| Oooooorigins! 2005! |
| Time once again for Origins. Now, I know that a lot of people had a lot of trouble at the con this year. Badges got lost, tickets got lost, events were overbooked, etc, etc. Well, none of that touched me. I had a great time. I played in seven games, they were all awesome, which is nuts considering that con games are easy to fuck up. But really, you're here for the piccies, right? Well, I was supposed to go down to Origins with my amigas Kylee and Andrea. Kylee, however, made the mistake of relying on total asshats (and my scorn there is on them, not her), and so didn't make it. But Andrea and I made it down to Columbus in good spirits, parked my car with Jeff who rocks and rocks on, and headed over the con, at which point I started taking pictures. |
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| So, as usual, my first pic is of the immense line at the "I didn't pre-reg" stand. Although I've heard that the volunteers were sending people to the wrong lines, anyway, so maybe pre-regging isn't the ultimate answer. Anyway, I had a game to play. Lots, really, but the first was called Four Colors Al Fresco, billed in the program as "pulp superheroes in an alternate Renaissance." Please, you had me at "hello." The game's from The Impossible Dream, and I recommend it heartily. Lots of pulp fun, a really cool mechanic, and you get to take control of the story from the GM at times. I played the Arbor the Orient, a tree-based martial artist who could root himself to the ground and talked in Zen koans (which are a bitch to make up on the spot, lemmetellya). At left, you'll see a pic of Captain Italia, our fearless leader, towering above the Whirling Dervish, my fellow non-Christian outcase (as I kept saying, he's an infidel, I'm a heathen). Below, a group pic. Here, quotes. |
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| So after the game I went to the food court to grab dinner, and took this pic of Andrea (below)... |
| And then headed off to the White Wolf room to run the first of my Mage: The Awakening games. Now, as last year with Requiem, the first round people played mortals, and the games were meant to be TPK - 1. Below, my ill-fated mortals, somewhat out of focus. Quotes here. |
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| So that first Mage game was just two hours, meaning I had time to squeeze in another game before "sleep" (sleep at cons should always be in quotes, because it's almost always ironic). So I played in a game called Ghosts of Albion, which is evidently based on some animated webstuff, and that Eden is producing. Andrea played as well, and actually her character was my character's boss. That's her at right, with a plastic bag on her head. Well, I have not, as of this writing, seen the webstuff, but the game is frickin' awesome. Got some common elements of WoD, but very Victorian and very high-magic (at least, with us it was). I played the only character without magic, and I got to shoot and punch things, which was just as good. Pic at right, quotes here. |
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| Irony aside, I actually slept fairly well that night. Friday, bright & early at 10AM, I was running the next of my Mage round 1 games. Now, this was odd. I know that two of the round 1 games Thursday were oversold. Friday morning? I had four players, and one of them got in with generic tokens. WTF? Anyway, a good time was had by all, pic at right, no quotes because it was too early to be funny. Oh, and by the way, Andrea bought a dress and a corset, and looked fabu. Check it out, below. |
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| So despite what I'd told people, I did have a game Friday afternoon. I was playing in an Unknown Armies game. Now, I'd never played UA before, just heard good things about it. Gotta say, I like it a lot. Neat system, excellent writing (take a bow, Stolze and Tynes), and the GM in this case was definitely a good one. I bought that game Sunday. The game in this case involved tracking down a missing girl and finding a sketchbook of horrors. Below, pics. Quotes. |
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| Before my next engagement, I hit the dealer's room. I took my usual pic of Justin doing something inane... |
| ...as well as a pic of people beating each other with sticks. |
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| UA ended at about 5. I went to grab dinner, of course, but I had to hurry, because at 6 I had a mad, crazy, violent, gory game of... Clay-O-Rama!!!! (But first I went upstairs and took a pic of the parade outside the hotel.) |
| Now, as you may remember from last year, Clay-o-Rama involves making a monster out of Playdoh and having fights. As with last year, it was a lot of fun. And yet... There are rules to Clay-o-Rama, see. And far from making things less fun, they allow you to do things like smack the monsters with your shoe or throw them at the ceiling (difficult in the minis room, but still). But the GM didn't use those rules, just as last year...we just rolled to hit, and did damage. Kinda tame. Plus, one player was actually trying to twink Trying to twink...Clay-O-Rama. That's bloody pathetic. Next year, I'm signing up to run this game. Not that it wasn't fun, because it was. Piccers! |
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| My creation, the Hextaped, evangelist of Six-Leggedness. |
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| The oddly deadly vampire bunny. |
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| The battle begins. Balto and the "Noctopus" mix it up. |
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| The board after I threw one of my enemies off the table. Boo-yah! |
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| This is less wrong than it looks. |
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| The remains of my first kill. |
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| The remains of Balto. |
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| It couldn't last, though. Finally, the kid at left beat me and gleefully and psychotically tore the Hextaped apart. Sigh. But don't be sad! I wasn't! I had another game to play. This one called....Dread. Dread was the best game I played in at Origins, and that's saying something. I'm not even going to tell you about the game. I'm going to link to The Impossible Dream's page and you can check out the Quick Start and then buy the fucking thing when it becomes available because it's awesometastic. |
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| We didn't knock down the tower. We all stayed alive and into the game, all the way through. The players were fucking great, and although there was laughter it was an incredibly focused and intense game. Group pic at right, and didn't have time to write down no damn quotes. I was trying to stay alive! I wound up staying up for another hour plus talking to Naomi and her husband, who are cordially invited to come crash with me and game anyoldtime. And then, "sleep." This time, sleep was harder, because the room upstairs was leaking water into ours. BLAAAAH. But they comped us for that night, so no harm no foul. 10AM Saturday morning, there I am runnin' Mage again. There was a bounty hunter in the room (right), but that didn't throw off my game. The mages got into the junkyard, rescued the survivor from the first round, and entered the temple. Pic below, quotes here. |
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| I had to run the round 3 game pretty much right afterwards, but I did snap a picture of a very surprised-looking Julia reading the Mage demo I wrote. And then, time for round 3. The characters stormed the temple and faced the challenges, and that's all I'm sayin'. Pic below, quotes here. |
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| So by this time it was getting on 7PM on Saturday, and yes, I had another game at 8PM. But first, I wound up playing Super-Munchkin with perennial gamers Travis and Kira. |
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| ...and then heading over to the Eden room, where I spent an inordinate amount of time during Origins, to play Army of Darkness, the RPG. I'm interested to read the game, but it's not out yet. It was campy fun, though. We got sucked from a gaming con into the AoD world. I was playing J. C. Allerac, the game designer, and wound up conspiring to leave Bryce Campbell, the actor, in that other world, because he was a jackass. Pic below right, quotes here. As a side note, some poor guy missed an AFMBE game because his ZM didn't show. |
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| And somewhere in there, I took a pic of Kira. |
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| And then, sleep. Sunday morning, I broke my rule about no RPGs on the last day of a con. I was signed up for a Blue Rose game, but discovered the GM wasn't there. As it happened, though, I had a ticket for a City of Heroes game that I had purchased (I thought) by mistake, so I played in that. I have never played the online CoH game, and the RPG was fun. It was a supers game, done Eden-style, which is cool because their system works. I don't know that it replaces SAS for me, but I had a good time. Pic below, quotes here. |
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| So all in all, I'd say the best Origins yet for me. Next year, I'm planning to break out of my White Wolf shell and run AFMBE, perhaps Ex Machina, and probably Clay-O-Rama. See ya there! |