Lazy, crazy, hazy days …
Doyce’s Star Wars “Prince of Alderaan” campaign came to a crashing halt on Friday, just hours before the game was to begin. He was kind enough to forward the players a synopsis of What Was Going To Happen in the remaining sessions. Pity — there were some scenes in there I’d have given money to see. And I’d just mapped out how Dag was going to end up prestiging into Privateer. Ah, well.
Instead, the Testerfolk and Randy came over to our house, we sat and chatted, and did some character design for Jackie’s Necropolis campaign. Is it just me, or is anyone else daunted by a campaign distributed as a thick, hard-cover tome. Eek.
Saturday morning and early afternoon somehow just slipped past us. Later afternoon and into the evening we had our Nobilis fix for the week, which was plenty fun.
Sunday, after the usual morning churn, I did up the game notes for Nobilis, then opened up the home theater box to start putting things together. Which is when I learned that it had no auxiliary audio inputs. Feh.
We spent the rest of the afternoon taking it back and hitting the local big boxes. Nothing seemed an automatic win. The runner-up, available in a number of places, is a Panasonic receiver, which has a built-in 5-disc DVD/CD changer. Since we already have one of those, I’m not sure we need another one, nor am I eager to be swapping between CDs and DVDs (it sounds organizationally nasty to me). On the other hand, it does have an Aux port that the current CD changer can plug into. Still, it’s a good $80-100 more than the RCA system, and one more incompatible remote; I wish I could find an RCA system a tick up from the one that won’t work for us.
More searching today.
We then swung past the Testerplace to pick up all the stuff we’d managed to leave behind the evening before when whisking a sleeping Katherine away, and ended up chewing an hour or two’s worth of additional time.
That was an unfortunate chew, because I’d gotten New Character Fever in the afternoon. My original plan for Necropolis had been a scaled-down gold dragon character (recycling Aughto from Rey’s abortive epic campaign). That was fun enough, but I was still fiddling with personality issues. Meanwhile, Margie had been considering a comment by Doyce that we could really use a meat shield powerful stand-up fighter sort. So she was going through Savage Species and looking at the anthropomorphics there.
Well, at first, that struck me as a shame, because the deva she’d come up with had some kick-ass abilities the party could use. And then the penny dropped, and I suddenly got a yen to run an anthropomorphic elephant barbarian sort. I do like simple, straightforward characters (mechanics-wise), and a large humanoid elephant wielding a mongo chopper of some sort qualifies quite nicely.
So I stayed up too late last night doing the initial write-up. Tsk. And decided quite early on that, yes, this is the character for me.
If nothing else, I can always open each meeting with a rousing rendition of “Colonel Hathi’s March.”
Well, I don’t have a gaming group any longer, so I can’t speak to what you’ve been going through.
I however, was a beta tester for the newest MMORPG, Star Wars Glaxies: An Empire Divided. I became hooked (my first-ever MMORPG), and have gotten four friends similarly hooked.
Consequently, all my free time is taken up with my Bothan jack-of-all-trades, Worduk A’Sil (can you believe nobody gets that name, even people who know how obsessed I m with her?). A I type this, he is extracting polymers from the soil of beautiful Corellia, for use in crafting improved stimpacks, which will keep him alive longer when hunting and trapping vynocks (he’s currently working on improving his skill with a laser carbine) as he gains the experience necessary to become a bounty hunter (while covertly working for the Rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire). Should any fellow players in the Bria galaxy read this, say “Hi” to him. He may be found dancing away battle fatigue in the Coronet City cantina, or experimenting at the public crafting stations near the starport, or on a mission with T’lile, who will be embarking on a questionable career as a smuggler.
I make it a religious rule never to get involved in MMORPGs, just because I know I would never get out. Latter-day drouds, they are.
By the way, Dave, how do you pronounce droud? I had a friend who was certain it was drood, whereas I’ve always said drowd. I e-mailed Larry Niven, but he only responds if your mail is “sufficiently interesting,” which lets me out on general principle.
I’ve pronounced it both ways (as well droe-ood). It’s not, though, a word that comes up on conversation all that often.
Niven wrote once:
Incidentally, droud was a typographical error I kept making for “crowd,” as the shisp in hachiroph shisp was a typo for “ships.” I kept making the same mistakes until I used them in this fashion, and that got me over it. Use your typos.
On that basis, you’d probably be correct.
(And it’s, not suprisingly, a fine essay.)
I don’t remember seeing that, and I think I have all things Niven. Is it in N-Space?
Further up in the site, it refers to the essay, “Words in Science Fiction,” as having originally been published in 1974.
A quick Google of that indicates it was printed in Reginald Bretnor (Ed.) The Craft of Science Fiction (Harper & Row, 1977).
Speaking of terms coined by Niven, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday used one! They were doing a story on “inexplicable mobs,” and they invoked Niven’s “flash crowds”! Apparently, that’s Mr. Niven himself, explaining his concept.