I got a pretty good "haul" for Christmas. I haven't posted about it, so this is a good time.

First, Randy surprised me with one of these little darlings. Yes, it's green! I've already moved some of my favorite music to it (Disturbed, Tool, Blue October, Black Sabbath, Nirvana...) and started a membership over at audible.com. The first book I bought is called "The Travellers" by John Twelve Hawks. It's been really good.

But the goodies didn't stop there. Randy also bought me Ptolus. This is a full campaign set within one city. Monte Cook and his team wrote this campaign as a "play test" of the 3rd Edition rules for D&D. The book comes with an envelope full of full-color handouts and a CD with another 400+ pages of material. The book itself is a hefty 640 pages! Talk about a little "light reading"!

I wanted this because I really like DMing, but as a writer, I have a hard time letting go of the story and giving the players the chance to write it. Role-playing is a collective story-telling experience and my need to control the direction of the story was hampering game play. I'm hoping having someone else create the campaign will free me up and let me relax into the game-play more.

Continuing in the role-playing category, I got a bunch of Reaper mini-figs as well:

He bought me another half-dozen of Ed Bourelle's Skeleton Key Games tile sets over at RPGNow.com.

I got so many books for Christmas...and after Christmas! Look at all these books:

I told you it was a lot of books!

Mom bought me these. *grin* And she got me some excellent pajamas. Her gentleman-friend bought me some of the cookie sheets I love. Mmmm....cookies!

As if all this wasn't enough, I was pricing computer parts, planning on building me a "game computer" (I just built one for Randy using spare parts we had). I found a Gigabyte motherboard and an AMD Sempron CPU combo for only $90! That was too good to pass up. I started spec'ing out a full system and had it pretty close to finished at under $600... Randy continued his Christmas giving by saying that my getting another computer was a justifiable household expense and told me to order it. I managed to talk him into letting me add on that motherboard combo for him and an upgraded video card for him as well.

So Thursday and Friday were "geek nights" here at the Kaelber household. I built my new system, then raped it by installing Windows XP. *sigh* I upgraded Randy's WinBlows system, helped Nick install an additional hard drive in his computer and Randy installed a hard drive in his Linux box. Right now, in my living room, there are a total of seven computers (two of them servers)! Randy's got the "little" 17 inch monitor Mom traded us for some hardware and tech knowledge. He's running dual monitors now. We're both running our systems with a KVM switch (his for 4 computers, mine for 2) which saves having to have multiple keyboards, mice, monitors and so forth.

I've got my computers set up so I only have to move one cable to get sound on one system or the other. And the last little gift for Christmas was "Lego Star Wars II" for PC....which is absolutely a blast to play! I'd recommend getting a PC game controller for it because it's obviously focused towards the console-style movements and instructions. Still, the game itself is not just a kid's game.

Whew. That's a big list. I've got to get going so I can play with some of it!