DexCon 2007, Part One

I had smooth sailing for the actual trip to the con, hotel check-in, and registration. I'm not always that lucky. I reconnected with a couple of friends that I rarely see outside of conventions, then checked the Big Board to see how many people I had signed up for my games and who they were. Things weren't looking good. One person had pre-registered for all three of my games, including the one he'd played before, and someone else had signed up for the first of the three. That was it. Cursing the possibility that nothing I'd offered would actually run, I perused the rest of the Board and came up with a backup plan. I hadn't needed to worry that much, as it turned out.

Kevin Meares (fellow GM and a regular face in my games) showed up first, shortly followed by my friend Michele Mishko and Lou, a friend of hers with a lot of experience in RPGs at home, but not much convention experience. I now had enough people that the event would definitely run, and was happy with the combination of two familar faces and a new one. We were then joined by Jason, another familiar face from some of my previous events, but new to my GURPS Cabal series, and Lowell Carson, the guy who'd signed up for all of my events. The Cabal series in general has been very popular (which is why it became a series), but for some reason this particular installment, "Controlling Interest", hadn't drawn well. I don't think I've burned out the series, and think it's more likely that I just haven't written a sufficiently appealing event description for it. This particular session went very well, with the players puzzled by how the main Bad Guys worked, as they're supposed to be. Kevin Meares gets credit for figuring out most of it, but the players were still sufficiently in the dark that I think I can use those particular villains again in the future. And as usual, there were at least two situations generated by the players that I'll be able to use to generate future scenarios. I don't know why this works so consistently for the Cabal series, but it does, and I plan to keep using it as long as there's enough interest in it.

One quick dinner, courtesy of the Indies Games Explosion contingent, and some conversation with friends associated with said contingent, and I was back at my table for the next session, which was a GURPS Banestorm scenario called "A Slice of Blackwoods". I'll confess that I'd run out of time and opportunity and did not playtest this one as I usually do, so I was worried about unexpected plot holes or other difficulties that might turn up. Fortunately, there were no problems of that nature. Again, I just had one player originally signed up, and ended up with five by the time everybody trickled in. Kevin, Lowell, and Michele all turned up again, along with Duke (another new face for me) and Glen, who knows a lot of the same people I do and has turned up in a few of my games before, though I don't remember which ones. The way the scenario actually played out surprised the heck out of me in that I'd been worried about it running short because there wasn't enough going on, but the complications I'd written into the characters did in fact make the problems of the story challenging enough to fill the time slot almost exactly. Michele's performance as the shady goblin with an eclectic skill set won first place, as her character literally stole the show. I only had two player characters survive the scenario, so this one might be more dangerous than I'd realized.

This entry is getting long, so I'll continue it tomorrow.

Going to DexCon in my Crocs

I've got all my stuff organized, reviewed my scenarios, and got my directions. It's DexCon time!

In all honesty, I'm not as excited as usual. I was unable to get Friday off from work, so it's just a Saturday/Sunday con for me, which for some reason takes some of the zip out of it. At least I've got Monday and Tuesday off from work afterward.

I'll be wearing my Crocs for the first time at a convention. You've probably heard about them somewhere along the way recently, since they're taking off as a fad. They're sort of sandal-like, and extremely comfortable. Because of a heating/cooling system glitch at work for the last two weeks, the dress code was relaxed and I've been wearing them to work every day of it. I've read that podiatrists have said one shouldn't assume that because they're comfortable, they're good for your feet. I have to admit that my feet started hurting here and there the last two days, but hey, it took two friggin' weeks before that happened! I'll keep my feet Croc-free tonight and tomorrow to see if that makes any difference, or if it's something else and my feet would've hurt anyway. Maybe it's just wearing them all of the time that's the problem.

I've gotten some work done on the new In Nomine scenario (which I'll simply call "Fear" as a working title) here and there this week, which is a Good Thing. I doubt that I'll get much more done before DexCon, but it's a decent start. I've been meaning to do a sequel to "Angels on the Edge" and to do a scenario involving people having nightmares for some time, and this one covers both bases. It looks like "Fear" for In Nomine and "A Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer will be my new scenarios for 2008, and I might do another installment of my GURPS Cabal series if I'm still in the mood when I finish "Fear", and use that in 2008 as well if I finish it in time. I don't feel the need to run something in nearly every time slot at conventions anymore, since the financial reasons for that no longer exist, and I'd rather do good work, run less, and get to play a bit more than I have in the past. Looks as though I'm fully back in horror writing mode, though I'd like to shake that up before it feels too much like a rut. I see a comedy scenario somewhere in my near future, just before or just after the next Cabal story.

I'm sure I'll have a DexCon report after the con. More about that later.

I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dice

I'd love to use this as a title or description for a roleplaying convention event, but it strongly implies a Sandman connection, and I just don't have that story right now. Maybe something will come to mind later. My experimental Fluid system or Mortal Coil would probably work well for a Sandman scenario, but neither of them use dice, making the title inappropriate.

It does, however, make a cool title for something I'm thinking about at the moment. I've been reviewing my RPG scenarios for DexCon and GenCon, and it's getting me back into RPG mode.

I'd hoped that my next convention scenario would be for In Nomine, but was having trouble finding an idea that was appealing enough to follow through and wasn't something I'd done before. I've done a number of angels vs. demons scenarios, which are a great deal of fun, but I was getting the sense from players that they felt we'd done this before, and hadn't drawn as many players with the last one, though I'd felt it was truly different in several respects, being steeped in Amish culture and using some character types I hadn't used previously. I hoped to find something for a new scenario that had a metaphor that would resonate somehow with my real concerns, so I could stay connected to what I was doing, and I think I've found it. The subject is fear and ignorance, and how the two are often connected. I'll have to get some ideas down before I forget them. This could be good.

Torchwood

Wow! I just finished watching the first season of Torchwood on DVD. Overall, good stuff.

Torchwood is a spin off of the updated Doctor Who series. The flavor is essentially The X-Files as executed by the people who currently produce Doctor Who, with five main characters. It sometimes reminds me of Farscape in that the main characters work together all of the time, and still end up pulling guns on each other from time to time due to the circumstances in which they find themselves. If you don't care for Doctor Who, you still might want to check it out because the tone is far more adult than Doctor Who. In fact, I'm curious as to how well some of the episodes will survive editing for an American audience because of some of the sexual content.

Now that I really have your attention, the best part of the show is actually the way the writers handle the toll taken on the characters' personal lives as a result of their jobs. By the end of the season, they've all paid a mighty price somewhere along the way and are emotionally wrung out. The last two episodes of the season should really be watched in one sitting, in my opinion.

If you do watch Doctor Who, there are a number of references to events crossing over with Doctor Who, some subtle and some not so subtle, and it's worth paying attention to catch them. Two of the five characters have actually met the Doctor (Captain Jack extensively, and Toshiko just in passing).

Yes, the monsters are still a bit cheesy (the Weevils in particular), and Captain Jack has a few decidedly unnatural secrets (and I'm not talking about his sexual orientation) that might bother people who'd prefer more realistic characters, but it was still well worth watching. If same sex romantic relationships bother you (or clearly depicted opposite sex sexual activity), there's no point in watching, as sexual elements turn up often enough to be an issue if it's something you don't want to see.

I know they're making a second season, and I hope to see where they go from here at some point. It'd make a great roleplaying campaign. It may be the closest we'll ever see to a Delta Green TV series, except that Torchwood chases aliens and alien artifacts rather than creatures and items from the Cthulhu mythos.

Hello, Dalai!

I hadn't realized it at the time, but my interest in Buddhism goes back a bit further than I'd realized. I was on a company trip to New York last year that included a trip to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. In a room full of figures of world leaders, past and present, there was one that stood out for me. While most of the figures were tallish men in suits, he was a small man in loose robes. And in a room full of faces ranging from serious expressions to pleasant smiles, the small man positively exuded happiness. It was a wax figure of the current Dalai Lama.

I went back to look at him several times, enjoying his smile and trying to puzzle out how a wax figure could radiate happiness. Obviously Madame Tussaud's did a wonderful job of capturing the essence of the man. I told my wife about it, commenting that I could certainly use some of that bliss. She could only say "Me, too".

I recently read "The Art of Happiness at Work", which is credited to the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, M. D. The title says it all. The book is essentially the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist discussing how to be happy at work. I can't say that I learned much about Buddhism from it, but they do a great job in showing how to usefully apply Buddhist ideas to the western workplace. You get a real sense of who the Dalai Lama is as a human being, and that it's truly possible to be happier at work if you have the right perspective. I might have to pick up the first book, "The Art of Happiness".

I'm currently reading "How to See Yourself as You Really Are", which was written by the Dalai Lama himself, and finding it enlightening and useful. It's not surprising that Buddhism is practical, as they've had quite a long time to apply it to the Real World. The thing that continues to amaze me about Buddhist thought is the practicality of it all at the same time that it goes to some very metaphysical places. At the end of the day, it's all essentially about your personal mind set, which is what I think makes that possible.

Lest anyone thinks I've entirely fallen down a Buddhist rabbit hole, at the same time that I purchased "How to See Yourself as You Really Are", I bought a collection of Richard Matheson short stories and was considering "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon". I loved one revealing quote in the book, which was something to the effect that he got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than Jim Morrison did. I wouldn't want to live that life myself (though I did for a while, once upon a time), but I enjoyed the man's creative work.

The rest of the first season of Torchwood was waiting for me at my Friendly Local Comics Store, courtesy of the same friend who lent me the first eight episodes. I think I'll finish the season before blogging about it.

Work on the house continues, and for what I think is the third straight weekend, my wife and I barely left the house. The living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom all look fairly good now, though there are odds and ends yet to be done even in those rooms. Our spare room, the basement, and the outside of the house still need some attention, and the spare room is next on the agenda. We've packed up a lot of stuff, and by the time we actually move, there won't be that much that needs to go. Uncluttering the house feels like uncluttering our lives, and contributes to my recent feeling that things are, if busy and imperfect, at least trending in the right direction.

Happy July!

Geez, half the year gone already! I'm still very busy with the house. For the second weekend in a row, my wife and I have barely left the house, focusing on what we need to do here, except for mowing my father-in-law's lawn. Progress is apparent, and yet there's still so much to be done that it's discouraging. I keep trying to focus on what we've accomplished and the good I feel from that accomplishment.

I've started writing RPG material for the home Firefly campaign again, which is good. I've got to get back into the groove before DexCon and GenCon. I dug out the scenarios I plan to run for those conventions and will be reviewing them in the coming weeks to make sure I have everything I need.

I've finished the professional education course I'd mentioned last month, which means that I've successfully read and understood over 5,000 pages of insurance/legal material. Now I can use the letters SCLA after my name. I'm not taking the trip to Las Vegas, though. I'll be cashing out and applying the money to the GenCon trip. So I do get a trip; it's just not the one they'd planned for me.

I've finished reading "Demons" by John Shirley. My feelings are mixed about this one. It has some wonderful ideas in it, but the human characters didn't feel at all realistic to me. They seemed more like plot devices than people. There were also some very well done descriptive passages of astral locations that made me feel as though I was really in the impossible place described. There was some very heavy handed political allegory that came off as more preachy than the author likely intended. And then there were powerful passages, such as the part where a sorceress summons and attempts to control a demon, only to find out the process doesn't go quite according to plan. I'd give it maybe a six out of ten, cautioning the reader that it varies wildly from a nine to a two at any given point along the way.

I'm currently reading "Viriconium" by M. John Harrison. I've finished the first section, The Pastel City, which was very well written fantasy, even if the vocabulary was a bit excessively obscure for the average reader. This book is the sort of thing Tolkien might've aspired to do and couldn't pull off. Where Tolkien is simply wordy, spending three pages telling you about the color of a doorknob and the history of said doorknob (even though that history has absolutely no bearing on the story), Harrison will spend two densely worded sentences telling you about the doorknob, but will leave you with a sense of dread and wonder about what might be behind that door in the process. I usually prefer more compact prose, but learned to enjoy this one for what it is, and I look forward to the next section.

I finished watching the first eight episodes of the Torchwood TV series this weekend. I'll have more on that another time, I think. For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed it and that it gives me a rockin' idea for a roleplaying campaign.

Neil Innes, Unsung Comedy Hero

I just re-acquired two old records that I'd lent to someone a long time ago, both by a group called The Bonzo Dog Band. The name probably means nothing to most Americans, but I went to a lot of trouble to find these records in the first place. Why? Because one of the core members of the band was a guy named Neil Innes. If that still doesn't ring a bell, Neil was the guy who at least partially wrote the funny songs in the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", which is an obscure little film that most people who'd read this blog may have seen once or twice (probably more like two or three hundred times). Neil appears in the film as Sir Robin's lead minstrel, singing the song about Sir Robin bravely running away.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison were known fans of the Bonzo Dog Band, with Paul producing a song for them ("I'm the Urban Spaceman", under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth).

Neil was also involved with a TV movie called "The Rutles" which was a Beatles parody involving members of Monty Python and the original cast of Saturday Night Live. It was a ratings catastrophe for NBC in spite of the quality cast, probably because you had to know a fair amount about the Beatles in the first place to get some of the jokes. The music demonstrates impressive understanding of what made the Beatles distinctive. If some of the lines weren't so damn funny, you'd think some of the songs were actual lost Beatles tracks.

Fans of Pythonesque humor will probably find it worthwhile to track down anything recorded by the Bonzo Dog Band or the Rutles (though the Bonzos 40's/50's era style is probably funnier, overall). My personal Bonzo favorites are "Hunting Tigers Out in Indiah" and "Canyons of Your Mind", which I guarantee contains the worst guitar solo you'll ever hear in your life. You'll hurt yourself laughing even as you cringe. "Mr. Apollo" is great for those of us old enough to remember the Charles Atlas ads in comic books. "I'm the Urban Spaceman" is good, if not especially funny.

Now I just need to find a way to get these records into a more modern format so I can play them in the car. Any suggestions as to how to do that would be appreciated.

More Movies

We just rented the American remake of "Pulse". Meh. I hope the Japanese original was better. Kristen Bell sure is cute, though, in a generic sort of way, and gives the only performance that's even marginally interesting.

I was going to write a more detailed review, but this movie doesn't deserve it. I'll just say that there are a couple of cool shots, but it's not worth sitting through an entire film to see them. Everything else is just blah. It's a three on a scale of 1-10.

"Pan's Labyrinth" was better, though I can't see how this movie won awards. I couldn't tell you what exactly I think is wrong with it, because it's not so much that there was something wrong with it as that it just didn't connect with me.

Predictability was a problem. The only character I cared the least bit about was Mercedes, and I suspect that was because she was the only character with a real question about what was going to happen to her. I knew what was going to happen for every other character within the first five seconds they were on screen.

The fantasy sequences were sufficiently fun, especially the one with the Pale Man (the one with eyes in his hands), though I wouldn't recommend sitting through an entire movie to see them.

The real world parts of the film were more engaging to me, even if the results were predictable. The performances were fine, if not exceptional. I'd still give this movie only a five out of ten, and wouldn't recommend it unless you think you'd really enjoy the fantasy sequences.

Happy Father's Day!

First of all, a Happy Father's Day to my father, with whom I share a love of games, a fairly sociable nature, and (increasingly) a hairline. Thanks for teaching me chess, which was one of the main things that started my involvement with games. Our taste in games rarely matches, but the game gene seems to be there in general, and is lasting a lifetime. My wife has often stated that much of what she loves about me comes from my father. Thanks for your contributions to my sense of humor, which I'm sure is one of those things.

Thanks to my father-in-law, who embraced my relationship with his daughter wholeheartedly. He's been there for us in many tough situations. He's been my Sunday football buddy for the last couple of years. Now if only I could get him to teach me a few of his poker tricks...

Thanks to my former sensei Ralph Jenkins, who was a spiritual father to me, whether he realized it or not. It was the eastern spirituality that came with my martial arts teaching that has taken me down an especially useful path, not to mention the benefits of good physical conditioning during my younger years.

And thanks to my stepfather, who married my mother after I'd left home. He allowed me to stay in his home for a couple of months during the lowest point of my life when he could've said "no". I don't think we ever understood each other at all, but he made my mother happy during their years together and we eventually learned to co-exist.

"Mama Falls Out"

I just returned from a funeral in South Carolina. My mother picked up an interesting slice of local culture along the way. She was talking to her friend Denise about funerals, and Denise was explaining why she didn't like to go to funerals with her mother anymore. "Mama falls out", she explained.

"Falls out of what?", asked my mother.

Denise laughed and went on to explain that in her particular Southern subculture, some people go into spectacular displays of grief at funerals, to the point of literally falling on the floor crying and sobbing. This is called "falling out". Apparently it's not unusual there for at least one or two people to do that at each funeral.

Everywhere you go, people do things a little differently, and this is consistently fascinating to me.