Last weekend I played in
Intercon F a local, weekend long
Live Action Role Playing convention. This was my best Intercon yet; I really enjoyed all the games I played in and
Across the Sea of Stars is now my Most Favorite Ever Game&trademark;.
Here's who I was in which games. Details and spoilers behind the cuts.
I started out Friday night as
Presley the Hounddog in
Moving Day. I was a secret agent assigned to guard Marguerite, the the $25 million bear. My cover story was that I was a moving present. The game was a lot of fun. We were all able to escape from the truck before it slid into the river and avoided being bleached or dissolved by the icky toxic waste. I was able to recruit a number of the more disaffected toys and we were able to keep Marguerite safe from the bad guys trying to steal her, as well as bust the guys dumping the toxic waste.
Saturday morning was crazed as I had to get up early to drive my son to a math competition and still get back in time to play
Andi in
Jamais Vue. This was one of the reduced characters prepared for Jamais Vue so that I could leave at noon to pick my son up and get back in time for Across the Sea of Stars. Unlike most of the other characters, I started out with my memories (mostly) intact because I was actually a superior alien intelligence accidentally transferred into a puny human body. It was vastly amusing to be able to alternately tell the truth and have no one believe me; and to make up brazen lies to get the simple humans to do my bidding. I finally accomplished my main goal of escaping my human body just before I had to leave at noon.
In the afternoon (and through the rest of the evening) I played in
Across the Sea of Stars. This was a simply amazing game in its complexity and richness. I particularly enjoyed the "tales within the tale". They added so much to the experience both in the additional roleplaying experience and in the insights to the main story. The game borrowed from many classic SF sources and I really enjoyed being able to play out bits of some of my favorite stories. I played the
Human physicist Mannheim.
My character was the pre-eminent physicist in the Coterie and the director of a project to mount an expedition to the Great Attractor...250 million light years away! Without significant technological advances, it could be a one-way journey at best. To complicate matters, Mannheim and The Vortex of Chaos, a sentient starship, had fallen in love with each other. Should I stay or should I go?
Some of my favorite memories include early on discovering that the peculiar laser Mannheim had invented, when shown on a unique gem called The Heart of Antares, did in fact reveal the treasure map he expected, reenacting a particularly poignant variation on The Cold Equations, and, against great odds, striking a significant blow for the underpeople.
One of the most moving moments occurred after we completed an incredibly shocking tale of betrayal and genocide of the Vasræ perpetrated by a handful of members of the Ma!son, which drove Tel!las the Ma!son to commit suicide.
One of my clearest memories is from near the endgame when Vortex handed me a pile of technology, which I automatically assumed was what was being offered for trade. It was exactly the technology we needed and so I said to trade whatever it took to get it. When Vortex explained that it was the technology WE had just acquired through research, my jaw literally dropped. So we had the technology not only to make the journey to the Great Attractor feasible, but also for Mannheim and Vortex to share a life together, so that it became an easy decision for Mannheim, the Vortex of Chaos, and Maggie Gale to head out on the Long Goodbye....
Interestingly enough (to me anyway) I now have yet another personal measure of the success of a game--how much poetry did it inspire? Previously, Casino Xeno (
http://interactiveliterature.org/E/Schedule.php?action=25&EventId=4 ) inspired one poem,
The Soul of an Android (
http://marius23.livejournal.com/20337.html) Apollo '79 (
http://interactiveliterature.org/D/Schedule.php?action=25&EventId=12 ) inspired one or two protopoems (that is, poems I'm working on but haven't completed). Well, Across the Sea of Stars has inspired no less than four protopoems. (Working titles are Great Attractor, Betrayal, Cold Equations, A Blow for the Underpeople.) If and when I complete Intercon inspired poems I will post them here.
Finally, on Sunday morning, I played the Red Bishop in Wonderland 2.0. Thankfully this was a fairly lightweight role with no links to any major plots; I was basically a schemer, working to increase the power of the Red court and performing tasks like helping the Red Queen upstage the Queen of Hearts
Oh, and then there was Crashed, the ongoing memory loss game. It has some potential, but I was so busy with everything else I was doing that I didn't really get into it. There was also a problem with the wristbands. They were just plain paper and so didn't hold up to taking showers. I think a piece of clear packing tape might have solved the problem.