This thread is for what the title says.  If we're going to talk craft, one of the central points should be not to just list all kinds of RPGs and discuss them, but to discuss what you're all running RIGHT NOW, and what kind of stuff you're doing with it.

So, let's hear about what you're up to.

RPGPundit

I've hit a lull. But a friend of mine is back in town that's actually into gaming, so I may get to play (as in... as a player) for once. Probably a Modern game.

Thus far, we've only done Magic the Gathering, though.

For all its oldness, MtG still rocks.

I'm playing right now, not running, that said:

The game is Te Deum pour un Massacre, albeit with some heavy houseruling behind the scenes I think.  It's a French rpg set during the French wars of religion.

The characters are in the town of Le Havre, with one PC being a nobleman newly appointed as responsible for all grain storage and taxation and with the possibility of being civilian governor.  I play Henri Morin, his personal secretary, a charming but ruthless and ambitious man born to the lower bourgoisie but with ambitions to rise far beyond that.  Other PCs are the noble's housekeeper and general household staff manager, a young noble who acts essentially as security consultant and a physician (five characters total).

Essentially, everyone outsources everything, the Baron decides what needs doing and tells us to do it, my character who is a social ninja in terms of skill levels then deputes various assistants to do his work and so on.

The game is focussed on intrigue, so far we've not had any fights at all (though we have instructed others to fight on occasion) and there is much maneouvering over who has the right to tax what and whom.  It's a fun game, particularly since most conversations tend to be very polite with an underlying hint that if things go badly extreme violence may follow.

The next game I will likely be playing too, and will apparently be more action based, I tend to think that it's good to follow up intrigue heavy games with more actiony games so as to get a change of pace so that should be fun too.

I intend next year to run some more of my Vikings game and possibly some Aquellare.

Right now I'm playing a 1st edition AD&D game with some guys I found locally who've been playing together for years.  The campaign plot is quite convoluted and I'm not really sure what all is happening yet as my monk joined mid-stream, but it's a great group of guys.  We just finished clearing out a dungeon (where my dude was captured and held prisoner, natch) held by some illusionist who was magic jarred victims for longer life or some such.  Now we're on our way to rescue gnomes from a kobold stronghold.  The game is tough and very much in the classic '80s mold (with better plotting, maybe), and I'm loving it.

I'm also running a Classic Traveller game that is not set anywhere in or near the 3I via cam and voice chat with my old group.  I started by presenting them with a number of archetypal Trav pursuits (space merchants, space pirates, space police, space merc, etc.) and every one of them chose pirates, so this is a pirate game.  The campaign has finally started (I've been working on it sporadically since March!) and concerns the adventures of the crew of the pirate yacht Mustang.  Yes, yacht; one of my players rolled up a noble and mustered out with it, and that was their only character who landed a ship.  He's kind of a naive sort, who has romantic visions of interstellar swashbuckling in his mind.

To get them started, I allowed the captain to swap out his TAS membership and the majority of his starting funds to outfit the ship's boat with some weaponry.  They're going to be relying on surprise to pick off targets here and there.

Our campaign wiki (in my sig below) has information on the subsector in which we're starting, as well as a campaign journal.  Next game's tomorrow night, and I couldn't be happier.

I'm running "Return to Castle Defiant," a weekly GURPS 4e Banestorm game featuring cinematic action, 500 point characters, and liberal use of the "spend a CP to upgrade a roll from crit.fail --> fail --> success --> crit.success" rules. Also, two of the characters have Magery over 3, and all have wildcards skills (the mages = College! for their spells, the swordswoman = Sword!). Again, very liberally defined.

I'm playing a Mutants and Masterminds 2e game via Skype, set in Houston, after a super-hurricane takes out the resident superteam. This game runs once a week. I'm an Iron Man variant. It's too soon to make a call on the system; I'm not crazy about the Hero Point limitations, but the genre may be slowing me down a bit as well. We may be taking a break from this one over the holidays.

I'm also playing in a Werewolf the Forsaken game, every other weekend, set in Austin. I'm a former business guru/freerunner, now the spiritual negotiator for the pack. The system is being run with few tweaks, and it's surprisingly smooth -- the nWoD system seems to get out of the way when you want it to, but supports the really crunchy bits when you need 'em.

Personally I'd be quite happy to have posting in this thread be a prerequisite to posting in any others, but then I'm a fan of gamers being people who game.

I would absolutely be in favour of posting here being a prerequisite to posting to theory.

That aside, I'm quite curious to see more, what is everyone else doing?

Paul, interesting comments on Werewolf, most of the posts I see on NWoD tend to be whinging about the combat rules (which look fine to me) and I haven't seen much concrete comment on how it actually played.  That fits with what I had guessed though, it does look pretty smooth.

After we decided to pause our "Elves are taking over Greyhawk" game for a while, I listened to the players what they wanted and got almost nothing. They all wanted to play fantasy, but no specifics. Apart from one player. He wanted to play a Drow campaign. I resisted, of course. For a while...

So a Drow campaign it is. But to make things interesting for me and some of the player who didn't want to go all-out backstabbing, we changed some of the ground rules. I've been reading the War of the Spider Queen novels, and while I didn't found them too exciting (and the end was utter crap), I got some ideas from them.
So I killed Lloth. Again. Drow society -- and especially monotheistic Menzoberranzan -- doesn't quite like that. Especially when some rather big enemies lurk just beyond their city. It gets even worse when all the players are the noble sons and daughters of a rather minor house.
Lloth will remain dead this time. Lots of statues and even some priestesses exploded, so most Drow assume that this time it's not just a simple test of their faith. This will be the big plot point: Every house is looking for a different way out.

During the first adventure, the characters escorted a human trader who allegedly held great power in his caravan. They passed through a big multi-cultured market where promises of power could be obtained. Well, they passed over some so in the end they had the choice between venerating the Drow Goddess of Death and Vengeance or going psionic. Strangely enough, they choose the latter. Considering that the last psionic Drow house was completely obliterated...

The other houses are going through some weird changes, too. (My players should not read further) I'm throwing in everything I can find as a supplement or weird anecdote. The first house evolves into Laser-Powered Chaos Hermaphrodites, the second one will slowly turn into the British Army, all kinds of surface gods will play their parts and I don't even want to know what my players will destroy and or create.

They recently killed two beholders and took their Mithril Mine (I didn't quite expect that) and I'll send them to faraway Maztica soon, where they should gather psionic power to help their house survive. Dark elves and sacrificial pyramids sounds like a opportunity that shouldn't be missed

And because I can only stand so much intrigue and cold-hearted killers, we're running a Iron Kingdoms campaign, too. We're still in the Witchfire Trilogy part, so there's nothing intriguing to report. This is the first time they're playing with True20 and it worked out great this far.

Quote from: BalbinusPaul, interesting comments on Werewolf, most of the posts I see on NWoD tend to be whinging about the combat rules (which look fine to me) and I haven't seen much concrete comment on how it actually played.  That fits with what I had guessed though, it does look pretty smooth.

To be honest, we're not heavily into combat, but the few we've been in have gone smoothly. There are occasionally "WTF" moments when your 12+ dice pool comes up with no successes, but they're notable largely due to the reaction, rather than their frequency.

That said, I wouldn't hesitate to run a combat heavy WoD game; a Highlander style campaign is brewing in my prospectus pile as we speak.

Currently, I'm running one-to-five game playtests of all sorts of stuff I come up with.

The Cog Wars, The Exchange, and I'll be trying out Microcosm shortly...  Stuff of mine.

In the Summer my friends and I had a PBeM game of Games Workshop's "Mighty Empires" with some extra Roleplaying thrown into the mix.  

This Fall has been really busy -- work, teaching, freelance and a new baby!  Last day of classes was yesterday, so things are going to get a little more manageable after all the marking is done.

In the New Year I'm planning for the playtest of my RPG, including a slot at the local Convention.  There's an active Living Greyhawk group here that I'm thinking of checking out, a weekly game of All Flesh Must be Eaten, and a group in the next town that are looking for people who want to try out Dogs in the Vineyard.

I just finished a C&C game set in Malbatil, a world I started creating which is loosely based on the Thirty Years' War.

Just recently, I'm running a one-shot (one to three sessions) of The Shadow of Yesterday.  It's a game about a pirate crew going for some mighty jewels in a ruined temple in the jungle.

They've already encountered a dinosaur, and next time they'll encounter the savage defenders of the ruins.  Then they'll encounter the rival pirate captain.

It's pretty fun so far.

Right now I'm running two games of In Harm's Way, both dealing with British middies in the 1790s - the IRC one is being posted to Actual Play - and the otther is my face to face game.

I just temporarily finished my Commander's campaign for IHW - two of the Commanders got Posted for firebombing Tripoli with naptha barrels dropped out of hot air balloons and cutting out the Philadelphia in the process, and it's a good place to pause a bit.

I've restarted my StarCluster "Beginner's Luck campaign, now in it's fourth year. We're still setting up the campaign, which is likely to be based on and around Glorianna. Very, very high tech - so high tech that it looks primitive.

Not playing in anything.

Soon, I hope to be alpha testing In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades - an extention of IHW to WWI fighter pilots.

-clash

We just began my new campaign this past Sunday.  We're playing Epic RPG and I'm running it in Rimenor, which is a northern, tribal, just barely-iron age setting, inhabited by the villages and small towns of the Fost, who are kind of a combination of Vikings and Great Lakes American Indians.

The campaign started in Beohald, a once proud village fallen on hard times.  Everyone pretty much agrees that the hard times and bad luck came about twenty-five years ago, when the current jarl's father, killed all of the bards of the village (and therefore all of its history) in a fit of rage.

Since all of the warriors/hunters were out on an extended hunt, the almost-adult kids all took a trip to the next village to the west, looking for the missing half-breed trader husband of the herbwoman.  They took off on the game trail for the next village around the bay (around two weeks trip).  Two days out, they came across a grizzly bear.

Instead of letting the beast be, one of the characters got too close, and it ripped them a new one.  One of the characters spent the entire combat trying to get a spark to light a torch to scare the thing away.  Two of the characters almost died before they got lucky and killed it.  Then, after sacrifices and taking trophies, the gluttons for punishment went looking for possible offspring (it was a she-bear), and found them - two adolescent grizzlies snuffling across a clearing.  

Oddly, one of the party decided to approach the two big, young bears (possibly to capture them?  make friends with them?).  Anyway, she was not persuasive in her attempts, and the animals ravaged her.

The rest of the party agreed that this was obviously pay-back from the gods, some sort of Fostic Karma, and left the body to the bears.

Currently:
Ongoing ALIENU/Hearts & Souls Game: Heroes are aliens/alien hybrids of college age on earth dealing with a variety of threats as the few superheroes that remain--albeit the college aspect hasn't been focused on the last bit its going to roll back around again I suspect.


Ongoing Reliquery/Hearts & Souls game: Heroes are teenagers who discovered an abandoned superhero lair with numerous experiments, trophies and other expected things--utilizing these items (some with evil histories) they're trying to be heroes and deal with the slow drift of the end of high school that pushes them apart as friends.


Ongoing: The Shrouded Keep/High Valor RPG: A lone dvegr battlemaster and a human farmer's son who inhereted a magic sword discover strange animals twisted mutant things near the river of Mistfall, atop the falls proper they uncover an ancient keep of Dvegr or Sidda design, hidden in the mists of the three falls, and only able to be reached by activating a special dam, haunted and forlorn they discover a mad alchemist trying to stop the monstrous things born from the tainted waters--as a still beating dragon heart buried under a fallen tower pumps strange warped blood-magic into the falls and river below.

The heroes stopped the heart and triggered a long dead prophecy, related by the dying alchemists last words and a ghosts whispers.  The Seven in Shadow rise to conquer the land, and its up to these two to gather the means to thrwart the Seven and hold against the long night they seek to bring about.


Ongoing Shadow X-men/MSH: (Beneath the Black Cross) Ongoing campaign about a trio of mutants in the Marvel universe, going to a West Coast iteration of Xavier's School, dealing with threats from avariety of foes old and new.


Ongoing ACE/Vast Frontiers Playtest: (Hangmen's Gulch) Asteroid field and goods depot above a colony planet on the frontier, a sherrif and his deputy spent time dealing with the rough and tumble miners, farmers, and other independents sorts from within 3 ton mecha.

I'm doing a lot of writing right now, and checking this board when I need a break. Unfortunately I am not actually playing anything.