Junior Varsity Jihad

Ok, ok, days two and three now!

Day Two contained mainly a mob LARP which was...eh. It wasn't particularly great, but it did end up with a shootout in the final scene and the largest body count I've ever seen in any game, including the Cthulhu LARP I will get to in a moment.

I found a copy of the core rules of Space: 1889, which I fully intend to play. Victorians...in space. Can you think of a better idea? I sure can't. Cruising the galaxy in ships with tempered glass windows! Shooting people to the moon with what is basically a giant cannon! Martians! Dinosaurs on Venus! Yay! I also had a massive Dork Moment at the dice table and purchased three d10s of a sort of fiery color for the express purpose of rolling a specific stat for a specific character -- the dice will represent Joanna/John Gill's arete rolls ^_^ I took them out in the food court for an experimental roll after purchasing them, and they immediately botched. Definately Joanna's dice. Anyway, it was a silly conciet, because to keep it up I would have to get new ones if her arete score ever goes up, but you know.

Speaking of Joanna, we had a reporter following Myke and the rest of the Guild crew around, to do a story on the con...and when I mentioned this character, he for some reason latched onto this and interviewed me fairly thoroughly about her. Kind of odd. I wonder if she'll make it into the story.

After the LARP and the shopping, I caught the tail end of a Dark Ages Cthulhu LARP called "The Old Man of Damascus", which seemed quite interesting. I also had a random gamer girl actually come out of her hotel room and lead me to the place where the LARP was occuring, which was kind of nice and chivalrous and whatnot. By the way, the Crowne Plaza in Indianapolis is literally the coolest place ever. It's a hotel inside of an old train station, with all the rivets and industrial i-beam construction that implies. And there are hotel rooms that are ACTUALLY INSIDE OLD TRAIN CARS. Also there are concrete nuns.

After that was a long period of hanging out and sorting Magic cards with the fellows, which was a lot more awesome than it sounds. Yay. I will miss all of you this year :(

Today was taken up by my ATM card, er, not working. I was kind ofpissed aobut that. Anyway, through splitting a buy-one-get-three-free deal with a friend of mine, I am now in the possession of an RPG that takes place in Dante's inferno (kind of). The game itself appears to be terrible, but hey, it was free.

Besides that, there was Dark Fathoms.

"Dark Fathoms" (being the second LARP of the convention which involved big monsters in a fragile undersea vehicle) was a Call of Cthulhu LARP that took place inside a Nazi submarine at the very end of WWII. We had been sent to retrieve passengers and cargo from a mysterious Point 103 in the Antarctic. My character was a 17-year-old ensign who had joined the service because he was afraid of getting called up and wanted a shot at a safer position. He landed himself on a u-boat, which was fine until he encountered his first depth charge attack...and discovered he was terrified of combat. Now, the war is almost over, and all he wants to do is get out alive and go back home. He was very nervous and young and frightened. Of course, my PERSONAL goals for playing this character were to take massive amounts of sanity damage, go crazy, and die.

Oddly enough, this did NOT happen, mainly because I was assigned by a commanding officer to the torpedo room early on, which was the Room the Plot Forgot. Due to the set, I could hear all the crazy shit going down in the other rooms but couldn't actually SEE it...which was scary enough in itself, of course, and I was on the verge of running outside in a panic when someone called for an abandon ship and the LARP, well, ended. With me still alive and mostly sane. Weird for my first Cthulhu game.

Anyway, the plot that I missed was basically that the insane SS officers we picked up in Antarctica were digging there, looking for evidence of some great Master Race from which the Aryan race descended. They found...well, their cargo, which they brought on board with them. The cargo was a minor Elder God, who started talking to the evil SS scientist and slowly driving him to open the crate and free him. A war corrospondent was tortured with a potato peeler, the captain and the SS officers had a power struggle that ended in death, and..well, the scientist eventually heeded the creature's call and threw open the hatch to set the Elder God free. All hell, literally, broke loose. Death, blood, entrails, tentacles, and the submarine flooding and cracking. None of which I actually SAW, of course, but hey.

I cannot even begin to tell you the amazingness of the set. Seriously. Whoa. There was a working phone between the bridge and the engine room, posters on the wall, alarm systems, rigged lights, a functioning gramaphone playing Wagner, and a very well-done monster. The cramped space and dark lighting did wonders for the LARP, too. I was honestly freaked out throughout most of it. Though I suppose the fact that I used to have nightmares about being in an underwater vehicle that cracked and flooded could have contributed to the overall scariness of the game. But still. Amazing props, amazing set, amazing LARP. Yay.

Also I ate an entire slab of raw potato. Don't ask.