What I'm playing Now

Currently I'm running two sessions, both using a heavily bastardized version of AD&D 2nd ed.

The first game, which is roughly weekly, is with three players, and fairly straight forward vanilla style adventuring. This particular game is serving as the gateway drug to my friend, who is thirteen and has never played D&D before. His mother, an avid nerd and gamer from days of yore, and my wife are the other two players. The group has bonded very well with each other over the last few months, and somewhat surprisingly, they all like and care about each other a lot (which seems to usually be lacking in most of my gaming groups). This group's particular campaign is set in the 1620s of Ae'rinus' history against a backdrop of a growing backlash of monstrous dissention in the arrea surrounding the Great Inner Sea of Drachmaar.

The group has been dealing with an epic level invasion of goblinoids coming down from the mountains to the south. The town of Südenberg, where they all first met, is now largely in ruins, and until recently (last gaming session), the nearby Untergeist Forest had been taken over by SeveredLimb (troll immune to fire) and his three BrokenTusk Ogre commanders; they were using captured druids to fortify the forest as their base of operations, which was pretty successfully outstripping all the trade around the Inner Sea.

The campaign itself is more of your traditional hack n slash type game, but as the group games together more often, they have begun to develop some very good roleplaying. And now that they've begun to grow as characters, I think they're getting ready to break into some very interesting storyline opportunities.

The other game I'm running is a solo game with my wife and I. I'm very much the type of GM that is more used to Solo games than larger groups, thus rarely have I ever had a gaming group with more than five people participating (largely because when I started playing the game, I could rarely get more than one friend over at a time, so we all kind of got used to the solo gig). In this game, my wife is playing Vera, a dampiel, who until recently, had a pretty rotten case of amnesia. The gameplay here is very dark, fast paced, and somewhat surreal in regards to character power. The effect has created a somewhat unbalancing character in Vera, but since the game is solo, that sort of problem is only limited by the surrounding NPC perceptions, and she tends to travel with the freak train anyway, so there's really not a problem. In this campaign, particularly more than any other campaign, I've been forced to do far more homework than I'm accustomed to; mainly because my wife, Sue's, thirst for "What happens next" is so great that I can't get a way with saying I don't have any new content for her for more than one night a week.
The plus side of this, of course, is that the story line has had a lot of openings and twists to the point that Vera's story is both rich, nonlinear, and in my opinion a pretty good plot for a book (which is exactly what Sue plans to do with all those session notes she takes).
The story takes place largely in Riversedge, the largest city on Ae'rinus, and revolves around Vera's action with a semi-secretive guild known as the Brotherhood of the Raven, of which she is a member of an elite subset of that group known as "The Murder." Since she's part of The Murder, she has been simultaneously helping progress three separate plotlines in addition to her own desires and goals.
The only problem with the Vera campaign is the rules; d&d rules have no ability to really generate the play and feeling I want to go with on this campaign, so its led me to searching the net for more interesting info, and finding a scad of new resources, mostly in the form of other gamer blogs and forums, hence spurring my own desire to start something up with this blog.
My current plan of action regarding the rules, will likely involve picking up a copy of the GURPS basic set with my birthday/christmas money, and begin considering a paradigm shift.