Well, nothing went quite as I'd expected this weekend. It wasn't a bad weekend. Just not quite what I'd planned.
Friday evening, just as Matt and I had decided to have dinner at Second Street, K.T. called and asked if we'd be willing to come down to Newport News to give her and Kevin a ride to their car, which was in the shop. I didn't want to drive all the way down there just to turn around and come home, so we made plans to go with them to Don Pablo's for dinner.
Matt and I got stuck in crawling traffic on the way to K.T.'s. If I'd thought about it at all, I wouldn't have taken the interstate. I hate being stuck in traffic (especially when Matt's got the leg-bounces - it shakes the whole car and I hate being shaken and jiggled unless its under my own power) so by the time we got there I was in a foul mood. I did invent a couple of new insults while I was at it, though, so maybe that's a plus.
I usually like eating at Don Pablo's. The food is good, the place is fun, and the wait staff are usually pretty good. Well. They've been making some changes. My chicken parilla came on a plate instead of a skillet, and the marinade was making the bottom of the chicken soggy. The refried beans were too spicy for me. And our waitress was horrible. I won't even go into all the ways she and the kitchen screwed up. It was astonishing. One more visit like that and I'm going to have to take them off my list.
Saturday was my game. Now that it's over, I'd like to explain some stuff.
The party is in possession of a ring. It's extremely dangerous, if not downright evil, and they're supposed to be taking it to the university of mages so it can be properly destroyed. Naturally, there's a group of bad guys who want the ring. So I've been putting little distractions in the party's way so that the bad guys chasing them don't get too far behind. Standard tactic.
So I had them run into this village with a missing little girl, and along with all the other stuff wrapped up in there, the little girl turns out to have discovered a cave in the nearby woods where she goes when she wants to be alone. The party took a look at the cave, and in order to give it some flavor, I decided it was part of an underground ruin - an old dwarven mining settlement, abandoned thousands of years ago when the mines dried up, and more or less sealed shut by the natural growth of the caves.
I should've known better. The party decided that the place had been deliberately sealed shut or else maybe abandoned for some important reason, and decided that to protect the villagers, they needed to explore. So I had to throw together a map for an adventure I hadn't been planning on.
Well, okay, that wasn't too hard. I put together a small chart of random monsters, and since they've been whining about their lack of magic items, I threw in a giant spider with a couple of things in its lair. They wondered how the spider had gotten into the room in the first place. Ack.
Then I had a nifty idea. They were taking time off from their mission to explore these ruins. They didn't have a deadline for the mission, so that was okay. But I wanted them to understand that every decision has consequences. The bad guys who had been chasing them caught up, and terrorized and tortured villagers until the little girl agreed to show them where the caves were.
About this time, Kevin's work schedule shifted around and he decided to join the game. Well, heck, how was I going to work him in? He couldn't be in the ruins already, because they were sealed shut. He made things easier by deciding to be from the tribe of people who'd sent the party to destroy the ring. I had their shaman give him the mission of finding them and helping them, and decided he'd catch up just as the bad guys did - because the bad guys were pretty powerful, and I figured the party would welcome some timely backup.
That all went pretty well, and everyone seemed to enjoy that game. But over the next week or so, Kevin convinced K.T. that it was very important that they stop playing around in the ruins and get back to their mission. K.T. agonized over it for a few days, then came up with a solution. But Matt and Mike still wanted to finish exploring these ruins.
So going into Saturday's game, I was assuming there would be half an hour or so of argument between the two groups, and I was prepared - more or less - to handle either outcome. The argument took less than a minute. I guess Kevin wasn't feeling very argumentative. They decided to stay.
Now, my plan was to whip them through the rest of the ruins - there wasn't much more to see anyway - and move them on to the ring-destruction. (I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that there will be some glitches - and some consequences - to having the ring destroyed.)
But they didn't whip through the ruins as fast as I thought, even though I skipped the random monster tables altogether. And when they finished, Matt suggested wrapping up for the night.
No monsters had been killed. No evil-doers vanquished. No innocents rescued. A little treasure found, but that's about it. I was dissatisfied. I'm pretty sure they were dissatisfied.
Of course, Matt and I are going to be out of town a lot in the next few weeks, so the next two sessions of my game are going to be cancelled. Hopefully that will give me the time to put together something more satisfying for the climax of the ring thread. And after that... Well, maybe it's time for a break. Matt wants to run a 7th Sea game, anyway, and Mike has an adventure he'd like to run.
So Sunday we were planning on meeting up with K.T. and Kevin again to go down to Norfolk to see the Cherry Poppin' Daddies in a free outdoor concert. The plans for meeting and getting there had changed at least four times, and by the time we'd arrived at their apartment, I'd pretty much inwardly resigned myself to spending a lot of time driving and walking around Norfolk more or less aimlessly and to missing most of the concert.
Matt had forgotten to eat earlier in the day, so we decided to go to T.G.I. Friday's for dinner before we headed for Norfolk. That was sortof fun, except that the waiter wrote my dinner down wrong, and the kitchen tried to give me a platter of ribs instead of the pork chops I'd ordered. Five minutes after they'd taken it back with apologies, I'd tasted Matt's ribs and thought I should've kept them! About the time Matt had finished his ribs, my pork chops arrived, and they were pretty good. Matt was still hungry, so while I ate, he contemplated dessert.
I got a box for the second pork chop and my leftover potatoes, and about the time everyone else was deciding on a dessert, a girl from the kitchen arrived with a second platter of pork chops for me. I blinked, told her I'd already eaten, and sent her back to the kitchen. About two seconds later, of course, I realized I should've taken the plate and stuffed it all in the box. Oh, well.
By then, we were definitely going to be missing the concert. We decided that it wasn't all that important, ordered dessert, and went back to K.T. and Kevin's to watch Dogma instead. Good movie. I should add it to my wish list.
So, my weekend wasn't actually bad. Just... not what I'd planned on.
This week should be fun. Today I'm taking my dad out to lunch for a belated Father's Day. And Braz, Kris, and Karen are all planning (the last I heard, anyway) on arriving Thursday evening for the advent of the reunion party. I'm taking a half-day off from work Friday to spend time with our friends (and to go to Sam's Club, since Matt and I promised to provide hamburger and hotdog buns for K.T.'s cookout). I'm looking forward to it all!
Word of the Day: protean - able to assume different shapes or roles; displaying great versatility.
Another word I'd already known! I first encountered protean in Glen Cook's Black Company books, specifically in the third book, The White Rose, in which he describes a deadly magical storm in which everything caught in it - men, beasts, objects, and the very ground under their feet - is rendered protean for the duration of the storm.
The first three books are among my favorite books ever. They had an interesting point of view - most of the story is told by a doctor who belongs to a mercenary army working for the bad guys - and they didn't insult my intelligence. Of course, Cook is up to book nine now, if I remember correctly. I keep buying the books, but it's been several volumes since I actually cared about the (new) main characters. I want the old main characters back. I want the glimmer of dark humor back. Actually, I just want the darn thing resolved!
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