actual play
Fall – Episode 20 “Reaching my Limits, Part 1″
This weeks episode was another mostly character driven affair. We were all also pretty tired and/or sick so things moved kind of slowly, but not in a bad way. We had some great character development and I started Alex down a path that I’ve recently realised is totally in keeping with her character. So with out further ado…
Fall – Episode 19 “Losing Ground, Part 2 “
We picked up exactly where we left off, with Darius in front of his locker contemplating the blue jelly goo that has soldified into a gelatinous cube and ruined all of the books, nic nacs and photos that he’d stored in there (including a collar from when his dog Nebby was a puppy, awwww).
Taking time cleaning it up Darius gets to home room a little late, where he is promptly sent to the principle’s office. Once there he’s accused of destroying the practice field, on his own, in a single night. His accusers? A bunch of jocks, the same ones that recently egged his house and filled his locker with blue goo. Despite (or perhaps because of) his rather terrible attempts at proving his innocence he too gets sent to guidance councillor, for the rest of the day.
Fall – Episode 18 “Losing Ground, Part 1″
Alex, Calvin, Megan and Darius have had some pretty exciting times since my last actual play report but luckily Jenni has been dutifully recording our adventures, so go to her blog to catch up.
In an effort to get better at recording the games I’m in I too am going to get back into the habit, but this one got a little long. I’ll see what I can do about making them more succinct. However with no further ado, Fall: Episode 18!
KapCon 2010 – Day 1
KapCon is over again for another year, and it’s proving a hard task to process back into the real world. I had another great Con with more fantastic moments than I can fit in here. › Continue reading
Dominion – I finally played this too!
Thanks to the friendly folk at Budget Board Games Singapore, I managed to finally get copy of Dominion a few weeks back. If you’re not a board game person, you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s been one of the hottest games on the scene for the last few years. Again, wikipedia has all the history but it won the Spiel des Jahres this year (the ‘Oscars’ of board games) which basically makes it this year’s best board game. › Continue reading
Ars Magica – back on the wagon
Yeehaa! First gaming session in some time last night and it was a game I’ve wanted to play ever since I heard about it: Ars Magica.
(In the interests of fairness, I should point out that there was no wagons in the game, despite the headline and the ‘yeehaa’)
I’m not going to go into a blow by blow account of the session, but I do have a few things to say. › Continue reading
But Nobody Loses an Eye… aka, How I was re-introduced to LARPing
A few weeks ago, I spent about 3 hours in a local pre-school pretending to be a 5 year old. Normally this sort of behaviour would see me carted off to some sort of institution. However it was all in the name of utterly sane LARPing. An oxymoron? Possibly, but regardless it was stupidly good fun.
My last LARP experience was a couple of years ago at the annual KapCon LARP. I didn’t have a great amount for fun, seeing as I had no idea what to do and my character goals seemed very hard to actually achieve. So I was put off LARP somewhat, and decided it wasn’t for me.
However a friend of mine has recently spearheaded the establishment of a NZLARP chapter down here in Wellington, and the first game on the schedule was a fun 3 hour game called “But Nobody Loses an Eye”. The set up is simple. All of the characters are 5 year olds at a birthday party. It’s meant to be fun, silly and high energy and it certainly delivered.
I was Sally, the highly competitive almost marbles champion, who at 5 and a 1/4 was convinced that today was the day she was going to knock her arch-nemisis Roland off his marble champion perch. I had a bunch of other goals but that one, along with trying to convince Evelyn to take me to the Super Sparkle Princess Ice Show, where the two I focused on the most.
However having lost my marbles (in the literal sense) before the game even started it seemed that beating Roland was going to be tough. However I stuck at it and while narrowly missed out on the Ice Show I did manage to reclaim the marbles and I think convince a lot of the other kids that Roland was too much of a scardy cat to face me on the field of war!
I’ve been thinking a lot about why this LARP seemed to work for me and I’ve decided that it’s the small scale of it. The goals were clear, and seemed very achievable. There weren’t too many characters to get confused with and I was able to just channel my inner 5 year old. Though I have to admit that I don’t remember 5 being that tiring!
Will LARP now become a regular part of my gaming life? I don’t think so. But I will no longer dismiss it out of hand if the format is similar to this one.
Previously on Fall
Even though we’ve been playing in my Buffy RPG game pretty regularly I’ve been shocking at writting up the actual play reports. Luckily however, my co-player Jenni has been very good at keeping everything up and running on that front. So if you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to head on over to her blog to read up on the last 3 episodes. Expect an actual play report of episode 10 “Full House” later today.
Episode 7: Change the Channel
Episode 8: This is your brain on drugs
Episode 9: You can’t make an Omelette
Making Germans Light Up – a Power Grid actual play
With one of my recent gaming group having left for six months, my friend Duncan arriving back in Australia after 4 years and a delayed departure of me and mine for Singapore, we decided to get down and dirty with some games last night. Duncan’s a board game person and so we busted out one of Duncan’s German contraptions: Power Grid. › Continue reading
House creation in A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying
A few weeks ago my long running gaming group sat down with the new Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying rules to make a House and characters. I had read the rules, but not actually put them into play yet so was really looking forward to how this very collaborative part of the game panned out.
To start with the World this house is going to inhabit is not George R R Martin’s Westeros. I’d decided a while ago that as two of the players hadn’t read the books and as I wanted them to have as much freedom as they wanted to mess up the world that I’d make my own setting, which borrows very heavily from George R R Martin’s masterwork. So I filled the players in a little on what to expect, and then we lept straight in with total random rolls to let the dice decide the history of the House.