Hello, blog. Miss me?

It’s late at night and I feel like writing. Not posting a link on Facebook. Not tweeting the twit-erers. Something that takes more than 140 characters to type and a sip of coffee to read.

I feel like waxing nostalgic. I remember visiting the campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville as a high school student. Two classmates and I rented a billiards table. As I chalked my cue, the soothing strains of music from the band Chicago blared from a jukebox. Why did this moment mean so much to me? Because I was excited.

Thoughts of the future were racing through my brain. What would college be like? What would I learn? What kind of opportunities would that open up? What would I create? How would I make my mark on a world seems to consciously avoid changes? There was no fear in those thoughts, only awe and wonder.

So I had my college experience. I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science. Now it’s been a decade since my shadow has darkened the hallways of a college campus as a student. Where is the awe and wonder? I can’t help but think if my present self traveled back in time to meet myself at that billiards table if he, er I, would be impressed. Have I lived my life with drive and purpose? Or, have I been too cautious and lacked ambition? Could I have taken more risks? Could I have made few mistakes?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suffering from regret. Well, America, it’s like this. The only thing that strikes me with awe as of late is the stupidity of our elected politicians. There have been changes in the system. Our country is in the process of getting turned upside down and inside out by nimwits. But I have faith that America can’t be held back for long. I wonder that if my future self came back today would he tell me how I helped elect some folks who made things right again. I wonder.

This past weekend I attended DieCon 9 in Collinsville IL. I ran a game of Stone Age for the Atomic Squash gamer group.

The setting for this year’s Spycraft LARP was a disco in a divided Berlin in 1972. I also wrote a character, a Polish businessman who would black out and lapse into a psychopathic rage.  We had about a dozen players turn out. Due to a shortage of female players, I took the role of a lady photographer for the Rolling Stone magazine. Rick R was absolutely entertaining as Andy Warhol! Amy S played a bartender who “dosed” quite a few patrons.

It was great to see friends: Tom W, the Imbodens, Amy, Cuban, Joe, Jason W, Adam, Rick R, Ron and Jason A. Good times!

A meme from Facebook..

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. Please play along!

1. I don’t usually participate in these things. I’m going to respond but not tag anybody new.
2. I wrote three live action role playing (LARP) games: Kobolds on a Plane, Black Tie Affair and Tabriz School of Magic.
3. My high school mascot was the Orphans.
4. I have a twin brother.
5. I have two computers and two laptops.
6. Growing up we did not have a television in my house.
7. I play the guitar but need more practice.
8. In video games I collect the shiny things.
9. I like the sounds that trains make.
10. I taught myself to play chess when I was eight.
11. I like toast without jelly and butter.
12. I hate needles.
13. I want to visit Europe, maybe parts of Ireland that were once divided as recently as 20 years ago.
14. I want to learn another foreign language, maybe Russian.
15. Televised baseball puts me to sleep.
16. I used to sing in a choir.
17. I work on my social skills.
18. Beets make me sick.
19. I think global warming is a hoax designed to prey on our fears.
20. I like Mary Ann but when I was younger I was seduced by Ginger’s shiny dress.
21. I don’t have any tattoos or piercings. Why mess with perfection?
22. I was in a church play in high school, the beginning and end of my acting career.
23. I have learned to walk around my house without the lights on.
24. In the summer between high school and college I taught nature classes at a Boy Scout camp.
25. I am a Christian who once thought the little fish that folks stick on their cars meant they bought it from a Christian car dealer.

When my brother Kevin and I were in high school he wrote a simple game in Commodore BASIC he called Mines of Minos. In it a miner had to move around mines in order to escape a cave. This past week I wrote a version in Java using the Slick 2D library.

This is a gift for Kevin. You will need a recent version of Java to run it.

Click on an image for a larger version.

For the first time in over a year I made it out to an Atomic Squash game night at Heroic Adventures. I had fun playing Gloom, Let’s Kill (that game has issues), Patrician and Stone Age (my new fave). It was nice to meet new folks and see the regular crew.

I took some pictures. Unfortunately the ISO setting I selected on my digital camera washed out most of the images. Ah well, I uploaded copies of them to my Flickr account.

Click on a picture for a link to a larger version.

I was organizing my gaming stuff today. So far I have written three games: one Spycraft LARP and two Kobolds Ate My Baby LARPs. At Archon this year we discussed what the next Spycraft game will involve. I am going to join Jason and Ron, a talented writer who writes for the SLUGS Vampire LARP, in putting together a game set in the late 70s, arguably the golden age of spy movies. This gives us a lot of material from which to draw.

As I thought about what the next game might be like. I wondered if I would be onboard to write a third, a fourth or more. I recalled the conversation I had with David Collins at GenCon. He has written dozens of LARPs using his Courting Murder rules system. He told me that he usually writes five or six games in a setting before he moves on to another one. This made me realize that perhaps there is such a thing as a creative limit. This may explain why some of our favorite shows jump the shark in dramatic fashion. I loved the X-Files but, friends, the latter seasons were never as great as those that preceded them. I want to believe that I can realize this in my work before it happens.

Every game I write I like to challenge myself to introduce conflict in new and fresh ways. The conflict can take many forms: character vs character, character vs environment and even character vs herself. For “The Black Tie Affair” we used a dysfunctional family. All of the family members were at odds. The father was missing and probably dead. The mother put out a hit on her son. The son was a dope fiend with no love for his mother. For “Kobolds on a Plane” the clan leader was dead and two different Kobolds wanted to claim his spot. In “Tabriz School of Magick” there were two houses with many rivalries between them. Of course, sometimes the players take the conflicts and turn them on their ear. The player who played the mother in “The Black Tie Affair” decided to cancel the hit and reconcile with her son. I’m okay with that. After all the game is for the players and we should never make them a slave to the story.

Me at Archon 32

This past weekend was Archon 32. I started Friday afternoon by making a trip to Office Depot to pick up name badges, folders and sheet protectors for the materials of the Kobolds Ate My Baby LARP. I arrived at Archon where I ran into a bunch of old friends and signed up for games with my buddy Jim.

We headed out to dinner at Applebees. There he filled me in on the latest goings-on in the world of politics. I must admit that I had been busy with convention prep and didn’t spend enough time to understand the details of the recently signed $700 billion “emergency” financial market bailout bill. Jim told me that it felt like a stealth tax to subsidize mortgages for poor folks and to profit politicians. I agreed with him thatsome of the fundamental problems still exist even after the massive give-away.

After dinner I joined Jason’s Circus Imperium game. We were joined by a group from Ohio. We teased two of the girls from Ohio by calling one of them the “nice” one and the other the “mean” one. Both played the game enthusiastically and were amusing.

Jason has a room party that night. His was the only party that night. Once he told folks that he wasn’t giving away free alcohol, the foot traffic to the room died down. I played a little Rock Band and a dice game. I left around 1 AM to go home to print out all of the materials for the Saturday morning game.

The Kobolds LARP started at 10 AM Saturday morning. I was surprised that we sold out all of the slots for 15 players. I was even more surprised that all of them showed up. In 2006 we had a number of no-shows. I had writing help this year. Jason and Adam contributed a number of ideas I tried to incorporate into the game.

The LARP was set in a school of magic. The players were divided into two houses with three of the players having no house alignment at all. Each house had six players. During the writing process I drew influence from chess pieces. I realized that there are six different types of pieces: pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, kings and queens. So I spent some time thinking about high school archetypes and how they might correspond to chess pieces. For example I wrote a bureaucrat that corresponded to a pawn and a class president that corresponded to a queen.

Jim’s two oldest boys joined the game. They are grade schoolers with little gaming experience. So I made with House Elfs. Their goal was to help their school house, much like a brownie or a billiken.

We ran three different contests for the House cup competition. The first was to write a drinking song. Since Adam decided to sleep in, we drafted one of the house elves to help judge. In a stroke of hilarity one of the players bribed him with a dollar bill to vote for his house.

The second contest was a competition called Snatch the Troll’s Stash. We lifted ideas from the game Devil Bunny Needs a Ham. We laid out a grid on the floor using paper plates. We marked off a line using masking tape. The goal was to go from one end to the other on the plates. They draw cards for movements. If they drew a King or an Ace, then the Kobold that was furthest along was moved back to the beginning. Unless, of course, they were past the marked line in which case they drew against the Troll Cave Horrible Death Chart to determine their fate.

The last contest was Headditch. In our last brainstorming session Jason got the idea to set it up like fuss ball. We laid down six parallel strips of masking tape on the floor. Players had to stay on their strip of tape. We gave them sticks with nets on the end. We pulled the head off of a Kewpie doll and used that as the ball. The players moved the head to the end of the room to their goal to score a point. We did some improvisation, but it worked out.

Next I played a game of Living Greyhawk using Dungeon and Dragons 3.5 rules. The players were cool but the game was kind of a bummer. It ended by having us watch a village burn to the ground.

I headed to White Castle with Jim to pick up some carry-out. I wanted to make a 7:30 PM Arkham Horror game so we got the order to go. On the walk back to the convention hotel a mini-van pulled out of a parking lot. We thought the driver was slowing for us. Jim started crossing in front of him. But he lurched forward. Jim quickly ran out of his path. Then the van swerved toward me! I put a death grip on our sack of Slyders and spun around to deflect most of the force of the speeding van. Only then did the driver decide to stop. He opened his door and asked if we were okay. We were shocked but fine. The only damage was that the chicken rings that were sitting on the top of the sack were not strewn all over the ground. Ah well, another Archon, another White Castle adventure.

Will ran a game of Red Dragon Inn. It was a fun casual game and a nice change of pace from the inexplicably short Arkham Horror game.

Then, somebody started a game of Werewolves of Millers Hollow. This game requires eight players. So Archon is about the only place I get to play it. The game started with around 12 players. A couple of tables were added and the number of players expanded to somewhere around 30. I snapped some pictures with my cell phone camera and uploaded them to my Flickr account.

I didn’t make it home until around 5 AM on Sunday. I was exhausted and slept most of the day. So, this year was another great Archon. I met some new friends and spent some time with old friends. We are already talking about plans for next year’s Archon and discussing writing games for next year’s Die Con.