A Window, A Light...

Mage is dead. Long live Mage.

So that's done, then. You got to hear all the complaining, and probably weren't there for all the stuff that went right, and for that I apologize. It definitely wasn't a perfect campaign. It wasn't even the campaign that I initially set out to run. But it was the campaign we played and I ran for the better part of a year of which the theme became, I guess, personal growth and how it's really not the same as personal power. 

It was pretty ok.

I often have a temptation with games to return, both as an ST and as a player, and I'm perfectly content to leave this game where it's ended. There's nowhere else to go. The PCs are currently orbiting the realm of moderately-powered super heroes who now accelerate time, cause the air to burn at a whim, fly, make paper strong as steel, and conjure impenetrable walls from shadow-stuff with few, if any, repercussions.

That's cool. They also trashed my arch-mage nemesis in two rounds with automatic fire. There's a reason why the supernatural fears the teeming masses of humanity, and it ain't because they won't clap to save Tinkerbell so much as being capable of unleashing a torrent of hot lead at very high velocities. The Masquerade isn't there for the romance, ladies and gents.

It's all Sidereals from here on out. That, and our awesome Skype Burning Wheel game you never see me talk about.

While our friends in Seattle are complaining about the 2 inches of snow they got*, what I'm most thankful for at our Thanksgiving potluck at work is that it means I don't have to leave the building to get something to eat. What with the inconvenient freezing rain outside. It's not actually that bad, I just don't like it. But I always get a kick when the Puget Sound exhibits any symptoms of winter aside from frost on the windows in the morning, because it always sounds like they're going through the apocalypse up there.

We had the weekly Mage session yesterday, which was basically a filler or bridge episode when bits of several PC back story suddenly arise. It was short, and is basically leading up to a Halloween game, which is kind of amusing since we're skipping a week at a time or more between games. Running a game once a week often catches up with me at the worst times, and the web page doesn't get updated at all, because I'm torn between making new material and trying to log old material, and when that happens, actually being able to run a game wins.

Plus, updating a web page I don't actually have to update is tedious as hell.

I also made cookies which were soooooo disappointing. I guess they were ok. I just, I dunno. I can't stand behind those cookies.

Because the game ended early, Frank decided we all needed to watch Happy Feet, which I remembered thinking was cute and fun but, in actuality, seems to be a tedious morality tale involving a penguin with a distinct evolutionary disadvantage convincing YouTube to save arctic fish, or something. The pacing is pretty akin to something like A.I., in which a small robot and Jude Law try not to become irrelevant and then the movie literally becomes stuck in an ice block, in what feels like real time.

Seriously, Happy Feet is a hot mess. And it's not because I'm a jerk. Or at least, not just because I'm a jerk, because I want to like a movie about dancing penguins. I mean, I guess I don't really care about tap dancing, and I don't ever really think about penguins, but whatever. It's 2:15 when it could have been a 30 minute film short that didn't devolve into some idiotic message about overfishing the Antarctic continent, which is not something I even know if happens.



* Which is adorable.

Autumn is always the time I associate most strongly with my late high school years so, like it or not, so I often end up with flashbacks to sitting in a small, white room listening to downloaded music on an outdated PC and working on updating my primitive website while the trees slowly turn orange and yellow outside the window. It's also around this time that I start having trouble waking up, when the daylight through the window ceases to issue forth and the temperature drops.

Anyhow, what's on the plate? I'm trying to go virtual at work, because I've had more then enough of driving on 270 West. The hassle isn't worth the socialization. The advantages of working from home include a better diet and more comfortable environment, as well as increased access to things like my bank and lowered gas expenses. It's almost 100% win. My supervisor's got my name in.

I'm not running Mage next Tuesday. Too much generally going on, and too many people competing for time means that I'd have to dump what marginal social life I've got and spend most of my last week and days coming up onto Tuesday updating webpages, filling in Concilium social structures and actually writing the game. Which I like doing, but I don't need that to become everything that I do, though I have recieved some flak for it.

"We ran through everything I prepared." I explained.
"But hardly did anything last game!"
"That's because that was the last game, we were basically running on side notes and wrap-ups."

I write journal entries while I'm at work, but I write them in fractions and they require little overall concentration and almost never any research. I write them because they require little sustained attention. Mage and, for that matter, fiction or essays don't function the same way. I need to be able to concentrate for more then two minutes without being interrupted by the need to fix someone's Outlook.*

Reading Blame!, playing Persona 4, ect, et al. That is mostly it. And writing.

I've been playing Minecraft, which is hard to describe as a game. It certainly is an environment, where enjoyment comes primarily from emergent properties in the setting. I had spent some time in a few generated worlds, then settled on one where I was dumped on a beach and, very close by, are these massive spires that are held up - in some places - by a column only a single block wide. Obviously, real structural integrity isn't critical in a program where blocks, if removed from all other supporting structures, will literally float in the air, but it's an impressive enough site that it kept me there. I was able to find stone, coal, and sand easily and so just dug a whole in the nearest hill and used that as emergency residence. A few interesting things stemmed from this.

Boring thing #1 : My home is mostly comprised of dirt with a foundation of stone.
Irritating thing #1 : The monster known as a 'Creeper' spawns in high quantities near where I had chosen to reside randomly.
Irritating thing #2 : Creepers are basically creepy green suicide bombers. They get close to you and explode. This leads to a number of surprising deaths.
Interesting thing #1 : This leads to a home which is basically a war zone, and a crater-studded landscape.

In MineCraft, enemies come out at night and catch fire during the day, thus dying and ridding you of that potential problem. Even in the day, though, when I leave my hobbit hole, I take my blocky life in my hands. If I were playing Iron Man, where a death means you delete the world, I would have died so much I would have had to uninstall the game. I am dying constantly. This ties into something else. Partly for kicks and partly because of my need for stone blocks (in order to build my sky bridges), I tunneled deep into the earth in a stair step pattern. I eventually broke through into a cavern which was packed with monsters. Skeletons, zombies, slavering spiders and deadly creepers.

I had tunneled into a dungeon.

Monsters spawn at random in low light areas, but dungeons are particularly dangerous. The possess a fiery cage in the middle which cannot  be moved and which dramatically increases spawn rates. One can tell the presence of a dungeon by mossy cobblestone blocks which are, incidentally, able to be mined. This leads to :

Interesting thing #2 : Emergent dungeon crawl.

On paper, it sounds terribly boring, but the goal is to acquire materials with which to build. Caverns are the locations where veins of ore and coal are easiest to locate, and where water and lava are available for harvesting via iron bucket (resulting in obsidian, if utilized correctly). Basically, the best stuff is found in the most dangerous places. This creates a situation where you can either venture forward into the dark to quickly harvest rare and useful materials or you can carefully build yourself a preserve. Room by almost-non-nonsensical room created only to block off the dangerous, untamed caverns from your safe-if-haphazard, well-lit mines.

Some of these caves are huge in size and range in all three dimensions, creating situations where I've had zombies and creepers fall en masse from ceilings once I've been detected. The result? One of the best video game D&D experiences I've ever had with the best rationale for delving along with the best rationale for weird and unusual dungeon construction.

Meanwhile, in the world above, I've barely even started my sky bridge.

* A valid problem, but one that keeps me from focusing.

I'm not feeling super-well, I've got a game today, and it's likely to be slow in the afternoon and people will be sent home. Based on these things, plus some other errands, if they offer a chance to go home early, I'll probably take it. Laundry, stamps, procurement of curry spices, these are all pretty critical things and I'm three days behind! Plus, the onset of this weather is doing unpleasant things to my throat.

The game today is set for 8, which is pretty late, but the games are pretty short. Two new players are joining, there's a resolution of the last games events, and the setup for some interaction between them and one of the major factions... the premise pretty much writes itself, with minimal need for me, but obviously I've got something set up. I need to double-check how abyssal intrusions are banished, but if there's one thing I want to demonstrate, it's that the local concilium takes the PC report very seriously.

I was thinking about the game as I went to bed, and had a couple of interesting, if slightly unnerving dreams.

I'm not apt to spurn a paycheck, and I'm not likely to have the chance this semester, since things didn't go to plan. That's the good and the bad in one sentence. Technically, things can still come through, so rather then beat myself up about it, I can acknowledge that there's a substantial boon in waiting until some things are paid off or much closer to and I'll have better savings. So that's it for a little while then.

I'm still working on Mage. I have to build a city, and I really want to look over stuff like Boston, Mysterious Places, Sanctum and Sigil, and stuff like that again. It's still in the design phase because I've been very busy with other stuff, and I don't even have my playgroup yet. I like to design NPCs and setting elements with them so they're invested from the beginning. I also kinda want to use all that stuff, even if nobody sees the work that goes into it but me.

Um, I bought Persona 4 online, after checking two Best Buys and two local GameStops. And while the manager of the Collinsville GameStop was very charming, I did not give her money because she did not have any of the games I wanted at the moment. That probably will be my first check in the future, though, because it really was a swell first impression. Anyway, I always skimp on the shipping so I can expect it sometime... man, like, next month. In the mean time, I've got to the very end of Dead Space, even if I never finish the last boss. I've been spoilered on the ending, and honestly I'm about as meh as you can be on it, in a very general sort of way.

The game itself has been good. Not great and not awful, either. It loses a lot of points because you see everything the game's got a little less then halfway through, and it doesn't really mix it up from there. It's got the 'ambush you as soon as you press the button', the 'every time you succeed, something negates it', the 'it's horror so the controls aren't very good', the 'cut-scene ambush', and the occasional 'flood of misshapen creatures'.

That's all standard action-horror stuff, so I didn't get pissed and kick it out of bed. But I did toy with the idea sometimes, because really, I'm mostly sticking with it out of sheer bloody mindedness. For other, maybe better, gamers, it's probably no big. I bet you'd be able to complete the whole sha-bang much more quickly. For me, I kept losing interest.

For all that, it had its good points. It was pretty good at scenery and the action was solid. The guns are cool, and I liked the feeling I got after I had just fought down this big, flesh-skewering monstrosity with my fusion cutter or just wailed on it savagely with the melee attack. I'd stomp on it, and curse, and then throw it over a bridge with telekinesis. Sometimes I'd sing a riff from LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out.", probably to Frank's chagrin.

I fuckin' love that song, though.

I feel a little healthier emotionally, but sicker physically. Something's taken root in my chest and it won't dislodge, making work for the last two days a real drag. More experienced first level analysts were asked to provide mentoring for analysts just leaving training, and that's actually what I've been up to for the last few days. When the site supervisor stopped by, he commended me on being a good analyst, which makes me feel pretty good despite being tired and cranky. That kind of thing previous supervisors I've had before this job never really understood; that people like hearing that their hard work is being noticed.

There is stuff planned for my weekend, even though I'm mostly going to take it easy. Second to last Abyssals game was last Thursday. The PC who'd been making trouble for us for so long had finally split and a separate session with an outside guest PC was run on Wednesday, and that character wasn't invited to the Thursday game - not out of spite, but because he just wasn't there anymore and nobody really wanted to split the game 4-and-1. The rest of us Abyssals descended into the Labyrinth to reclaim our names from the Neverborn, which I guess they had in their possession to return. In return, the Circle was broken as the cost, and we had to choose someone to expel. Our group chose the person who'd voluntarily left us after a surprising amount of debate.

I don't know if there's something to be learned from that. Perhaps that even if there's not immediate and direct ramifications for acting against your group, you may be selected as the fall guy as soon as that kind of decision has to be made.

I think Changeling is actually canceled again. It's one game away from resolution, folks. I can't get you guys to come in to wrap this up? It's a different and valid reason every time. Running two games a week is really trying. We're all adults, even if it sometimes feels like we're just pretending, and that time is precious. We chose gaming, but other obligations must frequently be met.

My next game is gonna be Mage. A friend is going to be taking over for the current ST to run a short D&D session using the Warcraft setting until our friend gets his bistro off the ground for this summer. In a fit of dramatically misplaced priorities*, fulfilling ones dream of opening up ones own restaurant and the attendant work takes priority of running Sidereals for me. I mean us. Yep.

I wish I felt a little better. It was like the old depression for a few days and even leveling out is a downer. It is, however, a reminder of how different my mind is now then before. That was a sample, and I didn't like it back. I'm exhausted now.

* I'm kidding!

This is originally the subject I wanted to post about, and I guess I got distracted and forgot. That's what happens when I post at work; such is life.

When I originally got the WoD Corebook, I loved it. Interestingly, I felt like the supernatural was portrayed as being almost common but any kind of cohesive organization was vanishingly rare. I don't recall any specific places where this was said, or anything, but this is the impression that I've carried with me since I first picked up a NWoD book. It's a setting that I really can't call 'new' anymore, but it's taken me a long time to revise my concept of what the gameworld was like.

( Cut to save space, since I've got too many of these up lately.  )

I blew my weekend off to do whatever, and if you've got lots of things you want to accomplish, then I recommend it. The actual details of 'how' involve a stack of aluminum cans and a daunting amount of stacked cardboard which can be followed by checking the linked entry on my Facebook. It's true that I enjoy finding new ways to repeat myself, but I assume you wouldn't get anything out of that.

While it remains to be seen if I'll actually have the time to keep up with this kind of thing, I renewed my Cam membership (I hadn't actually realized it lapsed, but the point was moot) in the hopes of maybe playing the same old character or branching out. I feel like I have a few ideas I could bring to Requiem that'd be fun and I'm juggling concepts for Mage. There's something about that prick Atol that makes me want to return to his character, but I've had several concepts that keep popping up. Many of them seem surprisingly mundane, like I can't get past playing someone who was really steeped in being normal and things just became progressively weird about everything else.

Since I signed back up, I need to bring Atol back though, if only because I don't feel like he ever really got a resolution. Without going into it forever, he started off as a terrible character (not a bad person, just kind of two dimensional) and got better. Then I turned into a terrible player, which is something I've got my reasons for, anyway.

So yeah, I've sent out some messages, because my copy of my prestige is hopelessly corrupt and won't open. I had backed it up, but it seems I backed it up post-corruption, so that doesn't seem to do me any good. It was probably out of date, anyway. Without it, I don't have a record of any MC, which is tangenital, but irritating. If the VST Coordinator/Mage VST doesn't have records of it somewhere, I might have to bug Stephanie, who certainly isn't obligated to worry about it anymore, anyhow. It would be kind of funny to have this character from 2006 without any recorded playtime. My information in the CRD was very accurate until the reset, at which point I rely on it to have exactly nothing more then my starting point-buy. Even that doesn't look accurate to my recollections. 

I got a package from my father and picked up my booster box on Friday showering with years of collected bits of cardboard that I'm surprisingly excited about. I haven't felt this excited about Magic since before college.

My weekends are starting to get a little more busy. Friday was internet and gaming night, which went well. Mage: the Awakening played out almost exactly like a Guy Ritchie movie, featuring the protagonists and their cable of hard drinking ex-cops and cons named 'The Aristrocrats' (snap).
Today I was thinking of logging onto FFXI to play, because my internet is hooked back up, but I've decided to go out to the tournament again today because I didn't go yesterday and it's draft today. So, probably playing until 6, and then out to dinner at a randomized location.

Sunday is work and Monday is meeting up with a different group for Magic: the Gathering again. I know one or two guys from work and the rest I've never met before, but I got invited when I mentioned that I was getting back into it so it was as easy as that.

Magic players have always gotten kind of a bad rap. There certainly are skeezy ones, I won't even argue. And ones without social graces. But generally I've found them to be a pretty diverse and cool group of people. In many cases, it's as simple as bringing a deck and saying, "Hey, I'm here to play." In that regards, it's not unlike kindergarten. Pull up a chair, friend.

I'm really looking forward to the next Mage session. This one ended when I looked at one of the antagonists character sheets. It's Hideki Oki from the core book, and he's kind of a badass, but he's not a good magician. He's a troubled and mentally unbalanced killer, instead, so while nobody could tell who he was by scrying, he didn't expect someone to use magic and then cross reference a police database to check his plates. I gleefully told them he lived alone in a small apartment in Seattle, and they broke in silently. What followed busted me up.

After breaking in and rolling successful stealth checks, one of them decides the sleeping baddie needs to be unconcious, so he pistol whips him, doing a little damage and waking him up violently and turns on nightsight. The other guy decided to use a tactic he saw on television and start shouting at him to get up to disorient him while grappling, but he rolled his Composure + Resolve vs. Intimidate + Manipulation and avoided the grab. The third guy didn't have Stealth as a skill, so he was waiting in the hallway as backup. When he came in, he didn't realize that one of the characters is wearing what are effectively night vision goggles and flips the light, prompting everyone to groan and try to remain unfased.

The character that burst in, as he flips on the light, brings his pistol to bare and takes a shot at Hideki, whos' grazed, but spends a willpower to open the window and tumble out, knocking over a planter filled with mud and some sad looking ex-flowers. The dumpster diving corporate espionage guy grabs him through the windows and beats him about the neck and sholders, while captain nightsight is back on the ball and takes a quick shot (minus the penalty for cover) and puts a bullet through the killer's eye. Hideki tumbles back over the railing of his 5th floor apartment, setting of car alarms and angering stray cars and neighbors.

Queue cursing and frantic morality rolls, as one character is excited at the kill but dubious why he's rolling for a Morality 3 degeneration check while the others are trying to remember if they wanted to kill this guy or not, while looting the room for electronics or evidence. So, there's going to be a police chase next, probably, and it's going to be a riot at the Concilium meetings. I laughed my ass off.

I officially mentally 'killed' a project that I'd been trying to work with since high school. I've talked to a few people who read this journal about it briefly, and it's something I was invested in, but I really can't get passionate about it. It was a writing project of indeterminate length set in a world I was never really able to pin down. The more I thought about it, the fuzzier it became. I realized that it was, at heart, several projects and none of them were going anywhere.

It doesn't really matter what it was, but for those curious, it was the sci-fi thing that I had been trying to puzzle out forever, now. It comes down to 'I don't want to write it, and I have no incentive to do so.', so I'm just kind of taking notes and trying to determine if there's anything I do want to write in particular.

I feel surprisingly good about this decision, to stop trying, but I feel oddly about the characters I'm leaving in perpetual limbo. Most of them were never very fleshed out, and so it's a relief to let them go, too. One in particular is an interesting exception. Atol is a character that's really taken a life of his own. When I sat down to create my first Cam LARP character, I tried to pull a name from somewhere that wasn't going to be a trite, overused Shadow name for Mage. I hadn't really put too much thought into it, so I determined I'd cross over some of my character ideas from one of my less likeable characters from my long time novel attempt. I always enjoyed writing Atol dialog, even if I couldn't get anything else going. Thanatos02 is my common screenname and avatar, but Atol is my secondary. 

Kind of a strange set of circumstances. His project killed, the character continues to live on seperetly. He may still get his own work, then.