you know you're the absolute pinnacle of geekness when you are describing in detail the magical use of traceroute in your silicon valley buffy roleplaying game to chase down the evil Homeland Pervasive Vigilance (HPV) hacker into your vampire social-networking company, and end up at an ip address in faerie. and everyone giggles. z_amber made a horrible pun about a L33tmotif.....
Aaaaagh! we're dorks. and like 4 people are blogging this. in the room right now. while we're like sharpening our stakes and putting in our "cold iron" tongue piercings. er. huzzah! let the slaying begin!
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not to mention the insane real life whiteboard gantt chart that Rook made for our rival company. I'll have to take a picture...
and someone saying, "I'd like to shoot him... I figure I have no reason NOT to have a crossbow out."
And the strange plot of us worrying that Uma, the girl formerly set up about 10 episodes ago to be an avatar of kali by her thuggee parents ... well, worrying that she had to be cured of any remnant of kali-ness. With some dumbass xtian bible study students.. and it's all happening at Staffnord...
And the parallel plot (I am a sucker for beautiful structure) of Ifurita's mom trying to "fix" her nano-robot thing and put her back to where she was before she died of cancer. Well, anyway, a neat game! definite overtones of feminist interesting plot of women that everyone is trying to heal or cure from trauma but they realize they do not want to be fixed and the thing that would be fixed would be their superpowers or capacity for violence.
Rook is very cool!
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I named the episode "Damage Control" after we ended sometime after midnight. Nearly everyone almost died. We kept having to blow drama points to save ourselves. Uma, the npc who had just broken up with z_amber's character, scared us all and then ended up killing herself in a surprise, horribly dark turn to the story. Our company is under attack, our characters were under attack, we were trying to save someone who was being threatened by something that seemed real, then fake, then was real again (interdimensional paramilitary). Our company servers were under attack from Ned the guy who works for the rival company and who "telecommutes" i.e. is some sort of pixelish projection over the net... It was a nice detail when we finally broke into his hut in "faerie" with its typical peasant hut stuff, right, but then it was just overlaid with 9 years worth of tech-head clutter, server racks everywhere, bits of equipment...
The werewolf scenes were unexpectedly cool... as Uma in her misery (keep in mind her parents are in jail as mass murderers, and everyone's telling her she is dangerous) spent the evening with the sympathetic dog, confiding in her...
After the game I'm even more amazed at the way everything tied together. The reason I was giggling so hard at the name was that Rook was bristling up right down to his game-running bones at how whump kept pulling his punches on us in a funny way.... (whump GMs the game alternately every 3 games with Rook and they plan each other's basic plots and work on the story arcs.) So Rook felt all the players were getting slack, expecting to be immune from any serious damage - physical or emotional - or death, that our opponents were defeated by easy ways out and we weren't emotionally invested enough. This state of mind is complex and can't be created just by facing off with a big scary creature. Because you whack at the creature and either the battle is long and drawn out or not. But the battle has to be made emotionally complicated as well as imaginarily cinematic AND the outcome should be uncertain. I am sure Rook is typing up his notes right now so I will not describe the fight in detail, but I give it high honors!
Part of the reason the complexity is hard to explain, because the story arcs go back over many episodes. There is something amazing over living through the fleeting experience and it being shared but then it's gone, not like TV which you can play back on a tape or dvd, but we are getting to play through something as complicated as the storylines of buffy or "what firefly could have become" or whatever other show you can think of that is long-running and action-soap-opera structure. So with this small group of people we have had this weird shared experience which is rather intense at times even if it has many a moment of nodding off accidentally to sleep or all just sitting there not sure what to do while we eat pizza or some people listening and some not (me included). How sad that it could not be bottled up or properly conveyed ever again. I still miss our old Vinland game... Well, it's really an art form, that's all I can say. When it's done right that becomes very clear.
Can Rook come teach my Knowledge Management Systems class? Something tells me that those universes would map together very nicely somehow...
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | April 10, 2005 at 06:38 PM