BadgerCon part 2

[lathany]

Sunday marked the start of the games kicking off with The Founding of Star Castle (Swordmaster), Gold Team IV, Sons of David (Cthulhu) and Glory (Ralph).

Sunday

Sunday morning involved the first of many fights with the coffee filter machine. As bateleur has already indicated, we lost every single one. However, ealuscerwen got around the problem by making the coffee in the sink, so I managed to drink enough caffeine to GM my full-day game.

I ran The Founding of Star Castle with ealuscerwen, frax, cardinalsin, zandev and Rob as players. The Founding of Star Castle was set during the height of the Athory Empire and was consequently a thousand years or so before my current campaign.

Memorable moments included :

• ealuscerwen trying to find a good reason to use Morna's "earthquake" spell


• Orthaniel (Rob) spotting the "other part" of the Maythen (four-headed hydra) - her nest; whilst the party in general, having had enough of Mummy's mental attacks, were watching from the safety of a nearby cliff


• Zalanthus conveniently opening gates to send the various alien creatures home through zandev consistently making his focus tests (focus = 91)


• cardinalsin keeping his cool whilst Illiam consistently failed his focus tests (focus = 76)


• The party facing down 133 Arrow Boars when they were expecting between 30 and 50


• Rob explaining Valerie's combat stats to frax : "You have a wad of Action Points therefore you kick arse"

And the party killed the bad guys. Thus earning them the favour of the Baroness Dimity.

Whilst Swordsmaster stuck to the outlined schedule and paused in plenty of time for dinner, Gold Team did not. This would have been OK if it hadn't been running in Hut and resulted in all the Hut members (minus bateleur) waiting in one of the bedrooms for hours whilst starving hungry. However, what we did about this is a another story which bateleur will tell sometime.

Monday

Monday morning was another relatively early morning for me. I had already set myself a benchmark; if I was up before onebyone then it was OK and I could still regard myself as not being a late riser. Usually I manged to make my "early riser" category by getting up before cardinalsin as well.

It could be said that, on occasion, I have low standards.

My Monday games were Gold Team and Sons of David (second showing).

My Gold Team consisted of myself (all-rounder : Assault 1, Stealth 1, Technical 1), ealuscerwen (vehicles and heavy weapons : Vehicles 2, H. Weapons 1), zandev (sniper : Marksman 2, Stealth 1) and Mr LJ Anonymous (front man : Assault 2, Stealth 1).

Mission One : This went badly. If Anon and I hadn't fluked on our dice rolls at least one of us would have ended up dead (rather than lightly injured). The other teams are probably wondering how we got ourselves shot on such an easy mission. We're not talking about it. Nor are we discussing the hole we left in the window of the next-door building.

Mission Two : We aced mission two after zandev was allowed to indulge himself in a long and unexpected obsession. Those of you who know zandev might think that this involved GBAs or DVDs or some other acronym. It didn't. The object of his interest was a large prison store room. However, it won us the mission, so the rest of us will eventually stop sniggering.

Mission Three : Mission Three also went well for us - again down to zandev's conversation with an NPC (or two). He discovered that there were going to be snipers on the roofs. He then carefully planted glass bottles on the roof-hatch of the roof he was going to be covering the judge from. Consequently he shot one sniper and covered the other with broken glass. This enabled ealuscerwen and Anon to get the judge out unscathed whilst I... basically did nothing.

Mission Four : Mission Four was another mess. I spent most of it cowering safely in a basement screaming over the radio at the others to shoot the bad guys. Not my finest hour. We took two injuries (one heavy) and Anon saved ealuscerwen's life. I eventually called the army in - not that they were terribly helpful either. However, again, probably the less said the better.

At this current moment - bateleur thinks we have won. Having heard about some of the arithmetic errors he made when adding up though, I'm not about to break out the champagne. However, it appears that Large Prison Store Room fetishes Rule.

Sons of David, in contrast, was a cuthbertcross flavoured Cthulhu game set half in England and half in Tuvalu (where ?!). We (bateleur, Rob, Katie and myself) were the second showing. However, the first showing had over-run (due to something which Georgia called "character roleplaying" and I prefer to define as "ignoring the plot") so we got to see the ending first.

We were asked to locate a friend of ours who had disappeared three weeks earlier. His mother (the asker) gave us the key to his apartment so we investigated. The investigation was in true PC style which involved prying as deeply as possible into his privacy (no underwear drawer was left unturned) whilst making increasingly unlikely assertions about his private life. However, this was Cthulhu, so the reality outweighed the guesswork.

We ended up in Tuvalu where we chased down cultists, lied to the minister and his family (OK - I did), got hypnotised and drugged whilst pretending we were on holiday. However after a bit of petty theft and the Burning Of The Really Evil Book we saved the day, rescued our friend and no-one got eaten.

I should add that it would only be petty people like me who would point out our superiority over the first showing. They not only had their friend sacrificed, but failed to prevent their Gibbon from being eaten.



Afternoon feeding time looms, so I'll return to this later.