After my job picked up and moved to India without me, or more accurately, I read the writing on the wall and left her before he could leave me, I ended up moving back to Chicagoland. After a decade away, it was interesting to discover that things really hadn't changed all that much. The internet had come into being while I was away, it was Xbox vs Playstation instead of Nintendo vs Sega, but overall, I could go places I'd frequented while growing up and feel the same familiarity.
The gaming scene required a certain degree of adjustment, though. For one thing, I didn't even bother trying to join up with whatever game Joel may or may not have been involved in. I'd closed that book and had no interest in re-opening it. On the other hand, returning to Chicago meant that people like Luke and Drew became available once more, though Drew would be harder and harder to get involved as he got married and moved into the city and away from easy access out in the 'burbs.
Also, Clay had traveled north to Chicago within a month of my doing so. That wasn't too hard to figure, since he could read the same writing that I could. Indeed, Mick would leave Dallas to help set up a call center in India soon after my departure. We all knew that the Dallas tech support business was doomed, so we scattered before the storm of lay-offs hit.
As it turned out, Clay had friends that he'd met online in the area, in fact, he went to their wedding. Thus Morgan joined our group. And while my brother Anthony was with the Peace Corps in Romania during this period, my brother Matt was available as well. The thing was, I ended up with two distinct gaming groups, Lombard and Chicago.
The Lombard group included myself, Luke, Morgan, and Clay as the core. Paul from Champaign, my brother Matt, a friend of Morgan's named Shane, My grade school friend Ryan, and a random guy I met at Games Plus named John all tagged in and out, but for the most part it was the four of us. And for the first few years, what we played was Warhammer 40,000. I've spoken of the 40k universe recently, so I'll not go into depth here, but what was a break from my previous pattern was the fact that we weren't playing the roleplaying game. We were playing the miniatures game.
At its heart, regardless of the books, RPGs, video games, and everything else that's attached to the Warhammer universe, Warhammer 40k is a miniatures game first. It's about platoon to company scale engagements where each side has anywhere from twenty to a hundred guys on the board with a handful of vehicles in support. You move around, shoot each other, sometimes get into melee combat, and so on until one side or the other is wiped out or running for it. It's not a bad game, though there are a bunch of holes in the system. But what's prohibitive about the game nowadays is the price. Sixty dollars for a rulebook is on the high side compared to, say, forty dollars for a D&D Player's Handbook, but not insane. On the other hand, the prices for the miniatures started high and have inflated to insane. Back in the day, you could buy 10 metal minis for twenty dollars. Today, it can cost you as much as sixty for five plastic ones. Given that even the smallest tournament legal armies needs at least twenty minis, and some factions rely on lots of troops and can go over a hundred, you're looking at a minimum investment of three hundred dollars for a rulebook and the smallest army the game can support. And that's without painting them!
Needless to say, we were eventually priced out of the game entirely. Before that happened, though, we got a few good years of shooting and stabbings both among ourselves and at various tournaments where our vehicle heavy armies were ahead of the curve. It was a fun, if expensive, hobby.
But what 40K didn't provide was any real storytelling, despite our layering on home brewed campaign rules. For that, I turned to the Chicago group. Drew had some friends in the city who were running a D&D 3.0 game in the city proper, and Luke and I joined that one too. It was an inoffensive game, but also not a very memorable one. I can't tell you what character I ran, what modules we played, or anything in particular about it. After a time, I got Matt involved and even took over running the players through that first 3.0 Adventure Path that started with The Sunless Citadel, and I couldn't tell you anything about that one, either. Indeed, the most vivid memory I have of the Chicago game was watching a limo and a sports car get into a huge accident right before our eyes as we drove in for the game one night!
Eventually, the Chicago game wound down and people stopped trying to get it together, which was probably a mercy. A great game is better than a good game which is better than no game which is better than a bad game.
But probably the worst of all is a boring game, since the whole point of gaming in the first place is to enjoy one's self.
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