As I previously mentioned, this last weekend was the 3rd Annual Southeast-Trogland Giant in the Playground Meetup - aka: SET GITP Meetup 2k9. This is our third year hosting playgrounders from all over (which i find to be pretty impressive in itself), and it continues to be awesome.

Our group this year wasn't *quite* as big as last year (there were several who really wanted to, but were unable to make it - and we *did* miss them), but in some ways, the smaller group was better overall.

Here's basically how this all went down:

On friday night around 7pm, we all met up at Thunderdome. This was the "official" start of the festivities, but several people had arrived earlier that day, and we hung out at the Hippie Hut for a while beforehand.

Thunderdome is basically a JC gamer's hangout. They have about 20 networked PC's as well as some consoles hooked to projector screens, and a bunch of board games. They also serve some pretty tasty food. We had told the owner that we were going to be invading on friday night, and he said they'd stay open as long as we wanted, basically... ...so we all had a good time playing video games, board games and card games (and some played a session of Paranoia) till about 3am.

On saturday around 1pm, we all went over to the Greenwood Challenge Course, which as been a meetup locale for all three years. It's a private area with a shelter, an open field area, as well as some high-ropes climbing elements that Robb is certified to administrate. We had a cookout and spent the afternoon playing Kubb and some other games and watching a few climb up about 70ft to 'the wall'.

On saturday night, we all headed to the Mid City Grill for food and more games. Mid City is a great place for this, as it's about the most laid-back restaurant i've ever been to. Oh, and they're also open till well-past stupid-thirty in the morning. Zeb & Alarra taught me and Sheri to play the Ticket to Ride card game, which we'd never had a chance to play before. It's really cool. If past years are any indication, there's a good chance Sheri will get that for her birthday or christmas this year. There were also games of Munchkin Fu, Monty Python Fluxx, Battlestar Galactica and a session of 4e D&D (which was testing encounters for a module written by one of the absent playgrounders). Probably more as well.

Sheri, Ginger and I left the party around midnight, but I'm told festivities continued (in various places) until about 6am. I do wish I'd been able to stay with them a while longer, but we had to get up for church in the morning and honestly, I was pretty tired by that point anyway.

When we returned from Erwin on sunday, our house had been occupied by the remaining playgrounders (some had had to leave earlier). This *was* the plan, but it was still kinda odd to walk into your house to find a bunch of people you'd only met a couple days ago. We played an interesting game of Monster Manual Charades (high recommended, btw ;)), a game of Werewolf (the party/card game, not the whitewolf rpg), and then there was some Ticket to Ride, Arkham Horror and Set.

I need to point out here that, while the Ticket to Ride and Arkham Horror games were going on, I was sorting through some pictures in here on my computer. As it happened, the acoustics in our house were such that I couldn't tell whose voice was coming from where. Also, everyone's voices were at almost the same volume. At one point, I heard the following dialog:

Voice 1: "Ok, I'm going from Raleigh to Pittsburgh"
Voice 2: "So, are you attacking it or what?"

It was... ...a little surreal.

Anyway, people began to head out, but the rest of us hung out and had a great time till all had departed.

It was a great weekend. I miss everyone already and can't wait for next year. About 129 of my best shots from the weekend have been posted in the Gallery (plus the pretty-terrible-but-existent group shot shown here - next year, I think we're going to try to stage this at the challenge course...it should also be noted that the shot is missing a few people).


I feel like I should mention that the weekend *was* marred by one pretty significant black spot: one of the guys ended up in the hospital. I haven't mentioned it on the boards, and I don't want to talk about it here much because other peoples' health concerns are kind of a private thing, but I felt like if I didn't mention it at all, it would sound like I didn't care - and that's completely untrue. I should also point out that this incident isn't directly related to anything going on this weekend - it was just something that happened to happen here. We're all pretty sure everything is going to be ok, but he's going to be there for a couple of days. He's had some visitors from a few of the playgrounders before they left town, and I think he'll have some more from the locals. And of course we all wish him a speedy recovery... ...and that it didn't completely kill the experience for him.

EDIT: Supagoof has since told us to let people know what happened: basically, he's diabetic and his insulin pump stopped working, causing his blood sugar to skyrocket (like, 600+). We went to hang out with him in the hospital last night. He seems to be doing pretty well and was in fairly good spirits. We were actually there for over 5 hours playing games and talking to pass the time. His brother is flying into town tonight and he'll hopefully be released today. He said he had a great time at the meetup right up until this happened. We hope he comes back next year.


~PS

Friday, June 26th, lunchtime -

Had a great time with the Rosolinas at dinner on wednesday. They're lots of fun - i wish our schedules would let us get together with them more often.

Worked on gaming project a little more, changed some things, hoping to playtest soon.

House clean, Ally had a bath, am eating lunch and finishing up some work.

2009 SET GITP Meet-up is very nearly underway. Some people are already in town, others are heading this way.

More later.

~PS

So I just looked at my calendar for last week, and, apart from work, it's completely empty... ...yet, I feel like I've been very busy somehow.

Apart from the Little Fears session (which was awesome :)) we had at the beginning of this month and the Star Wars game I've joined, we haven't gamed in like two months. Yes, I realize that sounds dumb (ala, "aside from this gaming, I haven't gamed at all"). I guess what I really mean to say is that, due to massive scheduling conflicts, both of my normal, weekend gaming groups have been out of commission for a while. Since April 25th, to be exact.

I'd probably be feeling more severe withdraw symptoms, but I've been using the interim to work on my new gaming system. It's currently composed of about 15 pages of rules and examples plus some prototype character sheets. I also bought about $10 worth of glass pebbles to be used as various markers/tokens for this system. It's pretty much ready to playtest at this point and now that the foundation is laid, I'm about ready to move on to writing some setting stuff. The system itself is designed to be setting-independent, so my options for setting design are pretty much limitless. :)

Once the game reaches Beta (that is, once I've had a chance to playtest it for a few sessions), I intend to post everything in its own little corner of my site. I'm really excited about this thing. Some of you know I've designed systems before, but they've all been very informal and not terribly complete - which is to say, once i started fleshing them out, I abandoned the concepts because they weren't going to work as well as I'd like. This one, on the other hand, has proven to be exactly what I wanted, it has been reasonably well documented and has been developed and tweaked over the course of the last year or more. I feel like it has really solidified - and, most importantly, has remained true to its root philosophies (more on that at a later date).


In other gaming news, I'm still very much looking forward to the Mouse Guard game. I actually got the last issue in the current series (Winter 1152) yesterday, and it's quite good. I previously hadn't thought much about Mouse Guard in a while because, as I said, the group has been unable to meet to play the game and I've been working on other projects. Hopefully (reasonably) soon.


On a different gaming note, over the last week, I've begun and nearly completed the original NES Metroid which I downloaded for my Wii. I even got as far as destroying Mother Brain, but was unable to get out before it exploded (possibly because I thought I had to go back out the way I came in). It's been fun, if occasionally frustrating. After I finally beat it, I think i'll see about getting the SNES Super Metroid.


On a not-at-all-gaming note, The songwriting/music part of my brain has been occasionally bouncing some ideas around as well. I really need to start doing some writing for next year's RPM...


~PS

Sheri, Llama and I took a trip out to North Carolina this weekend to attend our friend Kevin's wedding. It was a nice little ceremony. We're all very happy for them. Stephanie is sweet, and well suited to Kevin in a number of ways. It was good to see him so obviously happy too.

I must confess a bit of mild camera-gear-envy with respect to the photographers' toys. Also, there was a penguin cake at the reception, which was cool.

We got to see some other mutual friends there too - William and Ginger and Mike and Bethany. It's always good to see people we don't get to hang out with much (esp. Ginger who just moved away from us). We spent saturday afternoon and evening hanging out and playing games with Ginger and William. It was a lot of fun - we don't play games as much as we used to.

The car ride was a bit long, and I think Llama was starting to get a little loopy by 2am when we got home, but the trip was successfully completed.

This morning we went to Hopwood Christian Church. We had originally thought we were still going to be in NC this morning and so had arranged for Sheri to have this morning off at our church, but we ended up coming home saturday night and so decided to visit somewhere else. It was nice, actually. Jim Street had a great message about how to bless a fish (heh), and it was probably the most thought-provoking message i've heard in a while - and one that I truly thought embodies the spirit of christianity. We saw the Rosolinas (who we're still trying to have over for dinner sometime) there and also Brian West and his family (who i hadn't had a chance to talk much to in a while). Brian and Danielle invited us over for lunch, and we ended up hanging out and talking for a quite a while.

Brian is trying to get motivated to record some of his songs, and I think this is a great idea. He's been writing for a long time, and he's really into it - but most of his stuff just gets left on the page after it's written and he doesn't have any really good sounding recordings of any of it. We had a lengthy and interesting talk about the technical and artistic aspects of songwriting and recording. I really hope he does something with this. I've even offered to help with the technical stuff which intimidates him a little - not because i'm great, but because i've at least done it before. Maybe it'll get him started.

Tonight we're supposed to have a planning meeting for OotsCon '09. Our crowd this year looks a little smaller and some key people will be missing (and they will be missed), but some *other* people are able to make it this year. Hopefully it will be as successful as it's been the last two years. It's really not about the numbers, it's about the fun - there were only 13 11 of us at the first OotsCon back in '07. Hopefully we'll be able to get our plans ironed out.

My homebrew gaming system has reached Alpha status. I have just a couple more mechanical aspects to iron out, and then the first round of playtesting will begin with whoever i can get to help me out with this. I've discussed the theory of the system at some length with Sheri and Tony, and they both seemed to think it has some potential. It is definitely a bit different in its root philosophy from the games like D&D that we're used to - but I personally think these differences are a *good* thing. At whatever point the system reaches Beta, I'll be posting some more detailed info on it.


~PS

This weekend was Johnson City's annual Blue Plum Festival. Basically, it's a weekend event that takes over downtown JC the first weekend in June. I did, in fact, see some people selling(?) plums, but they were pretty sparse. Mostly it's a bunch of crafts/vendor booths, tons of festival food, and three stages spaced just far enough apart that they don't overlap acoustically (too much).

This was the first year that I would say we've "gone" to the festival. We went and walked around a little a couple years ago, but didn't do or see much - but that was largely ok since it was about 97 degrees. This year, we met up with some friends and enjoyed an afternoon of meandering around together - and I was having a good time taking some pictures. We also met up with some other friends of Robb & Edie's and also with Mahto and some of his buddies so that by the time we had dinner at Mid City, we were a rather sizable group (aside: we still have to get together with Steven for a game of Munchkin).

After our tasty dinner, we went back to a particular stage to see a band called Cutthroat Shamrock. They had been compared by some friends of mine to groups like Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. They are basically an Irish-flavored punk group. I wouldn't say they were amazing, but it was a good show: they all played their instruments well and had good stage presence and personality. About the only "critique" i would give is that most of their songs had the same kind of sound. It was a *good* sound, there just wasn't much variety. Still, i think a couple of friends picked up a couple of their records, and i liked them enough to be interested in hearing some more.

Some pictures of the Blue Plum are up in the Gallery.

(kinda) Speaking of, i'm looking into possibly picking up my music hobby again sometime soon for some song writing (maybe for next year's rpm).

In gaming news: I finally got to continue my Little Fears game from RuchtCon! I love this game, and i've greatly enjoyed coming up with spooky stuff to put in it...though after i've been working on it, I find i'm a little edgy at night. I think I empathize a little too much with the children in the story. Anyway, If you've taken a look at the Gaming page recently, you've seen the novel of a session summary i've written up for it.

Still looking to start up Mouse Guard, but it probably won't happen until next month, due to scheduling.

Also, i'm working on finalizing (finally) the simple mechanics for the homebrew roleplaying system (which still needs a name) that i've been working on for the past...too long.

The 3rd Annual GitP Southeast Trogland meetup is fast approaching. We've had several people cancel on us unfortunately, but we're still expecting a decent crowd and fun times. That'll be 26th-28th of this month.

Played the zombie-killing board game Last Night On Earth for the first time on friday. Despite dying in the first 5 minutes, it was pretty fun. It seems pretty much straight-up die rolling players-vs-zombies though, as, apart from trying to get some 'hero cards' (w/ items or special actions) to play, there really isn't much else you can do - and strategy seems to generally boil down to "do we want to be together, or separate?" Answer: together.
Anyway, post-game thoughts: 1) The Sheriff sucks. Yes, i know he's the only character that gets to start with a gun. You know what? He sucks with that gun. He forgets to load it and, even if he has some, he can't hit the broad side of a zombie. 2) If you are the priest, do whatever you can to get the pitchfork. Yes, I know that doesn't make sense, but the priest can't use guns. I (somehow) killed like 8 zombies with the pitchfork. It felt ridiculous, though awesome. 3) In theory (statistically), it's much easier to kill a zombie with a gun than with something like the pitchfork. In practice: yeah right.

As for the Wii, i'm currently addicted to Excite Truck - a stunt-racing game Rucht gave us for christmas. It has a bunch of unlockable stuff, and it's capable of some pretty impressive crashes. Sheri's kind of good at this game, but mostly she just sucks really, really well.

Wanting to go ride our bikes, but we're waiting for Sheri's ankle (which she hurt a while back) to be (more) fully recovered.

~PS