Ever wonder what I'm talking about when I say 'I'm looking forward to the game this weekend'?

(Head's up, it's not football or any other sport). Here's an overview of how to set up a character in Call of Cthulhu and a little bit about the game itself.  I've been playing one continuous campaign for 32 years now (okay, we have a little extra umph in our concept rather than just ordinary people with guns who die or go mad quickly). I've enjoyed that immensely. This game really gave me a good sense of interacting with other people and having fun all at the same time. And this video is well done.

Well, we did survive the adventure, even the mummy who was killed by a Spawnling of Hastur

because everything was in a dimensional time marble, and it all reset, basically, so the people who had died horribly, or gone mad and eaten their comrades or grass or died of hydrophobia, all lived.  We found out that out time traveller (who is modelled somewhat after Doctor Who) also 'regenerates', or more properly, another 'her' is pulled from another dimension into this one, with different appearance or personality. We received our rewards, rolled our checks, and have one last leg of the campaign, which is supposed to be even harder.  The whole thing has been about distraction and misdirection, something our game master is an expert at.  We've seen two avatars of Hastur and have lived to tell the tale.  Let's hope we can make it three, or at least prevent the third.  This is all out of the Call of Cthulhu book 'Ripples from Carcosa', published by Chaosium.  There are three adventures: one in Rome in 80 CE (shortly after Mt Vesuvius erupted), Norman England, and the 22nd-century future.  The first adventure is 'Adventus Regis' ('The Coming of the King').  The second is 'Herald of the Yellow King'.  I don't know about the third yet; that shall wait till next week or, more likely, after, assuming we actually complete the adventure hale and sane.

Our Call of Cthulhu game is a little unusual.  For one thing, ours is an ongoing campaign and has been running in real time weekly or so since July of 1991.  In game terms, we started at the same point and are in July 2012 currently.  Our characters have undergone multiple transitions and transformations, saved the world countless times, lived, died, had children, gone mad--all within that timeframe, going forward in an interactive and ongoing story.  In it we are trained martial artists and weapons masters (and mistresses) living in Arkham, Massachusetts right outside of town (we kind of got kicked out of the town itself, after several incidences, from the dreaded pizza boy incident (let's just say we do carry-out now) to the gas explosion that was really a super genius child building an interdimensional transporter in a microwave.   It includes aspects of horror, science fiction, mystery fiction with occasional forays into westerns or even romance.  The game master has incorporated several systems into our game.  While Call of Cthulhu, by Chaosium, is the basis, he has also converted things from Witchcraft, RIFTS, The World of Darkness, GURPS, Nightbane, Star Wars (the roleplaying game), Ars Magica, and Hârn, to name a few.  This has made it very rich, indeed.

Over time there have been several players, lots of characters (my original one is actually on this mission, and I rolled her up that fateful day in 1991), and it's all been done around a table with dice, paper, and pencil and a lot of actual roleplaying (not dungeon-crawling, or shoot-em-ups, or stuff like you find in so-called computer 'roleplaying' games).  Nor is it live-action roleplaying (LARPing), where you actually act out the story, although I had a guy in a hair salon tell me otherwise, that that term is being used to refer to old-style roleplaying vs. computer games.

So anyway, it was an enjoyable game.  We all got some action in (Brenda's male character did a lot, as he was the guy, and well, it was Norman England, so the women spent their times mostly sewing until everything hit the fan, and then there was swordplay.  His female character nearly died from a blizzard, only to be torn apart by a Spawnling of Hastur, but she got better.  So all in all, we did well.  Let's hope the last leg works out, too.

Good night!

A day of serpent mages and magic carpet rides

Okay, for anyone who has never played Call of Cthulhu or other tabletop roleplaying games, that probably sounds weird. But the game today involved trying to get innocents away from a serpent mage, who bugged out of there with them when he found we were dispatching his Children of Yig (giant snakes) fairly quickly. So we didn't manage to free the innocents yet, but we did escape a crowd of almost two hundred degenerate snake-human hybrid people who were out for our blood by using magic to turn ourselves invisible and then rode the air back to the plane crash site we'd started from. So it was an exciting game, and no one died. Since one of my characters is currently magically bonded to another, I have to be very careful or if one is injured or dies, so it goes with the other. Brenda has three characters on this adventure, so the stakes are high for her as well. But we're trying to save a 6 year old girl, an airline stewardess, and a German guy from having their genetic material used to try to elevate his serpent hybrids to a more civilised form. Yeah, you guessed right on what that means. It's an interesting adventure. It's called 'Final Flight'. The book is very small. I'm not sure who publishes it; I don't think this one is a Chaosium one. One of Brenda's characters owns and airline and so it was a natural fit with a plane crash in the Amazon and all. Of course, it's kind of funny that I'm playing in this adventure right before taking a plane ride myself. But at least we'll be nowhere near the jungle. :) Here's hoping for an uneventful couple of flights this week.

The weather has improved for the trip in terms of temperatures, being in the 50s and 60s here and the 40s and 50s in Chicago. It may be raining here on the day I come back, but that should be okay. I have a lot to do before I leave. Tomorrow I'm going to pay some bills and start getting everything together I need to, as well as working on the house. I hate to leave on vacation with the house a mess, and it definitely is, although I did do four loads of laundry at my friends' house today while I helped them get their house ready for the game, so at least that's taken care of, and I'm doing a load of dishes in the dishwasher right now.

So now I'm listening to some Loreena McKennitt and considering that while I shouldn't be all that sleepy, as we're an hour ahead with Daylight Savings Time now, so even though it's after 10 pm my body should think it's nine, I am, indeed, sleepy. So I may turn in soon, and then start anew tomorrow, going to work and getting things ready for my absence, and then going to the library to turn in a book and renew some. Then I need to straighten up around here.

Okay, I think I'll check the news before I go to bed. If I don't write anymore tonight, have a wonderful evening.

Only Chaosium

would have a contest of 'name this tasty dish' and have it be fried calamari.

I've seen better calamari, but it was fun. Sorry I didn't see it before the contest ended. Sorry, for those not gamers--Chaosium produces 'Call of Cthulhu'; Cthulhu is a giant squid-headed god...you can figure out the rest.