Origins 2006

ORIGINS OVERVIEW

Wednesday, June 28

We landed about an hour late, getting to the hotel around midnight. Beth's flight was also late, though the pilot made up for as much time as he could, so her plane landed at 1 am. I'd say we made an early night of it, but that isn't exactly accurate.

The Looney Lab folks were setting up a cloth tree to celebrate the release of the new game, Treehouse.

Thursday, June 29

8 am: I played in my first Official CoC Tournament, the Shuggoth Tournament Qualifier. It wasn't the best CoC gaming I've ever had, but it was a good, solid game. The guy playing the weirdest of us all did a fine job of playing his character as consistently weird, but not upstaging the rest of us. I didn't advance, but that was good, given how packed the rest of my schedule was.

The pacing was good. A few years back, I was in a CoC game where what the gm wanted to do was show off the deadly lizardman vessel, but he'd paced things so that we only found it in the last half hour of the game. There was a lot of what, in retrospect, I thought was wasted time.

In the Shuggoth Tournament, that wasn't a problem. We all had a reason for going right to where Things Man Was Not Meant to Know dwelt. There was a tricky bit where, IMAO, the obvious thing to do was to call the police, but there was at least one PC with clear motivation not to do this, one player who had his PC go along, but make a backup plan that did indeed get used, and my PC, who was going to follow that PC's lead. It's a still a weakness in the scenario, though.

I meant to rest before my 8 pm game, but never actually did. Due to miscommunication, Josh and I bought 5 copies of the latest Order or the Stick book, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, rather than the 3 we should have bought. I showed the author, Rich Burlew, some of the drawings he'd inspired from Erik Hanson, who's been illustrating our D&D game, and got an autograph plus a drawing inspired by the work Rich had inspired, so it was a no-brainer to give that copy to Erik as a present. That leaves only one more to place. Rich recommended selling it on ebay, but I think we missed the window for that, and I had too much already packed to bring it to DexCon.

8 pm: Everway larp: Piper's Court, run by Kat Miller. This was fun. Kat gave me a PC meeting my requirements: nicely broad, I can overact, and not too much to keep track of. I got to play with Mike Holmes and Mike Young, and to talk larp shop with the latter. Alexander Newman played an excellent villain, and in so doing alerted me to another test to add to the list Stephen and I have begun making for larp characters.

Friday, June 30

8 am: With Great Power: A League of Their Own, run by Kat Miller. This was delightful. Only one other player showed up, which was good, because we created characters from scratch, and had more of a stake in all of it, and we played the Story Arc all out, start to finish.

1 pm: I was signed up for The Swing: Blood of Dionysus, but the gm never showed. I gather he'd missed a previous game as well. I don't know if he made it to Origins. This worked out well. I was curious about The Shab al-Hiri Roach, and Lisa Provost, who was running it, only had one other player at her table. We figured that these two problems were meant for each other, and we corralled a fourth person. It was lots of fun, although I think we misinterpreted a couple of rules.

I grabbed food at the much touted North Market, a couple of blocks away. Good food, but the market is not as impressive as Philadelphia's Reading Food Market, though it does have longer hours, I think.

6 pm: Artesia demo: I was dozing due to fatigue by now, but it was still interesting. The author, Mark Smylie, went by on his way to the Origins Awards Ceremony as we were playing, and we all waved. Some time later, news trickled back that Artesia had won. The gm made a nice compromise between pre-gens and DIY character creation. The scenario had a very The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly feel.

11 pm: I was scheduled for CoC, Milk and Cookies. But, in a moment of sanity, I told the gm that I couldn't stay up for this one.

I think that the All Batman larp was canceled. Pity. It sold out the first day, before I could sign up for it.

Saturday, July 1

9 am: I was scheduled for a Strange Arcana: 1776 Demo run by Richard Iorio. Unfortunately, he had an emergency come up. Fortunately, there was good signage telling me that all sections of this demo had been canceled.

I thought about getting some sleep, but I ran into Mike Holmes on the way back and told him that I was now free for a HeroQuest demo, something he'd been trying to enlist me for. We got a couple of players and did the Develop In Play style char gen. I want more of this.

The rest of the day was the Todd Furler section of my schedule. I'd play Phonebook: The Dialing if he were the one running it. Scary thing is, a few folks I told this to, including Josh, got this thoughtful look on their faces and said "Hm, I've got to design that one now."

Noon Unknown Armies: Overboard: Atypically for Todd, in my experience, this one was actually set in the UA world, with half the PCs being mages. He usually does something more offbeat. It still had that nice edge. Despite the mojo, the PCs were in way over their heads, knew it, and were (to some extent) torn between survival and doing the right thing. I am so glad that we didn't have to figure out who best roleplayer was of this really good bunch.

Somewhere in here, I learned that Beth had taken 3rd place in the Set tournament, winning a t-shirt. Julian Lighton reckons he was probably about fifth.

6 pm octane: The Town Eater: This one was absolutely delight¬ful. Mexican wrestler. Kitty! Very smart motorcycle. Much helpless laughter and shouting.

8 pm Inspectres: No Shrieking After 10 pm: 5 of the 6 of us who played octane were in this. The 6th had already played. There was a total of 8 players bouncing off each other, Todd, and the walls and ceiling and floor in a room where no one else was scheduled.

Near the climax, my cell phone rang. I stepped away from the table. Josh told me that Julian had just won the Icehouse tour¬nament. Josh was one of the finalists. I gave a mostly voiceless yelp of joy, then went back to the weird wackiness that was our Inspectres game.

I hooked up with Josh and dragged him back to our room so he could help me pack. Beth couldn't find her cell phone charger, which added levels of stress all around, as she does not have a land line. By the time we left the hotel on Sunday, the staff had found her a couple of chargers that previous guests had left behind, at least one of which worked to charge her phone, but we're still baffled.

Sunday, July 2

9 am Pendragon: Some Enchanted Evening: Oh my. This was my second Pendragon game, topping my first. My first was marvelous, and was run by Peter Corless. For Some Enchanted Evening, the GM had 30 characters, and could run with any combination of knights, ladies, and mages. Well, almost. She wanted at least 2 knights. For me and one other player, the first part of the quest was realizing that we'd mistaken the Marion room for the Morrow room, the signage on the two rooms being confusing.

Next step: Pick a character. After much pondering, I went with Sir Myron, the Jewish knight. Previously an actor, good at intrigue and oratory. Then, I criticaled a religion roll for him. At that point, I thought to myself that I was playing some version of Harold's SCA persona.

The game ran over by 30-45 minutes, and the GM noted she needed to trim a bit. I'm wondering if having clearer handouts explaining what went on before would help. Her verbal expla¬nation was good and necessary to supplement the handouts, but did take some time. I gather that the scenario and notes and all were online, but Geocities did something weird, and the backup files were on a laptop that died. Some of the scenario was in hard copy, the rest longhand and in the GM's head.

By now, it was 3:40, and I made the exhibit hall in time to purchase octane.

After that, Beth talked to a security person about the missing charger, and we headed for the airport, where there were various delays in odd ways. Josh and I were put onto a 6 pm flight that didn't take off till after 8 pm, which was good for us because the 8 pm flight we'd been scheduled for was running way late, as it couldn't get out of La Guardia at that time. Due to the weather, there was a ground stop on incoming and outgoing flights. We met Phil Bruccato, who had the same gate, though not the same flight that we did. He'd had a good convention. I gather that the Deliria games went really well. Beth made her flight, and we discovered that Gaylord Tang had been at Origins and was on that flight as well.