Well, I’m off to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham this weekend, attending both Saturday and Sunday (which we did in 2008, but not 2009). Having the night there means the day can be more relaxed, providing more chances to play and the chance to get involved in stuff starting in the afternoon. I would like to play Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space
, but right now it looks like it won’t be running until the end of Sunday – just when I’m going to be heading along home (long drive).
I’m kind of wishing I had the chutzpah to run a game of my own, but I’m such a damned wimp. I’m enamoured by the potential of running a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
game using the DWAITAS system, which seems like a perfect fit. I could use the sample player character sheets right out of the box without any effort, running a game part-adventure, part-knockabout. I can see it being a bit like classic PARANOIA or Tales From The Floating Vagabond, a chance to play and have fun, but with a lower death toll than the former and a little less slapstick than the latter. We’ll see, you never know…
Maybe I’ll be consigned to playing – and getting annihilated in – a game or two of Agricola or Dominion; but. here’s hoping, that I’ll get a chance to play a RPG session (or two).
I rescued an article about Torchwood Series One at h2g2 a couple of months ago – and while I mentioned it in passing, it seems a little silly not to unearth it again just before the start of Series Two.
h2g2 is ‘an encyclopaedic project… written by people from all over the world’, conceived by Douglas Adams, launched in 1999, named after The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and absorbed into the BBC stable of community sub-sites in 2001. I write and subedit there as The Apprentice – and found this article on Torchwood languishing it what the site calls the Flea Market – a dumping ground for almost articles and promising ideas that need care and attention to get them into a state suitable for consideration as Entries in the Guide.
I found it quite enjoyable to drag together the various bits and bobs of information needed to fill out the detail of this article, as well as the range of quotes for each episode. I did stick with as much of the original entry as possible – which led to certain episode overviews reading a little differently to the ones I specifically re-wrote or expanded – but did do a considerable amount of work myself. I took a few liberties trying to guess around the knowns and suggest a few unknowns – like where the team park the car, when exactly the series takes place, and how the heck that pterodactyl gets in and out of the Hub.
Do have a read… and if you find anything alien, it’s theres… any errors are probably mine.
My entry on Torchwood – expanded significantly from a half-complete piece found in the site’s Flea Market – appeared on the front page of h2g2 two days ago having become an edited part of the Guide. For those who haven’t visited, h2g2 offers a user-generated encyclopedia akin to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (as created by Douglas Adams) with a little more content and editorial control than Wikipedia. Very entertaining site that I have contributed to on and off for the last 8 years…
