This is where I will discuss my latest hobby: old school role playing using modern technology.
I am not the only 40 year old to have atavistic urges to play D&D, see this Wired story. I need to get 80% of the thrill of D&D in 20% of the time I used to have to play it. I think technology can make this happen.
You are going to need rules.
Although I have all the original TSR rule books, I am most interested in the 1981 Moldvay edited Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert Rules. These are most accurately translated by Labyrinth Lord, from Goblinoid Games.
You are going to need web conferencing tools.
I will acknowledge that I am standing on the shoulders of (hill) giants here. Zak at D&D with Porn Stars seems to be the first person to try running D&D campaigns over Google+'s multiuser video chat system, called hangouts. He may have also been the one to mention free internet white-boarding, courtesy of http://twiddla.com/. Finally, I believe Zak was one of the forces behind http://constantcon.blogspot.com/, a sort of rolling gaming convention where people advertise open games.
You will need to keep notes.
While I don't have much to add to the list, I will mention a few other technologies that I will be using in my campaigns. I use google calendar to schedule sessions and send out invites. I use google docs to keep notes during play, including using a spreadsheet to track party and monster stats.
And I am manifestly using blogspot to gab about this.
Thinking about publishing your modules?
I use The Gimp to make old school (i.e. highly schematic) maps and Open/Libre Office to make pretty PDF versions of my modules. Much of this was inspired by the One Page Dungeon challenge.
Finally, I wrote my own character generator, which is admittedly a little wonky right now. When I get some time, I will rewrite it to be more in line with LL and perhaps be a good tool for generating an NPC rooster.
One last shout-out. Much of my current interest in playing D&D again comes from the excellent blog by Jamie Maliszewski called Grognardia.
I will leave you all with this fabulous picture of a group of my misfit dice. You may notice a few of them have serious user interface issues.
