I’m still running my lengthy homebrew-setting scifi comedy Fate game, Spaceward, Ho! (including a session on Saturday) and just finished my stint as GM of a rotating-GMing Fate game in the world of Abirsta that the other players and I made up together using the Dawn of Worlds system. We just had our first session under the next GM tonight, and it was an absolute hoot.
And, of course, I’m organizing the local RPG Meetup Group’s next big Quarterly event, Tales of the Crimson Boar, where we’ll host 10 tables over 10 hours for ~40 players and GMs, if all goes well, with the theme of “mysterious strangers” (The Crimson Boar is a classic high fantasy bar/inn location the Meetup group has co-designed that can be dropped into other settings as needed; all participating GMs just need to incorporate the inn and one or more mysterious strangers into their scenarios this time around).
And then I’m also helping organize our next season of Semi Organized Play, this one using the Exalted 3E system and setting to run a co-GMed campaign we’re calling Corsair Stir Fry: Wayward Suns about a group of Solar Exalted arriving on a tropical island in the far West beneath which slumbers an ancient Behemoth that various factions of Dragon Blooded, Sidereals, Lunars, spirits, gods, fae, and Death Lords are all vying for! Myself and three other GMs will run a total of 18 sessions over the course of 3 months to a player pool of about 20 in an interlinking, multi-table story. It’s been absolutely crazy to get organized, but we’re in the final stretch now (character creation’s in just over a month) and I am SO excited :-D
Oh! And I’m running two sessions at GenCon in August: my “heavy metal band seeks to ascend to godhood” rock opera comedy, The Final Performance of the Hellknights of the Underdark and also my “third-string supervillains get roped into saving the world, somehow,” supers game, Minor League Evil. Both powered by Fate in this iteration, though I have a full setup to run Final Performance in Pathfinder, as well.
Sorry, I got overexcited. I love talking about tabletop gaming!!!
I have been so, so happy with Fate for scifi. If a group wants the uber-crunch, something like Mindjammer or Nova Praxis would be fine, but the base game, with a few tiny tweaks, handles space opera style pulpy action amazingly well, and you can slowly scale up more complicated elements. Bulldogs! is a great pre-made system that is about halfway up Fate’s potential crunch-tree with an awesome Futurama-esque setting and all sorts of cool bits to play with regarding ships and items.
If you ever wanna chat Fate scifi homebrew, though, hit me up. I’ve got about 60% of a really cool (to me) rulebook written for my home game mentioned above, Spaceward, Ho!, and it’s supported almost 3 years of wacky, wonderful adventures with the fabulous crew of the starship Savage Heart. My general prep for a session is “generic brain-thinky time” for X-hours to decide on a very rough idea of where I want a session to more or less go (if it’s not directly continuing from the last), then 1-3 hours of “write out some basic outlines, sketch out some three-line NPCs/enemies, and maybe plan out a couple of explicit challenges/contests, if appropriate” time in Word. Print out 1-2 pages of stuff and we’re set to game for 3-4 hours :)
Of course, like any RPG, 50% of that is tossed out within the first five minutes when the players, say, decide to help the crazed religious fanatics overthrow their own government instead of proving their own innocence in the frame-up job to rescue the existing government.