Winter Wonderland 2006: a short film by Steven Jarvis

We got a new DV camera (a Canon ZR300) Friday, and I shot a bunch of footage in the snow this weekend. I edited that down to a 3.3 minute move in iMovie HD which I’ve uploaded as a 5.6MB Quicktime movie called Winter Wonderland 2006. It’s mostly just shots of The Boy running around in the snow. Music by Jack Johnson

30 Days of The Burning Wheel: It’s the Beliefs, Stupid! (with apologies to James Carville)

So, a week ago Friday we finally got to have our character burning session. After a sluggish start, we finally got a world and some characters burned up — more or less. It was an odd session, and I learned a lot about starting a BW game from it.

From the outset, I wanted to put a few artificial limits on the game. The most important of those is that I wanted to plan for a short game, only 4-5 sessions. Part of it is that I wanted to approach this game as a sort of training run for GMing BW since I’m new to GMing it. Also, we have one player in the group who’s a total BW newbie and doesn’t have much experience playing any games outside of D&D and other d20 games. Also, I have RPG ADD something fierce, and I didn’t want to set my sights on a longer game that would fizzle like my recently-ended D&D campaign.

We were also coming off two weeks starting Tim’s Riddle of Steel game — a “world/character burning” session, then the first session of play — which we’ve been having a blast with. So, the bar for a more narrativist and more player-driven style of play was set high.

[Read more »]