Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Monday, December 05, 2005

Apparently the turkey spirits got bored and gobbled away

My rash of bad luck seems to be waning, and I'm finally getting over the crud I had. I'm only hacking occasionally now. I've gone through three bags of cough drops in the last week, but I haven't had to take any more today (knock on wood).

This weekend was mostly uneventful, although the game was particularly entertaining. Only in our version of Call of Cthulhu would a character 1) be shot by a Rambo-like assassin determined to prevent an Apocalypse of Biblical proportion, 2) mentally whammy the assassin to sleep, 3) find out that the helpful doctor who came along in the ambulance is the back-up assassin, 4) detoxified the poison the doctor injected, 5) sleep the doctor, 6) decide to get out of restraints by stepping sideways into the spirit world, 7) turn into a raven to step out of the bonds, 8) turn back to self, then 9) launch self outside the ambulance to get away from everyone who's trying to kill him, returning to our world, only to 10) be hit by a lorry, and 11) find out he's now in Dublin Ireland rather than Derby England.

Got that? Yep, that's our game. We're no closer to preventing Apocalypse, but if this keeps up we may not need to worry, because the character's going to be too beaten up to turn into an avatar of Nyarlothotep.

I love Lovecraft, and I love what a good job our gamemaster does at setting the stage. Sometimes, though, players send their characters careening in unexpected ways across that stage. This was one of those times. It's an interactive story after all. Sometimes it pings into strange directions. After fourteen years of play, our story has gone into some very odd ones indeed. But this was just classic. Thanks, B. :)

PS Today marks the fourteenth anniversary of living out on my own away from my marriage. It seems like it was just yesterday in some ways, and a lifetime away in others. Also, happy birthday to U! (a person whose name starts with U., not bad grammar for 'you').

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