Life goes madly

[thorfinn]

Been a long while since I posted anything... Life has been pretty madly busy. In short summary, after resigning, I spent a couple of weeks sitting around the house being extremely lazy and playing computer games, sang in the 2003 RMPS and MUCS Handel's Messiah concert, made a large batch of home made pesto for friends, attended txxxpxx's Xmas cocktail do, went to Geelong with seedy_girl to visit her family for Xmas things, came back to town for New Year's, doing the usual thing at Nat and Andrew's place in Clifton Hill, then spent a couple of weeks alternating between watching daytime TV, playing computer games and frantically writing characters for DeadFall. Flew up to Sydney for Chinese New Year, and flew back into Melbourne on the Saturday, arriving at Arcanacon 2004 an hour and a half before running our game, and the game worked, and was lots of fun. Have caught up with qamar and entrippy (at elindal and fraerie's house, two people who I really must spend more time with). BlueBox stuff is starting to ramp up, but I still can't talk about it... Whee!

Messiah Concert

The Handel's Messiah concert was great. The Town Hall was sold out fully a fortnight before the concert... And the Mozart orchestration is indeed great, especially performed at the proper tempo. More texture, and boofier endings... All very nice.

Computer Games

I acquired Battlefield 1942 Reload (the base game plus Road To Rome), and have been playing that a bit. Not a bad game, and reminds me a great deal of Netrek in style and nature. The only problem is that it's a first-person shooter, and although this wasn't too bad, I wound up feeling ill after a couple of hours of gameplay. Unfortunate, because otherwise I like it.

Downloaded the Homeworld 2 1.1 Patch, and replayed the campaign... Err, a lot easier this time, especially M04. Those of you who had trouble with the released game? Pull down the patch, and go for it again. Much, much better.

Also acquired NWN: Hordes of the Underdark, and am up to the end of Chapter 2... I must say that the Epic Level stuff is very nice, and the henchman script fixups are fantastic. You can now command your familiars and elementals in a reasonable level of detail, which helps an awful lot when the typical Wizard party contains a summoned Elder Elemental and a familiar. A few new spells here and there, and so far, the official campaign is a lot better than the previous two, IMO. There has been controversy about the fact that it's not got multi-player support, but I feel that they made the right choice. Making the official campaign multi-player capable would have detracted from the quality of the module (multi-player support would have complicated a lot of decisions), as it certainly did for the last two. All in all, much fun so far.

Geelong

Odd little town... It is odd to be on the end of "hey it's a chinee!" stares again. I haven't had that sort of look since my early eighties childhood in the southern 'burbs of Sydney. Still, spent some time with seedy_girl's niece (Izzy), who is nearly a year old now. Xmas presents are a lot more fun when there's a small child, methinks. They appreciate everything so much more.

DeadFall, Pheno?, Arcanacon

Well, some may have thought that a 25 player SLA Industries Freeform was a crazy thing to do... Me, it's definitely the sort of thing I like to write. What I like most about freeforms is that a well constructed one is like a well organised fireworks show. Light blue touch paper, stand well back, and just watch the action fly. Thanks go muchly to drwally for stepping in and helping out with writing as well, and much much thanks to seedy_girl for putting in a vast ton of work. Her first time writing, and I hope we haven't scared her off...

I really wish that the last few days of the con didn't collide with Chinese New Year, though. The first session of the freeform on Saturday night didn't run as smoothly as the Monday morning session, due primarily to two factors: firstly, I didn't have a prepared start-of-game briefing and execution plan, which meant that the start of the game was slightly more confused than it should have been, and secondly, we didn't have a copy of the glossary for every player, which meant that we got interrupted for system/genre questions more often than we should have been. The game still worked though, and session two on the Monday morning (all 25 players at 09:10 on the last day of the Con, verily this is an amazing feat) worked even smoother, once I'd written the briefing and made sure we had enough glossary sheets. Anyway, I've just emailed Phenomenon, to see if they want the game for Pheno 2004...

The other games I played at Arcanacon were:

• Grand Hotel: A fraerie and elindal freeform, and thus, as always, brilliant. This time with the help of Nigel Cunningham too. I really do like the "let's have lots of characters and players can exchange during session" concept.
• A Locus of Locusts: A Nobilis freeform. Interesting system, although I intentionally got myself the character that had absolutely no system knowledge, and knew nothing at all. That made it an odd experience, but reasonably fun. I think I had a few difficulties because, having just written a freeform, it's hard not to pick the technical flaws, where if I hadn't just done that, those minor flaws could easily have been ignored.
• corruption: A drwally game. One session, and it was fun. Suffice to say that I shall be acquiring the Blue Planet books very soon. Three dimensional underwater combat is just the funnest thing ever, especially when you're playing the character with all the combat skills in the world. As usual for a drwally game, though, not just a standard romp, but a romp with a nasty twist. All good.

Oh, and congratulations must be made to lirion, who played her first ever roleplaying game (Mijikayo no Douyou ni Yosomono, an anime thing) at this Arcanacon, and collected a Best Team award for the session.

Chinese New Year

There really isn't anything like a Chinese New Year Eve dinner with a large (20 plus cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma, then add another 20 for partners and the next door neighbours) crowd. All those special dishes that don't get cooked any other time because they take too much effort come out, and the Chinese hospitality priorities really show. We turned up straight from the airport at about 22:30, and the first thing that happened is that they piled food in front of us... I took it in stride as normal procedure, but seedy_girl noticed that the order of events was reversed from the western cultural way... Certainly in my family, and I believe generally in most chinese cultures, feeding your guests is first priority, and only after they're happily fed do you worry about drinks and chit-chat.

BlueBox

Hrm. Still can't talk about the details. But suffice to say that things are hotting up. Whee!

Comments

meep

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

congrats to both of you.

*smewch*

[drwally.livejournal.com]

Hey fatty, don't forget to thank Shaun for his monster formatting effort! I had to give him special leave dispensation from GMing my game so he could finish everything...

BTW.. OOOOOOH!!!! ENGAGED!!!!!

Thanks :)

[elindal.livejournal.com]

Needless to say, we have been wanting to spend more time with you two too. (hehehe)

However, with the run up to Arcanacon, The Grand Hotel was taking all of our time.
Now, life should be less stressed and more free.

Thanks for the comments about the game. It is great to know that all the hard work paid off.

[redcountess]

Gee, Seedy's sister looks like her, and I notice that Izzy has a cawl over her eye - you know that means she has second sight, don't you? :-)

[kitling.livejournal.com]

I really want to play more blue planet - i want to play with the world..when you get the books come over and talk world with me? I'm a good gm but suck at system details