The game started out slowly, due to people (including me) showing up late, but once we finally got rolling, things went pretty well. We didn't have the snap of the earlier sessions, and I think a lot of that is on me -- I didn't push things to be faster, and Karin and I were both feeling a bit crummy. That said, people seemed to have a good time.

Full recap at the wiki

Fallen Glory: The heroes started out by defending the moon unit from demon-angels that demanded the return of the Chalice of Life. Said demons went down quickly and painlessly, as near as I can tell. We then split into two groups:

Tanker: Aether, Legacy, and Sparks dealt with mercenaries attacking an oil tanker. The mercenaries went down quickly, but their leader turned out to be Hanpa, who believed that something on the tanker could give him the ability to travel through time. And that fight was interrupted by Project Bastion, which actually fared a bit better this time. Torque didn't wet himself while fighting Legacy, and the addition of super-strong Impact made the fight a whole lot uglier, at least until everything went screwy.

Hostage: Cricket and Stranger tried to deal with someone who had taken one of Cricket's friends hostage. As it turned out, the villains just wanted to attack Cricket and hit him until he blew up (due to his cosmic-energy-related illness). They succeeded, absorbed Cricket's cosmic energy burst, and then vanished... and the timestream shifted around everyone.

At this point, we went from "normal adventure" to "Oh, so the Nazis won, did they?", with all the seriousness one should expect from alternate-timeline adventures. Sparks gave everyone a quick history lesson by accessing Nazipedia, and they learned that the bad guys fighting Cricket had traveled back in time in order to help the Nazis win. Not just 'cause they're evil Nazis, though -- because in the future, where the bad guys are from, the Elagarian empire blew up Earth, leaving only a fragment in space to serve as an interstellar ghetto as an insult to the final remaining humans (and keeping it from falling into the sun by using cosmic energy). These mutants wanted to advance the human cause, so they're actually sort of understandable, and not just totally evil, and... yeah, okay, no, they're still evil. Also, Hitler is now known as die Mutantfuhrer, and Sparks, upon seeing his picture in Nazipedia, shouted, "Tetsuo!", which then forced us to stop and explain the joke to the one person at the table who hadn't seen Akira.

Everyone joined up and whomped on Nazis, and as the one person in the group old enough to have been born before the 1940s, and thus still exist in the new timeline, Legacy got a goateed alternate-timeline counterpart who appears to be working for an anti-mutant resistance. The heroes were doing fine against the Nazis, but as the session ended, they had been tagged with a marking energy signature, and the Mutantfuhrer had just crossed the Pacific in about two minutes and was nearing their position...

So there we go.

So nobody ever responded to my e-queries, but two publishers did, independently of any e-mail on my part, contact me to let me know that my novel was still under consideration. It's nice to hear that they're at least still being looked at.

And work was a killer this week, resulting in lousy contact-keeping on my part everywhere else. My project is a small project, relative to Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, but we've got some very ambitious goals. So far, writing has kept up with the demands of the schedule, even with losing one of our writers to another team. We ended last week with a very cool internal demo in which a lot of features went from nonexistant to roughly working. If we can keep up that kind of pace, we're going to have a fantastic game.

Next week starts a new internal demo (actual game content, but with a "you have to be able to show it" deliverable that makes it about half-demo, because our project is trying to demonstrate provably that we got something working by making it available to play), and the writers will be diving back in. I thought that the last batch of plots we worked on were cool. This next batch could rise to fantastic.

(And I'd love to be able to say more, but anything more than "Wow, this is cool!" starts to get into the territory of stealing the thunder of any marketing person who's going to have to hype this game somewhere down the line, and that gets me talked to. What I can say is that I know a lot of RPG fans talk about choices and consequences, and we're aiming to provide that in this game. The choices are only rarely in what you say -- talking is great, but really, "I did your quest" and "I did your quest but am an asshole" aren't really anything more than flavor. Choices aren't made by what you say. Choices are made by what you do -- which side you align yourself with, who you give the important object to, which group gets obliterated by the mighty power of the player. And consequences come in actually having the feel of the area change because you destroyed someone or helped someone else. If we do this right, this will be a game people will be comparing notes on for awhile.)