[Catch-Up Entry] - DartCon and What Came Before
The day after we saw Spamalot, there was some confusion about whether or not we were playing D&D and two people (in addition to the one person we knew would be out of town) didn't show up. Therefore, we hung out with MP, talked about Eberron, and re-watched the first batch of episodes of (D&:D related-humor anime series) The Slayers. That was probably the most relaxing few hours of unstructured time I've had in weeks!
For the next few days, I mostly worked a lot and prepared for my Paranoia XP game at DartCon.
On Wednesday, gigglius came to visit! We rarely get to see gigglius for an satisfactory amount of time, so that was cool. Unfortunately, mrsmetallian works until about 9pm on Wednesdays so we did not get to eat dinner until late. Before that gigglius and caught each other up on our lives, I entertained one another with various amusing internet thingies, and watched The Gamers, which gigglius had never seen before. Once mrsmetallian came home, we rushed to Penang to grab some dinner before they closed. We were a bit rushed, but it was good as usual. After that, I gushed about Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men to gigglius and (perhaps cruelly, in retrospect) handed over the whole stack of issues before bed, thus probably ensuring that she'd be tired the next day. I don't actually know how her next day turned out, because I had to take off for work early-ish so we could leave for DartCon on Thursday night!
I got a crazy idea that I could prepare for my Paranoia XP game in the car without getting sick if I took some of mrsmetallian's Dramamine first. Perhaps forgetting my experience in Africa, I tried this trick and ended up in some kind of horrid half-dead-yet-not-sleeping state for most of the trip.
We arrived in Hanover around 1am and hung out with the recently-arrived erics_dtt_blog and his girlfriend around the bar for a bit before crashing in the tube room.
On Friday we got up late and had a nice lunch at Molly's with rdbutts before heading off to our respective favorite departments to chat with old professors. I had recently emailed Professor Lagomarsino to congratulate him on his teaching award, and he'd suggested that I drop by and visit. I actually bumped into him on the street on the way to the History department and we had a good chat about this and that. Sadly, none of my other favorite professors were in that day, but I did get a tour of the new History building and that was cool.
I attempted to do game prep while Arrested Development played nonstop in the SLR until 8 pm when I played in doogly's classic-style AD&D 2nd edition game along with erics_dtt_blog, magus145, VR, and two other folks (I feel bad for forgetting names...). I played an Elven Ranger, and I whipped ass because I had a sword that did +3 against undead, and there were tons of undead everywhere. It's amazing how much of the old rules I've forgotten, though! We were playing in a 2nd ed. game until about two years ago, but now everything's mixed up with 3.5 rules. At least I remembered enough old-school Psionics (from playing Khalil) that I was able to advise VR's character, the amazing "Ülf-mann!" During this time, mythomanic and AC made a mighty pile of tasty chocolate chip cookies and kindly brought some up to us.
After the game, there was fun in WL's room (conveniently right next to the room where we were playing AD&D) with WL, mrsmetallian, skyflight, lordof42, and llargh, followed by fun in sgtpoliteness' room with 10053r and KC and others until far too late at night.
On Saturday we rolled out of bed and imediately launched into mrsmetallian's Pendragon game at noon. mrsmetallian has never run a Pendragon campaign, but she's run a fair number of one-shots so I played Aelfric the Bold, my recurring Saxon Knight character. erics_dtt_blog, spartana07, and a whole pile of other people played, and we resolved an issue of marital infidelity and werewolves. There was not a lot of combat, but Aelfric (who actually isn't that good at jousting, though he hits very hard) managed to accidentally skewer another knight. (Don't feel bad, the guy was a class-A dick.)
After that, I furiously prepared for my Paranoia XP game at 8. I had a really good group of players: mrsmetallian (Recording Officer), wroughtironkite (Equipment Guy), mythomanic (Loyalty Officer), cheapsniper (the best Happiness Officer EVER), skyflight (Team Leader), and AW (Hygiene Officer). I ran the introductory adventure from the Paranoia XP book, so I don't want to give too much away, but it was largely about spam, thus continuing my recent theme. Dear god, I had no idea how much fun the various drugs would be...even without horrible side effects from untested interactions. Man, when cheapsniper was nearly killed by a grenande and wroughtironkite gave him the drugs that convinced him he had x-ray vision (while also giving him bright red eyes and a steady stream of black goo from his mouth), it was just too much. Especially since cheapsniper then gassed the room with Gelgernine to prevent skyflight from reporting him as a mutant and proceeded to lead the (heavily-drugged) group in rousing Loyalty Songs. It was almost as good as when his grenade got caught on his sleeve and exploded inside his personal force field. Or when he attempted to trick mrsmetallian into framing wroughtironkite for treason and got his leg neurowhipped off by a guardbot. Or when mythomanic called up The Computer to question the quality of cheapsniper's clone template. Or when AW decided his "narrow" skill would be "Throwing Mutant Vomit," and it turned out to be useful. Or when skyflight started licking HotFun off of everyone. (Hmmm, that sounds much dirtier than it was.)
The body count was surprisingly low (I had so much stuff to keep track of that I didn't have time to be adequately cruel) overall, but when it was time to fill out the pre-made mission evaluation forms, cheapsniper actually got to answer "yes" to the question, "Did you kill 3 of your own clone?" so I must've done something right. ^_^
Afterwards I floated around for a bit, then wound up hanging around the bar with llargh, skyflight, mrsmetallian, sgtpoliteness, WL, and probably others I was too buzzed and tired to remember.
I slept really poorly for some reason, and on Sunday morning mrsmetallian got up early to buy some attractively-priced New Hampshire liquor. Then we played in wroughtironkite's custom vampire-hunting game with skyflight. It was a high-lethality game with random plot generation based on a set of cards wroughtironkite developed. We each got two characters, which was good because both of mine (Gunther and T-Bone!) died in the final battle and I think only two or three of the others survived as well. See, we'd pulled the "Lair" card and stumbled across 6 elder vampires in addition to the 1 we were hunting. Oops. It was a very interesting system, where each round of combat was determined by a single roll, but the characters' abilities varied from round to round. The downside in practice is that we consistently rolled like shit and therefore the whole party got smacked around pretty badly. I liked the variety of elder vampires we faced...we had Claw Guy, Bulletproof Guy, Mage Guy, Plate-Armored Guy, Shapeshifting Leader Guy, Count Not Participating in This Battle Because Gunther Blew Him Up In A Near-Suicidal Explosion And Staked What Was Left, and one other guy I forget.
After that, we scrambled to back to NJ as quickly as possible so we could get to bed at a reasonable time. We were sorta successful in that, but three late nights in a row (plus sleeping directly below a high-traffic area) pretty much destroyed my productivity for the rest of the week.
(BTW - On the drive home, we saw a bright, greenish-white object arc through the aky over route 91. We thought it might be a flare or possibly a meteor. As it happens, the Lyrid meteor shower was visible in New England that day, so that must have been what it was. Neat!)
As usual, I regret not getting to spend more social time with people, but that's just how DartCon is. I spent nearly all of my time either gaming or preparing for my game, which meant I hardly spoke to anyone who wasn't involved in a game with me (or socializing in those 1am-4am windows) and didn't get to see some people at all. Ah, well, Green Key and corp meetings are coming up this month and I'll just have to make it up then. ;)
For the next few days, I mostly worked a lot and prepared for my Paranoia XP game at DartCon.
On Wednesday, gigglius came to visit! We rarely get to see gigglius for an satisfactory amount of time, so that was cool. Unfortunately, mrsmetallian works until about 9pm on Wednesdays so we did not get to eat dinner until late. Before that gigglius and caught each other up on our lives, I entertained one another with various amusing internet thingies, and watched The Gamers, which gigglius had never seen before. Once mrsmetallian came home, we rushed to Penang to grab some dinner before they closed. We were a bit rushed, but it was good as usual. After that, I gushed about Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men to gigglius and (perhaps cruelly, in retrospect) handed over the whole stack of issues before bed, thus probably ensuring that she'd be tired the next day. I don't actually know how her next day turned out, because I had to take off for work early-ish so we could leave for DartCon on Thursday night!
I got a crazy idea that I could prepare for my Paranoia XP game in the car without getting sick if I took some of mrsmetallian's Dramamine first. Perhaps forgetting my experience in Africa, I tried this trick and ended up in some kind of horrid half-dead-yet-not-sleeping state for most of the trip.
We arrived in Hanover around 1am and hung out with the recently-arrived erics_dtt_blog and his girlfriend around the bar for a bit before crashing in the tube room.
On Friday we got up late and had a nice lunch at Molly's with rdbutts before heading off to our respective favorite departments to chat with old professors. I had recently emailed Professor Lagomarsino to congratulate him on his teaching award, and he'd suggested that I drop by and visit. I actually bumped into him on the street on the way to the History department and we had a good chat about this and that. Sadly, none of my other favorite professors were in that day, but I did get a tour of the new History building and that was cool.
I attempted to do game prep while Arrested Development played nonstop in the SLR until 8 pm when I played in doogly's classic-style AD&D 2nd edition game along with erics_dtt_blog, magus145, VR, and two other folks (I feel bad for forgetting names...). I played an Elven Ranger, and I whipped ass because I had a sword that did +3 against undead, and there were tons of undead everywhere. It's amazing how much of the old rules I've forgotten, though! We were playing in a 2nd ed. game until about two years ago, but now everything's mixed up with 3.5 rules. At least I remembered enough old-school Psionics (from playing Khalil) that I was able to advise VR's character, the amazing "Ülf-mann!" During this time, mythomanic and AC made a mighty pile of tasty chocolate chip cookies and kindly brought some up to us.
After the game, there was fun in WL's room (conveniently right next to the room where we were playing AD&D) with WL, mrsmetallian, skyflight, lordof42, and llargh, followed by fun in sgtpoliteness' room with 10053r and KC and others until far too late at night.
On Saturday we rolled out of bed and imediately launched into mrsmetallian's Pendragon game at noon. mrsmetallian has never run a Pendragon campaign, but she's run a fair number of one-shots so I played Aelfric the Bold, my recurring Saxon Knight character. erics_dtt_blog, spartana07, and a whole pile of other people played, and we resolved an issue of marital infidelity and werewolves. There was not a lot of combat, but Aelfric (who actually isn't that good at jousting, though he hits very hard) managed to accidentally skewer another knight. (Don't feel bad, the guy was a class-A dick.)
After that, I furiously prepared for my Paranoia XP game at 8. I had a really good group of players: mrsmetallian (Recording Officer), wroughtironkite (Equipment Guy), mythomanic (Loyalty Officer), cheapsniper (the best Happiness Officer EVER), skyflight (Team Leader), and AW (Hygiene Officer). I ran the introductory adventure from the Paranoia XP book, so I don't want to give too much away, but it was largely about spam, thus continuing my recent theme. Dear god, I had no idea how much fun the various drugs would be...even without horrible side effects from untested interactions. Man, when cheapsniper was nearly killed by a grenande and wroughtironkite gave him the drugs that convinced him he had x-ray vision (while also giving him bright red eyes and a steady stream of black goo from his mouth), it was just too much. Especially since cheapsniper then gassed the room with Gelgernine to prevent skyflight from reporting him as a mutant and proceeded to lead the (heavily-drugged) group in rousing Loyalty Songs. It was almost as good as when his grenade got caught on his sleeve and exploded inside his personal force field. Or when he attempted to trick mrsmetallian into framing wroughtironkite for treason and got his leg neurowhipped off by a guardbot. Or when mythomanic called up The Computer to question the quality of cheapsniper's clone template. Or when AW decided his "narrow" skill would be "Throwing Mutant Vomit," and it turned out to be useful. Or when skyflight started licking HotFun off of everyone. (Hmmm, that sounds much dirtier than it was.)
The body count was surprisingly low (I had so much stuff to keep track of that I didn't have time to be adequately cruel) overall, but when it was time to fill out the pre-made mission evaluation forms, cheapsniper actually got to answer "yes" to the question, "Did you kill 3 of your own clone?" so I must've done something right. ^_^
Afterwards I floated around for a bit, then wound up hanging around the bar with llargh, skyflight, mrsmetallian, sgtpoliteness, WL, and probably others I was too buzzed and tired to remember.
I slept really poorly for some reason, and on Sunday morning mrsmetallian got up early to buy some attractively-priced New Hampshire liquor. Then we played in wroughtironkite's custom vampire-hunting game with skyflight. It was a high-lethality game with random plot generation based on a set of cards wroughtironkite developed. We each got two characters, which was good because both of mine (Gunther and T-Bone!) died in the final battle and I think only two or three of the others survived as well. See, we'd pulled the "Lair" card and stumbled across 6 elder vampires in addition to the 1 we were hunting. Oops. It was a very interesting system, where each round of combat was determined by a single roll, but the characters' abilities varied from round to round. The downside in practice is that we consistently rolled like shit and therefore the whole party got smacked around pretty badly. I liked the variety of elder vampires we faced...we had Claw Guy, Bulletproof Guy, Mage Guy, Plate-Armored Guy, Shapeshifting Leader Guy, Count Not Participating in This Battle Because Gunther Blew Him Up In A Near-Suicidal Explosion And Staked What Was Left, and one other guy I forget.
After that, we scrambled to back to NJ as quickly as possible so we could get to bed at a reasonable time. We were sorta successful in that, but three late nights in a row (plus sleeping directly below a high-traffic area) pretty much destroyed my productivity for the rest of the week.
(BTW - On the drive home, we saw a bright, greenish-white object arc through the aky over route 91. We thought it might be a flare or possibly a meteor. As it happens, the Lyrid meteor shower was visible in New England that day, so that must have been what it was. Neat!)
As usual, I regret not getting to spend more social time with people, but that's just how DartCon is. I spent nearly all of my time either gaming or preparing for my game, which meant I hardly spoke to anyone who wasn't involved in a game with me (or socializing in those 1am-4am windows) and didn't get to see some people at all. Ah, well, Green Key and corp meetings are coming up this month and I'll just have to make it up then. ;)