Felina

Felina passed away last night.

I'd like to say in her sleep but I suspect she was awake. She'd been very ill lately because of an ear infection that kept becoming more and more complicated, until she simply gave up.

She will be missed.

The con

I spent last weekend at Gaelcon, which was being run by Andrew, a friend of mine. It was the first con he'd ever run and I have to say he did a fantastic job on it. This one went up to 11!  I didn't actually play that many games, only three if I include the left for dead tournament, but those I did play were a great deal of fun.

I did run a game written by Ian, which I had helped play test for him, set in the discworld. Its worth pointing out that it's the first game he's ever written, and it came together brilliantly. So brilliantly in fact that he won the best game award (You should have seen his face). 

I won something as well :)

Apparently being a paranoid devious bastard helps you roleplay better when anyone could be your enemy.

The auction was good fun, especially the start when they surprise awarded a charity with €10,000. The representative was nearly in tears, heart strings were being tugged. We bought a nintendo 64 and some D&D stuff by Keith Baker, all told €200. Played the 64 last night. God those graphics are awful. I think I'll go play it again now though :) .

Exam madness

Well I've had an interesting day today. It was my end of year exam this morning, 10:o'clock to be exact, so I headed off to the Marino institute (The one that isn't actually in Marino) as usual to take the exam. I started to get suspicious when no other students, or even exam officials were there by 9:30, so I double checked at the desk. 

Long story short, I was in the wrong place, I should have be in UCD sports hall, which is very far away from the Marino institute. The opposite side of the city actually. So I sprinted out of there and grabbed the first cab I saw and got to UCD sports center.

Fun fact: there are two UCD sports centers, one of which is in Blackrock. Can you guess which one I went too and which one I should have gone too. Back into a taxi I go. At this point I'm already 20 minutes late for the exam, so I'm worried about not being let in. Eventually I get to the second sports center, half an hour late now, and have to spend a further 10 minutes looking for the exam hall, which turns out to be cunningly hidden behind the cafeteria.

Thankfully they let me in to the exam hall without any trouble what so ever, and the exam went reasonably well so all in all the insanity turned out okay. Looking for the Blackrock dart station was fun too. For such a big building its damn hard to find.

City chase

Well I just finished taking part one of the events ever. Me and Les spent about 5 hours running around Dublin solving clues and completing challenges (although they weren't all that challenging!). Strangely the two most fun ones involved large inflatable balls, strangeness.

The (new) World of Dorkness

I like this system/setting compared to the previous one. One of the best (in my opinion) changes is the removal of absolute truths from the mythologies in general. In previous books any mythology presented was treated as absolute truth, and therefore most players took it at face value. Now its presented as it should be, as an actual mythology, not belived by all, containing some symbolism, and even a contradiction or two.

The alternative mythos for each group (werewolf, vampire or whatever) don't even make a pretense of meshing together.

Another issue that was present in the previous WoD was balance between the different creatures/factions you could play. Werewoves ruled close combat utterly at lower xp levels, capable of obliterating entire parties of vampires alone, however once a vampire was around for a while the tables were turned, and don't even get me started on mages. Now, with the changes to mythology and mechanics, a cross over game would be fairly easy to run, since there are no 'built in' reason for any one creature/faction to leave the others alone, And while world spanning quasi societies exist for all the different beings the players can play, they are under no obligation to join any of them.

At leat thats my theory. I'll let you know more when I get around to actually running a cross over campaign.

Bored

I've been working on my project for college for most of today, and now I'm a little burned out, so I've decided to share one of my strange and wonderful pictures with you all.

On a side note I just remembered that I hate putting pictures up on this damn thing, user friendly it is not.

Apartment hunting

Its that time again. Shiv and me have been viewing apartments for the last few days. We have a few criteria beyond the usual roof walls doors and (intact) windows, and many places are meeting almost all of them. None have actually managed to jump that last final hurdle and meet all the requirements, which is weird considering most of them are pretty sensible. So far the worst offender is the lack of a dryer for clothes. In a flat. Seriously how would that work.

One place didn't have a balcony, dryer or hotpress!!! WTF!

We've also decided we hate tiny fridges, and shiv wants somewhere south facing so we have natural light for her plants. Strangely the south facing isn't that hard to come across. We'll be going for a two bedroom place since we have so much stuff, and might convert one of the rooms into a games room, or not, who knows. The two main contenders also have nice big tables for gaming nights, in huge open plan rooms.

We'll be moving in a few weeks. Requests for help may be made, or partys may be planed, so keep your weeksends free.