Ok, ok, so this review is a little behind the time, if other people’s posting is a schedule to judge by, but I’m just now starting to get back into the swing of things. Problem is, now I’ve gotten a big hit, I gotta find something in the next month or two to get a small fix of LARPing, so I can wean myself back down to normal levels. Read on for the full post.
I am so glad I took friday and monday as vacation around the Gazebo fun. It came in handy. Me and rigel left town around 12:30, and had a fun trip down chatting and playing tunes at each other and bouncing from topic to topic. Driving in the rain (there’s that pesky weekend rain again) wasn’t always fun, and waiting 2+ hours for the GW bridge (I am never taking that bridge again type of bridge traffic) was distinctly unfun, but on the whole, the trip was reasonable. We got there later than we watned, and were a bit late for our gamestart, but we weren’t the latest, as a group of MITers had their van break down about a mile and a half from the hotel. So now we break it down into a section by section review of the con.
Eye of the Storm
This was a great game. I was playing a fairly straightforward character, without much to hide, but who happened to know more or less everyone at game start. There were a few characters who came in part way through that he didn’t know, but it was all good. I spent a lot of time saying ‘you’re asking about foo? You should go talk to bar about foo.’. I also spent a lot of time trying to be a humanitarian towards Aerynne’s character, but what do you expect?
Petshop of Horrors
I wish I’d had enough notice to do a better costume, but I was able to borrow a pair of cat ears and that went well. I was (or so I thought) a perfectly normal cat. Then some less than normal things started to happen to me, and in the last hour of the game I became an accidental target of so many things. That’s what you get for scratching JD playing the hired help. And then having Android come over and munch on my arm was amusing. Oh, and being picked up by the big bad and bashed onto MR. It’s all, look at my limp body! I’m a prop now! Teehee.
Downtime
I took some downtime in the middle of saturday. I needed it. I took a nice nap, and fired up my laptop and got some internet access (I almost posted from there, but held off) and relaxed. It was good. I also gave Eddy a ride to pick up the now ok van (the MITers, remember). Turns out it ran out of oil. Lesson to all of you: always carry a spare quart. Called Asdr83 as I was missing her. Bought 10 raffle tickets.
TBA
Oh my, oh my, oh my. Play it. It turned out to be very different from what I was expecting, but still tons of fun. I expected people to be playing deep in character, and seriously. People were in character, and staying there, but it was much more light, and some characters were engineered to be random and chaotic. Or maybe it was just the players. It would be a very different game with just having different players. The game was pitched as a storytelling game, and so I was expecting more storytelling, but most of the time was spent in random conversations which led to some very amusing in game jokes. I did at one point spin off a pretty fair tale off the top of my head, and one of the other characters did a really cool thing like that too. Some of the others had some prepared material that went over well. All in all a really good game, but I would have preferred people to be more serious. Regardless, I recommend it to any and everyone, unless you need to have tons of plot driving your character. Mental note, get an LED marquee, and some shower rods and curtains for pipe and drape.
Saturday night
Saturday night was a very rewarding time socially. I went by the con suite for a little while, where JD had a very, very nice bottle of port, and he was generous with it. Will have to remember it in the future. And then I went over to the MITers room, (who included Eddy and Aerynne and some others too) and sat around and chatted with them all and with Rigel’s brother, who did a fantastic job playing a ferret back in Petshop. I went to bed very, very late, but happy.
Sunday
Got up earlyish on Sunday to enjoy breakfast, then went and rested and packed and stuff. Was out of the room by 11:30, and had everything in the car. Then I went to closing ceremonies, where I bought another 10 raffle tickets. I like intercon, and I like to support intercon, and one of the ways I can do that is by giving them money in the form of raffle ticket sales. Remember this. Closing ceremonies consists mostly of plugs for other LARP events, interpersed with the awarding of raffle prizes. Intercon D had a fantastic plug. So did many other events, mostly in the Maryland and VA region. On the upside, the raffle went really well for me. After winning thre prizes, almost all in a row, they started chanting for it not to be me. And I remember at one point Paul (drawng the tickets out) said “If this is… again….” and it was. Here’s what I ended up winning, as best as I can remember: Rulebook for Cthulu Live and Shub-Megawrath stories, which I am trading to Mr. Teem for Mary Celeste stuff instead. Two Mageknight promo fiures. Rulebook for Soap: the Soap Opera RPG. Free admission to Lollagazebo in november. Deck of cards for a chess-type game. And a 2lb bag of peanuts that were leftover from the Circus larp. I think that was it.
Trey and Paul and company did a great job with this (Trey has been a friend of mine for years, so it was nice to see it went so well for her) and I have a T-shirt on order, hopefully it will arrive soon. Then me and natb and gruyere loaded up into the car. I brought hte two of them to the train station so they could go back to NY. I headed up so I could try to get to CT for father’s day, and then back to the waiting arms of Asdr83. I skipped the dead dog, which everyone tells me I shouldn’t have, but I had other things to do. Unfortunately, traffic on the way back wasn’t much better than on the way down, so I had to take a rain check (hah! rain…) on Father’s day and head up to MA. Despite the extreme sleep deprivation, I had tons of fun, and will definitely go to the next gazebo Intercon in 2005.
Meanwhile, Intercon D is already shaping up to be one of the best Intercons I have ever seen, if not the best. You should all go and sign up for it right now, if you aren’t already. Games are filling fast, but there are still plenty of options.
http://www.intercon-d.org
