Sharing a little too much psychosis

In its heyday, my gaming group had a good three or four distinct campaigns going on set in different worlds.

One was pretty generic fantasy. A world of Elves, Dwarves, blah-blah-blah. We did good stuff with it and it lay the groundwork for the original world we'd create a few years later.

One was a science-fiction/deep space setting. Spaceships. Blasters. All that. We had high-tech space marines (take THAT Games Workshop!), Jedi-esque psi-warriors, and we had riffraff smugglers who would have made Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds proud.

We had a gritty, "real-world" setting only with people who possessed psi abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, all that fun stuff). Sort of a "Tomorrow People" meets any contemporary action movie you've ever seen.

That one actually has come back from the dead a couple of times and is still considered an active campaign. Sorta.

And then we did a superhero campaign.

The superhero campaign was "four-color". Costumes. Epic powers. All that crap. Cartoonish villains. Incredible abilities. World-spanning organizations. Justice League meets the Avengers meets the X-Men. Only with more of the former.

At one point, the campaign went off in an interesting direction. We had a world-spanning altruistic foundation of do-gooders. They fought to feed the starving, protect the environment, educate the masses, etc. All the good stuff that Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and charitable organizations do now, only they had a "Last Resort" team of superheroes. Badass superheroes. Something malign would come along to endanger the world and the Last Resort team would be sent in. They'd smack around bad guys and disappear into the woodwork, never seeking fame or acclaim.

Why mention them?

I've been watching "Young Justice" on Cartoon Network. It's one of the two-ish shows I actually like on that network (and so it's obviously getting cancelled). The plot revolves around an alien invasion. The heroes never seem to get anywhere in the show and the bad guys are always three steps ahead in their smirking schemes.

The lopsidedness of the plot must really be getting to me. I dreamt last night that my gaming group's "Last Resort" team went in and kicked everyone's asses.

I'm not ashamed to admit, it was a lovely dream.

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Every time I see a pic of Pope Benedict, I'm reminded how much he looks like Emperor Palpatine.

I have to wonder if he's retiring because he couldn't execute Order 66 or if he's "retiring" so he can lay the groundwork for that...

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My copy of Warren Ellis's "Gun Machine" is supposed to arrive today. I also got Corey Doctorow's "Homeland", the sequel to "Little Brother".

I'm sure both of those books will keep me on a nice, even keel for the forseeable future.

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Kickstarter is like crack. Weird, gambling, crack. You're getting lured in by a shiny idea and tossing money at people in the hope that they can deliver on that idea.

Every time I think this is a dubious thing, I look at my Bug-A-Salt and smile.

I love Kickstarter.