Just check out their reasons.  They think D&D promotes gambling amongst other things.  I feel discriminated against.

Me:  “You all find yourselves in the forest near your village.   The town has been over run by orcs.  Your parents have told you to run as fast as you can to the forest to hide.   You haven’t seen them since and as far as you know the Orcs have burned down your house.  You are there with a few other kids from your village and you are all hiding in the forest.”

Cameron: “What’s an orc?”

Me:  “They are humanoids, tall, scary looking with tusks and such… and they have been burning down your village.”  I show them a picture of an orc from the players hand book.  They all look eagerly.  I ask, “What are you doing?”

Victoria:  “Ahh… I cast … hmmm.. I send my owl to go up and fly around …”

Me:  Your owl flies around and catches a rabbit.  The young paladin with you looks very worried, “I want to find out what has happened to my family, tell your owl to look at the village and see if they can see my house.”

Cameron:  What’s a Paladin?

Me:  He’s a young warrior and a friend you know from church.   He’s got a very nice sword and is hiding with you, his name is Adrian.

Cameron: Is Nicolas there?

Me:  Yes, Taco Fingers is there.  He’s hiding along with you.  (Everyone snickers.  When Nicolas lost interest, his character was christened “Taco Fingers” by his siblings.  I went with it.)

Ok, so we go on with this little adventure for a bit and I finally corral them to exploring the town and looking for what had happened to the parents, and where the orcs have taken them.  They figure out how to cast magic and do things very quickly.  I was amazed how quickly too.  I’ve seen 30 year olds struggle to grasp flinging dice after many weeks of playing and these kids caught on to even the most complicated rules like it was nothing.  Little sponges of wisdom they are…

Finally, they find their parents.  They are held in a pen with all the other village folk and are tied up.  The orcs have a couple of guards and the rest have gone to sleep.  Now’s their chance….

Victoria:  Ok, I’m going to sneek in and try to untie my parents!

Me:  Ok, roll to see if you can do that silently.  (She fails!)  Aoo… the orcs catch you and you are now tied up along with your parents!

So, there we were, orcs everywhere, and Victoria captured.  Oh no!   Victoria manages to cast a noise cantrip that manages to get the orc guards distracted enough for Cameron and his npc friends ambush the orc guards in the forest and they soon leap in there trying to untie everyone else.  After a bit of combat, they go out and stab the sleeping orcs.  Coup de gras all around!

The village is saved.  They are heroes and now level 2!  You never see kids that excited over a video game. 

I did this year get a bit of a chance to see much of the costumes before the contest.  I admit I ADD’d out of the improv fan comedy light bulb joke session and didn’t see the actual cosplay, but I did get a chance to see a few of the players standing out in the hall and this year’s selection was very good.  (pictures pending)

I did run that GURPS game in one of the board rooms.  It did turn out very well and they did give me a lot of good RP, I don’t think we had as much action as I wanted.  I still have the characters and I may run a continuation of the game next year as per request.  By then, I will have my rules down better and I won’t be looking stuff up as much.  GURPS is a very easy system and I can fudge a lot if I have to.  lol  The system lacks a good ship battle system so what I did was played the ships like they were battletech mecs with lots of guns and armor and just described movement.   It was fairly easy.  Next time I may bring the hex grid and get serious on ships battles.  That was the best part of the game.  I do need mini ships for this don’t I.  hmm.

Parties.  Lots of parties.  I lent my room out for the Wholigans Dr. Who party both nights.   I think we had most the alcohal on the floor this time around.  Our party could have had a few more signs, but we did have a OMG amount of beer and other things.  We even got one of my gamer friends completely smashed who doens’t usually do that sort of thing as he repeatedly told us over and over again. lol  We had to help him back to his room, gawd he was gone.  lol  I think the highlight of our party was the “Empress Dalek” costume.  I’ve got a bunch of pictures of that and as usual, pictures pending. Next year, we need to top that guy who brought the cello, maybe a whole chamber orchestra lol.

I got the rest of the week filled with laundry, and cleaning, maybe a bit of maintainance, and family diplomacy to work out.  I hope to get at least a little sleep before the con, but that doesn’t look likely.  I certainly am not getting sleep while I’m there.  My room will be taken over by the Space City Timelords for parties on Friday and Saturday night.  Gawdz, what have I gotten myself into?

It’s an awesome feed about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. It’s done in real time, that is, it’s the testing and the prep before the launch as it happened 40 years ago. It’s been fun to follow.

Thinking of Apollo… namely ApolloCon, don’t forget it’s next weekend and we will be there running the movie room.  I’ll also be involved with the Space City Time Lords and throwing a party in my room.  Don’t know what night it will be yet, but it will be announced at the con, if not here first.

I also am going to try and run a GURPS game on Saturday afternoon.  Probably around 12 noon or so.  It should be on the schedule at the con or up on the webpage soon.

Anyway.  No game tonight, it was determined after a few cryptic email and text conversations with parties involved.  (I did mention addled brain syndrom?)  Right.  Ok.  Too bad, I’m really starting to get into it.  GM’ng isn’t so bad when I get over the performance anxiety.  I’ve certainly done enough research to write a book on the subject of mid nineteenth century Steampunk Texas.  Who needs to make up stuff when there were plenty of real life crazy going on there at that time.  Lots of nice politics, war and various conflict and scam going on for a lifetime of gaming in that era in this part of the world.   I think I could carry on this game for 3 times longer than Texas was a Republic and never run out of adventure nor have to actually make anything up.   lol  Just add silly steam tech and instant game fodder.  Now if I can only get comfy with GURPS rules.

In other games featured at Owlcon, I played a rather mediocre Cyberpunk game with a GM who insisted on his players generating characters, my worst pet peeve concerning gaming conventions.  Never do this folx, it makes the GM look like an amateur and takes valuable hours away from getting to the business of killing things. In 5 hour slots, this is very annoying to those of us who come to these things to role dice and figuratively blast stuff.  I should make a note of all GM’s who have done this to me and make sure I don’t pick their games next year.

The Shadowrun game I got into was much better organized.  In fact the GM was almost obsessively organized.  It was a great gaming experience and I’d game with her any day.

I have to admit they had nice t-shirts.  The panel I went to had an audience of at first just two of us.  However, a few other people later showed up and we maybe had 5 in the room.  The whole con was like that on Friday night.

I missed the day portion of Saturday.  We were taking our final exam at the Elissa on Saturday so I had to be there.  I did rather well on the test which was doing great since I had skipped out on the study group the night before.   When I got there, I managed to make the only LARP that happened to make it that weekend.  It was a weird combination of Steampunk, Changling and Furry and me and one of my Amtgard friends managed to pretty much take over in the RP.  I guess that’s what happens when you take a bunch of 20 something LARPers and throw in a couple of 40 something old Amtgard geeks into the mix.  Give us some rather ambiguous rules and loads of magic to play with and we will run amok.  I look back at it and I think that we would have been successful in killing the fairy ice queen if we only thought of taking the statue we had turned her into and thrown it into an iron box so her fay friends wouldn’t have been able to rescue here … then we would have been able to throw her into the sea without too much interference.  Oh well, hind sight is 20/20.

I had planned to be at Stormwall on Sunday, but as luck would have it, power issues returned to the boat.  However, this time, we isolated what was causing it all this time.  It was dirty power.  The power grid at the marina has been pretty spotty since Ike and we discovered when we were fixing my burnt out wires at the inverter that the power input from the marina was only 99 volts instead of 110 and the current was almost non existent.  This is probably why I’ve been having so many problems lately.  Fortunately, the Harbormaster was around to fix the power connection so all is good now.

Imbolc was great.  I love Buescher State Park.  I even got to meet and chat and hang out with Isaac Bonewitz.

In other things, check this out: 7 ways to spot bogus science.