Game = Life

CARP has a gameday coming up and Weekend in Gothic Earth is at the end of the month. My gaming schedule has accellerated almost out of control.  While I'm enjoying myself, I barely have time to breathe!

Friday night I ran the first half of a Living Death scenario ( Medicine Bones, very good!), with the second half on Monday night.  Saturday was a day-long slot zero for WiGE.  Keith Hoffman, husband of Our Dark Mistress (Claire, the campaign director) the author of the scenario (Medicine Quest, also a super scenario) drove up to run it for the Michigan contingent.  I'm proud to say that Michigan provides around half (sometimes more) of the GMs for WiGE, as well as a fair number of players.

I've ranted about the wonderfulness that is Living Death in this space before.  It's all role playing and it rocks.  Play it. Nuff Said.

Sunday I ran two scenarios for a relatively new, non-RPGA campaign called Legends of the Shining Jewel. It's a high fantasy D&D 3.5 campaign, and it's just a riot.  I've only played the first two scenarios (and run them once now as well), but I have to say that I'm very impressed with the style and quality.  There are lots of opportunites to role play, some politics and intrigue, and a fight or two (actually scaled for the party level, unlike the RPGA's lamentable Legacy of the Green Regent.  It's all Open Gaming Source material, and I think it's going to have legs.  Jae-bob says play it.

Tomorrow we playtest the October MSU Shadows scenario. kirkt68 is the author and GM, and it is also a huge amount of fun.  The characters are all White Hats -- no Heroes or Slayer.  We're all poor schlubs thrashing around trying to deal with the supernatural on the campus of Michigan State University.

My character is a terribly neurotic graduate student who is saddled with pretty much every psychic power there is. She sees dead people, she sees demons, she gets flashes from objects and people, and now she's involuntarily reading minds. Her closest friend is her cat Fitzhugh, though she's starting to bond with the rest of this unlikely batch of Scoobies.  It's great fun.

Thursday we play the Living Spycraft scenario (Winter of Discontent) so that there are GMs who have played it and can run it on the gameday. In Spycraft I play a snoop/fixer whose code name is Woodstock. She's short, skinny, has a shock of yellow hair in a color not found in nature, and a nose like a macaw.  In other words, she looks a great deal like Snoopy's long-time companion.

Saturday I'm helping out at Fortress Games with World Wide D&D Day till 5 pm, and then I'm off to Daggerford, Adam's home campaign, where I play a halfling mage with an affinity for wild magic and her sights set on becoming an archmage.

Sunday it's off to the Michigan Mythos Militia to run some Call of Cthulhu for my fellow cultists. I recently became a Missionary for Cthulhu, and will be running "Under the Greenwood Tree", set in the Dark Ages in Sherwood Forest. Heh. Heh. Heh. I'm running the same scenario, along with "The Mystery of April Snow" at U*Con in November, so this will give me a chance to work the kinks out.

Whew. I'm going to need a vacation from my time off! But I have to say... it's good to be in the center of so much gaming opportunity!

Over the holiday (which was somewhat gaming parched), I played another Living Dragonstar scenario, and it was everything that its sibling wasn't.  While the story was fairly linear, I felt that we had some flexibility to be creative in how we resolved the story's issues.  I think my favorite moment was when my mostly-non-combatant/support character (a retired combat medic, now a priest of the Father) confronted the minions of the Big Bad (lizardmen, essentially). 

"I am a powerful shaman, and if you don't bring us our missing friend, I will have to hurt you."  (holding out a "tangle" grenade).  GM says: roll intimidate -- dicebot (for once!) is my friend and a 20 comes up.  The lizardmen quiver, shake, wet themselves and flee in terror...

:: chuckle :: Aiden may never get over himself after that one...

In other play... our Friday night home campaign met again after our holiday break (withdrawal, major withdrawal), and the GM did something that I found very interesting.  He presented us each with a survey, asking questions about what we like, dislike, want more of, want less of, etc.  I found it hard to answer, because I'm so essentially happy with the campaign.  Still, I thought it was a courageous move on his part, and it only cements my respect for him as a GM.

On the down/depressing side, the Tuesday night Adventure! game is cancelled on accounta Real Life(tm).  *sigh*  Rick's a great GM and our last session rocked... but they changed his hours at work, and with players all over the country there really isn't a time when he could run it for us and still be able to function at work. At least he hasn't been off-shored yet, and maybe we'll be able to do something via PBEM.  But I'll miss it -- I was just starting to feel like I had some connections to some of the other characters.

It is a hobby, though, and Real Life(tm) still gets to take priority.

I've got lots to say about my Gamer-Geek trek to California for GenconSoCal, but right now I need the help of great minds. In our Friday night home game (which I missed, alas) our characters have come into one wish each. These aren't the paltry D&D 3rd edition type wishes, but a full bore, 1st Edition AD&D type wish. A mega wish.

And I have no idea what to do with it.

Background: Forgotten Realms, D&D 3.5. The character is a 9th level, teenaged, female, halfling wizard. Eren grew up near a wild magic zone, and spent far too much time playing there. She has an afinity - no, an obsession - about all things magical. The party sometimes refers to her as the "halfling gun". The half orc or the human cleric will just pick her up and *point* her at what we want to squash, as she usually has something nifty like Scintillating Sphere, or Ice Storm up her sleeve, and she loves to blow up the bad guys.

She's jazzed about making items (first item was a wand of magic missiles), but bummed that they cost so much in terms of time, money and experience. (Player understands about game balance...)

She's just now starting to realize that good people, nice people, people she *likes* can have very bad things happen to them, and sometimes there's nothing she can do about it.

One character wants to become a half-dragon (his character worships Bahomet), another is seeking early access (about 4 levels early) to a prestige class, so it sounds like we will, to some extent, be doing power-ups. If you read my LJ, you know that I hate being un-useful, or being significantly behind the rest of the gang power-wise.

So... advice? Ideas? I got me a wish here... and thanks for any help you can provide.

Padawannabes is off to the bosses in Renton. Unfortunately it took me two more evenings than I had hoped it might. Ah, well... time enough to sleep when I'm dead.

Tonight we play Adam's home campaign again after a week off for the holidays. We ended on a cliffhanger, as, on returning from a dungeon foray with resources depleted, we opened the door on complete and unnatural darkness... (Uh oh)

I play Eren Willowburr, a young halfling wizard in that game. She grew up near a wild magic zone, and has a profound fascination with all things magical. This is the team that meshes so well together. Our motto: Teamwork, Magic and Luck!

A phrase sure to send people scrambling for the doors! But... since this is my gamer blog, I'm going to post things like this here, so if ya don't wanna read it, don't! I'll do my best to be entertaining.

Though I somewhat cordially loathe D&D and D20, I am nonetheless playing in two D&D Home campaigns. Go fig. It's what the GM's (both men I respect enormously) and the other players want, and I am having a great time.

On Sundays, I play in a Forgotten Realms campaign. I have two characters in this game currently -- for story reasons the group of characters split into two groups, and for the players whose primary character wasn't in the group, we created lower level characters. The GM suggested at the beginning that our 2nd character might, in time, be a cohort or henchman for the primary character. So, we alternate weeks -- one week we're with the Southern group, cleaning out baddies from the Spiderhaunt woods to make travel on the road safe again; the next we might be with the Northern group, negotiating with refugees from Zhentil Keep to get them to side with our patron, Randal Morn, in the fight to take the Dalelands back from the Zhents.

My secondary character is Adrian Montrose, a Sembian rogue/mage (mostly mage), a younger son of a successful mercantile family. He's also a devotee of Sune, and practices her tenets to the best of his ability as a lay worshiper, especially that part about "perform a loving act every day". The group has been negotiating with a group of Tempites driven from Zhentil Keep (seems Cyric wants to be the only god in town...).

The visit to the Tempite camp has been very trying for Adrian; most of the women there are perfectly capable of snapping him in half with one hand. (I made some very poor rolls when creating Adrian -- 7 str, 9 wis.)

However -- he discovered in the course of the negotiations that a Tempite cleric/soldier named Sergei was deeply enamored of one Deacon Lt. Catherine, and so Adrian became determined to see if he could smooth the path of true love. This led to things like sneaking around tents at night spying, as rumor had it that Catherine was seeing someone on the sly. That turned out to be Catherine sneaking out to spend time with the Monseigneur/Commander -- her father! (Which had to be kept secret as that sort of nepotism -- children serving under parents -- is frowned upon. Adrian, btw, has kept that secret from his companions -- he didn't see that they needed to know, and felt he should respect the lady's privacy.)

In part as a result of the negotiations, the larger group split into two. Both Sergei and Catherine went the group that is going to ally with Randal, so Adrian figured he'd take a shot. He maneuvered the two of them together around the evening fire... and Catherine turned nervous as a cat, like a schoolgirl terrified of her first date. Thinking that he might be able to get her to relax, the following evening Adrian plied her with wine and turned on the charm. Unfortunately, that worked too well, and Catherine began flirting with him. Which, of course, Sergei saw. So now, instead of helping the lovers to get together, Adrian managed to drive a wedge between them. He extricated himself from Catherine (managing to offend her in the process) and went out to drink, think and pound his head against a tree. Finally, he decided he needed to come clean with Sergei in desperate hopes of saving the romance.

Sergei, understandably feeling betrayed by someone he'd thought a friend, wasn't overly welcoming. (Did I mention that I made some horrible diplomacy rolls?) Adrian made every argument he could think of, growing increasingly desperate, and finally gave Sergei his last bottle of fine wine, with instructions to use it in his pursuit of Catherine. He went away sad and discouraged, convinced he'd done a disservice to the Lady of Love (and his two friends)... but wait -- what should he hear later but that Sergei and Catherine are off taking a walk together, hand in hand! It seems that Sergei took his wine and advice, and now the two are on the road to a relationship.

Score one for true love!

Evidently Lady Firehair was pleased with Adrian's efforts, because he managed to charm one of the other women into a very energetic dalliance. (Good thing he's got a good constitution, and my dice finally decided to be kind to me, or she probably would have inadvertently killed him. Ah... but what a way to go!)

A side note: Silveran (an elven monk) seems to have absolutely no sense of decorum whatsoever when it comes to discussion of intimate matters (he offered newlywed Carenza a potion of Enlarge with the suggestion that it might improve her marital relations). He spotted Catherine flirting with Adrian, and concluded that the charming rogue was, well, being a charming rogue. He was prepared to read Adrian the riot act (but couldn't find him at the time).

I can't remember the exact circumstances, but when Silvaran found that Sergei and Catherine were together after all, he concluded that Adrian had been noble and spurned Catherine in favor of Sergei. So, instead of a lecture about his profligate ways, Adrian was treated to a somewhat bizarre lecture of congratulations upon his rising above his baser nature. Adrian was unable to completely stifle guffaws of laughter; I laughed so hard it induced an asthma attack -- always a sign I am laughing well and long.

Since I as the player in the persona of Adrian had been working all summer to get Sergei and Catherine together, it was indeed triumphant.