Enthusiastick Journal

There's been a notion percolating in my brain for the past few weeks, and I think maybe its finally ready to come out. The trouble is that its not fully-formed, at least not so much that I can point a finger to it and say: that, there, is exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyone who knows me knows that I like mythical allusions in modern settings. This is not news. I enjoy them whether or not they take place in the context of magical realism; that is to say I enjoy them whether people in the setting accept them as normal or totally flip out because what the Hell, man.

I also really enjoy, for lack of a better term, re-imagined elements. That word probably comes from Wikipedia, where whomever first created articles for the Battlestar Galactica miniseries (and subsequent television show) described it as a "re-imagined version." So rather than the shows being labeled by date or called simply "old" and "new" they're referred to as the "original 1978" series and the "re-imagined" series.

There's something interesting about that phrase. Re-imagined. Re-envisioned. You imagine something, and then you imagine it a second time, differently.

The seed for this scattered thought, the element that began binding this notion together, is something Rebecca Borgstrom wrote on her Hitherby Dragons blog (helpfully syndicated at hitherbydragons) called The Song of Jeremiah Gannon.

R. Sean Borgstrom, for those not in the know, is a writer and a developer of roleplaying games. She wrote Nobilis and several of my favorite supplements for Exalted. Love her or hate her (and a lot of people do hate her) its widely acknowledged that she is brilliant, but also six different kinds of crazy. People tend to read the things she’s written for games and describe them with a gleeful smirk using adjectives like “cracked out” which, in this context, are intended as complimentary. She routinely thinks up things that are just unspeakably cool but also very unexpected. Calling them “from out of left field” is to do an injustice to the depth of the phenomenon I’m describing. I really don’t think there’s a sports metaphor that works, except to say that maybe they come from a spaceship inhabited by supernatural flower aliens (who may or may not be time travellers) that just happens to be hovering somewhere in the general vicinity of a baseball outfield. But I digress.

So RSB wrote The Song of Jeremiah Gannon (parts two, three and four for those of you playing along at home) and its absolutely fantastic. It re-envisions the story of the Legend of Zelda as a mythic tale about God and America and a dozen or so other things. Ms. Borgstrom’s writing is nothing if not layered and nuanced; she has been accused of being dense, to the point of incomprehensibility to some audiences.

That’s where all of this started. And then I played (or actually ran) Hero’s Banner at Story Games Boston a few weeks back, and borrowed the book from locke61dv, and read it. And its good. And there’s this interesting little element in the game where one of the things that drives your character is some mythic predecessor, someone from the tales and folklore of his people who he strives to be like. And if you play multi-generational stories or simply play the game a bunch of times using the same setting, then you have the option of using the stories you’ve previously played out as that element. Your new character is the descendant of your old character and wants to grow up to be just like him.

And the wheels in my brain started to turn.

And I started thinking about that Mage game that pax_malificus ran, and how much I enjoyed it. It contained within it a great deal of the intersection between these two things: mythical allusions that were themselves re-imagined. Helen’s Avatar was an old-fashioned angel, one so powerful that it could not be contained by a human shell anymore, and was bound in a phylactery long ago as much to protect the world from it as to protect it from the world. Helen and Kit themselves had both been meddled with by the previous custodians of their Avatars; Helen could be seen literally as a dream her predecessor made real, right up until the moment she opened her eyes and started to move in the world.

All of this catalyzed this weekend with the season 3 finale of (the “re-imagined”) Battlestar Galactica. The show has contained a number of mythic elements from the start, all of them re-imagined from their role in the original series. On the colonists' side we have the Greco-Roman Lords of Kobol and their various artifacts: the Arrow of Apollo, the Tomb of Athena, the Gates of Hera, the Eye of Jupiter, etc. And on the side of the Cylon we have their one true god, nameless and unknowable, and the possibility that both Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six are receiving regular visitations from his angels, who just happen to take the shape and voice of their respective loves, each other. And the season finale, without giving anything away, really helped to push all of that to a whole new level.

When foreign_devilry wrote his story-game’d version of Exalted (which I had the pleasure of playtesting at JiffyCon), he brought out a similar thing, a thing which exists in the Exalted universe, but which his system pushed to the fore. On the one hand you have the wonder and glory of the First Age, when golden dreams collided with enough force to reshape the face of the world. And by definition each and every Solar Exalted was a part of that, and also had a hand in its downfall. That’s the curse the Primordials wrought; by the Exalts own hand was Creation doomed to ashes, its halcyon days forever twisted, never again to rise to such heights. And in foreign_devilry's vision of the game you actually had to describe how it was when things were good, and how it is now that they're bad, and tell the story of how you made it so.

Mythical allusions. Re-imagined.

As an aside, there absolutely have to be better terms for this than the ones I am using. The trouble is that literary criticism is, at best, a hobby for me. I devoted my academic pursuits to learning history, which has worked out well enough. But I'm awkward and clumsy with the terminology; magical realism is a fantastically cool thing, but I've only known it existed as a concept for a year or two. This jargon is like a second language with which I don't have native familiarty. But, again, I digress.

There's something about those elements that really appeals to me. And I want more of them, both in the fiction that I consume and in the games that I play and create. If roleplaying and story gaming is just the oldest form of make-believe reinvented and given rules and structure, then its worth keeping in mind that all the great epic stories of old were re-told. They were, as they say, transmitted orally and therefore allowed to change a little in each re-telling. And true, sometimes that just means that you end up with one version of a story told by Ovid and another by Vergil, and they're basically the same except Artemis has been swapped in for Athena. But I have to imagine that some of the strength of the stories, some of their resonance, comes from the process of letting them be organic, letting them grow and change as they needed to, until they were, essentially, as cool as they were going to get.

This can all go horribly wrong, of course. Just look at some of the travesties that have been perpetrated by mainstream comics if you don't know what it mean. But it can also go very right. I miss playing Mage and Changeling precisely because I miss games that were so well-suited to these themes, and brought them into our modern era rather than relegating them to dusty times of old or just fantastic myth. And if I ever actually get around to finishing a story game of my very own then you'd better believe I will make room to bring them there, too.

I'm crazy tired today. Last night the Mountain Witch finally came to an end (for the curious, a recap can be found here.) After game many of the players retired to the Asgard for food and drinks. The past few times the Story Games Boston crew has hit up the Asgard late on Wednesday nights we've been confused and intrigued by the existence of a karaoke corner by the bar, where drunken Bostonians congregate to howl the classic rock into a microphone. Every time it makes me kind of antsy, because I love karaoke and am drawn to it. I said as much to locke61dv, as I always do.

Only this time around Richard, who is young and brave, actually went and signed up. I could hardly let that stand, so I followed after him and signed up as well, and the rest came out to cheer us along. Soon we were all poring over the song selection books and debating what makes a good karaoke song. locke61dv copped out as not drunk enough for this, while foreign_devilry seemed willing so long as he could get someone to sing with him. Richard shouted a little Rage Against the Machine (for though the little karaoke corner is a random thing, their selection depth is entirely respectable) to the amusement of our crew and the guy running the karaoke. The rest of the bars patrons did not seem equally amused. Then I went up and murdered Fastball's "You're An Ocean," always a favorite of mine. I am totally out of practice. Which is a very dangerous thought.

Any way, I was out late enough that I missed the last train out of Central. Eric and April were gracious enough to drive me and the others home (except Richard, who is apparently walking distance from Central, because he's an undergrad at MIT.) And so I am a bit bleary today, because I'm operating on too little sleep. I don't think I have any plans tonight, though, so I can just relax and take it easy. I mean, I really want to get home and become a crazy vortex of cleaning and organization, but its probably not going to happen.

My weekend was low-key but good. Friday night there was more LoTR Risk (trilogy edition) with dippy423 and Brendan. I once again was the sole player for the forces of good. I fared far worse this time than last, eventually hunkering down for the long siege in Southern Rohan, having given up the ghost in Gondor (which is bad, as Gondor is worth 7 battalions every turn.) In the end I think dippy423 won anyway, but realistically speaking I was never really in the game.

Saturday I saw Breach -- 2 1/2 stars -- I went in predisposed to like this one, and I did. Its a moving and dramatic story reduced to a managable number of personal relationships, and I always like that. I'm a big fan of Ryan Phillippe and Laura Linney both, and neither disappoints here. Also I will never be able to see Dennis Haysbert as anything other than President David Palmer ever again. Even in those Allstate commercials, poor guy. Gary Cole is also distracting for similar reasons, although he's at least three different people in my head. Oh and Phillippe's characters wife is played by an actress named Caroline Dhavernas who is a total cutie. Anyway, enough digressions. Chris Cooper's performance was good but not stellar, and overall I found the film engaging but not particularly memorable.

Sunday my parents came up for brunch. At the tail end of the meal we were joined by my sister and brother-in-law, who were in town house-hunting. There was big news afoot: I am apparently going to be an uncle. Sometime around October I will be welcoming a niece or nephew into the world. How nifty is that?

Sunday night was the Legends Winter Feast. After a bit of stressing out about hitting the road on time (which we didn't, my bad) things went smoothly. It was a pretty good time, certainly fun to see some of those people again and whet my apetite about Legends Spring season. I've been thinking about doing a write-up for nachdemspiel, but frankly it wasn't all that eventful, particularly not for my character. The high point of the night was probably sleetfall winning a jar full of alchemy potions by correctly guessing the number inside (sixty-four, and he got it exactly.)

According to the folks at Legends this was the best Winter event in recent memory, which means that so far the game's upward trend continues, even in the face of the controversy surrounding leadership and ownership of the game. The player-to-staff ratio was really good and a lot of the staffers I enjoy were there in force, so that gives me hope that things are going to go well despite the occasional forecasts of doom. Drama and forecasts of doom seem to be part and parcel of every LARP organization, near as I can tell. With Legends a policy of ignoring them has worked for me so far, and I suspect it will continue to.

So as promised we had our second session of the Mountain Witch, which brought us to the close of the second chapter.

My blogging efforts are simultaneously aided and hindered by the discovery that Nathan (aka hamsterprophecy), our GM, has already done a write-up of the events of the first game. You may wish to check it out, as I have decided I will be focusing almost exclusively on the events of last night's session.

Last week we had the first chapter, which introduced us to our seven samurai:

1. Eisaku (played by Richard). Eisaku is a large and excessively solid man, due to the fact that he is a descendant of Mt. Fuji. In spite of this he seems relatively well-adjusted and devoted to his ideals. His astrological sign is Boar.
2. Ieyasu (played by David.) Ieyasu is a haughty, pretentious dick with a rigid formal demeanor and a superiority complex. In other words he's the classic samurai. His astrological sign is Ram.
3. Hikaru (played by Alexis.) Hikaru is an odd duck and a bit of a mad monk, with training in traditional Noh theatre. He's laconic and what he does says often has an incomprehensible koan quality. His astrological sign is Rabbit.
4. Hiroshi (played by me.) Hiroshi is tubby and yet strangely agile and always seems to be eating, except when he's startled, in which case his mouth is hanging open with crumbs falling out. He provides much of the game's comic relief, although he also appears to be a competent samurai. His astrological sign is Dog.
5. Nanami (played by Jonathan aka foreign_devilry). Nanami is less a samurai and more a strange and sullen ninja. The group fairly rapidly discovered that she appears to have expired some time prior to joining us in the climb up Mt. Fuji. Her astrological sign is Rooster.
6. Sanjuro (played by Eric.) Sanjuro is blind and yet seems to have no difficulty getting around. He is a skilled geomancer and member of the group best schooled in the mystic arts needed to combat the magical tricks and trials sent down by the Mountain Witch. His astrological sign is Ox.
7. Taro (played by Ben.) Taro is an imperious and charismatic fellow with a manner somewhat less proud and aloof than Ieyasu, with whom he butts heads. Taro is strangely good at giving orders, although the various party members vary in how well they respond to being told what to do. His astrological sign is Dragon.

When last we left our heroes they had ascended above the tree line and passed the first threshhold, a gate guarded by ogre-ish Oni who required each samurai to sacrifice that which he held dear in order to continue. Eisaku attempted to bypass the Oni and found himself swept away into an ice-filled tunnel deep into the earth. Richard, who plays Eisaku, was absent last night, so he has not yet reappeared. Ieyasu was forced to give up his sword, only to be offered Taro's sword as a replacement. Sanjuro, to his horror, had discovered a heart cleft in twain and left in a pile of snow just beyond the threshhold. It was apparently the thing he held most dear, and he seemed profoundly shaken by it.

( A cut? Unthinkable! But this one's really long. Click here to read on... )

The first time I saw this video was a long time ago in internet terms -- maybe a year? Back in the days when Google Video was still new and exciting. But apparently juineve missed it the first time around, because a couple of days ago she sent me a link along with some snide comment. And if someone as savvy as her didn't catch it, then maybe it passed some of you by as well. So as my gift to all of you, here is an internet classic: Fear of Girls.

At Story Games Boston last night I got involved with a game of the Mountain Witch that our GM, Nathan, jokingly referred to as "the biggest game of Mountain Witch ever played." Its a game for three to five players, you see, but due to an unusually high turnout for Story Games we had seven players. And since its a game about ronin climbing Mt. Fuji to slay the Mountain Witch who lives at the summit we made a lot of Seven Samurai jokes during character creation.

It is a really nifty game and I will have to acquire it when I have a little more cash so that I can run it for some people, and also steal adapt some of the system elements for use in my own games. Each character has a zodiac sign and 2-3 defining traits (mine were "fat yet agile" and "comic relief" -- oh yeah, I'm playing That Guy) which are things that your character can do that no one else's can. But in terms of dice mechanics the game is all about trust. You can only gain any real advantage through trust tokens, but increasing your trust in another PC also makes you vulnerable to having your narration rights hijacked by them. It all works out really well and really interestingly, particularly in light of the fact that, first thing, each character is dealt a randomly assigned dark fate, which their player is responsible for foreshadowing and bringing to eventual fruition. Which is to say you're all going to end up betraying one another and/or dying horribly, which makes trust an even stickier wicket. I'm into it.

I will admit to a little bit of nervousness, largely because Nathan had been talking about wanting to run this game for a while, and wanting to run it for the full three sessions it would take to do it justice, and much as I am hopeful, I am not optimistic about that group of eight people sitting at the same gaming table again in any sort of timely fashion. And its a really cool game, so I want to play it again, and I get the same sense from everyone involved, but its eight people with busy schedules including several newcomers to Story Games, so... we'll see.

In any event a good time was had by all. Nathan did a good job of wrangling us, letting us sort of run wild during character creation, telling stupid jokes to one another and trying to outdo one another to come out with the most outlandish yet awesome traits for their samurai. The winner, in my opinion, was definitely foreign_devilry who, after a moment of staring off into space thoughtfully, simply wrote the word "dead" in the appropriate space on his character sheet, smiling maniacally the whole time. It was a stroke of genius.

Things got under way and, with some polite nudging from Nathan, took a turn for the serious. The players were all very earnest, and though jokes were still made (I, after all, took "comic relief" as one of my defining character traits -- and yes I know I always do that, but its really working for me this time, so shut urrrrp) and people were still smiling we were all very sincere about our desire for this game to be cool and in-genre. And as a result of good players and good GMing the first chapter went really, really well (again, in my opinion.) Which will only make it more tragic if we aren't able to keep it rolling. Like I said, hopeful, but not optimistic.

So, following on from my last post, let's talk about the other big Changeling game in my life.

We're into recent enough territory now that I actually have notes for that game, carefully archived and backed up on some auxilliary storage medium, an external hard drive or possibly a burned CD. And I suppose I could dig them out and pore over them in an attempt to recapture just what was going on there, in that place and time, but then you wouldn't be getting an entirely honest impression. My memory would be refreshed and therefore different things would rise to the surface. As it stands you get a relatively unbiased window looking in, a snapshot of what I actually recall when conjuring up thoughts about that particular roleplaying endeavor.

And besides, why look at boring (and at this point arcane) Storyteller's notes when I've got pictures?

I don't have a scanner in my life, otherwise I would attempt to share these pictures with you, because honestly they need to be preserved in digital format. They are among my most prized possessions. Rodrigo drew them, and through my various moves across the country and around greater Boston I have carried them with me to each new home. Rodrigo played in that game, you see, in the time when thablueguy and I were still sometimes referring to him as our "pet freshman," a tongue-in-cheek sobriquet that he put up with for some reason, demonstrating far more self-assurance than I would have in his shoes.

I like to think that each time I sit down at the table I bring an increasingly refined toolkit to bear on the gaming hobby. In planning for Changeling I was demonstrating that I had learned from my mistakes in Exalted, falling back on a system I knew so thoroughly it was like rediscovering an old friend. To this day I could probably make a Changeling character from scratch, given a little paper to work with, and given a handful of ten-sided dice I could even run a passable one-shot in the system, all without the aid of any books. Which isn't to say that I don't have books; I have most of the books in the Changeling line and I cherish them. I've just moved beyond them, which meant that I was operating in a sandbox that was very, very familiar to me. It was like coming home.

I was also utilizing what I had learned from the ill-fated Chicago chronicle, albeit in an indirect way. I was more of a dewy-eyed idealist in those days, as evidenced by some of the entirely fatuous and yet ultimately very characteristic things I said on an audio-only documentary on roleplaying games Rodrigo made as an exercise for one of his RTVF classes. I believed then, as I do now, that roleplaying could be a vehicle to something greater, something sublime, and that at its best it could actually change your life. And I was starting to understand the mechanism by which that was accomplished; it became less of a blind belief and more of a demonstrated phenomena that I was eager to utilize.

Too eager, perhaps, because as could be expected I pushed too hard and too fast. It was a good game of Changeling, in the end, but it was just a game, and I subjected friendships to stresses they should not have borne in my attempts to use gaming as therapy, to make clumsy ham-fisted points to people about things I didn't have the temerity to broach so arrogantly in real life. Frankly, after some of the crap I pulled, I'm surprised that lassarina is still talking to me (and _glass_house_ as well, though I was not quite so much a blunt instrument with her.)

It didn't help matters that the interpersonal relationships of the players were often tense and strained out of game, but I made things worse and I did it deliberately. People made characters that in some way reflected these issues, as they tend to do, and several times I herded them into head-on confrontations. It could have been awful, and a few times it sort of was. Ultimately I got gun-shy, pulled back from the brink, re-focused on the plot and brought the game to its conclusion. Ending games is a rare pleasure and I like to think this one went over passably well. I was looking to have an affect, and its clear that I did, but not in the way I would have wanted to, looking back on it.

But at least I got awesome group portraits out of it, hand-drawn by Rodrigo and carefully preserved by me. They're waiting to be scanned and someday, probably, framed.

I laid open the floodgates to requests a couple of posts back, and to my relative surprise a couple came trickling in. Alright, fair enough. Let's do this thing.

sleetfall has asked that I describe a little bit of the ill-fated Vampire game I ran, a game which was in many ways the bastard great-grandchild of the Changeling game that got me started playing White Wolf games in the first place. When it comes to gaming I am notorious for my tendency to get pretentious and overblown about the tiniest little thing, to spend days agonizing over the name of a minor NPC and to hesitate for weeks on end before finally settling on a title for the campaign. You see in my demented little head all campaigns simply must have titles, otherwise how would you know that they were wonderful, meaningful stories? Yes, I know I'm crazy. But its important to me that things have titles (whether or not anyone but me knows it), that they be relatively succinct and yet evocative, summing up what a game is about thematically in a few short phrases.

Which is why its significant that years after the fact the people involved with this game still refer to it simply as "the Chicago Chronicle," a lackluster moniker if ever there was one.

It went down like this: after bits and pieces of other games coming and going, as they tend to do, with false starts and creator's remorse and all that jazz, a group of people emerged who were committed to the idea of a regular, long-running game, something we'd all been without for a while. There were three players and a GM, just as there were in the Changeling game, which is one of the reasons I have come to think of three as an ideal number of players. The GM (or Storyteller as he is referred to in the White Wolf parlance) was me, elected more or less by default and by circumstance. And the game in question was to be a Vampire game.

The thing is, back then, I was really not into Vampire: the Masquerade. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hated it, but it was fundamentally uninteresting to me. So I made one of the most petty and childish decisions I have ever made in my gaming career, a decision that would come back to bite me so hard that I'm still reeling from it today. I decided that we wouldn't actually play Vampire after all. But rather than being clever and simply disguising another game as Vampire until things were up and running, I decided to use Vampire as a springboard into running the sort of game I actually wanted to run, which is to say basically anything else. I decided I would run a Vampire game so frustrating, so aggravating, so relentlessly oppressive that no one in their right minds would want to continue playing it, under the theory that after a few sessions everyone would quit and we could get on with having some real fun.

"So frustrating, so aggravating, so relentlessly oppressive that no one in their right minds would want to continue playing it." I succeeded, and failed, beyond my wildest dreams.

Its confession time, deep dark never-before-revealed secret time. In my head, at least, the Chicago Chronicle had a title after all. This being the late nineties I originally referred to it, in my internal monologue, as "Everything You Want." What can I say, I was a pretentious mindless twit when I was a teenager. Eventually that title would transmute, again only in my head, into the far more fitting and less asinine "(Be Careful) What You Wish For." I was resolved to let my players, none of whom knew all that much about the world of Vampire, make whatever ridiculous decisions seemed fitting to them at the time and then suffer the consequences. Moreover I decided to distill each of their character concepts down to its very core, figure out what it was that they really seemed to want out of playing that character, and then give them the exact opposite. Cruel and unusual? You bet. And did it backfire completely? Uh-huh.

• Kate P, who you may remember from my earlier descriptions of the Changeling game, wanted to play a Lasombra, because, well, who wouldn't? Obtenebration is neat. I played upon the psychological issues of both her character and the player herself, rapidly rendering her so terrified of even thinking about manipulating the shadows and darkness around her that she soon flatly refused. Her character's best uses of Obtenebration were unfailingly the ones that were completely involuntary, and generally reduced her to a sort of whimpering catatonia.
• Salomé, in a game in which the other two players wanted to play members of the core clans of the Sabbat (without really understanding what they were choosing, mind you) wanted to play a Caitiff. Not a Pander, you understand, but an honest to god Caitiff, without any real knowledge of what she was or where she came from. And thus I elected to make her, completely without her knowledge, a Malkavian Elder with a lower Generation than any of the other PCs and several of the major NPCs. She also would find herself using Disciplines without her knowledge, although she rarely if ever recognized them as the upper levels of Obfuscate.
• Finally sleetfall wanted, for reasons that escape me, to play a Tzimisce, a vampire seduced and Embraced by a beautiful woman in a story so rife with classic Vampire themes it could have been taken right out of Anne Rice. His character secretly had a heart of gold, and he was looking for a story about a hero in darkness. I had no intention of letting him live as long or as well as the whiny Louis de Pointe du Lac, and thus decided that almost everything he thought about the circumstances of his Embrace would turn out to be wrong, a fact that would crushingly be revealed to him mere moments before his anticlimactic and ultimately meaningless demise.

In a turn of events so stunningly predictable that you all have probably worked it out by now, the players simply couldn't get enough. I felt like mafioso Lou in Fight Club, watching in confused and increasingly horrified disbelief as my players, in the role of Brad Pitt, took all the abuse I could dish out and seemed to actually derive some sort of insane pleasure from it. This ill-conceived Vampire game, not designed to run more than a session or three, suddenly had to find a way to keep going and going because the players demanded it (despite the fact that, reasonably speaking, all three of their characters would have been dusted sometime around the start of game two.) And so it was that I learned a very fundamental lesson, a lesson that has served me well as a Storyteller 'lo these many years: most players are fucking masochists. Give the people what they want.

I had a very uneventful weekend. My half-hearted cold turned into full-blown misery, so I spent most of the weekend lying on my bed watching Buffy and drinking Vitamin Water. I did manage to get out Friday night and head over to human_typhoon & dippy423's place, where I ate Chinese food and thablueguy began the process of assembling the armor he's making for me and actually fitting it to my person. I am, if I have not mentioned this before, really super psyched about this armor, which continues to look more and more awesome. I'm starting to think I like playing more than I like staffing, which is ultimately unfortunate, as I have my doubts about Legends being as good this coming Spring as it was this past Fall.

Battlestar Galactica was new last night, and good, although my affection for the series has plateau'd somewhat. I don't get nearly the same geeky butterflies in my stomach feeling from BSG as I do from say, Doctor Who or Heroes (which is back tonight, huzzah!) Anyway. The supposed cliffhanger from December's episode resolved more or less as expected, and as ever teasing hints about plot development failed to bear any fruit whatsoever in the form of actual revelations. The Starbuck/Apollo tension that was theoretically brought to a crux will also apparently be serving as the A-plot for the coming episode, but I don't have any special hope that it will be resolved in a meaningful way either. I'm not as bitter as I sound, I just wish they didn't feel the need to stretch things out so damn much. It seems like things only happen on this show on the seasonal scale, as if I could watch one episode in four and know just as much about what's going on. Not that I ever would, of course, because I'm addicted.

Also it causes a little bit of cognitive dissonance that the Cylons I had been referring to in my head as the "single-run models" have subsequently been semi-officially termed the "final five." I suppose that appellation is more mystical-sounding, as well as being shorter, but its less descriptive. I got completely used to the term I made up in my mind for my own discussions, and having to relearn it as something else is a minor irritation.

On an entirely different note I bought the Eberron corebook from Amazon.com via Christmas gift certificate. It shipped this morning and should arrive by the end of the week. It was largely purchased on a whim; I've thought the setting was cool ever since I first perused it, and was struck recently with a yen to pore over a sourcebook containing just that sort of well-developed 'fantasy with a smidge of horror for good measure' world. The trouble is that since Eberron was first released in 2004 Wizards of the Coast has annoyingly gone ahead and released supplements for it, in their usual money-grubbing fashion. Some of these can obviously be ignored but others (Races of Eberron, Magic of Eberron, Faiths of Eberron) have the unfortunate distinction of looking both interesting and useful. So this is my appeal to the D&D nerds in the crowd: are the ancillary books worth buying?

Its been a relatively busy couple of days for me; Tuesday I tried to pick up my Exalted game again only to be shy a necessary player and unable to move forward. I ran a Primetime Adventures demo for euchaotic and sleetfall instead. The vastly different style of play seemed to take a little getting used to, but they warmed to it after minimal prodding. I'm hopeful that's an indicator of things to come, as we have discussed getting together some sort of Tuesday night gaming thing, with regular long-term campaigns happening every other week and short-term experiments and one-shots taking place in the off week.

Strangely enough yesterday was gaming too, the triumphant post-holiday return of StoryGames Boston at pandemonium_bks. We played some Shock, which was new to me and very thought-provoking. When things took a turn for the cyberpunk I made no attempt to reign in my love for some of the sillier elements thereof, and the evening for my character culminated in a battle with some franchise ninjas, after which he was forced to sign away his integrity in exchange for the antidote to a poison which had been slipped into the fast-food sushi he had eaten moments earlier. A good time was had by all, or at least by me, and that's all that matters.

On a sadder note for the geek in me I don't think I will be making it to Arisia this weekend. Its not that I don't want to go, its just that their website currently is forecasting that they'll hit capacity Friday night and then won't allow any more people into the convention. Probably something to do with fire codes. I'm pretty bummed out about that, as I was planning to do as I did last year and just buy a Saturday pass in order to slip into the Webcomics panels. This year not only would I have the chance to hear demiurgent speak but also the_ferrett, live and in person. Ah well, its what I get for not planning in advance. I'll keep checking the website in case something changes, but I'm not hopeful. There's always Vericon.