The Black Road

[mcroft]

I have a surprise evening at home, so I'm going to use it to write up my The Black Road experiences. In short, it was a blast. immlass and I came in a day early, meeting follybard and princejvstin at Logan and riding zebraback to Marlboro. We had dinner with follybard and prince_corwin at Longhorn, wherein 75% of us discovered that Chipotle slathered steak was tasty. This was followed by the same dinner crew at the traditional first night soak, where we met kba0, tryslora, and brannanjp1 and talked gaming and what we'd been doing for the last year. Novak, JP, and I do dissimilar things in dissimilar industries that have a lot of parallels, mostly in the "I will have to tell them not to do the dumb thing. Again." department.

TBR runs five long slots of varying length over three days, a thing that would have given Frank a heart attack back in the days of Nancon88 (named after the patron's game store and favorite Oldsmobile). We ran eight rounds in that much time at OwlCon, and we were done earlier on Sunday. TBR is a better pace for Amber games, even if we only played once using ADRPG and in that one we didn't have an auction. One game ran long, one short, the rest were, I think, on time.

Slot 1: Le Cygne: Dead Man's Tale

We GMed in the first slot. The Swan is a serial game that takes place in our ongoing PBeM game House of Cards. The Swan first got lost in 2004 and has faced Pirates, Volcano Gods, Ghosts, Werewolves, Mayan Gods, and Zombie Masters. Twenty-one players have walked her decks, looking for a way home. This time they got it, so that next time they can have a mission other than 'try to go home'. We've been mining the shadows created by some of our players for this game for a while now.

We made an effort to keep it from being an elfy-welfy and I think we succeeded. The players found there were several ways to advance their search for the missing macguffin and chose one while still seeing some of the greater city and her conflicts.

Sarabande fought a demon-gator, Errox haggled with a swamper (twice!), Amethyst interrogated priests, Umbra peed on things, and Peony traded underwear for information. Something for everyone...

brannanjp1's comments are here and follybard's are here

Slot 2: Spirit of the Century: Star Patrol vs. The Moon Baron

I've played Commander Carl Corey in both of kadath's Nine Princes ... in SPAAACE! games and I've had fun both times. Spirit of the Century (in spaace!) as run by kadath is a game that's long on atmosphere and derring do and larger than life characters. Even as ensigns we were darn impressive. We didn't have kba0's Eric Steel, so Corwin was "in charge" and proved it by giving people orders to do what they were going to do anyway.

immlass and I have watched a number of the Republic and Columbia serials this game models and it's a tough thing to do, because there's only so much chasing and fighting and being captured and letting the bad guys get away that you can do. We finished the slot early and hung out and chatted with kadath, who we like and we hadn't seen the previous night (she's local, so didn't need to come in the day before).

If she keeps running the game, she'll be making changes, so unclear if it'll be on tap for 2009

Slot 3: Kobolds Ate My Baby!: The Guns of Kobold Town

We had the first slot on Saturday, which is the long day slot and we weren't sure if we'd fill it. Silly us, the players managed to run full-tilt the entire time. I'm going to write this game up for the Kobolds Ate My Baby! Yahoo Group, so there will be more elsewhere about the game.

The last time I ran this, someone ended up eating Baby Rinaldo just after he'd been dipped in the Fount(ain) of Power(ade). This time was actually smoother. We used nearly most of the rules, skipping things like "movement" and "maps" (just like I did in 2nd Ed. AD&D 20 years ago...). We are going to run this game again, I think.

The players were silly and small and disturbing. Kobolds survive in the wild because they so often try to eat each other and while they are good at it, they are not quick at it. The Castle was the cliché Amber-during-patternfall place, with the grandchildren of Oberon running around trying to be cool. Brand's kid speaks kobold, and he sold all the black-haired babies to the PCs in exchange for their guns. They also tried to eat Wixer, Dworkin's Gryffon guard. Kobolds describe Wixer as a "Chikin-Cow-Fish". They also set the Grove of the Unicorn on fire to cook him. tryslora's kobold (Bam-Bam?) was both hungry and horny. She tried to get it on with 's baby-tastin' kobold while simultaneously eating her. They have rules for multiple actions in Super Deluxx Edition...

Also, apparently they all spoke LOLbold. It's as bad as it sounds. :)

Slot 4: Riddles in the Woods

egwenna's game of youngers sent to the country to escape the Blitz in London gathers pre-teen and early teen children of Elders and runs them around Fiona's vast estate. Trouble ensues.

I was a newcomer here, as were prince_corwin and tryslora. Returnees follybard and immlass were more cautious than us. At dinner I was shocked to my core (shocked!, I say shocked!) to discover that I was not the serving boy that The Grand Lady Florimel had let me think myself, but instead a scion of an even elder branch of her illustrious line and her nephew. Tabitha told me later that my father was named Corwin and was a musician. Oliver was stunned enough to believe.

The next day (still stunned!) We explored the woods and found stuff! The stuff was trouble, of course. It took the form of a cousin. In addition to being cute and neither someone I'd known all my (shocked!) life nor someone paired up with Cousin Adrian, she was athletic and we raced from the pond to the edge of the woods and back.

She asked us for help and I asked her to be my girlfriend. It all would've been fine if not for her mother, who had no patience nor ability to negotiate without hitting people.

We tried to deal honorably and fairly with them, but they wanted to bully us and threaten, so it was time to have my first ex-girlfriend. We spent some time smashing trolls in and out of the house (they belonged to the girl's mother) and eventually were saved by the dinner bell.

It certainly was the serious game highlight of the con for me. I had to write up what Oliver's explanation to Fiona was going to be at Logan because I didn't want to lose the details. This is a definite will-play-again.

Slot 5: TfOS: Amber High

Jack "The Ghoul" Gulik (said nickname is especially funny since it was given to him by someone who knows that the "G" in his name is pronounced "J") has run this a few times, and I've gotten to play twice now. It was a bit crowded and we each did a fair amount of waiting for GM attention to come our way.

Random's main contribution was arranging for a video to be shot on the roof. The video consisted of Caine (mcurry)'s ship, hauled to the roof and set on fire, her decks and rigging covered with the JV football team, who were doing the superbowl shuffle, while an agent of the LOLgrus (Lou) was killing his dudes. The sky was raining ball point pens and Gerard (lucasthegray) held the burning ship while Justin (kba0) kicked it onto the floating top-floor of the otherwise-deleted-from-reality R.E.B.M.A. business school, where it exploded. It was like filming a Magritte painting.

This footage was so amazing that only Random could possibly have music worthy of it. It'll either be "I'm Just Sayin', It's Time to Get Naked" or "It's Alien Bug Hat Day" from the live album Random's Big Stick recorded after the last session, called Bad Pickup Lines, Parts I and II. A lesser musician would've gone with something based on an Eartha Kitt fav. immlass and arcaedia were off solving the actual problem, but Random didn't even know about it.

Jack needs to run two sessions of TfOS, and I need to buy the rules, like I said I would in 2006 but didn't.

Random uses Pro-Mark Drumsticks, exclusively.

Afterslot: HoC get together

We hung out with HoC people and friends. brenda_mccart came in from the Northlands and prince_eric came in from somewhere nearby. We yakked for a while and went to dinner at Ninty-Nines up the road. We all didn't drink the diet bottle of Frozen Hatred. prince_eric and prince_corwin decided to have their characters get into trouble together. It was nice and low-key, which we needed.


All in all an excellent vacation and we're already talking about what we'll do next year. There might even be a reprise of follybard's Nine Rednecks in Amber, which would be awesome.

Comments

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

All of these at once would be pretty awesome.

In the Pogo comic strip, three of the supporting characters were the bats Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred, and they'd usually be seen playing cards with each other, usually different games at once. "I'm playing spades, Bothered is a Whist man, and Bewildered has a good pinochle hand."

"Hold it, misdeal. I've got two aces of clubs." "I've got seven aces, all differnt."

Having a bunch of kobolds, all playing in separate parody events simultaneously, strikes me as awesome.