Love for Odyssey!
Who's the mushroom over there?
Who's the mu-u-ushroom over there?
Good things:
The Bloody Ducks! Finding each other was tricky, but it was well worth it to play with such a welcoming and generally awesome group. I had no real idea how to play Idaea until I met them.
In fact, all my fellow Romans. The costume standard, while not obviously expensive, was uniformly excellent, and all the players were incredibly inclusive and great to bond with.
The Roman shield wall. Solid, well-drilled, generously equipped. Only sheer force of numbers could eventually wear it down. Bloody hell, I was proud.
The arena in general. Being part of the entire Roman nation standing up from the benches chanting "Mars! Mars! Mars!" in perfect unison.
Post-arena healing. The bead-in-a-bag mechanic is genuinely suspenseful, and encourages me to takes Expert physician in time for next year. Quintessence turned out to be not really my thing, and I can definitely see the advantages in specialising.
The deadliness of the game. That sounds really strange for someone who hates combat, but the characters aren't heroes, in the usual high-fantasy sense. They're gladiators, there to fight and die for the roaring of the gods.
Brain puzzles. Much more my metier, I'm vaguely thinking of recreating the bear-hunter game at home just so's I can figure it out to my own OOC satisfaction. I shall be good though, and figure out those 20 moves in play.
Bad things:
My tent. Despite the protestations of the the salesfolk, there was no inner tent. The bastard thing was single-skinned. I cunningly improvised with some binbags that lasted, ooh, about a day. The binbags came from First Aid, the subjects of my eternal admiration, especially after ephrael managed to fold away my tent back into the bag.
If it wasn't raining, there were wasps. If there weren't wasps, it was raining. More than one Atlantean was asked, in plaintive tones, "what under the gods did you do?"
My costume. reasonably Roman-shaped, and at least I had variants for all the wide extremes of weather. But Roman women clearly weren't supposed to move. At all. Tottering around the field was hard enough in the mud, but I'm bloody well restitching that pallas before I get much older. Well, a year older.
Neutral things:
Hello, World Forge. It must have looked like genius on paper, but when push came to shove it was too prone to character initiative and mechanical problems to rock my world as much as I'd hoped. Partially, I suspect this is because the Roman philosophers just weren't as in to it as the other nations.