Goodbye.

Annie Hicks, August 2001 - November 2006

So...

We held our first Dungeon Crawl Xtreme game last night... despite my being late to my own game (don't ask, long story) and Greg and JD were sitting in my livingroom unattended for 20 minutes while Kevin napped the nap of the dead (why, I ask you, don't I ever get to nap? I'm the one who gets up at o'dark fucking thirty with the child-creature when she decides that 5am is enough sleep thankyouverymuch.) in the back room. Not that JD and Greg destroyed my house or anything, but it does seem slightly wonky to me to walk in to the living room and they're there, but Kevin is not...

Everyone actually had character sheets with them. Karen decided at the last minute to remake her character because she didn't like the one I made for her (except that that really wasn't the case, she just didn't quite understand the character sheet so she took thirty-five minutes to make what was almost exactly the same character with worse stats. I'd rolled really well for her and she had 2 18's and a 17 on the original sheet... whatever.) and JD, despite being told multiple times that this was a medieval-setting game with High Magic content, still had his character with an electric guitar and a micro-cassette player. Interesting, but no.

Not everyone had dice. JD forgot his and Greg brought his Vampire Dice instead. Good thing we have a Very Large toolbox full of dice... Jess thought dice were really cool, however, and JD borrowed from me, snatched from Karen, and gave unto the Jess because let me tell you, I found dice in some very strange places this morning, including at the bottom of Jess's juice cup.

After dinner, we started play. Kevin's map-monkey, which is good because my vocabulary isn't the greatest for map-description and in many other games we've ended up with the map being completely wonkified at the end when it became important.... Kevin has, over the years, learned to adapt to my weird vocabulary, and also learned which questions to ask to make sure things line up.

We had three combats, several traps that they didn't find and sprung, or did find, but couldn't disarm, and someone needs to put more points into their spot checks...

But no one died. JD took like 6 points of damage, but since he was playing a half-orc bard (is it just me, or can JD never actually play a character that takes ADVANTAGE of the race/class bonuses, or what? I mean, seriously? HALF ORC... bard. Don't they take a charisma penalty?) he had plenty of left over hit points.

They completed their mission goals and got about 550 xps, which puts everyone about halfway to level 2, and apparently this was soooo much fun that everyone wants to play again tomorrow. Karen may even put off her return to New York. Which is ok with me....

Karen is planning her very first Hall plot...

Read more to see a snippet of our recent conversation:

KT: oh, are you prepping for this [plot] Right Soon, or should I go ahead and pack up the Scum for the nonce

Gris: I'm prepping for this Right Soon. Bastian can stay right where he is. ^_^

Gris: ;) Impatient, are we?

KT: not exactly... just that if there's going to be a wait, I should pack him up, because otherwise he'll wear a rut in my brain

Gris: Well now, we can't have Bastian rutting about in your brain. ;)

KT: ::inhale:: ::exhale::

Gris: ?

KT: I think that's actually the very first time you've ever zinged me on a sexual reference

Gris: ::ROFLOL::

Gris: I'm writing about prostitutes. It's sorta at the top of my brain right now.

KT: still. I think it might be an historic occassion

Gris: ::giggle::

Gris: You'll have to note the date. Tho' I shudder to think how you'd celebrate the anniversary.

Conversation in the Hick's Household:

KT: ::reading email:: So, Karen seems to think - last night - that it was a good idea to go out for drinks with the guy who shot her.

Kevin: ::spits out a half-eaten mouthful of waffle:: WHAT? I think you need to back up a step here...

KT: ::sighs:: I don't know if you were paying attention on Monday, but there was a sniper, shooting -

Kevin: OH! You meant in the GAME.

(I'm debating, however, on whether he spit his waffle out thinking Karen had been shot. Or that she'd gone out for drinks with someone.)

I don't know what's more pathetic...

That someone paid my character 2 gold pieces to take off all her armor (which strips a female character down to a very skimpy bikini) and dance.

Or that I actually did it.

I guess I'm just the social animal or something.

Within a week of starting to play Worlds of Warcraft, I was in a guild. Clan Banzai (Horde)/Noble House of Bonsai (Alliance). (Yeah, yeah, I know "that's such a gay name" but hey, I think it's cute.)

Less than a week later...

Yep. I'm an officer again.

Go ahead, laugh.

After much thought, and a six-week hiatus which did nothing to change my mind about what I'd thought; I came to the somewhat disappointing conclusion (at least from Kevin's point of view) that I was not capable of running two games at once, that this was completely unfair to my players, and that I was much more interested in my 7th Sea PBeM game than I was in the Shadowrun game. So, the discussion came up last night: what now?

The discussion covered several possibilities: Kevin would take over the Shadowrun game as the GM, I would make a new character and we'd keep playing SR. We could all roll up new Shadowrun characters. Or we could play something else entirely. It was sort of a flip suggestion of mine that pretty much everyone pounced on and now Kevin feels mildly railroaded into running a White Wolf game - a system he doesn't actually know very well. But, much like he was my Shadowrun expert on hand, I do know White Wolf fairly well and I'm right here to help him out. Turn about's fair play and all.

Where the problem came up is one of our gamers. Whenever I play with him, I'm constantly reminded of a line in 7th Sea which makes a little dig at White Wolf: "When you create a Hero in other games, you are often presented with the opportunity to take disadvantages or flaws in order to get a few more points for that advantage you want. The difference between a Hubris and a disadvantage is that a hubris is a heroic flaw. 7th Sea is designed with the intent that the players play Heroes, no matter how roguish they may be. Thus, while your Hero may be lecherous or cowardly, it's a bit unreasonable to expect the rest of the players to adventure with an albino megalomaniac who kills all little children on sight."

This player's characters are usually so flawed that they're emotionally crippled, socially annoying, and physically incapable. Now, taking a small moment aside for reality's sake: I understand that a real drug addict is often so wrapped up in their drug or obtaining their drug that they have the same exact problems; non-functionality. That they have sad and frightening lives with no friends that often end in overdose or violence. That being said - what fun is that? And if a real drug-user has few if any friends (who aren't also drug users and there for selfish reasons of their own like getting free drugs) why should a gaming drug-user have friends?

The problem with this type of character comes down to a simple question of fairness. In order for the tragically soul-sick to play his character concept correctly, everyone else in the game has to bend. And sometimes bend hard. For example: I do not have any drug-addict friends of which I'm aware. And even when I did, I didn't remain in touch with the ones who were so out-of-control in their addiction that they weren't any fun to be around.

What it boils down to is: why would my character hang out with this character? My character doesn't like this character. My character doesn't respect this character. And they're more bloody likely to get us killed rather than assist us in our goals, so tell me why the hell we put up with them, except that they're a PC and by the play-nice-people rules, we sort of have to? But we end up sacrificing our own character concepts on the altar of the tragically flawed's concept. And that's not fair. Storytelling - or gaming or roleplaying or whatever you want to call it - is supposed to be a team effort.

Now, admittedly, there are some circumstances under which a flawed or unlikeable character can work. In my 7th Sea game, for instance, Kevin is playing the Dona Melina - a prudish, class-conscious scholar. She's a snob. She's uptight. She's difficult to be friends with - however, she's also very good at what she does, which is explore Syrneth ruins and examine their artifacts. She's useful and because she's useful, people put up with her less than cuddly personality. Or, in another instance, back when I was running Heroes Unlimited, we had a character who had several mental problems and often got distracted or had flashbacks that made it hard to hold combat with him because you'd never know when he'd spot a water hose, think it was a snake, and go completely around the bend. And yet, when he was not having a psychotic episode, he was so damn nice that people forgave him for being a whack-job.

Now, we all have friends who are now functionally useless. They're so depressed that they can't function, or they've screwed their lives up irrepairably and we continue to help them as much as possible. This is because we have history with these individuals. We are helpful and kind, not because of what is, but because of what was. So, the tragically-flawed soul sick character can work, they just have to be handled gracefully and with the understanding that everyone else has a character concept that they'd also like to be somewhat faithful to.

And Kevin, who likes the tragically-flawed soul-sick concepts even less than the rest of us - my husband is, at his very core, a pragmatic "suck up and deal, I got over it, so can you" sort of asshole (and believe me that I say that with utmost respect for his determination to salvage his life after he made a complete hash of it) - gave this player an ultimatum: No tragically flawed characters. Particularly in Werewolf, where the concept is pack-unity, pack-mentality, a functionally useless maniac is just not going to work.

You'd have thought Kevin had asked this player to cut his arm off (his real arm, not his gaming arm!) with the way he reacted. What struck me, in the fairly long, intense discussion that followed, as particularly sad was this: I asked him "What's wrong with playing someone who has the potential to be happy?" His response, "Everyone is fucked up and miserable."

And I find that deeply, wrenchingly sad. As well, of course, as being patently untrue. Yes, I'm not always deliriously happy. But most of the time, I'm reasonably content. Yes, I'd like more money - who wouldn't? - or slightly less minor annoyances. But I don't consider myself to be fucked up and miserable. I don't consider most of my friends to be fucked up and miserable. Well, ok, so a few of them are, but those people aren't part of my life anymore. I got tired of trying to fix someone who didn't want to be fixed, someone who didn't want to be helped, someone to whom the goal of happiness is unreachable, and what's more, they don't want to reach it.

To some degree, I miss the 80's when we were all going to grow up to be rock-stars. This 90's hanging on goth tragically hip, being gloomy and depressed for the sake of life noir is getting old. It's been four years since the decade turned. Can we have a new theme for the Aughts?

The 7th Sea Golden Rule: Have Fun

The Second 7th Sea Golden Rule: If someone isn't having fun, fix it.

-- page 208, 7th Sea, Game Master's Guide

Being a GM (or HM or DM or Storyteller or whatever flavor of the month the GM is called in that particular gaming system) is HARD WORK.

A player has one thing to worry about - his character. Not that even being a character is simple, but that's not what I want to talk about right now.

A GM has multiple characters to worry about - bad guys, good guys, neutrals. An entire universe of situations. The rules. When to break the rules. (Some people think a good gm knows all the rules and never breaks them. We call these people rules lawyers and the phrase "first, let's kill all the lawyers" applies to them as well.) It is vital to know when to apply and when to break rules. When to fudge dice rolls.

A GM's job is simple and complex: Tell a story. Make sure everyone is having fun. (If you are NOT having fun, you'd better tell me. I can only fix what I can see. Sitting in the back being mad is not fun for you. Eventually you will make it not fun for the other players. If no one is having fun, what the FUCK are we wasting all this time on? You wanna be mad - go watch the debates.)

Let's get some things crystal clear here. I am a STORY GM. Do I fudge dice rolls? You bet your ass I do. In fact, there are some circumstances under which you have to bet your ass I do because the actual rules of the game are NOT going to let you live. But I will do my damnedest to make sure you do. I killed JD's character a few months back. No one was more surprised than I was. I'd shot at Marionette several times with a notable lack of success. I spent days thinking of ways to "save" the character. Death does not have to be a career-ending event.

Second thing. 7th Sea is, above all, supposed to be a dramatic game. Dra - Mah - Tic. When you do something dramatic, you get a drama die. When you need extra dice to succeed at something, you can spend them. Thus, being witty, impressive, brave, etc can help you actually be witty, impressive, and brave. To wit: Faced by 4 brute squads, the Hero decides that he's in a lot of trouble. He makes a brave quip - be off, fools, before I get warmed up - and calls 3 raises to try and Knock Out four Brutes at once. This gives him a target number of 30. He makes his roll without spending drama dice and gets a 32. Wow! Amazing. He gets a drama die! Same situation - rolls dice and gets a 27. Not quite good enough - however, he has a drama die to spend, which he does and gets a 6. Total, 33? Wow! Amazing! He gets a drama die. For an even net.

Addendum to Second thing: Cowardice will not benefit you. I know, it means you have to trust me. Please. Trust me. And god knows it took me a while to get it, too, when I was playing 7th Sea. With no balance and no swinging - the idea of swinging over to the enemy ship to fight seemed like sure-fire suicide. But not trying means no drama dice. If you're dramatic, I will help you. As much as possible.

Third. And this is the most important thing... There is a difference between screwing with your character and screwing over your character.

Roleplaying is never (or should never be) the GM vs. the Players. EVER. The GM will win, if that's ever the case. Hands down. The GM has more resources, more monsters, more spells, more villians. Rocks fall. Everybody dies. And honestly, what's the fun in that? (I've had a GM like that... in the last game, we had a 50-50 chance at opening a scroll that would destroy the world. Or the other one, which would destroy all the magic in the world. And there was no option to not open a scroll. Um. How fun is that? Not Very. Almost all of us were dead by the end of the game And with no magic, we couldn't get rezzed.)

Yes, as the GM, I will fuck with you. I will play mind games, I will wring emotions, I will throw you in jail, I will kill off your NPC allies. Yes, I want blood, sweat and tears. And laughs and triumphs and dramatic escapes.

I will not fuck you over. I will never, ever set up scenarios where there is no escape. Unfortunately, with most paper and dice games, there is the chance that you might die. But 7th Sea isn't one of those games. You can get Knocked Out. Which then leads to rescues (Three Musketteers, or escapes (Count of Monte Cristo), or waking up the next morning after getting hit over the head with a belaying pin (Pirates of the Carribean).

Perhaps it's a subtle difference. But critical. And I confess to being a little hurt that one of my players was unaware of the difference.

While I'm at it, perhaps I should clarify: Acts, scenes, story, epic.

Epic - the over-arching adventures of a group of heroes, think series of novels

Story - one main plot line, think one novel, one movie, or one play

Act - A part of a story, like acts in a play. For instance, in Pirates of the Carribean Act One would be the Battle at Port Royal and ends when the Black Pearl kidnaps Elizabeth Swan. Act Two would be The Curse and ends when The Interceptor is overtaken by the Pearl and Elizabeth and Jack are marooned on the island. Act three would be Escape of Captain Jack and run from the rescue by the British until the end of the movie. (In game mechanics, this is also when you get experience, your drama pool refreshes, and all Dramatic Wounds are healed.)

Scene - a bit of action - a fight, a conversation - usually seperated by a change of location. (At the end of a scene, all flesh wounds are healed)

These aren't necessarily very clear, and the book doesn't describe them very well. So if you need to keep it simple: The scene, act, story, and epic ends when I say so.

So... questions?

Kevin: Oh. oh, DEAR.

KT: What?

Kevin: SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED! Grundo Master must steal neopets for the Master.

KT: Oh, that's nothing, don't worry about it.

Kevin: ::hastily checks his pets and his inventory:: Nothing's wrong.

KT: I know. It just does that sometimes. Nothing happened.

::time passes::

KT: SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED. Congratulations, tisfan, you just found 1000 Neopoints on the floor!!!

Kevin: ::Dark glower:: Hmph. I get death threats to my neopets from the Grundo Master. You get cash. How fair is that?

Kevin calls me from work to ask a question.

Kevin: Hey Sweetie, how are you?

KT: I'm fine. Can I kill you?

Kevin: ::long pause:: Um.... no?

KT: Oh. Hmmmm.

Kevin: What?

KT: Well, I can't think of any other way to get Gersemi down to the raid tonight. I was going to duel her, then drag the corpse along with us so I can rez you as soon as you're home from work.

Kevin: Oh, well, that's entirely different. By all means, kill me.

KT: Thanks.

Didn't want to leave you
With the wrong impression
Didn't want to leave you
With my last confession
Of love
Wasn't trying to pull you
In the wrong direction
All I wanna do is try and
Make a connection
Of love

--Natalie Ambruglia Wrong Impression

Have I mentioned that my vampire coterie hates each other?

From my character's viewpoint: Joshua picked a fight with three KKK members and murdered them in an alley just down from her haven. He was then so horrified about going into frenzy and gaining a nice set of alligator teeth that he just left the bodies laying around. My character, being both poor and not particularly strong, was left to deal with the corpses and panicked. She hauled them a bit away and dumped them in the river. However, there wasn't time to clean up or anything, so it was pretty obvious to everyone where they were killed. Had Joshua been less concerned about his mouth or Alexis any use whatsoever (Mucking Falkavians!) then we might have been able to hide the bodies for a while and buried them later out at Joshua's estate.

Anyway.... the murder of these three white boys sparked off a vengance riot where the KKK came in and burned out several blocks of shanty town around my character's haven. Rather than deal with her own guilt about the issue (after all, if she'd done a better job at covering up the murders - which weren't her fault!! - then the riot wouldn't have happened.) Sara's decided to just be mad at Joshua for causing this mess.

On the other hand, her guilt about the issue has led her to do as much charity work as she can over the next few nights - leading prayers for the bereaved and helping to supply food and money to the newly homeless. Which is a good thing and has gained her a mortal who might help her out, a ghost that owes her four favors before his pennance is up, and the name of the KKK leader. Not that we didn't know that already, but it's good to have back-up proof. Now, unfortunately, the word of a spirit is not admissable in court, even in 1872.

Alexis wandered off during all this praying and whatnot and I had a sort of good idea (well, sort of. I'm trying not to question my own motives too much, since the idea will either get us what we need to bring down Major Templeton or get Alexis killed. What am I hoping will happen? I think I'll just move along here, shall I?) I went to track her down.

She was in the company of a young soldier that she's trying to seduce (and completely freaking him out instead, but he's both green and really polite) and I came up to her and started chatting, then absently did an Aura Perception on him.

I botched my roll.

In any case, Sara now thinks there's an extremely powerful, malicious mage wandering around in New Orleans who has started manipulating one of the members of her coterie for whatever dire reasons of his own...

Sara panicked completely and made hasty excuses to run away. It wasn't long past midnight when Alexis - worried about her friend - showed up to ask what was wrong and what happened and...

"Go away," says Sara. "I'm going to bed!"

"But it's only midnight..."

"I don't care," she says with great exasperation. "I have had a very trying day!"

I got two compliments yesterday during my Shadowrun game that made me extremely happy/warmfuzzy inside.

Greg, who was talking to a friend of his about my SR game, relayed the following back to me from said friend: "I sort of miss gaming sometimes and it sounds like KT is still a spectacular GM."

And JD said: "You've given me hope back for the Shadowrun gaming system."

Of course, I've always thought that any gaming system, no matter how badly organized the book is or how complicated the rules are, has the potential to be a great game. What is and has always been important to me is the actual storytelling.

Dice and mechanics are just a means to resolve conflict with the element of surprise. With a superlative group of roleplayers a system can have no - or very few - rules at all. What's important - nay even vital - is the blending of imagination, the emotional ties to a character that pull one into the story. And, of course, having fun. If you're not having fun, something is wrong. And the ultimate job of the GM is to make sure that everyone is having fun. (Note that fun comes in a lot of flavors: your character can die horribly and you can still have fun, or you can haul off a dragon's treasure chamber and still be bored. Fun is... perhaps not a very accurate term.)

My first experiences in role-playing were not so good: my GM was firmly of the opinion that dwarves, psionics, and halflings sucked. As such, he ripped those sections out of people's books. (No, really, I'm not kidding. he did!) He also was convinced that GMing was going to get him laid and took great offense to the fact that I wanted to play a guy because he wanted to be able to live-action some stuff out - like forcibly seducing my character. (Hey, this was Louisa, whaddaya expect?)

However, once I got to college and fell in with Liz and her friends, gaming became part of my life. AD&D first, then other systems. I had good games (one of the best games in my life was run over Christmas break and involved about two weeks of the most intense role-playing of my life. We lived as our characters, only coming back to the "real world" a few times a day to eat and sleep) and bad ones (my first Vampire game fell into the "bad" catagory. Besides little guidance from a bad GM in a new system, we had vampiric chickens, time-traveling mages, sex with Jesus shortly before the crucifiction and waaaaaay too many players.)

When I first decided to try my hand at GMing, I really did not know what I was doing and I was both too excited and too inexperienced to really be good at it, but I knew... I had the potential to be very, very good. I could feel it. It was like a sort of electric buildup right behind my eyes... the directed force of imagination. It's always been enough to take my breath away.

The planning out of plot, with each hook and turn carefully sculpted... watching people absolutely destroy a villian because they're so angry with her that they literally tear her body apart... the look of shock and horror when players realize exactly what a pair of clues mean... in-character arguments... romance... mystery... from the moment I started GMing, these moments have been the finest in my life.

After working desperately for several weeks to rescue their friend Morris from the clutches of the evil alien, the look on Felix's face when he finds the pregnancy test kit - positive - and Morris's hair on her pillow...

Lhynnae, coughing on her life's blood, is cradled in the arms of Catreenia as she breathes her last...

Ruth's sire saying with absolute confidence, "Well, the door locks," when asked about protection he might have on his haven...

"Want to play 'You Win'?"

So... I've been working on my 7th Sea PBeM recently... setting up plot hooks and planning out NPCs and whatnot... if things work the way I'm hoping they will, this could... possibly... be the best game I've ever run. The way things have fallen together so far, ideas and backstory and twists... well, let's just say, I'm really, really looking forward to it.

Players.... beware!

So.....

Kevin and I left our guild this weekend on EQ.

We got into the guild back when our warrior/cleric duo was in their mid-30's and gaining levels in Dreadlands. Maxeman came through the zone shouting "Guardians of Luclin is open recruiting, levels 25+! Friendly guild! Send tells!"

We were sort of bored and decided to go ahead and join the guild. Lack of something better to do, I guess. The guild was quiet. People didn't talk or group much for a while. Gradually, there were more members and we got to know people and chat and group with them. Ddayzz. Honoth. Richardaeron. Sait. Boomish. Greim.

Maxeman had some problems with his EQ account and had to leave. He turned guild leadership over to Greim. Ddayzz and Rich became officers. Somewhat after that, me and Kevin became officers. Most of our friends in the guild were officers. Greim developed financial problems and had to quit playing EQ. Richaraeron became the guild leader.

I recruited actively for the guild, although not openly. Basically, whenever I grouped with someone who didn't have a guild tag, I watched them to see if I thought they'd be a good fit and if they would, I send them an invite. Guvwenea. Akasma. Eltracker. People I liked to group with. And we had a good time. For a while.

Then people started leaving. Gradually. A few at a time. Mostly the people I liked to hang out with. And the new people coming in were... not quality.

It was getting so that logging into guild chat was an immediate invitation to being beleagured with requests for powerleveling or platinum or new items. Ug. Who needs that kind of annoyance?

Guvwenea quit to go to another guild and that was one of our dearest friends. And then Boomish left. Another really good friend. And Richardaeron, determined that no one should part ways with the guild "in a huff", stood up for people in the guild who were crude, insulting, and condescending.

Then Ddayzz left. And that was the last of our really good core of friends. There were a few others that we liked, but no one else that we regularly grouped with... So we decided to go as well. Akasma left right after she heard we did. So did Eltracker.

So... less than a week after leaving our old guild word has spread. In the last two days, we've gotten solicitations from several other guilds; Guides of Norrath, Brood of War, Chaotic Assassins, Ministry of Creative Anarchy and Videlicet Vis. Flattering, I admit, to be so well known as players as to immediately have so many offers...

But now... we have to consider....

Where to go?

I think what we're planning to do is sort of "try out" the different guilds. Hang out with them for a week or so at a time and see where we're a better fit...

And then decide...

Well, in my upcoming 7th Sea game, Kevin is doing something new and different for Kevin...

For one thing, he's playing a girl. Fortunately, it's a play-by-email game, so his obvious lack of femine wiles can be overlooked.

Secondly, he's playing a brainy intellectual scholar type with only one pip in any attack skills.

This should be interesting...

Memorable Quote:

Because you never know when an erotic dancing skill-soft might come in handy...

Well, after weeks and weeks of being level 59, I am now a level 60 cleric! yay me!

On the other hand....

It means I have to buy new spells.

Marzin's Mark - 15,000p

Blessing of Aegolism - 5,000pp

Banishment of Shadows - 2,500pp

Divine Intervention - never even seen it for sale

Ethereal Elixer - 150pp

Word of Redeption - 3,000pp

sum total in my bank? 6,000pp

I see problems ahead.

Theme Music: Cowboy Mouth - Louisianna Lowdown

Was it a blinding lack of subtlety
Or just a lack of style
Responding to the ways
And means of fear?

Take me back to New Orleans
And don't call me anymore
Because I might have loved you, yeah
But I love me more

Well, I'm feeling slightly better about the Vampire game.

Sort of.

Sarah's trying to ingratiate herself to the youngest childe of the local Nosferatu. In all honesty, of all the vampire clans, I find myself frequently most comfortable with the Nosfies. Nosfies are information brokers. They're usually utilized by the princes of the city as spies. Their information is generally for sale - for the right price.

A nosferatu is too valuable, most of the time, to meet final death in the purges that take place in a city after the over-throw of a prince. Training a nosferatu and getting him intergrated with the city is a time-consuming process and it's generally easier to let the current one continue his functions. Nosferatu generally aren't a threat to the prince because they prefer not to be in the limelight. I think there are a total of two Nosfie princes in the entire world of darkness (Don't hold me to that, I don't remember where I read that and can't seem to find it again.)

The Nosfies are survivors. They provide just enough information and hold just enough favors due to keep themselves well protected. And a lot of the clans have very little respect for them - they're viewed as social parasites. Distasteful, but sort of useful.

Getting in good favor with the local Nosfie can be one of the best decisions a neonate or Ancillae can make. So Sarah started on that plan recently, having run out of other useful things to do or paths to track down.

[Well, she probably ought to go talk to the local - disputed - Primogen of the Toreadors. (Except when I'm not playing one, my characters generally don't like the Toreadors. Funny, my characters tend to feel the same way about Tremire. When I'm not playing them. An aside within an aside here, how pathetic.) ANYWAY.... as the Toreadors are currently the ones involved in the power struggle with the Prince, Sarah's not entirely sure she can trust the Primogen. Maria might be posing as an uneffective leader to the Toreadors in order to get closer to the prince and to report his plans and movements to her "rebellious" clan members. "When you only see wheels within wheels in a Vampire Game, it means you're not looking hard enough."]

So I dragged my coterie over to Laurence's place and spoke with his youngest childe, Martin. Towards the end of that conversation, a riot broke out in one of the shanty neighborhoods lead by our favorite sheet-wearing assholes. (JD was sick today and didn't come to the game, so I'm not sure what Joshua did during this.) Alexis kicked in her obfuscate immediately and Sarah was too busy to try and find her using Auspex, so we got seperated.

I'm particularly proud of the fact that Sarah managed to rescue several people without ever having to get violent herself. Sarah's got a humanity of 8 and I'm trying really, really hard not to have to kill anyone, if possible. She never takes more than one blood point from her victims (whereas the other members of her coterie tend to take three, which is the max you can take from one lickstick and expect them to live without medical intervention) and refused even to kill the three members of the KKK that we ran into week before last. She bit one of them just long enough to use the Kiss to calm him down but never actually killed anyone, despite the fact that she has ample reason to despise them. As a matter of fact, she was quite distressed that she was left to dispose of the bodies - which she would not have done if the murders hadn't taken place so close to her haven and she was scared.

This time, she saw three rioters chasing a black boy about ten years old into an alley. She sped after them. The first to see her, she grabbed hold of and used Spirit's Touch to learn about him. Discovering that he was a deserter and a traitor to the Confederacy during the Civil War (a fact that would have warmed her to him on another occassion, perhaps) she immediately told him she knew about it and would tell his fellow cohorts about his cowardice and betrayal if he didn't leave immediately. He botched his willpower check on that and ran screaming into the night.

After that, she convinced her Spirit Mentor to help her frighten the other two away. Her Mentor cast an illusion which made Sarah appear as a Garou in Chrinos form. Which not only scared them away, it provided some very useful information as well. Because when Sarah told them to "go home and pray for their souls", the leader protested that "you just told us to come here." This directly links the riot and the local KKK to the garou. Something we'd suspected already, but this time we had proof...

So, after Sarah finished rescuing a man and his six year old daughter (taking a bullet for him because hey, she can heal non-aggravated wounds and well, humans can't) and getting them set up someplace else safe (Sarah needs some mortal allies that can help her do things - her one retainer is actually an animal, and while she has a human Patron, said Patron considers Sarah something of a pet fortune teller and is unlikely to respond well to being asked to do menial favors) she headed back to the Nosfie's place.

She backed up Martin to his sire who wasn't entirely sure he believed Martin's story about Sarah becoming a garou (even if it was an illusion) and earned a small boon from Laurence.

I haven't actually done much before in Vampire with the somewhat off-the-wall system of Prestation, so I was looking up the rules/flavor text about it when I read something that made me very, very happy.

Doing favors for Elders is a good way for neonates and Ancillae to raise their status in Vampire society, although she might be accused of bootlicking.

This is good, since my character's supposed to be sychophanty. While will allow me to regain any willpower that I spend.

Subtitle: Did you hear someone laughing?

Theme Music: One Night in Bangkok

As I looked down on my corpse, the White Queen dancing gleefully around my mangled body I thought to myself that somehow, this whole thing was all involving some magician woman named Ddayzz.

No, wait, that's too late. Rewind.

So, we worked our way through the Comedy Theater, slowly murdering the patrons and the actors (A Comedy Actor's corpse does not think things are so funny anymore...)

Wait, wait, back up some more...

We're waiting in the snow next to the ice river staring at a tiny little castle. The castle is so small that it might house something even smaller than brownies. It's buried up to the second floor in the icy waters of the Great Divide River and serves as the secret entrance to our destination.

Omani's called in its troops and there are armies on either shore of the river somewhat north of the dragon caves. We had to race past fierce battalions of Kael spear-throwers to reach our goal. The Kael giants don't like me very much (I wonder why... probably because I'm an ally of two of their sworn enemies, the Thurgadain dwarves and the Dragons of Veeshan's Claws.) so it was a little tense running through their battlelines like that, but luckily the Thurgadain archers held them off.

I looked around at my fellow intrepid adventurers and wondered if we're truly prepared for the horror that lay ahead.

Gersemi, the barbarian warrior-woman from the frozen nation of Halas; Deanoo, an enchanter and Ddayyz, a magician were from my home-city of Felwithe, Sorrantiz, the lizard-woman monk; and Eltracker, one of the wood-elves from the tree-city of Kelethin. Later we would be joined by others, Loutsoul and her bethrothed; Kinaden, a wizard I'd met several months ago; Honth, one of the cat-people.

Finally, when we all had assembled and enchanted ourselves with spells of righteousness and protection, we ventured forth.

Into the Plane of Mischief.

The woods are decked with bright pink and purple leaves and the hostile creatures which inhabit them are mirthful in their bloodlust. Crazed laughter echoes through the trees from unseen sources. Puckish mushrooms scream at us and huge bixies attempt to stab us with their sharp stingers. Making our way to the castle is dangerous and we lose one in the attempt. Fortunately, Tunare, my goddess, is dire enemies with Lord Bristlebane, king of thieves, who's domain we're intruding upon and she grants my request to return the hero to life.

Halfway along the wall of the castle, we find the slain bodies of others who were attempting to gain access and I return them to life as well. My pockets are bulging with the generous donation they make, which I will use to better my gear and increase my own prowess in dedication to my goddess. In return for our aid, they agree to accompany us into the heart of madness.

The castle is well-protected. The entryway is hidden by an invisible bridge, which takes us a long time to find, but once our feet are on the parapet, we storm the gates, slaughtering the warped and twisted halflings who have dedicated their lives to an insane god.

We make our way into the castle, past cunning sphinxs and false, biting treasure chests to the library, where we slaughter gorilla scholars and take their library cards.

After laying waste to the library, we continue on to the Theater of Comedy, where we murder the actors and patrons alike. Our own giddy laughter echoes across the stage as we clear the balconies. From one of the actor's dressing rooms, we find the hidden entrance to the chessboard. Cleared pieces stand guard around the board and we slowly work our way around, killing spare pawns and bishops.

"We're close now," says Ddayyz, excited. She points to the board where pawns are moving slowly in to kill each other. "If we can kill these pieces, their armor is some of the greatest in all of Norrath."

We cleared all the way to the board and light-headed with excitement and exhaustion, we stopped to consider the board and how best to bring the pieces off their squares without the rest of the board noticing our attempts. Ddayyz, who controls the elements into a cohesive golem that serves her wishes, sat down just inside the door to the chessroom.

And that was where the Queen waited.

Sly, out of sight, she was like a spider, waiting for her next victim. Impossibly tall, she raged down on us like a storm. Her loud cries alerted a row of pawns, who leaped into the fray.

Like nine-pins, we were scattered to the gutter, our broken and bloodied bodies trampled under the feet of the chessmen. With a start, I found myself, naked and without allies, back in the frozen tundra of Everfrost, where my soul is bound.

The road back to our bodies and our armor was long. We had already been working towards our goal for several hours and we were weary. We made a brief stop in Plane of Knowledge and purchased several Jade Inlaid Coffins and brought them with us. From the very borders of Lord Bristlebane's kingdom, Imdeath, a necromancer of no little skill, summoned, one at a time, our corpses to us, so that I could implore my goddess to return us to life.

Next time, Bristlebane.

Next time...

-- Khith Tariel, 59th Templar of Tunare

Sarah, my Tremire Mamba, is considering moving to Florida at the earliest opportunity.

She's also considering a radical personality change. I wonder if my GM will let me.

First off, my character was written up as a Conformer/Sycophant as nature and demeanor. ("What kind of sycophant are you?" "What kind of sycophant would you like me to be, ma'am?") This personality, while it would be interesting to play, is almost exactly not what I'm doing, which means I'd better never spend any willpower, because I won't ever get it back.

I don't really have a choice, as neither of the other members of my coterie are anything remotely resembling a strong-leader type, thus giving me a shark to lamprey on to. I'm trying to settle for sucking up to the Prince and hoping that'll be good enough.

(let me say as an aside that while I like my fellow players, their characters seem massively underequipped for the political machinism that is the World of Darkness)

First off, we've got Alexis, who has been in torpor for the last two thousand years or so. Alexis was embraced during the Roman Empire's peak by someone who thought she was a beautiful woman. When he discovered that "Alexis" was actually Alexander, a cross-dresser, he was so infuriated that he nearly killed the neonate and left "her" in torpor under the city. She was recently awakened during an archelogical dig and found herself in a world she does not understand in the slightest.

She's a Malkavian, which is probably just as well. There are things that other vampires will put up with from the childer of Malkav that they simply will not tolerate in other clans. Cross-dressing, however, is not one of those things. My character is aware that Alexis isn't a woman, but it's such a matter of extreme indifference to her. In a species that does not breed by sex any more, gender and sex are irrelevant, except as tools for seducing mortals into the Kiss. Gender is certainly no longer important in matters of vampire love.

However, she is tactless, clueless, and extraordinarily vain. She can't seem to get her little brain wrapped around just how much time has passed and is constantly referring to things that are ancient history as "just recently" and scorning things like this "cult of Christianity" as "just one of those phases that people go through". She frequently borders on breaking the Masquarade, which is not surprising, as there was no such thing when she became a vampire, nor did she remain in vampire society for very long following her embrace.

Joshua, on the other hand, is a Gangrel who is frenzying himself slowly into alligatorness. He's also wanted by the various white supremicist groups for his work prior to the Civil War as an underground railroad conductor.

His grasp of tact and subtle can be rivalled by my 9-month-old daughter. He is involved in the murder of three KKK thugs not but a block from my character's haven and is so traumatized by the animal features that he gained from his frenzy that he forgets all about the BODIES that are torn apart in the alleyway. He runs to my character's haven and stares, horrified, at his mouthful of alligator teeth while my character is left to deal with the bodies and the resulting police ruckus.

Two days later, he out and out confesses to the murder to a mortal friend of his. Now, admittedly, said mortal is a black doctor and not at all likely to turn Joshua in for murdering three known KKK thugs, but still. There is a $200 reward, and in 1872, $200 is a lot of money. (On the plus side, says Greg, just about any jury would rule it as self-defense unless it was completely stocked with KKK members. On the bad side, court cases are heard during the day, and no matter whether they find him guilty or not, turning into a pile of ashes would be pretty permanant.)

I admit to spending a large part of the game immitating Jessica's baby flailex manuever. (Folding in half, forehead pressed against the the couch cusions and waving my arms back and forth frantically)

What little information Sarah's been able to dig up about the situation in New Orleans is as follows:

- The prince is barely holding on to his power
- The rival Toreador groups have made some sort of alliance with the GET OF FENRIS
- The Tremire Primogen was kidnapped and/or murdered by the Get.
- There are Uktena on one side of New Orleans and Black Spirals to the south. The only thing that keeps them from anhilating each other is that the city's vampires are usually united to keep them out of the city and the country territory between them is occupied by the Mokole, who don't like either group and are a real bitch to deal with - being able to turn into Very Large lizards is a huge advantage in the swamp. With the war for power going on in the city, the chances that the BSDs might not start trying to get to the Uktena are getting slimmer by the minute.
- the chances that the Get know that someone was spying on them recently are pretty high. Alexis pulled a SNAFU by forgetting that she couldn't feed on women before attempting to kidnap a female servant from the Get's kinfolk household to pump her for information and to Mask of a Thousand Faces as her for a while. So, Alexis grabs the girl, then remembers her aversion and ends up dragging this kicking, screaming servant out of the house (still obfuscated, so the other servants see the girl being carried off by nothing at all). On the plus side, they probably don't know who is was, specifically.

So... d'you suppose I can get passage on the next boat downriver?

So, I killed someone's character last night.

So. My apartment building was evacuated because of a fire last night.

Guess which one of these things I haven't done before....

I have never, ever killed someone's character in an RPG before. (let me define some terms here for people in the audience who are giving me the dubious eyebrow wiggling - knock that off, will you? You're giving me eye-twitches.)

I - the GM, a GM initiated action. (I do not count "I juggled with my poisoned knives after pissing off the cleric and stealing her stuff and botched my juggling roll trying to show off and now I'm poisoned and dying" as being my fault. Sorry, I don't)

Killed - dead.

someone else's - not my own character on the Hall. (yes, yes, I've done that a few times, but whaddaya want? I have 15+ characters and personally, my head is too crowded anyway!)

character - a role playing character, as in not a real person, although I have been tempted, on occassion to do the latter, I haven't done it. Yet.

And he wasn't even being stupid. Well, ok, he was, but that was earlier and not at all related to a Humanis Policlub assassin trying to shoot him in the head. And it was in-character stupid, so I didn't mind that either. (Although why, after being a transexual male who bought a very expensive rigged bot to live a fantasy female life through, would you take your disillusioned and somewhat bitter EX WIFE out on a DATE?? Just a personal thing, mind you. And it did make for some extremely funny roleplaying.)

So, anyway....

The bot got shot in the head and took a deadly wound. Which is... well... deadly. Except that it's a bot, so technically it could be rebuilt or repaired (we can rebuild her, make her stronger... faster... BAH, get out of my head stupid AOL commercial. Out, out, you're evicted. And no, Steve Austin is not an acceptable substitute.)

I did some checks. Repairs to the bot are going to cost 250,000 nuyen. Which JD's meatbody doesn't have. Which all the characters put together don't have. The bitter and disillusioned ex-wife might have it, but I don't know that she's all that interested in helping, really. As a matter of fact, both Marionette and Shadow are rather deeply in debt already.

Options:

- JD rolls up a new character and I transfer Marionette's karma to the new character. By far the easiest plan.

- the runners attempt to earn enough cash to pay for the repairs. Unlikely. they hadn't been running long enough to like each other quite that much. And it wouldn't give JD anything to do for several runs.

- the runners attempt to find a backer who will invest in the bot's repairs. Maybe, but Marionette hadn't gotten that much reputation yet.

- the runners sell the plans to the bot to a big corp for the cash to repair the prototype. This might work. It also has its ups and downs as the corp will use the technology and then Marionette model As might be running around and doing things which Marionette might then be blamed for.

There are some possibilities here...

On the other hand, this is not the first time I've had to evacuate the building I live in because of a fire.

I'm glad we were all still awake when we started smelling smoke. The fire alarm is so weenie that we'd never have heard it if we were asleep.

Someone set fire (or maybe it was an accident, but I dunno) to the trashcan in the laundry room.

So we got the baby and left the house and called the fire department and woke up all the neighbors...

Very exciting.

Jessica thought so, at any rate.

But now she's all worn out from being up in the middle of the night. She's still sleeping at 11am. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, as I have no idea when we're going to have time for her to take a nap today.

Subtitle: [Subtitle removed because poster is too lazy to go back and finish telling the story]

Epic Quest.

EverQuest.

Yeah....

I've tried to do this epic thing before, with my druid back on the other server. Never got very far on it. Also did some work on the enchanter epic.

Now I'm starting the cleric epic. If I'm lucky, I might actually accomplish this one. It's a good epic. A lot of epics aren't good anymore, when compared to the newer, jazzier weapon drops from Planes or Gates. (Speaking of Gates, one of my guild friends has been nagging me and Kevin to get Gates and decided that he would mail us a copy. I told him if he did mail us a copy, we'd buy the second copy. Seems fair to me.) But the cleric epic is still good. Even if the item itself isn't too spiffy (but it is) the click-effect itself is worth toting this thing about in your inventory. 96% rez. Not that I can't cast a 96% rez, but it takes about 1/4 of my mana, and if you've just had a total raid wipe out, that's a long time to wait to get everyone up and ready to fight again. Much better to whip out the Water-Sprinkler (I didn't name it, not my fault) and click everyone alive again.

The problem is, Sony wanted the epics to be these semi-rare, very valuable items. More valuable, since you couldn't sell them. They're no drop, and most of the stuff you need for the quest is no-drop. But Sony's idea of making something valuable is to make it damned annoying.

There are three main parts to the quest: the Goblin War (or Orb of Frozen Water), the Summoning of Ixiblat Fir (or Orb of Clear Water) and Zordak Ragefire (or Orb of Vapor).

I've got about half of the Goblin war part done - first I killed the king of the Deepwater Goblins. I did this on the lying, bad advice of a spy for the Lord of Fire, Fennin Ro (he's a god). Said spy - Shmendrik Lavawalker - tells me that the King is planning to raid a nearby village and he (Shmendrik) wants to save it. So I swam down and slaughtered Lord Berguggle. Goblins (and orcs) are all bard-wanna-be's. They all sing little rhymes when they're going to try and kill you, "Puny creature at my feet, I think you will be good to eat!"

I took Lord Berguggle's crown and gave it to Shmendrik as proof that I had stopped the goblin threat to the village. Shmendrik laughed at me and declared that the goblins were the only ones who could stop him from burning the village flat and ... I killed him. He came back to life as a fire elemental and I killed that, too. From the fire elemental, I recovered Lord Berguggle's crown and gave it to Natassa Whitewater, who was going to take it back to the goblins and try and smooth things over. She cautioned me that she thinks Fennin Ro was behind this attempt and I should talk with Omat Vastsea to learn more if I want to undo the fire-god's plotting.

Well, being the good cleric I am, I stopped at this point and went to print out a walk-through of the quest. And promptly stopped heading through the epic in a straight path and went to what is often described as "the most mind-numbingly boring part of the epic;" gathering Pearlescent Fragments. This is actually for part three of the quest, but as it's supposed to be the thing that takes the longest, I thought I'd get it out of the way.

Besides, Kevin and I can hunt here by ourselves in relative safety. The pearl shards can drop off any mob in the zone at a rate of 1 shard per 200 kills. or so.

Well, while a cleric and a warrior are an efficient team, we're not exactly what you'd call "quick killers." It takes about a minute or a minute and a half to kill a 40-50th level mob, which is what these are. The mobs are all mostly fire immune dragon-kin. Drakes, wurms, wyverns, chromodracs, with the occasional toothy "feeder" thrown in for variety. The feeders are often called "spermies" because they look sort of like giant sperms. With teeth. If you take that formula of 3 - 5 minutes per mob - a minute or so to track one down and bring it to be killed, a minute or so to kill it and a minute or so to heal up afterwards, we were looking at a long, long stay in this zone (65 hours. give or take.)

Well, of course, we didn't leave it at that and frequently badgered friends and guildmates into coming down and helping us with a stint or two. With a few friends we could kill faster. We had a few 2-4 hour stretches with a few guildies or friends. We also did two two hour stretches with a bard friend who can kill unbelievable amounts of mobs in a relatively short amoung of time. In perhaps 16 hours, we'd collected 2 pearl shards.

This was further complicated by the fact that Sony had yet another DX9 glitch that was causing mobs to spawn under the world. Which meant the whole zone would be populated by mobs, but you could only actually get to maybe one every five or ten minutes.

Last night, after seeing Shrek 2 with our nephew, Kevin and I logged into EQ and prepared for another few hours of little progress. Actually, we were hoping to get into an LDoN group, but the pickings were slim, so we thought shard-hunting would be a good way to pass the time while we waited for something else.

A few of the guild's higher characters were on, so after about twenty minutes or so (and one massive over-train that we had to run to Burning Woods to avoid squishness) I started some subtle nagging. "Hey, Dayzz, you promised to help me with this, now get your assets down here!" "Uuan, nice to see you just logged on! Guess you're not doing anything yet! Drag your button over here and help me out!" "Snowmist, Iildaine, what are you up to? Nothing? GOOD!" Like that.

With the group I pulled together, we were killing upwards of five mobs every three minutes with constant pulls coming in. Sony fixed the DX9 problem last week in a major patch, so there were loads of mobs to be had. And we killed everything that we could find.

About an hour or so into this mad-pulling, I looted one pearl. Slowly, people started peeling off to go do something else. I nagged more guildies into coming down to replace them. Then for a while, it was just Kevin and I remaining. We had to move our camp to a slightly less dragonkin-inhabited area because we couldn't hold the camp by ourselves. A guild shammie - Jessikka - logged on and agreed to come down and help out. Another pair of guildies had a really dismal failure on a plane raid and decided to come down and help me out as well - after dying some 6 times in Plane of Innovation, they decided that my getting my rez-stick would be a good thing.

We killed for a little longer and surprisingly enough, looted the 4th shard shortly after Honoth arrived.

So.... now I have to plot some raids.

There are only 5 mobs left that need to be killed, most of which are force-spawns. The last tedious bit is killing the fire-goblin king, who is on a 19-minute spawn and can spawn either a Large Fire Goblin, a Fire Goblin Shamman, or Lord Grimblox. The spawn is random, and I've read the stuff from people who say he can spawn immediately, after 2 kills or after 15 HOURS of waiting.

Gyek!

Meanwhile, back in Seattle...

Our "heroes" (note the use of dubious quotation marks) are trying to combat Humanis Policlub. In the shadowrun universe, some people have become elves and dwarves and orcs and trolls through a process called "Unexplained Genetic Expression" which happened slightly after the magic Awakening in the world. Which is all a bunch of game mechanics to allow a cyber-magic environment in which to play. Humanis Policlub is, of course, the inevitable backlash against Genetic Expression. "If you ain't human, you suck," sort of motiff.

Human being being what they are, I don't think even the onset of trolldom in the world will totally erase people's dislike of blacks, whites, women, gays, otherly religious or anything else that isn't exactly like they are, but hey... Be that as it may, Humanis Policlub (with corporate sponsorship) is trying to eradicate the orc/troll population of Seattle.

They've been attempting to assassinate leaders of the Orc Rights Committee (O.R.C. - cute, huh?) and just recently managed to dump a biological weapon (Vitas virus) all over the crowd at a funeral held for one of the assassinated leaders. Vitas is an older virus, so most of the people who are "legal" (i.e. have SINs and jobs with corps, and are primarily human) are vaccinated from it. The street people (the SINless) and orcs and trogs living in the underground... well, they aren't.

So (inspired by my run in with Jess and the chicken pox) Vitas is very virulent - however, if vaccinated within 72 hours of exposure, people won't come down with it. So - back to our "heroes" - several charitable hospitals in the area have donated Vitas vaccinations to the orc underground and our heroes have to go pick up the deliveries. Humans not usually being allowed into the orc underground and all. In fact, most of the entrances to the underground are well hidden and the ones that aren't are well-guarded. With the recent racial violence that's been going on ("seperate but equal" schooling issues and hiring problems leading to marches and violence during the marches. An orc, Luthur Drogmar, is running against the incumbent human govenor in the upcoming election. Luthur is also fueling the fire by being engaged to popular - pretty and human - singer Virtue Lee. Also, Humanis sent some people in and blew up most of a very popular orc-resturant, Gracie's.) it was decided that the risk to human delivery people would be too great.

So, I've blown big holes in Marionette's van again. This time with a rocket launcher. Of course Humanis is going to find out about some of the deliveries, and try and prevent the pickups. That's really only common sense. My heroes have discovered a few things - that some of Humanis often rides motercycles (pale yellow, blood red, or black) - and that they have been followed from time to time, usually resulting in some random violence.

So they see one of these motercycles parked near one of the hospitals and decide to take some action. Fetch and Shadow go inside to make the pick-up, while Marionette and Invader (more commonly in our campaign referred to as "Big Blue") stay outside to watch their loaner vehicle (lovingly coated on the inside with the remains of one of the other teams who was out obtaining vaccine - "Turn to Goo" being a very unpleasant sort of spell to use on someone). Invader spots the motorcycle (pale yellow) and the girl smoking a cigarette nearby. Long, messed up hair, revealing clothing. He decides to go question her, thinking she might be one of the Humanis.

As he approaches, she blows a smoke ring, gives him a slow, sensual smile. "Looking for a good time, big boy?" Invader turns purple (I assume that if a white person turns red when blushing that a blue person would turn purple) and stammers a bit. The player and I do a little bit of role-playing while I make deliberate innuendoes and he makes accidental ones. The other players are practically on the floor laughing.

"Well, can I make a Street Etiquette check?" says Invader's player. "I don't have a 'Talk to Whores' skill."

"We'd noticed."

When we got down to Chesapeake, one of the things Kevin promised me was a gaming group...

Apparently several of his work-friends wanted to game and Scott (to the shock and surprise of no one) is a suck-ass GM, so Kevin thought it wouldn't be too hard to put a group together.

Which is, of course, why we're gaming with Greg (who I have known for some 8 years or so and met at college) and his friend JD...

Not that I mind, really. Kevin's work-friends have showed themselves to be the pinacle of reliabilty on several occasions. (Note: that was sarcasm, for the undercaffienated)

And JD is pretty cool, even if I do feel about 500 years old whenever he starts using current slang that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. And he's got a really cool character concept, even if it did involve my bending rules all over the place. Hey, I'm much happier with concept then mechanics anyway. (This is no longer the '90's. Style is not content.)

So, I've been writing up this newsfeed for the game - current events in Seattle and what's hot in music and sports and stuff. (JD reads the paper yesterday, then we start the game. About halfway in, he comments ironically "Look, there's all this brutal injustice going on in the city, and what are we doing? Fixing the Megacorp SNAFU?" Kevin, "Yeah, well, the corps are paying us... dead poor people don't have any nuyen.")

JD wants me to put it online somewhere, complete with flash components and stuff, like a real newsfeed. Thanks, no, I haven't got the time to do the projects I'm supposed to be doing (like writing a novel) or the ones I want to be doing (like ripping all my cds so I can put them in storage and still have all my music at my fingertips - can you say 220gigs of harddrive space? I knew you could!) much less putting together a gaming role-playing site. And I'm almost positive my various friends who know stuff about computers would probably flay me alive if I wanted them to help me set up flash stuff.

But I'm having a lot of fun writing it... maybe I'll put it on line in good old-fasioned html... which I can mostly fake writing...

Karma-earning line from last night: Shadow, "I have some chummers who know some people who might know some people who know some dreck. I'll get back to you."

So.... several weeks ago, after weeks of brain-numbing non-conversation on the Hall, the HMs got together and decided to go on hiatus for a while...

Well, in three weeks, we'll be off hiatus.

So the question, unfortunately, remains: Now what?

Wait. Stop... back up, rewind...

The Great Orc War plot ended in August just before Liz and Matt's daughter was born. Since then, Liz and Matt have found it difficult to play on the Hall at the same time... Penny being an active, adventursome sort of baby and not liking much to be set down for long periods of time while both parents stared raptly at a computer screen. Net result for Hall: Attendance down by one.

Rachel moved to Chicago in the end of August. Since then, she's found another group of friends who game real time. She often forgot about the time change between Chicago and here and would show up late, or be tired and leave early. Net result for Hall: Attendance down by one.

Jeff moved out to Kansas during the summer. He's since gotten himself a girlfriend, has a lot of work to do for his new job and has re-taken up fencing. Frequently he is online but not actually saying or doing anything. Net result for Hall: Person there, but not active.

Colleen started up a new plot, took Karen and Matt's characters off to the other side of the world and then promptly fell off the planet again. Net result for Hall: two characters absent.

I had a baby in October and not knowing how this would affect my Halling, decided not to make any Hall plots until I had a better handle on what baby-ness would be going on in my life. Net result for Hall: No new plots.

Given all those things, the Hall stagnated. We'd have transcripts of characters sitting around for two hours staring at the walls and making the sort of ennervated conversation that you might hear in a Dunkin' Doughnuts. "How are you?" LONG pause. "Huh? Were you talking to me? I'm sorry..." "Nevermind."

Frankly, it got boring. On the nights I'd HM I'd have to beat the conversation along with a whip and it still limped and stumbled around like a drunken cripple (only not as amusing to watch)

Conversations around the house Monday nights went like this:

"How's the Hall?"

"Boring as shit. Can I watch you play solitaire?"

"Anything happening on the Hall?"

"Jeff fell asleep, I think. Or he's grading a paper. Penny's eating her bib. Oh, you meant with the characters? I think they're decomposing."

The Hall has always been something I've loved and hated at the same time. I love the characters and the setting and I hate the intense emotion that sometimes pours out there, the frustration of plots and complaints... but for the most part, I've always considered the Hall a worthwhile expenditure of energy and rewarding.

When it started to stagnate, I grew frustrated and angry. Especially because the reaction of several people upon hearing the news that Liz and I were going to have babies was "well, there goes the Hall" and I didn't want that to be true. I still don't think it has to be true, but Matt and I can no longer carry the entire Hall by ourselves. He and I have generally organized most of the Hall plots - and to be perfectly frank, me more than him. I love Plotting and I consider myself to be a good GM. But it's a lot of work - as anyone will tell you who has tried - to get a plot to run and have people like it. Sometimes they just don't go...

Rachel tried to get one started once and it just didn't seem to ignite anyone's imagination... eventually it faded as if it had never happened. Jeff's run a few that had trouble because his background information is so detailed that without it, no one has any idea what's going on and with it everyone's eyes sort of glaze over with names and dates and places... Liz has done a few, but they're usually very small and involve as few people as she can manage without offending anyone (and sometimes she does anyway... offend people, that is)

It's a lot of work and nearly every single time I run one I end up saying "Never. Never ever again. I don't know why I put myself through this..." but I always come back to it. It's like a drug. Bad for you but addictive... expensive but much treasured.

I have too many characters and all of them are intense, colorful people who interact with other characters with frightening degrees of emotional attachment... which leads to the problem that I either have to play two, three or four characters at once (a real pain in the head for me) or someone inevitably feels slighted when their favorite character isn't getting enough playtime. Not to mention the fact that two of my characters have romantic relationships with Ashby's characters and Ashby abandoned the Hall long ago.

I'd like to cut some characters but honestly, I can't decide who. Nacheyla can't go... she's the HM character. Tyl might leave to go looking for her wayward husband (ashby's character who borrowed Zoya's spelljammer vessel some years ago and hasn't been seen since) and if she does, she'll only come back if (I no longer believe this will happen) Ashby returns to play. Loria and Diya can't leave because they're married to Kevil and Kevil is Liz's favorite character. Vallel can't go because he's married to Glossaria, who is Karen's secondary character. Ilarion I might be able to part with. He's got a romantic relationship with Jeff's character Temire, but Temire wants to be an adventuress and Ilarion thinks that's a stupid way to be miserable. If Temire wanders off to adventure again, she might just find that Ilarion's moved on with his life. Or there is a niggling little plot idea that I might run which has the possibility of having Ilarion end up somewhere else for a long, long time. Bastian might be able to go and only show up for occassional times when the Scum are needed... dunno... of all my characters, he's the one Karen is most attached to. And I admit, playing an assassin has its interestingly fascinating points.

(OK, have I mentioned that I think there might be something slightly wrong with the fact that I play more men than women?)

::back to the present::

Jeff asked recently if we could schedule the Hall for a new day - his fencing team meets Monday, Tuesday and Friday. (That seems a bit much to me and I know I wouldn't want to fence quite that much, but hey... it's not me, it's Jeff.) But we already know that that won't work. Karen works on Wednesday and has Choir on Thursdays. No one wants to commit to a weekend Hall time and that's a good thing, since weekends are often the only time people have to do social things...

I don't know if this means there will be no Jeff if we can't move the Hall - he's no longer stuck in South Carolina with no life but us and while I think that's a Very Good Thing (tm) it could be disasterous for the Hall. Liz and Matt are taking turns Halling and baby-wrangling and if that happens then the only time my characters will see Liz's characters is when I'm HMing - since I'll be HMing every other week if Jeff leaves.

I have a few vague plot ideas, but they're pretty localized - which is to say there's one of my characters involved and then his close friends will probably get involved... but it's not very sweeping and neither of them are designed for more than a few people.

I dunno... I've missed the Hall a lot, but I'm worried about what happens after the hiatus is up...

I'd almost rather give it a decent burial than watch it hack and wheeze itself to death until no one likes it anymore and is, frankly, relieved to see it go.

Faydedar is a dragon. A small one, but a dragon none-the-less, and is probably the toughest mob in the druid epic quest.

Lucky for druids, he's a forced spawn. Which is to say, I give something to someone and he spawns. That's the nice part, it means you don't have to wait around 2-9 days after he got killed the last time and *hope* you find him.

On the other hand.... he's still a dragon.

If you're going to be chasing down Faydedar (or Fay for short) here are some cute tricks to keep in mind:

1) it takes about fifty years to get there. I'm not kidding. It's middle east/west at the very south end of the zone, and it's a big damned zone. Be prepared for it to take upwards of three hours to get your raid all together in the right place.
a) some helpful hints - do not bind in this zone. You can, but Fay will just summon you and kill you eight or nine times.
b) stock up on fish scales or get an EB item
c) the "secret" entrances are hard to find, and located halfway up from the ocean floor to the surface. If at all possible, position one person at the entrance to the first tunnel and another at the entrance to the second tunnel

2) You've been there for three hours. Half your raid is still lost in the ocean. Don't start casting your buffs yet, they won't last long enough

3) Raids are like wars, they're not run by committee. Pick one raid leader, and everyone listens to that person. End of discussion. Get your raid plan together and DO NOT ask advice. It's safer.

4) Do not have a complete heal rotation. What will end up happening is this: Main Agro gets wounded, cleric complete heals, Fay summons and kills cleric. Repeat until all clerics are dead. At this point, everyone else dies. The cleric who bound in TD will get summoned back and killed another 4 or 5 times for good measure.

5) If you have a complete wipeout, the best thing to do is get a necro to the Elven docks and start summoning corpses. Fay will not despawn for a while, and he will toast you if you try and get your corpse back. He's vindictive that way.

6) If you're not going to make a second attempt at him that night - or people have already told you they don't have time for 2 rounds (a "round" against Fay takes about 4 hours) then just camp out and get corpses later.

Having done all that, if you're still dead....

1) do not drag your corpse back to the elven docks when your connection is bad. Your corpse will slide under the world.

*collapses from exhaustion*

12 minutes left on my rez timer before I got my rez. Close shave.

All right, non-EQ people can skip this.

I've gotten my main toon's baking up to 202 - which is not as easy as it sounds. And I decide I should work on leveling for a bit. I really want to get 54th as that's when I get Spirit of Eagle, which is a highly cool spell. (Note to self: Spellbooks have been increased in size again to 50 pages. Might want to go through and move the "unused" spells back further.)

So, I head over to Velketor's Laboratory, which happens to be my favorite zone at the moment. It's good exps, most of the groups I've been in have been great, and I need the velium that drops from spiders to work on my tailoring anyway.

I get in the zone and immediately find a monk to partner with. Not my favorite character class, but I manage. We go over to RS (Right side, or Right Spiders) and kill one spider. A cleric starts shouting for a group. There aren't many people in the zone and most of them are over on DS (that's Dog Side, where the IceKobolds are... why I always want to call them IceCapades, I'm not sure) or soloing. I figure, if we get 4 people, we can take BR (Back room) or six and we can go to US (Upper Spiders).

The cleric shows up, we kill another spider.

Cleric: Oh, my guildy's here, I'm gonna go group with him, bye!

Monk and I: Look at each other and sigh.

Ok, well, we can still do RS with just two. We kill another spider.

Cleric: Oh. Guildie went on a raid. Can I get back into group?

Me: SIGHS.

We end up with another three people who came into the zone just then, an enchanter, a paladin, and a warrior. So we have enough to go to US. I group invis everyone and we start up. Upper spiders, just so you know, is near the top of the zone. To get there, you have to navigate several interlocking ice-covered ramps. Did I mention that levitate doesn't work in this zone? You can fall for the 20,000 max damage here.

I don't know if someone's invis wore off at the wrong time or what, but suddenly there are 50 million spiders attacking everyone. I'm about a level higher than everyone because I'm the only one who didn't fall through the hole the first time (it's very icy near that hole, and you have to jump just at the right time) and I try to get down to help them. Stupid me, as I'm the only one who got killed. Everyone else managed to zone.

I consent the monk to drag my corpse to the cleric. I did not know this, but they dragged the corpse over to the first hole before doing the rez. Which means I zone in with maybe 100 hit points, visible, right next to a whole lot of crystal statues. And I die again. WHAM!

Cleric: Just so you know, Zephy, I didn't mean that to happen.

Me: Oh, that's very reassuring.

I decide not to bother with them, and I'm not the only dead person. The enchanter also got killed. He disbanded, got his corpse, and logged out. I get back to the zone, get my corpse, locate another, more competant cleric, and get a rez. And then I logged out. In the meanwhile - since all this took about half an hour or more - my "group" has trained the entrance 5 more times, killed 2 more people, and generally made everyone really mad.

What a bunch of nits!

Ooooooooooh, this is just lovely.

More crack.... just what I needed, more ways to waste time staring at tiny little pixels.

Jeff bought me Neverwinter Nights for midwinter spending holiday.

So far:

The graphics are really great. (Well, aside from the shirts that are constantly open to my character's navel, but you know, I think I've expressed that particular dissatisfaction before. Computer gaming companies will continue to cater to 14-year-old hormonal boys and nevermind at all the fact that it's mildly offensive and continues to foster bad gender relations. Hell, it's no wonder that half the country is anorexic and the other half is too fat. We either care way too much that society expects us to look like Barbie, or we've given up trying to conform and we eat the food that Commercialism provides us. Ah well, a rant for another day, I'll shut up now. Back to the game.)

Gameplay is pretty good. A little confusing at first, but aren't all interfaces when you first start out? It takes a while to get the hang of things, but once you do, it's really neat. I particularly like the swooping camera effects, where you rotate the world around you. (altho this is the worst part for me, for adjusting to the system, since the map does not rotate with you).

The combat system works exactly like AD&DIII rules excepting that you don't have to roll any dice. Which means any difficulties you may have had with the tabletop version of the game, you'll have with this game, but I thought (for a gaming system) that it was pretty good. All gaming systems have problems with their mechanics, but at least in a computer version, you don't have to remember what the rules are, since the computer does all the calculations for you.

At the moment, I'm still a little disappointed with the fighter-heavy lean of the equipment. I've probably "found" about 20 magical swords and/or suits of armor, but caster class stuff like rings, necklaces and robes are very rare. Although you do find a lot of spell-scrolls and magic wands, and I think only casters can use them, but I usually don't, since in actual combat I'm too busy to flip through my inventory going "Hmmmmm... did I have a scroll of fireball in here?"

On the other hand, I've barely done anything in the last three days but play, so...

Yeah, I like it. Hook that IV up right here, I don't need to leave my chair.

OK.....

Rule #1: Never, ever forget that, if the situation is in doubt, the cavalier will kill first and ask questions next week.

Rule #2: When Rule #1 might not apply, remember that it always does.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

OK... Kevin's been a bit ill for the last several days, and so we didn't game on New Year's Day like we were supposed to. But we did game yesterday....

Which really could have GONE BETTER.

Jeff was playing a ranger for the one session. And Rachel was playing my NPC ranger. Ah well, double bow power's not a bad thing. However, since Jeff was playing a new character, I had to "get him into the party." And as I wasn't feeling quite up to the "ho, you there, you look like a PC! Come, join the party!" line, I tried to be clever.

Never, ever be clever. It's not worth the aggravation.

When I was originally planning this game, I had decided that the "Flame" or, as Matt likes to call it, the McGuffin, was a highly sought after artifact, and, unfortunately for my players, more people know about it than they would like. This cleric/sage guy, for instance, knew about it, and has some shady connections and as soon as the Wagoneer who had the journal of the guy who originally found the Flame was murdered, this cleric/sage promptly bought the dead man's house (bribing several beaurocrats in the process).

Before Jeff decided he wanted to play, the plan was as follows:

The party members would troop over to the dead man's house (on orders from his sister) to find the journal. Instead they would find that the house had been hastily purchased. If they proceeded inside the house, they would find the cleric/sage in the process of ransacking the house looking for the journal. The sage, more interested in the academic field, doesn't want to quest after the item, and really, he's not interested in the Flame at all, he wants some of the historical data he believes to also be inside the Temple. So he would compromise with the characters, let them use the journal (after he made a copy) if they would journal their adventures and bring him back a book they might find within the temple.

With the addition of Jeff, I thought I would be clever (have I mentioned this problem with clever?) and have him be the agent of said Cleric/sage. The PCs would find him in the house and would talk with him, and then the Sage would have his agent go with them, to chronical the adventure.

Right.

It did (unfortunately) occur to me that in Waterdeep, there probably wouldn't be a For Sale: Sold sign in front of the house (why not, if Orcs can go on vacation?) so I had Matt (our party face-type) do a local history roll so he could find out about the sale.

He blew it, rolled a 20. Ack! Ok, I'll try subtle.

(Why why why do I try subtle with a cavalier in the party?)

(Because I'm an idiot, that's why!)

The party makes Perception checks. Matt and Rachel make it, and I tell them "the door is open".

Ok, perhaps in a normal universe, someone might actually sneak up on the house and look to see what's going on. In which case they would have seen Jeff (all alone and probably not particularly dangerous to an entire group of people) and someone would have, oh, I don't know, ASKED HIM A QUESTION or three! and we could have gotten started.

Oh, no... that would have been easy. Instead, Kevin kicks in the door and charges, yelling "Stop Thief" and swinging his sword around. Jeff attempts to shoot him in the hand, and Kevin bonks Jeff with his shield. Matt and Jeff and Kevin all end up yelling at each other (like as in, I was wondering when my neighbors might not knock on the door and ask us to keep it down). I almost packed it up right there and said "Ok, I was stupid, this is not working, let's quit now before someone is dead."

However, I managed to pull a Deus Ex out of my ass. Jeff's master, a Cleric/Sage, miraculously became a Wizard/Sage, was watching the whole thing via a clairvoyance spell, and showed up just in time to keep everyone from beating each other up.

On the plus side, it means that said Now-Wizard/Was-Cleric will be able to identify for them any items they get on their way back, but on the bad side, he didn't give them the healing potions I had intended him to give them.

You know, with the non-evil orcs and the not particularly nice wizards and sorcerresses I've had people running into, I'd have thought that someone might have drawn the conclusion that unless something starts out attacking you, you might want to THINK ABOUT IT before you jump on someone. Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh. Ah well. My fault. I forgot that Kevin was playing a kill-it-kill-it cavalier. And I also forgot that being clever is generally a very bad idea.

But, once we actually got going, things were good.

I discovered one interesting thing... party members are more intimidated by monsters that they don't know what they are then they are with "you see a party of bugbears." I described the monsters and let the party debate about it. "It's a pack of trolls" "god, I hope not, or we're all dead." "They could be gnolls." "I thought gnolls looked like weasels." "Dogs, not weasels." "Could we do a species identification after they're not throwing axes at us?" "Dear god! I have an ax in my head!" "You knew that was going to come in handy eventually, didn't you?"

Rachel, by the way, is very, very bloodthirsty. Matt cast his all time favorite spell (Sleep) and, for once, only knocked out one of them, which I think made him mildly nervous. After the battle was over, they tied up the remaining bad guy and Rachel's like "Why can't we just kill him?" "Because that's bad. You don't attack helpless creatures." And eventually the party dragged the snarling thing over to town.

Of course, for once, I had to let Kevin be right. Since he always insists that monsters and bandits and stuff get a trial before they're executed. And Rachel kept protesting dragging said monster along with them. "Are you sure we can't kill him?" Of course, she did take an ax to the face and was a little surly about it. They were shooting arrows at a bunch of Bugbears trapped in an Entanglement spell. The Bugbears, naturally, were not really happy about this and started throwing axes back at them. (rolls: 18 and 19, damage 6 and 4. OW!) However, when they got to town, the Captain of the Guards was pretty happy about getting the bugbear, since the bugbears had captured some of his men, and he really needed a prisoner to exchange to get his men back before they were eaten.

Since we spent the first half of the game yelling at each other, we didn't get as far as I had hoped... ah well.

Remember. No being clever.

Ok, so I'm sitting at the Ice Giant last night. It's an easy camp and good money - altho what I want with money these days, I have no idea. I have well over 10,000pp and nothing that I really want to buy.

And I hear that old familiar refrain ---

"Zephy! Hi! *hugs* Are you busy?"

I should start answering this with "What do you want *now*?"

Kaldren: "Zephy! I got those tea leaves you asked for, took me 4 hours of foraging to get a stack, but I got 'em! Can you come drop off those picnic baskets you promised me in exchange?"

Zyxlin: "Zephy!! Are you busy? I need help killing the Rockhopper King so the Cavemen will respawn!"

Enchantmentor: "Zephy, ah, cool, you're on. Out of the 500 druids in my guild, no one will help me get a key to Sebelis. Are you busy?"

Mydrin: "Hey baby *kiss* Are you busy? We're raiding Kael tonight and I know you said you wanted to go."

Bahtukhan: "ZEPHY, HELP me, I'm lost! Where in this damn zone *am* I? Can you come get me?"

Arcturon: "Where's Balthenie? We're raiding the Plane of Air tonight and I know she needs that Book. Wanna come along? There's some great druid gear up here."

Bedana: "Zephy! Oh, great, you're in Everfrost. I just made a new Shaman, and I could use some buffs."

It's a wonder I ever get levels.

In honor of last night's misunderstanding, I present the new Thief Kit I've designed: The Worrier.

Description:

The worrier is a master of uncertainty and doubts. She is plagued by the worst of all questions, the dreaded "What if?" She is the undisputed queen of the fretful vexations. No action can be taken without first studying all possible rammifications of what can and will go wrong.

Role:

A Worrier is a valued addition to any party that suffers from "It's a trap, let's go!" symdrom, and even in Cavalier-free games can find a use for this class. It is a Worrier's job to point out even the smallest of flaws in a plan, and then allow other party members to struggle to correct those flaws, or, if they are very lucky, exploit them. Worriers are also valued by evil races, as they often point out the gaping holes in plans for world domination. If Darth Vader had a Worrier among his staff, you wouldn't see some intake duct completely unguarded by anything even so simple as a METAL GRATE over the opening.

Secondary Skills:

As always, it is up to your GM to decide what skill best suits this kit, but some suggestions are Tax Accountants, Graduate Students, and Hypocondriacs.

Weapon Proficiencies:

Required: Shield Bash (since a Worrier is always worried about what will happen when someone swings a sword at her, they are required to use no weapons which use two hands, so they can have shield at the ready at all times.) Recommended: Dull Sword (what if I cut myself?)
Restricted: No poinards or rapiers (you could poke someone's eye out with that thing!)

Non-Weapon Proficiencies:

Bonus Proficiency: Unlikely Event Prediction - this new Non-Weapon Proficiency is exclusive to the Worrier class alone. It allows the Worrier to forsee, with accuracy, the most unlikey event that will occur, allowing the party to thereby avoid it. For example: the party happens along an abandoned picnic lunch. There are signs of a struggle, but the fried chicken still seems to be intact. The Worrier makes a successful Unlikely Event roll and warns the Halfling not to eat the chicken, because in the second grade, he offended a Tallfellow by the name of Sanders, who now owns a chain of chicken-making inns and taverns, and he might have known that the party was headed this way and set all this up in advance for the sole reason of spitting in the chicken breading, knowing the party halfling would eat it.

Recommended: Fret, Pace, Toss and Turn.

Equipment:

The Worrier gets twice the normal starting amount of gold, but all extra gold must go into extingency equipment. Extra bandages, rubber galoshes, eyepatches, small packets of jelly, napkins, cold and allergy pills, and, of course, the kitchen sink. Who knows? You might need it.

Special Benefits:

The Worrier automatically gets a +2 to all surprise reaction checks. It's very hard to sneak up on a Worrier. After all, she expects it to happen. Likewise, all Worriers get a +20% to all Find Traps rolls. Of course this chest is trapped, don't be ridiculous.

Special Hinderances:

All parties with a Worrier among them suffer a Moral penalty of -2. It's hard to think positive and be cheerful with someone constantly reciting the possible dangers of woodland areas.

Race:

Any and all races can aspire to be a Worrier.

So, we've got a group in Jagged Pine Forest and we're clearing out the gnolls. It's not fast-pull experience like in Dreadlands, but it's not bad. And it's good for faction.

It's me, Balthenie, a ranger from our guild, Bahtukan, a bard friend of mine, Silinai, and some shaman who I only invited into the group because he kept going in the cave by himself and training us. After he killed half my party (and himself), I said "Why don't we group? We'll be safer from you that way."

Silinai, as a bard, needs to kill both Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen. Alot. In order to get her epic, she needs both white and red dragon scales. (Added to this that warriors need red scales for their epic as well, and that it takes a group of 25-30 people to kill Vox and Naggy and the likelihood that she'll get these scales any time soon are.... well, slim. Especially since Vox and Naggy don't always drop their scales.) Unfortunately, she's a few levels lower than I am (she's 45th, I'm 51st). She heard there was a Vox raid picking up, so she notified the raid leader that she wanted to participate. The raid leader, a charming little dwarf warrior, said she was too low and she couldn't go. Bah!

Silinai passed this along to us and was sulky for a while. A few minutes after that, I get a tell (I'm currently roaming around without roleplay on, which means anyone who types "/who all druid" can see that I'm on and 51st. "Hi! We're a bit short on healers! Are you interested in a Vox Raid?" Hmmmmmmm. Leverage.

"Sure," I said. "Can my friend, a 45th level bard, come with me? I have a 51st level enchanter with me as well."

"Oh. Hmmm. Let me ask."

Time passes.

"Sure."

So we all get together and troop up to Everfrost, after saying bye bye to the idiot shaman we were killing gnolls with.

Surprisingly enough, the prep for the raid goes quickly. The groups are formed and buffing starts. That's when we find out Balthenie is the only enchanter. By the time she finishes buffing four groups, the first group's buffs are wearing off. It was a bit tiring for her.

We charge.

Vox fell over within 2 minutes. This raid had more casualities than the last one I was on. At least two people in my group died, and I think there were something like almost 20 deaths all together. One of them wasn't me. Which is good.

A few people fell into the bear pits. We all sit down and wait for the monks to begin corpse recovery.

Monk goes down there. Dies.

Another monk goes down there. Dies.

Me: "Why don't we just hire a necro to get people out?"

Monk: "BAH! We don't need a necro!!" Goes into the pit. Dies.

Raid Leader: "Ok. We're going to get a group together and go clean out the pit. I need the enchanter, a cleric, and a few tanks." They go down there. Balthenie dies. They decide they need her for buffs and rez her immediately. She dies again.

My group Leader: "We're going to go help. Follow me." He dies.

Me: "I'm getting a necro. How many dead people do we have?"

So, I went to nexus, hired a necro, dragged him all the way over to Everfrost with coffins and had everyone's corpse summoned. Next time, I'm not going to let the monks tell me they can do this. I'm just going to get the necro.

I said I was working on my epic, right?

First thing a driud does is talked to Telin Darkforest.

He's standing hidden in the trees down in Burning Woods. I get to Burning Woods, run all the way from one end of the zone to the other, talk to him. He gives me a "worn note". I get ready to go and get attacked by a giant. I run away from the giant a bit, root the giant in place. By the time the spell goes off, the giant has managed to pin me against the wall and I can't get around him. I can't back up, I can't move left, I can't move right, I can't go forward. Stuck. Whap.

Loading. Please Wait.

I run back to Burning Woods, get my corpse, get my rez. Whew.

I take the "worn note" over to Greater Faydark. Over near the orcs of Crushbone, I'm supposed to meet my contact, a druid by the name of Faelin Bloodbriar. She's a random spawn, and her placeholder is an Orc Pawn. I go over there and spend two hours killing every orc I can find. Nothing.

A day later, I bring Balthenie with me over there.

"Here," I said. "You stay here where she's supposed to spawn and I'll kill orcs to try and make her spawn."

Stupid me, I forgot to mention that I just needed to give her something, not kill her. She spawns, Balthenie tries to root her in place. WHAM. Balthenie is dead in less than five seconds. At least I didn't hit her, so she was still happy enough to take the "worn note" and give me a "ring".

I drag my friend Evildoc (A dark Elf cleric) over to Gfay and have him rez Balthenie.

Then I take the ring and go over to Kithicor Woods to find a dark elf named Giz X'tin and give him the ring. He gives me a "worn coin" and a Dark Elf Reaver spawns and tries to make paste out of me. I run.

I take the "worn coin" back to Telin in Burning Woods and he gives me a "dark worn coin" and tells me to seek out Athele.

Once you see Athele, you have to have at least 8 people to do this next bit, and this is what I was doing last night.

You give the coin to Athele. She gives you a "worn grass amulet" and you have to start "gathering forces". Essentially what you do is run around the zone and get a bunch of high level druid NPCs. You give the amulet to Sionae, from her to Nulen, from him to Teloa and from her back to Athele.

After that, a Dark Elf Reaver and 2 Dark Elf Corrupters spawn up on the mountain side (where, if you are smart, and I am, you have the majority of your forces up waiting to pounce on them immediately.) I bound on the mountain, so as soon as they spawned, I gated back and helped maim the inkies. They didn't take long to drop over dead.

I looted the "Fleshbound Tome" (ewwwww gross) and ran back to Athele with it. I gave it to her and she gave me the "Earth Stained Note". I went to gate back again to my friends on the mountain.

You Have Been Disconnected.

FUCK!

Try to log back in.

Xegony - LOCKED

FUCK!

I log on to chat. GM says they're doing a rollback of 30 minutes. That means everyone goes back to their save point from 30 minutes ago. Well, shit. That means I should still have my coin, but we're going to have to kill the inkies again.

Finally, get to log back on.

My rollback point of 30 minutes ago was after I'd given the coin to Athele, but before she'd given me the amulet. So I have nothing. I have to start over from the beginning.

FUCK!

I have a petition in. So maybe I'll get something out of it. But you know, I doubt it. Verrant's awfully "well, sorry" about shit like that.

I'm working on getting Zephyrine's epic.

Those of you who play EQ will go "Oh, uh-huh" and those of you who aren't will go... "Huh?"

The epic for the druid is a 1hs weapon (this is bad, because Zephy hasn't done 1hs since... oh, never? So her score with it is about 4. I think. That's all right, I seldom actually swing at things anymore anyway). It's called Nature's Walker Scimitar and it is: Damage 20 Delay 30 Str +15 Sta +15 Wis +20 Hp +10 Mana +90 Sv vs all +10 effect Wrath of Nature, which is a DoT for 1650.

Nice sword. What I have now is the Bone Club of the Garou which is a 5/15 1hb with +7 int/wis. As you can see, the epic is a major improvement.

On the other hand, the epic does involve killing lots of big nasty monsters and doing a lot of running around.

I started the quest about a week ago. I went and foraged four lore foods from four different zones: Frozen Tundra Root, Speckled Moldy Mushrooms, Ripened Heartfruit, and Sweetened Mudroot. (Doesn't that sound appetizing??). Then I went to Burning Woods and told Taelin that I was undertaking the quest (he's the NPC who gives you the quest). Last night, I took Taelin's note to a druid woman in gfay (who killed my friend Balthenie. SIGH) who gave me a ring. I gave the ring to a dark elf in Kithicor who gave me a coin, and I gave the coin back to Taelin, who made a mark on it and sent me to East Karana.

Anyway, today I'm going to give the coin to a druid in EK and hopefully kill some dark elves that are going to come try and kill her.

Wish me luck

"You might want to log on to EQ. Soress is quitting."

"The guild? I knew that, the raiding thing."

"No. EQ. Real life stuff."

So, I go and log on. Sure enough, Soress is giving away all his gear from all of his toons.

That's it. No more getting married. Every time one of my toons gets married, that person leaves the game a few months later.

Bah!

We all have our little morning routines, don't we?

I get up, pull on some clothes, come in to the computer room and log on. This usually includes saying "Hi" to whatever of my friends are currently on Irc, reading my journals and comics, email, updating my Hall Sessions To-Do List, and finally, after all that, I log on to Neopets. (shameless plug, yes, I know).

On Neopets, there's a number of little things you can do every day, but only once a day.

- Go to the bank and collect my interest for whatever nps are in my bank account. You have to do this manually, probably to make sure people log in every day.

- Get an omlette from the Tyrannian Jungle. (Omlettes are a good way to get free food, they are three "meals" in one fold over eggy, and with 4 pets, I go through a lot of food)

- Play Tombolo at Mystery Island (generally you get some sort of booby prize like a keychain or a can of Mushy Peas, but sometimes you get Neopoints, Codestones, Faeries, etc)

- Go to the Lost Desert and visit Coltzan's shrine. (most of the time nothing happens, but about once a week or so my pet gets more strength, or a level, or faster or something.)

- Spin the Fruit Wheel. (most of the time this gets a "this is not a winning combination" but sometimes I get 50np and a fruit. or 200np and a fruit. once I got a petpet.)

Today, I log on and start my routine. I get a slice of omlette, a can of beans and 59nps from tombola, "you feel a little richer" from Coltzan (about 250nps or so), and "Congradulations, you have won 15,000 nps and the following items - A Striped Paint Brush and A Radioactive Battle Muffin!!"

Not that I'm not grateful or anything...

But...

but...

A BATTLE MUFFIN?????????

More EQ stuff... yeah, yeah, I know... but hey... otherwise I'd be telling you all about our novel and then no one would read it.

Okay... Balthenie and I are in Dreadlands working on level 45.

Verrant did a patch this morning, and a lot of the new spell effects are updated... blue fizzies and red fireworks and stuff that looks like dropping a wave of ice water on the mob. Very very pretty... but, like most huge patches, the servers kept going up and down all day. Usually for no more than a minute or two, and sometimes only one zone would crash. Annoying, but not too bad, mostly.

We got into a really tight group and we were massively power-pulling. Mob after mob... the experience was rocketing in. Both Balthenie and I made 45th level after only a few hours, so that was good. It also means my Elder Spiritualist clickable effect will now work. I don't have to have snare memmed anymore! I can just click it! Yay! Save mana, save time, have another spell slot open... it's great.

Anyway, we end up with this wizard in our group who really wants to try and kill the Dread Widow (that's a large black-widow dryder sort of creature). She can Harm Touch for 300 points, root, lightening strike, has over 4,000 hps and is highly magic resistant. And at least 4 levels higher than everyone in the group. But he thinks we can take her and so, eventually, we decide to try. She drops a really nice intelligence caster item, too. +5 int +40 mana, and some other stats.

We go over and we chase her around for a while. She was actually not as hard to kill as we had thought, altho she did try really hard to make jelly out of one of the shadowknights. And the wizard looted the item (no drop) without rolling on it to see who got it. It was between him and Balthenie because no one else wanted it or could use it. And then he went linkdead before anyone could yell at him about it. We thought - understandably so - that he ninjalooted and split with the prize, a very sucky and rude thing to do.

Balthenie was, needless to say, EXTREMELY pissed off. A few minutes later he came back. He'd just gone link dead. And he didn't mean to loot the item, it happened because he was getting lag spikes and it was an accident. After some very profuse apologizing on his part and a lot of yelling and screaming from everyone in the group, he gave Balthenie his old item that he was replacing and said he'd stay and try and get another one for her, because it really wasn't fair and he really didn't mean it. And he was good to his word. We stayed at that camp for another three hours.

Finally, she spawned again. This time, she immediately took off after some random passerby, and we had to chase her all the way to Fironia Vie, practically. I finally catch her (damn she's fast), snared her, and began the ardous process of dragging her back to our camp spot. She nearly kills me three times in the process, too. Gah. I get her back and we start whaling on her. 80% health. 60% health. Heal the rogue back up because he's getting pounded. 40% health. Pry her off the enchanter. 20% health... finally, she's running... and

You have been disconnected.

Zone not available.

Zone not available.

When we finally all got back in, the whole zone had reset, including all the monsters that are normally in her web (which we'd cleared out before) and we nearly got killed before I managed to evacuate us to the other side of the zone. Then we had to trudge all the way back over there. And she's gone. No body. No mob. She's reset. And we have to wait, all over again.

Oh course, Balthenie has to work tomorrow, so she had to log. We never did get a second one of the things.

GAH!

I could just spit.

My dear patron, M, recently dropped another boatload of platinum on me. I'm just as impressed and pleased and stunned as last time.

This time, the sum was 20,000pp and I'm more than halfway through spending it already.

So far:

2 Pairs of Golden Efreeti boots - one pair for my druid, the other for Balthenie's enchanter
Bone Club of the Garou - for druid
Black Ice Leggings - for ranger
Centi Long Sword - for ranger
Primitive Leather Gloves - for ranger
and some odds and ends for a few of my sub characters

While I was up in the bazaar, one of my guildies asked me to pick something up for him, to wit, a pair of Tolan's Guantlets. These are lore items (you can only have one on a given character, either carried or worn) and he wanted to get it for a friend of his, but couldn't carry 2 pairs. So I went and picked it up. 75pp. Not too bad. Nice gauntlets, actually. Very nice. Too nice.

Ylia: OOOOOH! I marked those at the wrong price, they're supposed to be 750pp, give em back!

Me: Um. no.

Needless to say, she didn't get her gauntlets back, and I have a new enemy for life. Next time, lady, check your prices before you set up your stall.

Ever since I started playing EQ, I've wanted to go on a Vox or Nagafen raid. Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen are dragons, for those of you who don't already know that.

Vox lives under Permafrost, a castle in Everfrost Peaks. She's guarded by ice goblins and ice giants. She breathes ice-blasts of 300+ points of damage, hits something horrific like 20 times a round for 100+ points a blow, plus fear, plus spells.

Sounds like fun, yes?

Well, first off was the hurry up and wait. I was a good girl, showed up at the meet-place half an hour before we were supposed to. Phil and I sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. Killed a few ice-giants. And waited. Round about 8pm, we moved into the King Room (that's just to one side of Vox's lair). We killed Ice Giants for a while, clearing out the path to Vox's room. Phil got bored and angry after about an hour, and left. Ah well.

Round about 9:30, we moved into the prep room. (That's a small enclosure exactly next to Vox's Lair). At about 10, after we'd started organizing groups and stuff, the raid leader and his second both went link dead. And didn't come back. GAH! So we voted in a new Raid Leader (since we were all here anyway) and got moving again.

We did groups and group buffs. My total hit points after being buffed out the wazoo was 2800 (normal for me, unbuffed is about 1500) and Cold Resist was 247. Very very good.

About midnight, we charged. I got feared the second I stepped into the room and spun around in helpless circles for a while, then managed to regain control and ran up. She smacked me a few times down to 20% health before my cleric came to the rescue. I got breathed on once - ack! and then it was pretty much smooth sailing after that. I watched one of the Shadow Knights go down after he Harm Touched her for 286 points. My shaman friend, Lanadena got tail swiped into the pits and overrun by angry bears. Ow. One thief got a good backstab in and was immediately breathed on and evaporated. A druid dropped over after getting a snare to stick on her. One monk got low on hit points, tried to Feign Death and failed. Vox bit her. Crunch. Bye bye monk lady. And I'm not sure how the wizard dropped, I missed that.

However, no one in my group died (there were 8 groups total, 37 people) and only six people total died. Pretty good, all things considered. And I got the killing blow in, which pleased me to no end. And my group did the most damage to her, so we got the exps for the kill. Yay us!

The loot, however, was caster cloak, monk bag, lame bracelet, and two rogue spears. So, aside from some cash, I didn't get much out of it, save a bubble of exps. But hey, at least I got to go. And I had fun, which is cool.

More Eq Stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know, get a life. Guess what? I have like five of them, and you get to read about them here. Aren't you happy? You should be =D

I log on yesterday.

Mandaroth: Oh, thank Karana! Zephy, can you come help us out here? We just got pasted cause we don't have a healer!

Here being The Lair of Infected Paw (or Splitpaw as it's more commonly known) a gnoll burrow in the middle of Southern Karana. It's a lower level zone, so I'm not too concerned (and with good reason, I could kill gnolls in my sleep, by myself). In any case, B and I go down and help them out for a bit, but we're getting less than no experience for doing so. Zephy's a druid, so I offer to drag us all up to Velious where we can hunt things a little bigger.

So, we go. And we hunt Ry'gorr Orcs. We had one bad pull in which another group dragged their Elite Guards over us (who then promptly wiped us out thoroughly) but they were kind enough to get their cleric to rez us all, which was a nice appology. At least I thought it was, you'd have thought someone offered to spit in Mandaroth's lunch as nice as he was about it. Asshole. It's not like they did it on purpose, and they did rez your sorry butt, so shut up and sit down.

We hunt for a while and gradually all of our guild ends up with real life things to do. We pull in other group members, a bard, a wizard (the same loot-happy ninja wizard I mentioned a while back, as a matter of fact), and a monk with an absolute boatload of pre-programmed social buttons, most of which he pushes without having the right target lined up. "Damaramu aims a Flying Kick of Death at Target! Prepare to die!"

Someone shows up to do the Ring Quest, so we start packing up our things to get out of the way. It's a good plan. Ring Quest, particularly the later parts of it, are very dangerous, even if you're just happening to be in the way. Someone else calls out that there's a free snow griffen egg on the north side of the Ry'Gorr fort. Balthenie only needs two more of them to finish off her 4th Shawl Quest, so we peel out of there to claim the egg.

We get the egg, decide we're done pissing around at the Ry'Gorr fort anyway and that we're going to evac to the bridge to hunt Snow Griffons. Balthenie only needs one more egg now.

Zephy: We'll go over to the bridge and hunt Griffs. ::casts the spell to teleport them to the bridge::

::zoning. Please Wait::

A Snow Griffon claws you for 80 points of damage!

A Snow Griffon claws you for 71 points of damage!

A Snow Griffon claws you for 55 points of damage!

We landed on its head. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, really. But hey, when opportunity knocks.... you kick his ass. So we did.

And now Balthenie has her +4 wis/int shawl. On to pottery and Quest #5 of 8.

So, we were out EQing yesterday.

(and here's your cue, everyone who hates EQ... go read something else.)

I log on yesterday. My ranger, Jahkari, is 6 blues away from level 48. I decide, since no one's on that I want to group with, that I'll play her for a while and solo mammoths out in Eastern Wastes. (Rangers are particularly good at soloing animals, and it's good that there are still some big ones out there to solo.) I'm just getting out to where I want to be when I get a tell

Andahl: I need some more Words of Convocation. Want to come out to Ocean of Tears and help me kill Seafury Cyclops? Should be good exps for you.

Jahkari: Ok. I can meet you at the Iceclad teleport?

Andahl: On my way.

So, he picks me up and we port to ButcherBlock which is the closest zone to Ocean of Tears. Go wait at the docks, get on the boat, jump off the boat and swim. And swim and swim and swim. Finally, we get where we are going in time for:

Balthenie: Hey, everyone, what're y'all doing?

Andahl: OH! You should come with us! It'll be good experience.

So, I get to the island and he ports off to get her. And I wait. And I wait. And I wait some more. I kill some pirates because I'm bored. I kill them when they respawn because now they're mad at me for killing them the first time. I wander to the other side of the island and SoW a few caster types over there who make a nice donation. I thank them a lot and wander back. And kill the pirates again, who are really quite grumpy with me by this point. Can't imagine why.

Finally, Andy gets Balthenie on the boat