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Saturday:
Saturday was the surreal-a-thon, though my voice posts already covered most of the surreal bits.Though, for those who saw the "little wind-up zombies" post and didn't see the comments, between![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lunargeography's memories and a bit of Googling, I found All Wound Up.
The world really is that strange.
Then at 10 I was supposed to go to a game called Summer Camp Holiday, run in the Little Fears system. And thus we continue my run of never being able to try this game out, because the GM failed to show. We had a lovely conversation among the players, all of whom showed. To my amusement, two of the other players were the GM and another woman (I think his partner or wife based on interactions, but I didn't ask) from my In Dark Alleys game the night before. We chatted a while and after giving more-than-ample time for the GM to appear, we headed off to get our tickets signed so we could get a refund. On our way out, we ran into the room monitor, who was appalled that we all had tickets and were waiting - the guy who was supposed to run the game originally was a friend of hers, and had gotten a new job and had to cancel the game. Two months prior, he had canceled the game. No clue if he screwed it up, Game Base 7 screwed it up, or Gencon screwed it up, but that sorta sucked. And there was no other game I could get into that sounded interesting that didn't run past the start of my next game.
So I ended up with four more hours to kill. I thus spent a while wandering around the convention center, both the dealer's hall and outside, doing silly random crap and observing other people doing silly random crap. It was actually not too bad overall, and hey, I got to observe the Puzzle Hunt clue involving BPAL because of it.
At 2 pm I went to play in Fear No Evil, an Inferno game. It's roleplay in Hell! I was vastly amused. Only two players showed up. Both of us were female. *snickers* The scenario involved a living priest, a shade, an imp, and a redeemed hellspawn on their way to try to save a little girl who had been bodily kidnapped into Hell. This sounds approximately like the lead-in to a joke; all we need is the bar for them to walk into. But it was actually quite fun and played fairly well. They were giving away the main rule book, which led to my acquiring the main rulebook. Now I need to read it. The game was much fun to play.
Because there were only two of us, the GM let us have two characters each - so we each had a magic-using character and a non-magic-using character. This was quite a blast. Although the real fun was his reactions as the dice loved us on a few actions. (They didn't love us on others, so it balanced out, kinda.) In the final battle, we faced a Devil. Read: big, scary, powerful bad sort. The devil made a threat by way of saying he would not stop the children he had brought to hell from leaving if they chose, but the priest was going to die here today. The priest cast a spell, making the first half of the sentence a binding vow, and really annoying the devil by doing so. He was just trying to save the kids, but this turned out to be useful a bit later. The archer, you see, got two VERY good rolls...while shooting to hit a specific target. Namely, the devil's eyes. So the devil is now blind. This is when the imp casts a hex on him and it actually works. So the devil is now blind and at a -3 for all actions. And these little girls are in the room, so he has to target us. He can't use an area effect, because he's bound by his vow from targeting the kids! That was not the purpose of hitting him with vow, but it was a REALLY NICE side effect. (The demonspawn, not mentioned here, was the other one besides the archer who actually did any appreciable physical damage to the devil. He was also the only one to go down during the combat and have to be revived by the priest.)
After that, off to night #3 (my second session) of the LARP. I pretty much covered this in my voice post the next morning (now with transcription, and with a comment expanding a few details!), whilst attempting very hard not to fall asleep. We stayed up playing late (thanks to some joyous GenCon confusion, we lacked a room, but happily used a public plaza instead, which worked great). And then we all went to the Steak and Shake and hung out and chatted and chattered. Wonderful people, and a wonderful evening. The LARP was "Echoes of War Time" run by Merciless Trio Productions. If you like LARPing or are curious, and you're at a con where they are, check it out. They seem to have a good grasp of setting up a fun LARP and making sure people are cast comfortably as well. I will be playing in their LARPs again...and I don't LARP, normally. MUCH fun.
And then I went and fell over in bed because WOW tired. Happy, but tired.
Sunday:
Sunday was a 7th Sea day. I had an 8 am game with the GB7 campaign, Crimson Valor, which has replaced Song of the Sea. Thus, I got to play Nora again! This was a fun game, but it was somewhat damaged by too many people showing up and the GM not wanting to turn anyone away. It briefly looked like his sister was going to run a second table, but she wasn't talked into it (this was one of her free mornings - if I had to guess, one of her few free mornings - and she'd wanted to go to the dealer's hall; I can't fault her for sticking to that!). So we had 10 people are one table. One or two people tended to hold a lot of the limelight. One of them was very good at political/diplomatic solutions and bypassed a lot of the places where combat could have occurred for the group. This was a good thing, but it left characters who were better at those things out in the cold. Plus, we weren't doing much sailing, so we didn't get too much use of those skills. And I'm sure the GM had to gloss over some things since having ten players slows things down! If he did, he did it so smoothly we didn't see the missing bits go missing, but...bah. (Another player got snarky at the one who was really doing well with the diplomacy and stuff. It was kind of understandable because I'd wanted to as well just because I wanted some attention, dammit - but at the same time it wasn't right, because neither of us were doing anything to respond to the situation anyway, because our characters weren't suited. Getting upset because the guy who can handle the situation is, is kind of awkward.)
It was fun, just not as fun as it could have been. I wish I'd been more a part of it, more relevant, more included. But with marginally-relevant skills and a group that big, it's rough.
After that, I was trying to generic into a second 7th Sea scenario. I hadn't been able to get tickets for it because it was full. Four of us played, all on generics. No clue where the six players with tickets were. Probably in the wrong building, the way this con went, although they never did turn up and usually people were being directed to relocated games.
That one was more fun. I was more relevant and really had a blast. It wasn't perfect: the GM's sister (not the one from the morning, a different one) played, and she wanted to finish by 3 so she could go to the dealer's hall. Since the game started at 12:30 and was meant to go 4 hours, this resulted in some things getting cut. It was done VERY smoothly and I had a blast anyway!
But as the game ended, the girl who'd been driving me batty all game asked what got cut, and the GM told us. Those scenes coulda been cool too (though one would've split the party at the end, and probably wasn't really necessary). I'd have been happier not knowing. But I did have a blast anyway. I was relevant! I got to do things! And things went boom! Shiny!
(The girl who was driving me batty was hyper, being an attention hog, and just really needed to learn to calm down a little. Her character would do something stupid and get hit with negative consequences, and she thought this was a blast. She thinks taking a hubris is cool because you get points and you get to roleplay, plus she roleplays a couple extra bad traits besides because it's "her character". Apparently in some of the other sessions that I wasn't in, her character meandered through the ship stealing things from other characters. Not sure if they were PCs or NPCs. She was giddy and in a game that was already going to be cut short, she kept table-talking and diverting the conversation to crap that had nothing to do with the game. She appeared to be good friends with the GM's sister and possibly with him, but couldn't they have had these conversations after the game that we all paid for?)
I kept my mouth shut about that as much as I could. I was still very tired from lack of sleep, and that usually kills my judgement AND makes me irritable. Apparently it didn't completely kill my judgement since I remembered that fact and kept my mouth shut! (I would have been justified in saying something, now that I think about it clearly. But I do not believe it would have been particularly productive to have done so.)
So on the one hand I am very sulky about the second game because it could have been even cooler. And on the other hand, I had fun anyway. There's a lot to be said for the having fun part! I had a ticket to play Gloom that afternoon, which I sacrificed when I got into this game. (Didn't even get a refund: I didn't have time to do so.) And I would, if I had to do it all again, make the same choice (despite my curiosity about Gloom). Which, as a measure of a game, isn't too bad.
I am sorry I only got to play with the female GM of the pair of GMs once. I've forgotten her name again, but she rocks. (So does her brother, usually; I like her style of delivery better, and I have no idea why. I could give you no reason, rational or otherwise, for the preference. Only that it exists.)
Since the game ended at 3, I wandered back over the exhibit hall. I think I did a couple more demos, but to be honest, I don't remember any more. I was pretty fried by then, and mostly clinging to the experience of being at the con.
Four pm officially closes the con on Sunday. I've gone through it several times and I think next year we may fly home Sunday night. We'll arrive at a barely-sane hour if the plane's on time, but it will save us one night in a hotel, both cost-wise and aggravation-wise. Nothing seems to happen that evening in the hotels or any unofficial venue except among friends, and we don't go to meet up with groups or set anything up for that evening, so it's just dead space for us. Scott went to sleep at a bit after four, after telling me he'd already had dinner. I went and got my dinner, brought it back to the room, and ate it. When I offered him the rest of my milkshake (having had as much of it as my body would tolerate, even with pills), he was very startled as he woke up. He had slept through everything but my arrival (and he didn't remember saying hi to me). I felt similarly smashed, but I know my body: had I slept, I would have been horridly groggy the next morning.
But there's no reason we couldn't fly back that night. If a flight got cancelled, we'd be "stuck", but at least the hotel bill would belong to the airline in that case. :P
I admit, I wandered around a bit that evening, just watching all the gamer-types still in town with their friends. I didn't see anyone I knew or I might have said hi, but it stretched the feeling of the con a little. The sense of promise and wonder, of something neat around the corner. But I like that feeling better when there is that potential still, instead of the fleeting fading after-image of it.
And then we got up at oh-dark-hundred, got on a plane, and came home. Well, in between, I fussed like mad packing our bags. I always do. And it's not necessary, but it keeps me contented with the order of the world. (Why do I say it's not necessary? The suitcase expands. I didn't have to expand it. That's a lot of extra space I didn't use. Inefficient packing would have worked. But I prefer efficient packing, it generally reduces the potential for messy game explosions when a box comes open. And it reduces the potential for Laura explosions as she worries needlessly, too.)
I should note that somewhere on the way back, my brain spawned an actual Deliria scenario for a one-shot. Unfortunately, it spawned only the setting and starting point. I have no idea how one would resolve this. I need to work on that and see if I can coax it into an actual game with at least one concept for how the players could resolve the situation. This is the closest to a useful game idea I've come in a while, though.
Saturday was the surreal-a-thon, though my voice posts already covered most of the surreal bits.Though, for those who saw the "little wind-up zombies" post and didn't see the comments, between
lunargeography's memories and a bit of Googling, I found All Wound Up.The world really is that strange.
Then at 10 I was supposed to go to a game called Summer Camp Holiday, run in the Little Fears system. And thus we continue my run of never being able to try this game out, because the GM failed to show. We had a lovely conversation among the players, all of whom showed. To my amusement, two of the other players were the GM and another woman (I think his partner or wife based on interactions, but I didn't ask) from my In Dark Alleys game the night before. We chatted a while and after giving more-than-ample time for the GM to appear, we headed off to get our tickets signed so we could get a refund. On our way out, we ran into the room monitor, who was appalled that we all had tickets and were waiting - the guy who was supposed to run the game originally was a friend of hers, and had gotten a new job and had to cancel the game. Two months prior, he had canceled the game. No clue if he screwed it up, Game Base 7 screwed it up, or Gencon screwed it up, but that sorta sucked. And there was no other game I could get into that sounded interesting that didn't run past the start of my next game.
So I ended up with four more hours to kill. I thus spent a while wandering around the convention center, both the dealer's hall and outside, doing silly random crap and observing other people doing silly random crap. It was actually not too bad overall, and hey, I got to observe the Puzzle Hunt clue involving BPAL because of it.
At 2 pm I went to play in Fear No Evil, an Inferno game. It's roleplay in Hell! I was vastly amused. Only two players showed up. Both of us were female. *snickers* The scenario involved a living priest, a shade, an imp, and a redeemed hellspawn on their way to try to save a little girl who had been bodily kidnapped into Hell. This sounds approximately like the lead-in to a joke; all we need is the bar for them to walk into. But it was actually quite fun and played fairly well. They were giving away the main rule book, which led to my acquiring the main rulebook. Now I need to read it. The game was much fun to play.
Because there were only two of us, the GM let us have two characters each - so we each had a magic-using character and a non-magic-using character. This was quite a blast. Although the real fun was his reactions as the dice loved us on a few actions. (They didn't love us on others, so it balanced out, kinda.) In the final battle, we faced a Devil. Read: big, scary, powerful bad sort. The devil made a threat by way of saying he would not stop the children he had brought to hell from leaving if they chose, but the priest was going to die here today. The priest cast a spell, making the first half of the sentence a binding vow, and really annoying the devil by doing so. He was just trying to save the kids, but this turned out to be useful a bit later. The archer, you see, got two VERY good rolls...while shooting to hit a specific target. Namely, the devil's eyes. So the devil is now blind. This is when the imp casts a hex on him and it actually works. So the devil is now blind and at a -3 for all actions. And these little girls are in the room, so he has to target us. He can't use an area effect, because he's bound by his vow from targeting the kids! That was not the purpose of hitting him with vow, but it was a REALLY NICE side effect. (The demonspawn, not mentioned here, was the other one besides the archer who actually did any appreciable physical damage to the devil. He was also the only one to go down during the combat and have to be revived by the priest.)
After that, off to night #3 (my second session) of the LARP. I pretty much covered this in my voice post the next morning (now with transcription, and with a comment expanding a few details!), whilst attempting very hard not to fall asleep. We stayed up playing late (thanks to some joyous GenCon confusion, we lacked a room, but happily used a public plaza instead, which worked great). And then we all went to the Steak and Shake and hung out and chatted and chattered. Wonderful people, and a wonderful evening. The LARP was "Echoes of War Time" run by Merciless Trio Productions. If you like LARPing or are curious, and you're at a con where they are, check it out. They seem to have a good grasp of setting up a fun LARP and making sure people are cast comfortably as well. I will be playing in their LARPs again...and I don't LARP, normally. MUCH fun.
And then I went and fell over in bed because WOW tired. Happy, but tired.
Sunday:
Sunday was a 7th Sea day. I had an 8 am game with the GB7 campaign, Crimson Valor, which has replaced Song of the Sea. Thus, I got to play Nora again! This was a fun game, but it was somewhat damaged by too many people showing up and the GM not wanting to turn anyone away. It briefly looked like his sister was going to run a second table, but she wasn't talked into it (this was one of her free mornings - if I had to guess, one of her few free mornings - and she'd wanted to go to the dealer's hall; I can't fault her for sticking to that!). So we had 10 people are one table. One or two people tended to hold a lot of the limelight. One of them was very good at political/diplomatic solutions and bypassed a lot of the places where combat could have occurred for the group. This was a good thing, but it left characters who were better at those things out in the cold. Plus, we weren't doing much sailing, so we didn't get too much use of those skills. And I'm sure the GM had to gloss over some things since having ten players slows things down! If he did, he did it so smoothly we didn't see the missing bits go missing, but...bah. (Another player got snarky at the one who was really doing well with the diplomacy and stuff. It was kind of understandable because I'd wanted to as well just because I wanted some attention, dammit - but at the same time it wasn't right, because neither of us were doing anything to respond to the situation anyway, because our characters weren't suited. Getting upset because the guy who can handle the situation is, is kind of awkward.)
It was fun, just not as fun as it could have been. I wish I'd been more a part of it, more relevant, more included. But with marginally-relevant skills and a group that big, it's rough.
After that, I was trying to generic into a second 7th Sea scenario. I hadn't been able to get tickets for it because it was full. Four of us played, all on generics. No clue where the six players with tickets were. Probably in the wrong building, the way this con went, although they never did turn up and usually people were being directed to relocated games.
That one was more fun. I was more relevant and really had a blast. It wasn't perfect: the GM's sister (not the one from the morning, a different one) played, and she wanted to finish by 3 so she could go to the dealer's hall. Since the game started at 12:30 and was meant to go 4 hours, this resulted in some things getting cut. It was done VERY smoothly and I had a blast anyway!
But as the game ended, the girl who'd been driving me batty all game asked what got cut, and the GM told us. Those scenes coulda been cool too (though one would've split the party at the end, and probably wasn't really necessary). I'd have been happier not knowing. But I did have a blast anyway. I was relevant! I got to do things! And things went boom! Shiny!
(The girl who was driving me batty was hyper, being an attention hog, and just really needed to learn to calm down a little. Her character would do something stupid and get hit with negative consequences, and she thought this was a blast. She thinks taking a hubris is cool because you get points and you get to roleplay, plus she roleplays a couple extra bad traits besides because it's "her character". Apparently in some of the other sessions that I wasn't in, her character meandered through the ship stealing things from other characters. Not sure if they were PCs or NPCs. She was giddy and in a game that was already going to be cut short, she kept table-talking and diverting the conversation to crap that had nothing to do with the game. She appeared to be good friends with the GM's sister and possibly with him, but couldn't they have had these conversations after the game that we all paid for?)
I kept my mouth shut about that as much as I could. I was still very tired from lack of sleep, and that usually kills my judgement AND makes me irritable. Apparently it didn't completely kill my judgement since I remembered that fact and kept my mouth shut! (I would have been justified in saying something, now that I think about it clearly. But I do not believe it would have been particularly productive to have done so.)
So on the one hand I am very sulky about the second game because it could have been even cooler. And on the other hand, I had fun anyway. There's a lot to be said for the having fun part! I had a ticket to play Gloom that afternoon, which I sacrificed when I got into this game. (Didn't even get a refund: I didn't have time to do so.) And I would, if I had to do it all again, make the same choice (despite my curiosity about Gloom). Which, as a measure of a game, isn't too bad.
I am sorry I only got to play with the female GM of the pair of GMs once. I've forgotten her name again, but she rocks. (So does her brother, usually; I like her style of delivery better, and I have no idea why. I could give you no reason, rational or otherwise, for the preference. Only that it exists.)
Since the game ended at 3, I wandered back over the exhibit hall. I think I did a couple more demos, but to be honest, I don't remember any more. I was pretty fried by then, and mostly clinging to the experience of being at the con.
Four pm officially closes the con on Sunday. I've gone through it several times and I think next year we may fly home Sunday night. We'll arrive at a barely-sane hour if the plane's on time, but it will save us one night in a hotel, both cost-wise and aggravation-wise. Nothing seems to happen that evening in the hotels or any unofficial venue except among friends, and we don't go to meet up with groups or set anything up for that evening, so it's just dead space for us. Scott went to sleep at a bit after four, after telling me he'd already had dinner. I went and got my dinner, brought it back to the room, and ate it. When I offered him the rest of my milkshake (having had as much of it as my body would tolerate, even with pills), he was very startled as he woke up. He had slept through everything but my arrival (and he didn't remember saying hi to me). I felt similarly smashed, but I know my body: had I slept, I would have been horridly groggy the next morning.
But there's no reason we couldn't fly back that night. If a flight got cancelled, we'd be "stuck", but at least the hotel bill would belong to the airline in that case. :P
I admit, I wandered around a bit that evening, just watching all the gamer-types still in town with their friends. I didn't see anyone I knew or I might have said hi, but it stretched the feeling of the con a little. The sense of promise and wonder, of something neat around the corner. But I like that feeling better when there is that potential still, instead of the fleeting fading after-image of it.
And then we got up at oh-dark-hundred, got on a plane, and came home. Well, in between, I fussed like mad packing our bags. I always do. And it's not necessary, but it keeps me contented with the order of the world. (Why do I say it's not necessary? The suitcase expands. I didn't have to expand it. That's a lot of extra space I didn't use. Inefficient packing would have worked. But I prefer efficient packing, it generally reduces the potential for messy game explosions when a box comes open. And it reduces the potential for Laura explosions as she worries needlessly, too.)
I should note that somewhere on the way back, my brain spawned an actual Deliria scenario for a one-shot. Unfortunately, it spawned only the setting and starting point. I have no idea how one would resolve this. I need to work on that and see if I can coax it into an actual game with at least one concept for how the players could resolve the situation. This is the closest to a useful game idea I've come in a while, though.
