Gateway was great.

I ran my first ever Friday 2pm game. I think it will likely be my last 2pm Friday game. I found it a bit stressful to have arrive at the hotel earlier than I have in the past (I usually get there around 4 or 5) and then roll immediately into running a game. The game in particular was Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor. The game was okay and better than the first time I ran it back at the last con. It has a high learning curve especially if you're using the Instant Mysteries technique like I do. Also, in both games I've run the children have solved the problem in rather dubious manor. In the first game the children mind controlled the head master and were perfectly content to leave themselves in charge of the school. In THIS game the kids robbed a bank to solve the financial problems of Dr. Candlewick. I'm not exactly sure what feature of the game or my GMing (or my player base?) leads to this kind of conclusion.

At 8pm Friday I played in Colin's Apocalypse Word game. This was the first time I've played AW. I was The Hocus named Spider. Lots of dangling ropes, chains and straps imagery. One of my favorite moments was when I described how the followers I have chained to me climb up a series of ropes and pull me up into a rope woven thrown. In the end I ended up dying but not before I ripped out the throat (with my teeth) of one of my followers who had gone completely psychotic and spoke to her ghost in the psychic maelstrom.

At 9am on Saturday I played in Chris's Airship Pirates game. This game reminded me of the difficulties of gaming with kids. One player was rather young maybe in his early teens, maybe younger. He was VERY enthusiastic. He LOVED his character (a clockwork engineer) and was brimming with all kinds of ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas were very unfocused and not particularly useful to the situation at hand. I watched as poor Chris worked SO HARD not to stomp on this kids enthusiasm while trying to maintain some kind of credibility and relevance to the situation at hand. I would not have wanted to be in his shoes.

At 2pm on Saturday I played in Colin's Mountain Witch game. What an interesting game that is. It's basically an encounter based quest game but with this technique that makes everything personal and relevant to the Samurai involved. My character ended up dying when tried to kill another Samurai whose soul was being eaten by ghost. I ended up impaled on his blade instead since he was willfully giving himself over to the ghost. This whole game was a lot darker and creepier than I expected and at time bordered on full fledged horror movie. Particularly the moment when Chris's character got dragged into a cave by whole bunch of cat-women things.

At 8pm on Saturday I played in the Houses of the Blooded LARP. Jesus. So hard to describe without charts and diagrams. The player who I started a Romance with last convention returned along with her real life boyfriend/in game brother. So I was delighted to see them again. They were playing up a sibling feud having to with disapproving of my Romance. So I conspired to have the brother murdered and was successful.... along with apparently a whole LOT of other people. At the mid-point there was what I can only describe as muti-car pileup of murder. The scene involved two failed assassination attempts, followed by my hired assassin being injured before my Romance murdered her own brother only to have one of the previous assassins return and murder her. It was pretty epic. Later in the evening the brother was replaced by a Tulpa (kind of zombie copy) so we could use his votes for the political stuff going on and my Romance was haunting me as a specter and together we identified her murderer.

At 9am on Sunday I slept in.

At 2pm on Sunday I ran Dead of Night for the first time. This game is great and does everything I have ever wanted out of a horror RPG. I made pre-gen characters for this one, a priest, a teacher, a drug addicted satanic cultist and his underage girlfriend. The scenario involved Angels coming down from heaven to destroy the city. The highlight moment for me was when I pointed at the player playing the cultist's girlfriend and said, "That's when you start to go into labor." And Denys who was playing the cultist was like, "Ha Ha..... wait are you serious?" Me: "Yes." The look on his face was priceless. The turning moment in the scenario was great as well. This was just after I described one of the angels snuffing out the life of the babies in the maternity ward (yes, I went there). The Priest snapped and walked up to the angel demanded its weapon. He succeeded in his roll and so the Angel presumed he wished to join "the battle." So the priest took the sword, and then cut the angels head off with it. It was great.

At 8pm on Sunday I ran Don't Rest Your Head with just two players James, and Hamish. This game was short but great. James was a drug mule whose handlers had just threatened his sister and Hamish was a down on his luck musician who had just been attacked by his drum kit. The game kind of resembled a more surreal dream-world version of PsiRun. The characters were constantly fighting and running from surreal metaphorical manifestation of their fears. This ultimately led to a confrontation with a nightmare I invented called The Dream Eater that eats the hopes and dreams of people. I described the nightmare as a cross between Jabba the Hut and Truman Copote. They killed the nightmare and found themselves back in the waking word where James found his sister safe and Hamish got a call from an agent looking to represent him.

9am Monday - I slept.

2pm on Monday - Lunch at Three Flames Mongolian BBQ with good friends!

8pm Monday - I slept.