Culture Victim

Heeheehee. I borrowed Nadesico from Murdock and it's very silly. I like very silly.

"I won't let any of you die! Because if you die, that would mean more funerals, and I will not allow that to happen!"

I also got to a nice, long, relatively cutscene-free section of Xenosaga. So life is good. };)

I had a dream last night, that I suppose wasn't particularly strange. I was in the mall with some family members (not actually members of my real life family) and found the zoids we were looking for on clearance -- the various colored ligers that could be combined to build voltron. 'Dad' (not my real dad, or my stepdad) poo-pood and refused to get them because it was obvious from the shoddy packaging that they were the wrong product. I opened up the package and showed him that all the parts were there, but he was stubborn.

Then the mall was attacked by aliens, and we were all killed. We kept respawning, but we only had the crappy default pistol and were forced to flee. I killed a few of the enemies, but there were too many and I kept getting killed and it wasn't any fun.

So then we hid out inside a large old house in the middle of a grassy field, and the sailor scouts put up wards to keep the enemy from finding all the slayers-in-training who were hiding there, then took us one at a time into a pocket universe to battle monsters and level up.

I got bored waiting, though, so I went out into the field and collected pixie dust from the warded sections of grass, which looked like detailed 'frilly' grass from AC2, but white, with no textures. An old man taunted me with how doomed I was and kept pointing to circling vultures which could be spies for the enemy.

Out to Lunch

We had a little going-away lunch for someone today, and it wasn't until we got there that I heard that he'd apparently been fired because he was unpopular. I found that strange, since he'd always seemed popular with everyone I talked to, but they clarified that they meant 'unpopular with his superiors'. Which I find not at all hard to believe. No one would actually go into details, though.

At least he already had a new job.

The testers (these guys were all testers; I usually eat lunch with the testers when I eat it with anyone at all) mentioned that there seemed to be a really high turnover rate in the department lately, and I passed on the rumor about it being a company-wide push to fire people, because it's always more fun to be doomed, whether or not it's true.

The restaurant was a japanese place run by a korean, so of course I ordered curry. It looked and tasted like it came out of a can. The showoff on the Atkins diet had *two* teriyaki burritos. Yes, he's losing weight.

Don't touch it! It's evil!

Tonight went really well until the players touched the wrong trap, and everybody died. Well, not EVERYBODY. But enough people that they had to flee from the main planned encounter and run right into stuff I had vaguely sketched out ('it'll be this module...') but wasn't really ready for. Plus, people were dead and couldn't be replaced for a while.

Abbey was phoning it in (literally at first, but then over netmeeting) which was remarkably non-disruptive. At least compared to the rest of the fiasco.

( game summary )

The dead players were not at all happy to be dead, and they're making new characters with standard races instead of anything with ECL, just to get higher level spells or (in the case of Erelthrae's player) into a prestige class right off.

I probably should have looked more closely at the potential dire consequences of trapping the party in a steel cage with a celestial dire bear whose damage resistance they couldn't get through... although to be fair, that was a +3 mace that harmed the cleric. Of disruption. The shield was +5 equivalent as well.

I did the vault basically as a 'dungeon in a box', and it worked okay, except for the whole 'trapped in a steel cage with a celestial dire bear and nowhere to run' bit.