lyorn | Busy weekend, again

Friday

Friday I worked from home, which was made a lot more complicated by my cat who tried to lie down on the keyboard all the time.
In the afternoon, we had a choir performance at a local politician's birthday party. That was more fun than expected, and we got tiny open sandwiches and free drinks.

Friday evening and more role playing game trouble

For Saturday I had agreed to GM a role playing game for a friend (the one where I had so much trouble coming up with a good story) and had finally had an idea I actually liked late on Wednesday. When I came home from the performance on Friday I learned that a) one of the key players was not available for work reasons, b) his girlfriend planned to play his character (that turned out not to be true) and c) she would bring her roommate who had never played that system before and would need a character, to make up for the missing player. That, after the friend who had wanted that game had invited another player new to the system on Monday and I had not yet gotten around to even build a character for him.

Some of my friends have weird ideas about GMing. I did a few phone calls, asked WTF she was thinking and growled that I would not go back on the deal, but they'd get some monster in a cave they could kill, instead of something with a plot and NPCs.

Saturday and a happy end

Flederkatz came to the rescue, as usual: Not only would she prepare and bring all the food for the day, but she would build or check all the new players' characters, and support them with the rules stuff. (Deadlands is a lot of fun with its heaps of dice, best-of-pool open-ended-high mechanism, playing cards and fate tokens, but it can be a bit confusing for beginners.)

I could not do the adventure I had written on Thursday with the new line-up, so I thought about a monster in a cave and stole the set-up from a published fantasy adventure: A trapper, after getting bitten by a wolf, gets disappeared and incarcerated by the local feudal lord on suspicion of being a werewolf.

Of course, while I thought about it over Saturday's breakfast with flederkatz, plot and setting and a cast of NPCs just appeared in my mind. When everyone else showed up after breakfast I was sufficiently ready. It still was an adventure I could have played at any convention, and it had a cave, but no monster, everyone had fun, and I was dead on my feet at the end, but in a much better mood. Because I love writing adventures, and I love GMing.

And flederkatz should get a medal. Or an extraordinary chocolate cake.

Sunday and a movie

Today, Sunday, I woke up in pain all over (not getting younger), tidied up the place, took a painkiller, and met Ceridwen to see "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny". I liked it better than parts 2 and 4 and far less than parts 1 and 3, mostly because I felt the interaction of the characters made them all unlikeable. It got better. After that we had ice cream and then went home and I caught up on sleep.

One more crazy week to go, then the summer holidays will start, the choir practises will pause, and at work a lot of people will be on vacation, so no extracurricular stuff, like outings, meetings and workshops will take place. :is relieved:

Things going... actually well??

At least the project at work is running better than feared, but not too good to be true, which would be very worrying. The system is stable and fails mostly where the new requirements do not fit the implementation, but it does not come crashing down around our ears, but throws very reasonable error messages and then, undaunted, continues.