Stormbringer #21

Ran Stormbringer on Saturday, as I do every two weeks.

It was another town-based adventure, and unlike the last one I felt like it dragged a bit. There was heavy use of the new Whimsy/StoryPath cards. I kinda felt like it was constantly spinning the game off into weird directions, though I think I managed to control it sufficiently to spin a cohesive narrative.

Part of the reason I felt like it dragged was that there was lots of not-paying-attention going on, but with this group that could as easily have been the group as the adventure. I dunno.

In any case the players fended off several assaults, realized that they might be being played as pawns, tracked down their new nemesis Nigel the traitor (in the sewers, while fighting undead crocodiles, oh yeah), and learned of a plot to assassinate the new cardinal of the Church of Goldar.

Which they might do nothing about because they don't like him. (I figured it'd be a moral dilemma, which I adored while running Pendragon and Ars Magica in the past, but haven't pushed much in Stormbringer. Apparently, somewhat less of a dilemma than I'd expected.)

I'm thinking of wrapping up things at #24 or #25, then running something else, for at least a while. That'd require a climatic conclusion to the whole undead Pan Tangian necromancer plot. If so I need to figure out how to finish that off, after the assassination attempt is dealt with (or ignored) in two weeks' time.

They'll be sorry if they ignore it.

Par, Greg, Busy Monday

I had a very busy Monday. Today I'm happy to just be sitting at my desk, plodding through some standard emails, replies, ads, and other miscellanea that I couldn't get through yesterday!

Par is in town, and so Christopher and I had lunch with him. Par choose Chester's for lunch, which was our old lunch-time hangout right by the old Skotos house in North Berkeley. I hadn't been up there in, literally, years, which is pretty amazing. I mean it used to be that I not only worked up there, at the Skotos house, but Kimberly & I also lived up there for a year, from 1999-2000, so that was really my stomping grounds for a while.

Chester's is a little fancier than it used to be, with a lot less art on the walls, and some of the same staff. I was surprised, because when Christopher first called me up to tell me the lunch location, my immediate response was, "They're still in business??" Chester's was always very busy for weekend brunches, but their location is pretty bad, and so they never seemed to prosper beyond that. When we moved out of the old Skotos house they were trying to stay open for dinner, but in a really half-assed way, where they'd close if no one showed up soon enough, and it seemed to me that they were on a path to destruction. There's little that a company can do to endager itself more than to have unreliable hours of operation.

But they're still there. I had most excellent English muffin, bacon, egg, and potatoes.

Afterward I walked with Par downtown, and had a good talk. He has a very long stride and walks very fast. Now, I'm a walker, and I could keep up with him, but a bit after I got home I realized I was sore from the walk. Still am, a little bit.

Before we got downtime, actually, we circled around our old block, and checked out the new gourmet food court, where the always-empty TV store used to be. It's very upscale. There's a beautiful garden area in the back, in what used to be an ugly parking lot that we could see from both the old Skotos house & the old Alacrity office. And, amazingly, there's a gate in the back wall straight into the old Skotos parking lot. I assume the food court must have bought or rented the old Skotos parking lot for its staff to park in. Very weird.

The work day was a busy blur, because I had a contract that took me all day to put together. I was working right up till 6pm, when I had some guests arriving.

The guests were Greg and a game designer named Steve. We were trying out a new game that he'd put together, and I think it worked pretty well. Before the game Greg I shot the breeze a bit, which Steve was most kind about. He asked about my statement that there wasn't a Pendragon Second Edition (which he'd read on the RPGnet index), and after we talked about it a bit, he agreed that I was probably right, and it'd fallen through the cracks when Chaosium decided to stop using boxes because of the labor costs of collation.

In any case, we tried the game, offered some good comments, and then finally ended somewhere near 11pm. Afterward Kimberly & I watched a bit of TV, and then went to bed.

As I said, a busy day, as I was going from when I went up to an hour before bedtime.

Reviews

I'm doing a final pass on my review for RPGnet for tomorrow, and I realized one of the things I almost always do when I edit a review is take out 75% of the adverbs, which just tend to obscure content by being overly cheery or overly critical.