autographedcat

I was delighted recently to be invited by my friend Aron Wolf to participate in a D&D one-shot he was putting together. I’m a long-time RPG fan, but I haven’t really had a group of my own recently. Our old regular weekly D&D group in Atlanta scattered across the country, and while we managed to get things going again for a while over Skype, life intervened and we never got it back up again. So I was really excited to not only play, but play around a table in a room with a bunch of other people I already knew i liked and enjoyed spending time with!

Because this was intended as a shakedown cruise for the world Aron is building, he gave us all pre-rolled 3rd level characters with specific backstories, which let us drop into the “meeting the party” phase without a lot of time for chargen. This was useful, because our group was pretty evenly divided between D&D veterans and folks who had never played before, and even among the vets, some of us hadn’t really played 5th edition yet, so our knowledge of the system was rather out of date.

( Prepare for adventure... )

TTTO: “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas

I hold my fire
Only for a moment, then the moment’s gone
Tank builds threat
Misdirect three shots, turn growl off on my pet
Manage your threat
DPS must manage its threat

Healers scream
Suddenly the boss is running after me
Quick, feign death!
Tanks desperately taunt while it is running free
Manage your threat
DPS must manage its threat

Don’t pull aggro
One eye on the meter — not the damage one
When you’re high
Find a way to dump threat or you’re going to die
Manage your threat
DPS must manage its threat

This is a bit of fluff I wrote in 2009, after a night of raiding in World of Warcraft. I only ever shared it with Steve Shortino and Erica Neely, who were on my team at the time, and then forgot about it. I’ve written another filk about WoW to this same tune that I think is better, but I’ll include this one for the sake of completion.

(Originally posted on FB)

I recently found myself at a bit of a loose end, games wise. I’d been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic, levelling through six of the eight available class storylines, and wanting to take a short break from it. I was kind of itching for a sprawling Bioware/Bethesda style RPG, and debating doing another playthrough of Dragon Age or Fallout, when I came across “Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen” unplayed in my steam library. I don’t remember when I bought it, but it was probably deeply discounted during one of their sales.

The game was originally released for consoles in 2013, and later ported to the PC. It seems to have a fairly enthusiastic following, as I found from looking about online. And I had too look online, becuase otherwise I’d have no idea what was going on with it.

After a few hours of play, I have to say I can’t recall the last time I played a game so aggressively uninterested in giving me information about itself. The basic mechanics of the game are reasonably straightforward, which is good since it just drops you right in without much fanfare. The prologue has you playing a character who isn’t your avatar, but doesn’t explain much. You eventually pick up NPC party members, but the game is pretty mum on how you should evaluate these characters to join your party, and none of them are real characters in any sense, they’re just automatons. (Literally, in game. They’re called “pawns”, and they’re presented as soulless minions who only exist to serve your need.)

The user interface makes it hard to find anything, and there’s no way to tell if an area or a foe are appropriate to your level, short of charging in and seeing if you get your butt handed back to you. Conversations with NPCs are stilted, between the frankly awful voice-acting and the fact that you never actually respond to anything said to you. They react to you as *if* you said something, but it’s not like there was dialogue to choose that shapes the responses. They just say something, and you hit enter, and they say something else.

A friend I trust tells me the story is ultimately worth it, but I’m afraid that it’s just not engaging me. I might give it another try later, but I think for now I’m going to set it aside.

Look Upon My Gear, Ye Mighty, And Repair
by Rob Wynne
TTTO: "Dust In The Wind" by Kansas

My warlock casts
Conjure up a demon from the fiery depths
The spell falls flat
My spec is gone, and everything I learned is wrong
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

Once we strode
Like giants through the endgame, doing mighty deeds
But glory fades
Your grand achievements now just curiosities
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

Game moves on
Level cap increases, once again we grind
New quests call
And all your epics won't another level buy
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

This morning (28 December 2012) in the Tadpool, discussing the current WoW expansion and whether it was worth coming back to, Cory Latham made a comment about having too much time invested in his characters to roll new ones, and Christopher Dunn quipped that all that was meaningless, only the current expansion matters. And that got my filker brain working and this came out.

There have been two more World of Warcraft expansions that have come out since I wrote this, and it's still true, which hasn't always been true of my WoW filks :)

There’s a joke popular among people around my age. ”When I was a kid, you couldn’t ‘beat’ a video game. They just got faster and harder until you died.”¹

That’s a statement that could be applied to Imagi Studio’s “endless runner” game, Temple Run 2.² As the genre suggests, there’s no finish line in the game. You run until you make a mistake and die; the goal is simply to run as long as possible and rack up the highest score.

Of all the various games in this particular category, TR2 is my favourite, and its the one I’ve played the most. And although there is no ending, at this point I’ve pretty well beaten it in any meaningful sense. I’ve unlocked all the upgrades, I’m the top score by far amongst any of my friends who played the game. I’ve picked up all but two of the achievements.³

I guess I need to start looking for a new favourite iOS game.

My darling Angie reminds me that this joke was originated by Ernie Cline. ↩
Also available for Android. ↩
The two remaining, “Mega Runner” for 1000 total games and “Infinirunner” for 10,000,000 metres, are endurance challenges. The only thing I’d need to pick those two up is keep playing it over and over until I did. ↩

Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.

Whew! Another long fun day at OryCon.

Last night at 11pm was the Polyamory panel, which was in a smallish room absolutely packed with people. There was a lot of discussion about different ways to approach non-monogamy, and a couple of people there were dealing with particular issues in their own relationships that they asked the room for advice on. There was a great deal of advice handed out both generally and specifically. I got a good laugh when I noted that 95% of relationship advice for how to have a good poly relationship also applies as to how to have a good monogamous relationship, “and the 5% that doesn’t mostly involves calendars”.

I had hoped to make it to open filk last night, but after this panel was over, I was exhausted so I went back to the room and went to sleep instead.

We got up and out in time to get breakfast at the hotel buffet before I had to be at an 11am panel titled “Social Media: Revolution or Time Sink”. It was a spirited discussion about the various ways not only that we all use social media, but the way that marketers use the information they collect from our engagement on social media for various purposes.¹ We got a lot of good questions from the audience, and it was thought provoking.

I had a couple of hours off after that before moderating three panels in a row. The first was titled “Putting the Play Back Into Role-Playing”, and had a neat group of RPG vets. We talked a great deal about storytelling, collaboration, and how role-paying is ultimately what you bring to the table as a player more than the mechanics of the given game you are playing. I was left at the end of it with a desire to get into a really crunchy character-driven RPG again.²

Immediately afterwards³, we convened a packed, standing-room-only hour titled “Fifty Years With the Doctor”, celebrating everyone’s favourite Time Lord. The audience (and the panel) was a pretty even split between old-time fans of the show like myself and folks who had only gotten into Doctor Who with the new series. Two of the panelists even said that they got into the show because of their kids, which was a neat sort of reverse-generational story that you don’t run across too often. After a few opening remarks, we pretty much threw this one open to the audience, and had a rollicking good time rockin’ the TARDIS.⁴

The third panel of the afternoon was titled “The Positive Influence of Video Games”, and was just me and one other panelist. He had a lot of notes on scientific studies on the topic, and some background as a developer, so there was a lot of interesting data. But aside from those studies, we also talked about the aesthetics of gaming and whether or not video games could be art, the sorts of skills and social connections that gaming can help develop, and stories about games that had changed our thoughts about things or made a positive impact on our lives. We got a lot of good audience participation on this one, too, and I felt pretty good about it.

I met up with kitanzi in time to hear the very tail end of Callie Hills’s concert, which was unfortunately scheduled against my panel, and then we went back up to the room and ordered some food for dinner, after which I took a short nap before my final event of the day, which was being part of a “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” game. If you’ve never seen the TV show, it’s improv theatre games, with the twist here being that a lot of the topics and scenarios were tailored towards a science-fiction con crowd. My favourite game was one where we each took on the persona of a fameous author, and then discussed our approach to a book. The topic was “Romance Self-Help book”, and the authors were HP Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett, Dr. Suess, and George RR Martin. The lady who had Dr. Suess went on a sad monologue about trying to gain the affections of Sam-I-Am, turning to me at the end and saying “He won’t try my green eggs and ham. What should I do?” and I, as GRR Martin, stepped forward and said “It was at this point in the story that Sam-I-Am suddenly and tragically died.”, which good a good laugh. When it died down, I said “But love must go on, so I am introducing 743 new characters in the next chapter.” which got an even bigger laugh. We also had a lot of fun with traditional bits like Party Guests and Dating Game.

Once again, I find myself too tired for open filk. But I have my concert tomorrow at 1pm, so i’ll get to do at least a little bit of filking at this con. But for now….sleep.

Which is ultimately, in my view, not really as sinister as we tend to treat it. 95% of the people collecting data are doing it to more efficiently sell us things we might actually want, which means less time wadding through advertisements that you don’t care about. Since they’re going to put ads in front of us anyway, they may as well be for things we want to see. ↩
Aside to the old Defensive Perimeter folks: I miss you all so much. ↩
luckily, all three of these were in the same room ↩
If the TARDIS is a’rockin’, don’t bother clockin. ↩

Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.

Party of Four
by Rob Wynne and Jeffrey Williams
TTTO: “All Along The Watchtower” by Bob Dylan

I just don’t see a way into here
Said the cleric to the thief
This keep is too well defended
With its iron and stone motif
All these walls are much too high
The courtyard far too wide
Unless you’ve somehow learned how to fly
There is no way inside

No reason to get discouraged
The thief he softly spoke
There are many doors to pass through
And all these locks are but a joke
But you and I, we’ve fought the hordes
their treasure is our due
So let us not speak loudly now
It’s time to sneak on through

Down below the watchtower
There was a secret door
While the guardsmen paced and prowled
Inside slipped the four

Deep inside the cold dungeon
A wandering monster passed
The warrior pulled out his sword
And the mage began to cast

Another Dungeons and Dragons filk, this one started by Jeff with the opening lines, which he sent me in an instant message a few weeks ago. While the song is by Dylan, the filk is most certainly of Jimi Hendrix’s iconic cover. Now if only I could actually play it like that.

Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.

Tonight, I finished a replay of Valve Entertainment’s video game Portal 2, which was deeply satisfying. Portal 2 is one of those rare games that greatly improves on its original, and I enjoyed going through the story again and interacting with GLaDOS, Wheatly, and Cave Johnson.

After I finished, I did some poking around on the net for bits of information, and came across this video of two of the game’s lead designers, discussing its development at a game developer’s conferance around the time it was originally released. Some fascinating shop talk about how the project evolved.

Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.

Once upon a time,

bedlamhouse got a copy of a new video game called City of Heroes. It was an online multi-player RPG set in a comic-book superhero universe, and he suggested to the others in our AD&D group that if we all got copies, we could team up and play together. So I went and bought a copy. After watching me play it for a few days,

kitanzi decided it looked like fun, so we went and got her a copy too. For the next three years, we played the game a lot, often just the two of us, often with other members of Penguin Force, our superhero group. But eventually, we did what could be done, and newer shinier games (*cough*World of Warcraft*cough) lured me away from Paragon City. When I made the jump to WoW,

kitanzi decided to hang up the MMO habit, not wanting to get addicted to yet another time sink.

Earlier this year, though, CoH, now a venerable old warhorse in the MMO field, announced they were going free-to-play, and old subscribers could reactivate their old characters and play without paying a monthly fee. We both jumped back in, and while I couldn't recapture my enthusiasm for the game, she had a lot of fun beating up bad guys and flying around.

Last night,

kitanzi says to me, "Yeah, I think I'm getting bored with City of Heroes again."

"Well," I said, perhaps a bit too eagerly, "If you want to try Star Wars: The Old Republic", I could get you a copy. We could play together again!" She'd been watching with interest as I'd been playing the game since shortly before its release, and she'd also enjoyed watching me play other BioWare games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, so she didn't require much convincing.

I decided that it was probably about time put a proper video card in her machine, though. Integrated graphics were fine for the games she was playing before (I mean, CoH came out in 2004...it's not really going to stress out a modern system, even without a gamer-spec card in it), but TOR was likely to give it a bit more of a workout.

So, in preparation for this upgrade, I popped open the case to examine her power supply. I honestly expected to need to replace it, because gamer-spec video cards are power-hungry, and this was just a Dell Inspiron intended for general home use. But hey, I figured, check anyway, to make sure. And what I found astonished me.

I had figured I'd find a 280W or 300W power supply. If they'd been really spiffy, maybe a 350W, but I didn't expect more than that.

It has a 160W power supply.

I checked my calendar to make sure I hadn't accidentally opened the case of a computer I built in 1995 instead of the one I bought last year. Seriously, Dell, way to go. I'm amazed it even boots.

It's now fitted out with a 500W PSU and an ATI 6670, which is a solid entry level card that wasn't too expensive. Now we're ready to conquer the galaxy!

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: The Final Score (Podcast)

In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment came out with a real-time strategy computer game called "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans". It was well received in the gaming community, but I paid it very little notice personally.

One year later, a sequel was released, coming out just as I entered a six month period of unemployment. I ended up spending a lot of time playing Warcraft II, which was an awesome game.

By the time World of Warcraft in 2005, an MMO based on the same world as the RTS game, I was already deeply engaged with a game called City of Heroes. Some of my friends left CoH to play WoW, but I was still having a great time where I was, so I didn't pay it much mind. In fact, I kinda resented it for stealing away my friends from the game I was playing. My dismissing it didn't seem to cause it any lasting harm, though, and it grew like gangbusters.

Around the time that the first expansion for World of Warcraft came out, I was growing bored with City of Heroes/Villains. You can only go beat up the same bad guys in the same warehouse so many times before it starts to acquire a sense of sameness. So I asked

eloren what server she and her hubby were playing on, bought the trial CD, and rolled a character.

I had no idea that this would change my life.

I played the game mostly solo, sometimes asking

eloren to help me with difficult things or quests that required groups. I didn't really know anyone who was playing; well, that's not strictly true - I knew lots of people who were playing, and not one of them played on the same server as me or each other. I joined Jon and Aileen's guild, and got to know a few of the people there vaguely, but I was mostly just enjoying the game as a solo player. Then drama happened, as it so often does in guilds, and they broke up. A small group of friends went looking for a new guild to join, and ended up with a group called The Grim Covenant. They seemed nice enough, and I was invited to join them as well, even though I was still far below max-level.

This was a transformation experience. As I reached level 70 (the cap at the time) and started participating in group activities, I starting getting to know people. I began to feel like I belonged in the group. I began to form real and solid friendships with people.

And then I fell in love with one of them.

It wasn't on purpose; I certainly wasn't looking for a new relationship. We had just gotten to talking, which led to more talking which led to exchanging emails...at some point she found out I was polyamorous, and started to ask me questions about it. As time went on, we were spending more and more time talking to each other, and it was obvious to me that there was something between us growing deeper.

Honestly, the details at this point are beside the point. We met in person when

kitanzi and I went up to visit a group of guildies for a trip to King Richard's Fair, a trip that had been organised well in advance of these developments. During that trip, we began officially dating, although only the people who needed to know this were aware of it.

A couple of years go by. Following the failure of her marriage, she decided that, in the end, poly wasn't something she felt she could handle, and we broke up. This is probably the hardest breakup I've ever been through; neither of us really wanted to and we both still loved one another deeply, but she was in a place where she needed to figure out who she was and what she was doing with her life, and this just wasn't part of it. Her finding out that polyamory wasn't for her after all was certainly a risk I'd been aware of when I started the relationship.

(I wrote and removed a lot of detail in the last three paragraphs, deciding it was largely beside the point. If you want to know more about what this was all about, email me, and we can talk.)

That was nearly a year ago, just before Valentine's Day. I spent the next few months being pretty broken as a result, withdrawing from a lot of people in the process. Part of my withdrawing was to quietly withdraw from the WoW guild we were both part of. I was an officer and raid leader, but those were roles I'd been increasingly frustrated with, and this gave me the excuse and the permission to just let go of them. I went to another server, where I’d established a character and made some casual friends, and set back to playing the game semi-casually. Eventually, I joined up with a small group of friends to begin raiding again, though never as hardcore as before, and that's been my focus for the last 12 months.

Now there's a new expansion out, and as the new year begins I'm reflecting again on my life and how i spend my time. The truth is, I still enjoy the game quite a lot. The new expansion is full of really interesting new things to explore.

catalana and I still play together every week or so, working our way now through our second pair of characters since we began to play every Friday a couple of years ago. And I still have many people that are dear to me in the game, both in my old guild and in my new one, and others besides. Azeroth has become a comforting place to wile away my time.

But the thing is....time is the one thing in my life I never have enough of. And there's a lot of things that I want to do that want to compete with that time. I want to spend more time writing, both creative writing and blogging. I want to spend more time working on my musical interests. I want to catch up on some of the TV/movie watching that's been piling up. I want to just sit and read. Sometimes, I want to just sit.

Given that I'm not currently able to give up either work or sleep, I have to make some decisions about how to spend my time, and the decision I'm making right now is to take a vacation from World of Warcraft. I'm not saying I won't play it at all; I'm not giving up my nights with Erica, and it is a good way to kill an hour when you're in the mood for it. But aside from that regular session and the odd jaunt here and there, I'm going to spend a few weeks in pursuit of other hobbies, until I figure out the best way to create a balance that lets me do everything as I'd like to.

It feels very strange to step away from something that's dominated my leisure time for over four years. But ultimately, I think that right now it's best for me.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: Tanya Savory - Better Shade of Green

YouTube - Dara O Briain Live at the Apollo - i love videogames ( 09/12/2010 )

Current Mood: amused

Dahlia Lithwick writes one of the funniest recaps of a Supreme Court session ever. I'd pay good money to get a recording of this being read outloud by Nina Totenberg.

The Supreme Court tries to figure out what Madison would have thought about Postal 2. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

The state of California is attempting this morning to defend a 2007 law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under 18. Offenders may be fined $1,000 for each game sold. The law was struck down on First Amendment grounds in both the district court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. So much for the legal angle. The more profound story playing out in court today goes something like this: Gamers: Meet the old people. Old people: Try to find the power-on button. Everyone else, search for James Madison's avatar and ask what he thinks of Grand Theft Auto.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Frank Sinatra - Once In Love With Amy

I've seen an number of variations on this theme, but this is one of the better ones. What if Chess was a brand new game: how would it be received by the gamer press?

Chess casts you as king of a small country at war with a rival country of equivalent military power. There is little background story to speak of, and by and large the units in the game are utterly lacking any character whatsoever. The faceless, nondescript units are dubbed arbitrarily such labels as "Knight" and "Bishop while their appearance reveals nothing to suggest these roles. To make matters worse, the units on both playable sides are entirely identical aside from a simple color palette swap. The setting of the conflict is equally uninspiring and consists merely of a two-color grid so as to represent the two warring factions. Adding insult to injury, there is only one available map- and it's pathetically small, an 8x8 matrix (Red Alert maps are up to 128x128 in size). The lack of more expansive battlefields makes Chess feel like little more than an over-glorified Minesweeper.

The entire article is well worth reading. Great pastiche!

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Murray Head - One Night In Bangkok

Among the many things that really sucked about

bedlamhouse moving to Indiana was no longer being able to game with him every week. The D&D campaign soldiered on without him, but I really missed his presence at the table. I'm pretty sure he missed us too, because when the D&D group decided to shift from weekly to irregular status, he suggested that perhaps we could set up an MMO night so he could get in on some gaming fun.

( The adventures so far... )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Coldplay - I Ran Away

As most of you following this journal know, I've been an avid MMORPG player for the last few years. Though I was late to the party, having completely bypassed EverQuest and Dark Ages of Camelot and their ilk, I jumped in wholeheartedly with City of Heroes in 2004 and later World of Warcraft in 2007. While I tend to focus on playing one game at a time, I do sometimes go to take a look at other stuff on the market. (

kitanzi is currently having a ball with Spore, and I will have to eventually give that a whirl myself.)

It's not unfair to say that Warhammer Online was one of the most eagerly anticipated game releases of the year, if only because it gave the gaming press many chances to breathlessly speculate on if it could be the "WoW killer". (Age of Conan having failed miserably at even being remotely playable, let alone a juggernaut. ) And it's not hard to see why some people were excited. The Warhammer miniatures game has a long history of fanatic devotees, and the heavy PvP focus of the new online version looked like it might be just the sort of thing for people who like that sort of thing. Since I'm really not a hardcore PVPer, I wasn't terribly interested, but enough people in my Warcraft guild were rabidly excited that I figured I'd buy it and see what the fuss was about. At worst, I thought, it might be a diversion until Wrath of the Lich King is released in November.

( Unfortunately, the results are fairly underwhelming... )

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Guy Clark - Trying to Try

I had a relatively relaxing weekend, which is good because that was just the sort of weekend I wanted.

Friday night,

catalana and I met up for our usual night of WoW questing. We spent a good deal of time killing giants and water elementals in Feralas -- the giants were dutifully dropping stuff for us, and the water elementals not so much, so we dropped that quest and went to collect Yeti hides instead. On the way to the yeti cave,

catalana spotted a sprite darter and said "Those are so pretty! I wish you could get a non-combat pet version of one of those!" I whispered one of my friends who is a rabid non-combat pet collector and asked if there was one. It turns out, there is! It just involves doing a very long quest chain that starts with an NPC hidden in a spot that one would be fairly unlikely to notice. We dropped our plans for mega XP and decided to chase this chain down instead. It mostly involved razing a village of Tauren and freeing a bunch of the little dragons, then flying all the way to Darnassus to turn in the quest, then flying all the way back to Feralas to pick up the second part of the chain, then down to Shimmering Flats, and then The Hinterlands. Those of you familiar with the geography of Azeroth will note that we earned our frequent flyer miles on this one! It was late when we finally wrapped up for the night, but we were both the proud new parents of tiny little faerie dragons!

I split most of Saturday between WoW and Warhammer Online. WH Online is a new MMO that just came out, and a large number of my guildies are playing it, so I figured I'd at least see what the fuss was about. I'm really horribly underwhelmed by it, unfortunately. I'll keep dabbling with it, but as soon as Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I expect it to start gathering dust. I'll go on more about my impressions of the game in another post.

Currently exciting in WoW land is Brewfest! World of Warcraft has a number of little holiday festival events through the year, and Brewfest is essentially the dwarven (and Orcish) Okotberfest. There's a fair, and kegs of beer, and ram races, and a cool boss mob to go and kill for shiny trinkets. We spent a good deal of time on Saturday and Sunday repeatedly running the special boss -- hes' not hard to kill, but you can only run the event once per person, so even swapping people in and out of the party, there's a limit to how many times a day you can get his loot. But it's fun to do stuff as a guild again.

Sunday night, my darling

sweetmusic_27 and her old roommate Patty dropped in on their way down to Walt Disney World! This made me quite happy as I have not seen my darling Amy since January, and there was much cuddling to be had. We went out to Famous Dave's for a Giant Helping of Protein, then came home and watched a Jeff Dunham DVD. A good time having been had by all, we went to bed at a reasonable hour, as

kitanzi and I had to be at work and Patty and Amy had a long drive to Orlando ahead of them. But it was fantastic to get to meet Patty, and of course I'm always happy to see Amy. (We'll get to see them both again in a week or so, when they're on their way back north. We made sure they'd have to stop...we loaned them graphic novels! *grin*)

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Suzanne Vega - Marlene on the Wall

Well, last week our intrepid heroes managed to defeat the final big bad of the dungeon in one of the most anticlimactic encounters of my DMing career. The ancient evil they'd found clues of throughout the adventure turned out to be a vampire who had been trapped in gaseous form inside an urn in a secret room on the lowest level of the mine. Letting her out should have been a pitched battle that they may or may not have actually won. While they had the right kind of weapons to at least make a good go of it, she was high enough in hit dice that the cleric would have needed a perfect roll to turn her, and her ability to dominate members of the party into her willing servants....well, let's just say the odds were long for our heroes.

Luckily, the party had some very good initiative rolls and several of them got to go first. The mage led off, as is her usual tactic, with Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter. This spell will incapacitate (though not make completely helpless) a foe for 4 combat rounds. It does, however, allow the opponent to make a WILL save, and the vampire's WILL was +10.

She rolled a 4.

Now, it's always the DMs prerogative to fudge die rolls, either for or against the party. In this case, however, I let it ride, and, unable to put up more than the most token of resistance, they proceeded to dispatch her without much fuss.

Is she dead? Well, that remains to be seen. Vampires are very tricky to kill, and she did appear to collapse into mist on death. So there may very well be a powerful undead roaming free with notions of vengeance. Time will tell.

The party went back to town to report on their success. Unfortunately for them, Raffi got his elf on and made a very haughty speech to the townsfolk, blaming them (or more strictly their ancestors) for the curse of lycanthropy which was caused the lynching of Lawrence Gannu's grandfather some hundred years prior, and how they had thus been directly responsible for the woes they had been suffering. Since the sort of simple frontier folk who tend to live in mining towns don't usually take kindly to this sort of moral proclamation being made against them, they thanked the heroes for their efforts and suggested that perhaps it was a good time for them to leave town.

Overall, this was a very successful module. I'm absolutely in love with the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of d20 modules from Goodman Games.

As always, here's some quotes from the previous adventures, leading up to the dispatching of the were-rat Lawrence Gannu. I'll try to do more play-by-play in the next adventure.

Virko: We're all injured. Let's run away from the cleric. That's called "strategy".

Sensei: They're disrespecting you, Virko.
Virko: I don't speak vermin!
Sensei: I do! They're disrespecting you.

Raffi: You're the Elvis of the rat world.

(After I describe another 30' dogleg)
Don: We have this symbiosis. We understand each other.
Dave: The vermin whisperer.

Lawrence Gannu: You are invading my home. Leave now before it becomes your tomb!
Sensei: (pause) Ok.

Virko: So, you think you can terrorize the people of Silverton? I say thee nay!
Gaudi: Who *talks* like that?

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Pet Shop Boys - New York City boy

I apologize for getting so completely lax on the game transcripts, but I do want to keep noting the funny comments, because they're part of what makes our group so much fun.

Virko after one-shotting a goblin wererat with a quad-damage critical): Be careful. There's two of them now.

Virko (fighter): We may need to change our tactics, now that we're encountering lycanthropes instead of zombies.
Gaudi:(priest): I'm a little amused that we keep running into them in a silver mine.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Jethro Tull - El Niño

ericcoleman has a poll over his journal about chocolate preference, which reminded me of this amusing conversation I had during Tuesday night's D&D session.

Someone was offering around some Hersey's 70% Cocoa dark chocolate squares, and it led to this exchange.

D: I'm a chocolate snob. I'll only eat dark chocolate.
Me: Not me. I'm a chocolate slut. I prefer dark chocolate, but honestly, milk is fine. With caramel is fine. or crispy rice. or fruits and nuts. It's all good.
D: Oh no, not me.
Me: I figure chocolate is like sex. Even when it's bad, iiiiiiit's still pretty good.
D & J (almost in unison): Oh, that's not true.
Me: I dunno, I think it is.
D: Besides, I got spoiled by living in Europe for 2 years.
Me: (deadpan) Oh? The sex was that much better in Europe?

It took the party about five minutes to regain enough composure to continue.

Current Mood: giggly
Current Music: Jonathan Coulton - The Future Soon

We didn't end up playing D&D last night, because 2 of our players didn't make it, so it was a couple of hands of Munchkin and general revelry instead. Don won the first game, and I won the second.

kitanzi made cookies.

Best exchange of the evening...I forget what I actually quipped to start this:

Don: Yeah, yeah. You're very funny.

kitanzi: He thinks he is.
Me: *mock pout* Some people seem to like it.

kitanzi: They're just humouring you, dear.
Me: Oh. (thoughtful pause) Humouring me certainly seems to involve a lot of nudity.

(At which point,

kitanzi cracks up and Don gets the look of someone who has lost his place and is trying to figure out where the turn was....*grin*)

Current Mood: naughty
Current Music: The Charlatans UK - Up At The Lake

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