It's now 12:29 in the morning and the "Big Week" is over.  I'm sitting at home in front of my own computer, at my own (messy) desk, writing a blog post (finally) because I've been wanting to write all week but never seemed to get the right chance to do it.

It was a long, but good week.  I met a lot of great people, walked around a gorgeous city, and learned a lot about the state of the web, the future of the web, and where I'm at in relation to all those things.  So far, I think I'm doing a pretty damned good job of staying on top of things.  Huzzah!

I also got a ridiculously cute pair of shoes and promptly gave myself blisters by wearing them everywhere.  So, now I have a pair of bloody feet, a pair of ridiculously cute shoes, and a pair of bandages.  All in all, I am satisfied with this turn of events, even if it did mean some damage control.  What can I say?  I'm okay with being a masochist as long as shoes are involved.

When I finally got home yesterday afternoon around one, I managed to stay awake long enough to go out to lunch with Nick and then make it to Changeling for my usual "Friday Night Fever".  I have to admit that with Kyle and I being completely exhausted, I wasn't expecting to get much accomplished or really enjoy the night.  But I was committed to making an appearance nonetheless.  The game is really important to me, and even moreso to Kyle, so showing my face (black circles under the eyes are easily covered by red face paint after all) was not a particularly difficult sacrifice.

Low and behold, however... the best game session that I have had in ages!  I beat the living daylights out of one of my motley members, got into a fight with my best friend, hunted down an oath-breaker, lectured a wayward wolf-girl, screamed at people for getting stabbed in my apartment, avoided a strip club (unfortunately), and basically had a grumpy red-faced bloodbrutey ogre of a time.  It was awesome!  Apparently character interraction at my best happens when I'm exhausted beyond all belief (but excited due to an awesomesauce week full of the aforementioned great things that happened).

So... kudos for Web Directions North.  Somehow not only did it spruce up my work life, but also made gaming this week a hell of an awesome time.  I can't wait to see what happens next. 

Life has been pretty hectic lately.  With the holiday season, working my two jobs, snow and now flooding, plus getting sick and now having Nick be sick... when I haven't been wallowing on the couch in blatant boredom watching obnoxious daytime television and drinking tons of OJ, I've been relatively inclined to pull my hair out.  Thank god the holiday seasons are over, eh?

That's not to say I don't love Christmas, because I really do.  My family came up to visit and despite the obnoxious setbacks that the snow brought, a white Christmas was quite pleasant all around.  Unfortunately, due to the weather, I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with my friends as I wanted to.

Any gaming that requires an actual social group also tends to grind to a halt during December and sometimes early January.  The two tabletop games I was playing (Hunter and Scion, if you've forgotten) abruptly stopped at the end of November, and Exalted had ground to a halt at the beginning of the month.  The Friday night LARP, Changeling, took a three week hiatus due to parties and the holidays themselves.  I missed more than that merely from being sick and having to go to my sister's wedding.

That said, one of the other distracting things for social gamers that happened back in November was the release of Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft.  I haven't really talked about it much, and I'm not going to be talking about it today, I'm afraid.  I'll go into a rambling speel about the glories of my Death Knight some other day for your entertainment.  Or my entertainment.  One of the two.

With all my face-to-face social gaming being on the down low, I've had some things to consider.  Melbonia and I had a fairly long conversation about tabletop gaming, LARPing, and what we are looking to get out of such.  We've been a bit frustrated with our LARP lately due to the fact that some of the players have had some interesting ideas on what to do.  The plot has been going willy-nilly with people doing their own weird wacky things, and there hasn't been much of a grand over-arching storyline to keep us interested in the game.  It's been very Changeling the Dreaming instead of Changeling the Lost.  We would both like a more serious plot.

Luckily, when we both re-entered the gaming world with the New Year, we saw that some things were being changed and we definitely started enjoying the game more.  Nick and Kyle do a great job running it, and they work hard to make sure that everyone has fun.  It would be nicer if all our ideas of "fun" were the same, but people are never going to have all the same opinions after all.  That's what makes us unique.

We also found that our tabletop gaming had become quite focused on stats and combat rather than on story.  One of the main reasons that I roleplay is because I want to tell a good story and be part of a good story.  In fact, I would say that is the main reason that I roleplay.  It's not the say that our Exalted, Hunter, or Scion games didn't have good stories.  They did.  But there was also a lot of focus on the combat angle that took away from a lot of the actual story aspect.  Plenty of people enjoy dungeon crawling, and I can't say that I haven't had my moments of kitchen raiding in an old castle, myself.  At the same time, though, it's hard to feel epic like Tolkien, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, or a lot of those other fantastic fantasy authors when you feel like all you're doing is counting squares and stats rather than enjoying the story.

I know it's funny to say that, since the games we've been playing are done by White Wolf, which is a very heavy story-based system.  Unlike, say, DND which is definitely more dungeon crawling and combat oriented.  But, Exalted and Scion are both very combat oriented games in their own rights, despite having fantastic worlds to tell stories in, and Hunter is part of our own world, albeit much darker, and since we were going for a more "Supernatural" theme with the game, it had a lot of twists and turns that were more episodic than actual epic story.

The four of us sat down and had a long, deep conversation about roleplaying and what we want in response to Melbonia and my first discussion about it.  For me, rp is sort of like a drug.  I really can't live without my "stories" just like some people can't live without their television "stories".  To each their own, right?

So, we decided to do something that was a bit ironic and see if we could play in an epic fantasy game that Kyle would run in his own world based on the d20 system.  We're even going to attempt DND 4th Edition, which I have to admit I'm a bit worried about due to the fact that I haven't even really looked at the books let alone the game in a few years now.  I definitely want to divulge some of the details of Kyle's world, but I should probably get permission before telling about it.

The strange thing is (okay, maybe not too strange), I'm really excited!  I'm even going to be playing a class type that I've never enjoyed or been too interested in the past (priest), but I think I have a solid concept and I'm really looking forward to how it plays out.  Melbonia has a great concept as well, and Nick is still working on his, but I think he's got something down, too.

I'm hoping this will inspire some stories and art, and I'll definitely be giving you a first look at DND 4th Edition from my perspective.

Who'd have thought I'd ever go back to DND?

Halloween.  A night of thrills, chills, and for once no strange stares!  Okay, anyone over 15 probably gets looks when they’re in costume on Halloween, and if you’re over 18 and not wearing something that shows a bit of bum, a lot of cleavage, and your naval then people most definitely give you interesting looks.  After all, with the way costumes are these days, what are Slutoween parties if not giant orgies?  Perhaps this is why I don’t partake…

Halloween in Changeling is slightly different.  Every Friday night, a group of ogres, fairies, vampire and werewolf wanna-be’s, and a cast of other misfits gather together to play World of Darkness’ Changeling: the Lost here in Bellingham at the local university.  Are we in costume?  Oh yes.  Are we loud, violently inclined, taking swings at each other with giant Styrofoam weapons?  Once again, the answer is yes.  And in other games, the police have been called for such activity.  Luckily, no one even blinks an eye on Halloween.

This is my first year of LARPing (and granted, I haven’t been doing it for that many) that Halloween has fallen on a game night.  Last year at this time, our crew of misfit Arcadian break-outs were trying to solve a deadly curse on the town of King George Cove that would kill one of them every week for thirteen weeks and then call the Gentry down on them to send them all back to their enslavement in Arcadia (Does this sound like a magical kingdom or a prison?  In truth, it’s both).

Back then I was playing Celine Harper, flower fairy extraordinaire, all around cheerful do-gooder, and slightly deluded old-man chaser.  No one said that people dragged off into a realm that seems to be on the edge of chaos come back sane.  In fact, the point of Changeling: the Lost is that the characters don’t come back sane.  In fact, they battle their clarity all the way until they’re stark raving mad.  Why else would White Wolf’s tagline for the game be “Beautiful Madness”?

That’s not to say that everything that happens in Changeling is deathly serious.  This year I have a different character, and ogre named Freija, and while she takes life seriously, her sarcastic wit and general relaxed manner would probably say otherwise that she has a live and let live attitude.  Everyone has a mask after all, whether it’s to hide the beast or beauty within.

The funny thing about Halloween as a Changeling is that when you’ve been ordered by the Scarecrow King to meet for a Halloween Ball at this old “haunted” house, you end up being a costume in a costume.  I went to work as a pirate, due to the fact that the make-up I wear to make Freija’s patches of bloody skin is greasier than all get out, and then ended up going to Changeling as an ogre pirate.  And, as I differentiate from the character and myself, I’ll be the first to tell you that Freija did not appreciate the layers of skirts nearly as much as I did.  In fact, she spent the evening with them hiked up as much as possible, sitting in the most unladylike positions.

For all of you who went to Slutoween parties, stayed home scaring the piss out of yourselves watching horror movies, or standing out near the corner of Holly and Railroad watching Michael Jackson and company re-enact Thriller … let me tell you, you missed out on the real fun of the night.

Locked in a haunted house, our intrepid crew of about ten lost varying from ogres to pidgins to sewn-together chimera gathered together to enjoy the holiday at the expense of the Scarecrow King and his autumn court.  Shortly into the evening, a human girl in a schoolgirl outfit is found with a broomstick coming out of her back, lying face down in the floor in a pool of her own blood.  This starts off a series of events that can only be described as chaos.

I didn’t find out until the very end of the night that the Puppet Master had managed to get his hands on all of us and play a wickedly evil game of “how many of your friends can you backstab before I possess someone else”, and I’m impressed with our narrators’ abilities to keep us guessing. Nick and Kyle, I bow to you as usual.

Freija is not a girly girl.  In fact, she’s an ex-Hell’s Angel who was a gladiator turned ogre gladiator in Arcadia and came back to be a bouncer for a local bar as well as a Tolltaker (aka knee breaker).  So, really, I’d describe her as anything but a girly girl.  However, her current love-interest, a Fairest named Ruby, convinced her that a pirate costume full of skirts, frilly underwear, and a cute little pair of boots would be the perfect thing to make Halloween delightfully adorable (and ridiculous, in this ogre’s opinion).

Before the chaos of the evening starts, Freija and Erin (her usual ogre companion who has a trifle that turned her into a Fairest succubus Little Red Riding Hood for the night) explore the house, run into a room with creepy dolls, a bathtub full of rotten apples and people appearing in mirrors, and all sorts of other creepiness.  Erin bets Freija to go down into the basement or else she’ll sell Freija’s underwear to Viktor.  This, of course, cannot happen.

Unfortunately, after the murder took place, I was forced to stay with the softy crew and protect them from whatever evils are out there (little did I know it would be themselves…), and never did get down into the basement.  So now I apparently owe Viktor a pair of underwear.

By the end of the evening, we have one dead body, one broken clock, a crew of completely paranoid people, a succubus with a broken arm (Erin got thrown down the stairs), an unconscious ogre (Sig the pigeon beat Freija’s face in after she confronted him about throwing Erin down the stairs…), and…

A scene from Stardust?

If you don’t want spoilers for the movie, then please completely ignore this part because… well, the fact of the matter is that what happened to Freija at the end of the night happens to Septimus in the movie and, well yes.  Unlike Tristan, who had a much better job fending off Septimus with a chandelier, Marcus did not have the same amount of luck when it came to disarming the unconscious pirate Freija, who was viciously attacking him with her rapier.

I’m sure there is a lesson to learn from this, although I’m not quite sure what that lesson is.

I think we can sum it up easily like this:  Acting out a ridiculous haunted house scene with your friends is far more entertaining than A) Watching it B) Watching people dance it and C) having an orgy.

Okay, I’m not an expert on that last one, but I can only guess.