Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

I'm not at work at all today. Of course, almost everyone else can say the same thing.
I'm going to light things on fire in the back yard again, partially to celebrate the holiday and partially because fire is awesome.
It takes three bags of charcoal (plus wine-soaked wood chips) to fully fire up the new grill. There is nothing less awesome than a grill not fully fired up.
Lately I've been reading quite a bit and thinking about upcoming role-playing games.
Eventually the saga of Eric "Windstalker" Moore (Hi, Pam and Andrew!) the underwear model werewolf will come to an end (or more likely a pause, which is the way we transition between games) and we have to play (or at least half-assed try to play) something else for a while.
I'm really enjoying the new RPG based on Joss Whedon's Firefly series. It seems like a really well crafted games system with a lot of room for story telling.
At the same time, less than a full season of TV and a movie (plus a couple of comic books) doesn't really give us a bunch to build a campaign from.
With Darrell's current game, we have known geography (the local area) and an established mythology (the World of Darkness campaign setting, or at the very least all of werewolf myth) so deciding on a course of action for our characters is a lot easier.
In the Serenity 'verse, how far can you go on a tank of fuel? How big does a settlement need to be before you can get parts for your busted McGuffin device? Does this gun hold six rounds or sixty?
Even the Star Wars RPG draws on a rich well-known set of "rules" for how things work. Sure, it helps if you've seen all six movies, the TV specials and all the varied cartoon series multiple times. It helps more if you've read every published book and comic book and spent countless hours researching the setting online and participating in lively online debates about it. By the way, Han Shot First.
I found a pretty cool (or at least interesting) campaign setting put out exclusively on a message forum. It's called "Vegas After Midnight" and it is the oddest post-apocalyptic setting I've seen since Gamma World split off into all that crap with the spell-casting.
Basically, Vegas is isolated during some kind of world-ending event (nuclear war, nasty virus, invasion from space) and years later the survivors are split into factions based off the various casino themes. There are Roman wannabes at Caesar's Palace, Circus Circus freaks, Arthurian posers in the Excalibur, Mercenaries crashing at the Hard Rock Cafe and Skinheads for some reason in the El Cortez. There is even a freaky religious group called the Presleyans.
All in all, it is a very well-developed setting.
This setting is being released for some open-sourced rules which are being beta tested by the forum users, but I think it could be run with regular D20 Modern rules.
I've also been collecting the Coke Reward Codes from the caps of 20oz Coca-cola products and 12 pack cases in the hopes of eventually acquiring my first video game console since the Atari 2600. If you aren't using yours . . . I have a long, long way to go.
I'm going to start the burnination now.