The silly season is upon us again; all the odd little bits of news get sieved to the surface to fill newspaper columns, inconsequential items like the Israeli pull out from Gaza hide behind the enormity of Madge falling off her horse on her birthday, the Torygraph reports Cthuloid wars in and around Antarctica (courtesy princeofcairo, via pax_draconis). Yesterday the Times ran an article about growing spare faces in jars for when you need a face lift. They refrained from making a pun on Eleanor Rigby.

Times has attoned for this by forgetting to publish its T2 supplement – the important bit with the crossword and stuff, not to mention the telly listings – today, which makes me feel as though I should get a rebate on my 55p.

In the meantime, the members of the Athenaeum Club’s Thursday night role-play group have started emailing around Mouseketeer theme tune parodies based around the name of Yours Truly, just because I asked for a head count of who’s attending tomorrow.

And it’s hot.

It’s going to be a long day.

I had forgotten just how much work goes into the preparation of a new table-top RPG campaign. And that's just character generation.

It was my intention to provide players with easy to use hand outs detailing the basics of character generation, and giving the positives and negatives for each archetype. The players could then refer to the Players' Handbook for greater detail.

I have prepared a blank character sheet for each player, and typed up several pages of the bare-bones character generation information. I need to do several more pages, and have no time to do so. In the last week, I have been in for one evening. It isn't enough time, and we start tomorrow.

On the plus side, part of tomorrow night's gaming session will be taken up with tidying up and finishing the latest phase of the current campaign, after which we create Dark Continent characters, and outfit the expedition. Then I shall outline the purpose of the expedition and hopefully we will have just enough playing time to get the expedition to its first overnight camp on the continent itself.

Then I have a week to polish the adventure properly.

I haven't GM'ed for over fifteen years, as far as I can recall. Happily, the Thursday night crew are a forgiving lot.