Hello again! This site has been deathly quiet since the end of August. We quieted down because:

1) Schedules changed, and we were playing a lot more Amber. As I stated in an early entry, Nobilis has been our "GM's Night Off" fill-in for our regular face-to-face Amber campaign. As the summer waned, our GM, Nate, simply missed many fewer sessions.

2) I decided that Nobilis wasn't working as a fill-in game for six players GM'd by me. The focus just wasn't there, on either side of the GM/player divide. So I pulled the plug.

3)One thing led to another, then, at the beginning of October, a couple of maniacs began shooting up my stomping grounds. Their names are Muhammad and Malvo and you've heard of them. Because it was my neighborhood they were shooting up, I got really busy on my political weblog covering the story.

4) As a substitute "GM's Night Off" game, we agreed on a superhero campaign based on Nobilis/Dynamic Nobilis mechanics. Our codename for the system was, naturally, The Game of (Super) Powers. We made considerable progress on working out what would change from the base Nob/DynNob rules (little), and what wouldn't (much), and people got relatively far along with character creation. I figured at some point I'd post our info here as a variant, and I still may.

Now we're back in business as a Nobilis blog.

Our Amber GM, Nate, announced his desire to take a hiatus from GMing for several months.

A couple of the group really liked Nobilis from the fill-in sessions and I really liked GMing them. Nate decided he'd like to try Nobilis too.

So. New campaign, starting early in the new year, meeting weekly on a schedule, with several fewer players. (It looks like the folks who won't be playing Nobilis during Nate's hiatus will be playing Spacemaster.) That wiped out just about all the reasons I had for ceasing to GM the game: uncertain schedule, too many people, variable enthusiasm. We're currently in the very beginning of the prep stages. We haven't decided, for instance, whether Bill and Mike will carry over their characters yet, though it may prove better to start completely fresh.

I've done some housekeeping on the site. I've redone the categories - everything relating to the old campaign is now in the Old Campaign bin. Added "Elsewhere" for items about other sites. Added categories for new campaign material. (Currently empty, so they don't appear.)

I hope to mess with the site template over the holiday weekend. The great design work on Stand Down, the antiwar group blog in which I participate, has me thinking again about ways to manage content on gaming sites. Also an internet pal who shall remain nameless says he avoids gaming blogs with campaign-specific material. I'm thinking about ways to use categories to keep him from having to see such unsightly material.