Gaming galore!

So we had the usual weekend of lots of gaming. Saturday was Exalted, where I somehow managed to grab the wrong character sheet, and couldn't figure out why my character was so smart... nor why she had so little Willpower. Eventually, when we got to combat, I figured it out. :) I really need to throw away my old character sheet, or otherwise not have it in the book that we take with us to game. :)

Sunday was the Dragon Blooded game, and it was a whole lot of silly fun. Somehow, my character became the responsible one (she's one of the youngest in the group), paired up most of her cousins with their perfect spouses, and got married and had a kid of her own. :) It's a little bit of a bummer that she became responsible, because she's not really a pirate anymore. But when asked if she wanted to give up her Admiralship, she absolutely refused... meaning she had to do things the traditional way and basically conform to the status quo. Ah well, at least she runs the entire Imperial Navy now. :) (We do have 5 years of downtime between the games, so I MIGHT have her go back to her piratical ways, but there's been a lot of story stuff related to her growing up, so it seems a little disingenuous to go back on that now.)

We've only got two more sessions of the Dragon Blooded game, and then two months off before I start in on my Vampire: the Masquerade game. I'm very much looking forward to getting to run a game for a regular group again, since it's been almost a year since I had that in my gaming schedule. Now I just have to figure out how to keep the game at a reasonable number of players, especially for our tiny little apartment. :)

I'm really happy, though, because all of my gaming books are at our apartment now. And while I've realized that I got rid of a lot of books that would be useful now, I've still got some fun stuff that has reemerged. :)

Hurrah for Friday!

Glad to have made it to the end of the week. As promised, the temperatures have dropped, to the point where we could actually sleep comfortably last night. I even ended up bundled up in a sheet by morning!

I'm anxiously awaiting the weekend, even though I know it will be a zoo. In the midst of all of the moving stuff we need to do tonight and tomorrow, we have two games and a photo shoot! Eek! The games are the usual pair of Exalted games (though there's a chance we're going to call off the second one and go to the EMP instead), and the photo shoot was originally so that Jeremy can hopefully get some photos he likes to use for writer's stuff. Lucky me gets to come along and get some pictures taken with him as well. :)

Because I am a dork, I've had my clothes picked out since I first heard we were doing these pictures. :) I'm going to wear the cute vintage dress I bought from Betsy at the last Punk Rock Flea Market--white with tiny black polka dots, with red and black felt leaves and acorns stitched on (to camouflage the sorts of flaws that vintage dresses often have). I totally love the black and white and red color combination, and it's the closest thing I'll probably ever own to a white dress. :) Now I just gotta convince the boy to wear something that matches what I'm wearing... he has a perfect shirt, which he doesn't like. *sigh* I'll post pictures (or links to pictures) when all is said and done!

Friday!

And since I'm traveling, I only have a partial weekend, but ah well. Get to see my sister Monday night, and the rest of her family, as well as my mom, on Friday. This makes it almost worthwhile that I will be spending 2 weeks in Kansas City. I will be missing Jeremy like crazy, though, which is the big reason I wish I didn't have to go. Hopefully, though, the two weeks will give him some much needed time for writing, which I tend to distract him from. :)

Another bummer is that I have to miss our vanilla Exalted game on Saturday, and the Dragon-Blooded Exalted game on Sunday. In honor of the latter, a quote from the last session is this week's End of the Work Week Wisdom:

"Watch us secretly be related to every NPC in the game."--Katie
"It's like Lost!"--Craig
--Yeah, it's pretty much like that. :)

Monday

I had a fabulous weekend, and getting up this morning to go to work was not high on my list of things I wanted to do, but here I am. :)

Friday night we went on a walk after dinner, and found a neat little trail that runs along the back side of the zoo. There was a stinky elephant part of the trail, and the only animal we could see was something that had its rear end turned towards us, but it was still nice. It's funny that I've lived in my apartment almost 2 years now, and didn't even know what Woodland Park looked like. I've only ever been to the zoo. :)

Saturday was Exalted, and I have officially made a much more effective character than I had previously. YAY! :) But the other players still gave me a hard time about my character being WAY too high concept for this game, because her Motivation wasn't applicable. :)

Sunday was the first real session of Dragon Lines, and we had a wonderfully fabulous time. Because I have made the decision that I will not run away from plot, no matter how much I know that the plot will suck for my character, I ended up in all kinds of fun situations. ("No, I have a totally horrible plan. It'll be AWESOME!") And I also discovered that there's no use in trying to keep secrets from my character's family, because two of her cousins are totally spies. :) But I totally squicked out several of the players, and had much Fan Mail thrown in my direction. I call that a win! :)

We've got a fairly tame week ahead of us, though Jeremy is trying to finish up a story by Thursday night, and I really need to manage to get some crocheting done this week. I normally crochet during Exalted, and get quite a bit done. I had all my yarn and was ready to go, and then discovered that I left the notebook that I write down my patterns in at home. Sadly, I do not have my patterns memorized, which meant that I couldn't work on any of the projects I had with me. *sigh*

Nope, I didn't fall off the face of the earth...

Just been even busier than normal, and out off the office. I don't foresee my schedule improving much in the near future, of course, because that's just how I am. But I am about to go on vacation for 6 glorious days (counting the weekend), so that will be sort of a break. :)

I honestly haven't even been doing a whole lot aside from work. I squeezed in about half an hour of Rock Band one night last week, got caught up on a few things at the writer's group, and have otherwise been filling my spare moments with gaming and a tiny bit of crocheting. I made my new character for the Exalted game (though ended up not getting it done quite in time to actually play on Saturday), and yesterday we got to make our characters for the Dragon-Blooded Exalted game.

That was seriously some of the most fun I've ever had with character creation. There were 8 players, and we started out paired up with a family member--in my case, we defined ourself as cousins, though a couple of the pairs chose to be siblings (and then because of cross-breeding, more or less, we are almost all cousins to one another). We then had to come up with some defining event that had happened before the older sibling turned 9. And that's when we discovered that really and truly, my character was meant to be a pirate her whole life. :)

Throughout the course of the afternoon, we then paired up with 4 more players, and worked out events that had occured between our two characters at other stages in our lives, up until the point where we were all hovering between the ages of 31 and 29. By that point, my character had stolen a boat, cut off another character's hand, created a makeshift hot air balloon, witnessed an assassination that she had paid for, and stolen an airship (losing an eye in the process). So yeah, all sorts of pirate-y stuff. :)

The really cool thing about this is that my character now has a strong reason to be hanging out with 5 of the other 7 PCs. And as it turns out, the two PCs that I didn't have an in-depth scene with are the siblings of two of the PCs that I did have great scenes with. So we basically know each other, just indirectly. It also really helps to flesh out my character's personality to know that even when she was 7, all she really wanted was to go where she wasn't, and that she's never grown out of that tendency.

So I'm really looking forward to the continuation of this game, when we actually start playing. Of course my hope is that everyone will end up on my airship, and we'll maraud and pillage across the Threshhold, but even if I end up having to leave my ship in storage for a bit to help out my cousins and friends, it'll still be a blast! :)

Remember that chicken? Yup, still headless.

It's been one of those weeks where I'm barely in my actual office, let alone anywhere near the internet. Whee!

So the weekend was good, with an EtsyRain leadership meeting Friday, followed by gaming for the rest of it. Exalted was a short game, which worked out well since Jeremy was not feeling well, so I got him all comfortable on my couch while I worked on cleaning and such for a while. Sunday was the kids' game, and it ended up being the final game of that campaign. This means that we are now moving on to a game that I get to play in. YAY! :)

The new game will be Exalted also (oddly enough), though it will be Dragon Blooded, and it's going to be all sorts of fun. Many years ago, when Exalted was new, I wanted to play in a game where the PCs were young children, maybe 5 years old, who had already exalted as Dragon Blooded. I later found out that this didn't really work within the system. :) But the plan for Jeremy's game is for us to go through our childhood, adolescence, etc. and play out a few scenes from each. This works great with Dragon Blooded because he's going to set it up that a number of our characters are related to one another. :)

I've already worked out some of the details of my background, even though we'll probably play through some scenes that I may or may not have thought of. I suppose some of my thoughts are still subject to change, but I'm gonna have an airship and I'm gonna be a pirate. I wonder where that idea came from... :)

I've already had two research days this week, and I've got another tomorrow. It's like I have this office, but I'm never here. :) Ah well, at least I'm busy for the moment. :)

Oh (yes, I know this post is all over the place today), and we watched Muppet Treasure Island on Monday night, as I was told I needed to see Tim Curry as a "professional pirate." I approve. :) The song he sings is fabulous. :)