elanya

Okay, here is my happy update for you folks, about my weekend, I hope you appreciate it :o

First of all, I must say, Wales was gorgeous. The gaming was taking place in Bangor, and we stayed in Llududno (or, something like that anyway. I'm pretty sure I got in all the correct syllables). It has lots of mountains, more sheep than you can shake a stick at (or, er, anything else... this is Wales after all, the butt of many sheep jokes, pun intended!), and a castle for about every 100 sheep or so :D And it is on the ocean, or at least it was where we were. Mmm... ocean. All the signs were in both English and Welsh, in no regular order... sometimes Welsh on top, sometimes on the bottom, and it was the first time I'd ever seen a 'warning, badgers crossing' sigh ^-^.

The university was nice too. The first night, we arrived in Bangor around 9 or 10 (I didn't have a watch) to get registered. We met up with the rest of the Sheffield group, and then went back to Lllllll(etc)dno for food. We were staying at one of our member's houses. She grew up in Llllll...dno. Her mother hads a house there that used to be an 8 bedroom guesthouse. We managed to all squeeze in, some people on mattresses or the floor. I managed to snag a room wth a double bed and a sink all to myself, by virtue of not being excessively polite. ("I'm taking this room. Unless someone else desperately wants it." * Nervous quiet glances from English people. "Good." :D). I sat up reading for, well, a long time, because, well, I'm nocturnal. Having only woken up around 2, I couldn't go to sleep at midnight.

I had to wake up early on Saturday. Ll....dno is about a 45 min drive away from Bangor, and with that many people in the house (somewhere around 12 or 15, all told), a bit of line for bathrooms and breakfast was expected, It actually wasn't too bad, because I did have a sink, to brush teeth, wash face, etc. Then we drove to Bangor, and arrived at the university. We sat around for a while, waiting to be sorted into our categories. I had signed up fro Open Systemless, not really knowing what to expect. The concept of competitive gaming was very foreign to me, too, but it was explained to me like this:

The nationals started out as a wargaming competition. Wargaming is naturally competitive, what with making armies to try and crush each other and so on. When roleplaying started out, it was kind of peripheral to this, but since the same people tended to participate in the same hobbies (especially in the early days of roleplaying), the latter was tacked on to the competition. Then it kept growing.... and so on, Really, it is just seen as a special kind of convention for which you can sometimes get university funding. The other thing about the nationals is that whichever university wins get/has to host it the next year. So no one really wants to win ;D We were specifically instructed not to, even, hee!

We played through one scenario each day, with a different GM for each of them. The first one was probably my favourite. It was a supernatural murder mystery set in Louisiana. I played Henri Vert, the foreman of the slave plantation where it was taking place. I had been fired by the neighbours because the heiress thought me to be cruel, while in reality, I just felt that life was hard for everyone and everyone should be able to cope. I wasn't even racist, though I didn't like the heathen practices of the slaves. I was surly, too, yay! The owner of the plantation had hired me because he wanted someone to be cruel to his slaves (he was a racist, and general dirty-pants-rat-bastard by the name of Jean-Pierre Lefevre.) He was disappointed and pissy because I wasn't. And that was my character background in a nutshell. Other characters were: The 19 year old heiress and her auntie who had fired me, Lefevre's semi-estranged playboy son Etienne, a musician hired by Lefevre to teach his wife piano, and Issac Pierre, a free black doctor. The premise was that Lefevre was dying, and he had called us to his deathbed, to ask our forgiveness. We were asked to stay until he died, for the will reading. Only then, the lawyer was killed... :o I won't go into the details of everything, but I will say voodoo was involved. Of course it was voodoo! Lefevre was terrified of dying, and turned to voodoo to try and achieve immortality. He'd separated his spirit from his body, and went around possessing us and making us do bad things. He wanted one of us to get framed for his murder, so before he died, he'd called up a police inspector from New Orleans, who was a general thorn in our sides. The heiress turned out to be into voodoo herself, and quite a stubborn girl. She got locked in her room quite a few times :D In the end, we won, because another voodoo priestess who he had killed possessed one his son, and then he possessed me (initially), and they fought. The bad guy jumped out of me into the person who had a gun, and both people were eventually killed.

The group I was playing with was really good, we just clicked excellently. There was one guy who was a bit quiet, one who was a bit silly, plus a cute Scotsman who was very good at roleplaying (I think he was married, though, and well, I've already got a cute boy who is good at gaming. He doesn't have an accent, though ;), and another two guys who were really nice and pretty decent at gaming as well :)

After that day, I wound up going to eat with Jackie, a girl I know from medieval society. She's a bit flaky and annoying, really, but tolerable, and there was no one else around. She was staying with people in town, and we went to her friend's place to consume takeaway pizza and play with the (kawaii!) hamsters. Her friend called a couple other friends to go and crash the disco (that's why they call organized dances... no actual 70's music or Travolta-pointing involved ;) They were going to go to a pub first, and then to the dance, but I begged off the smoky Welsh pub, got directions from Jackie, and failed to follow them exactly. Bangor is pretty. It has a Marina, and a pier. I saw both. Then I retraced my steps, figures out where I wanted to be, and went to the dance. I think I have a thing for wandering around strange cities at night by myself. Safe? Wise? Probably not, but I've yet to have any problems :o I was exhausted when I got to the dance, and they were initially playing crappy music, but by the time I had inhaled enough caffeine to keep me going, a better DJ was on, and I had loads of fun. I'm still incredibly sore to prove it, too :)

I had a shower last night to save me time in the morning, and realized I hadn't brought my pantene... There was shampoo in the shower I could use, but no conditioner. Those of you who have seen my hair can understand how scary this was. I brushed and braided it afterwards, and haven't taken it out yet. I also left my moisturizer at Sarah's :/

Sunday, I was more than exhausted, bit there was a much lighter scenario to play out. We were playing bunnies and borough, basically, only no official system. The way the 'systemless' stuff was run, basically, if the GM didn't want to just arbitrarily decide something, you'd roll percentile dice, and high was bad. It worked quite well, really, and there was much roleplaying. Anyway, bunnies. This was actually a sequel to a scenario that had been run some years before, where the bunnies had had to move their warren. I was Dreamer, who was, well, a dreamer and a seer bunny. I had been having visions of men coming and flattening the warren, and whatnot. I didn't want to tell anyone, though, because I didn't want to move again, and ruin things for everyone. I was looking for a wise old bunny, but I never did find her, and wound up confiding in a friend of mine (Oakapple, the matronly one) instead. Other bunnies included: Bruiser (self-explanatory, really ;) Acrobat (Young, trying to impress me... it was spring), Nettle( clever with man-things, but very very annoying!), and Aristotle (The wise one... he was trying to understand the symbols that men make on paper and wood ;). We were sent by our king to explore the area, which I used to try and find the bunny I was seeking. We found out a house was going to be built on the warren site for the daughter of the local lord (not in those terms, but I'm running out of steam!) What we wound up doing was taking all their surveying posts, and setting them up somewhere else. We also managed to steal a shotgun (bang stick!) and some cartridge, which we figured out how to use, and set up to be abel to scare them off :D. It was really only a temporary fix though. But the girl who the house was being built for really likes bunnies, so after one more move, we were settled for good.

It didn't take very long at all for the results to come back in from all the games. I didn't win anything, but the cute Scottish guy (Chris, I think?) came second in our category. Well deserved, I think. He played the black doctor in the first game, and Aristotle in the second. Sarah won second in her category (AD&D), apparently for the second year in a row. Shefffield came fourth over all, I think, and we were pretty pleased with that. I think we did the best in the wargames catgories, though.

After that, we set off home, and I slept pretty much the whole way. And here I am. I did laundry after I got homr, and went on the net. And I now realize that I forgot to take my laundry out of the dryer before the laundry room closed for the night, and I won't be able to get it until morning. And if I don't get it in the morning, I might lose some stuff when someone else takes it out of the dryer. And I was really looking forward to sleeping in 'til 3 :( Ahh well, I'm Gaming again now, in IRC, and I may even still be up at 7, who knows?

That's all for now!