October2005Horror Festival, Campaign Update, Claw WikiThursday, 27 October 2005 I've finally gotten around to working on upgrading the CLAWs box. The conversion of the wiki part of the Tiki (including comments) is complete. All the other bits (blogs, polls, images) are about half done. Quite a bit of time was spent evaluating various blogging options (since the new wiki, PmWiki, doesn't include blogs) and I think I've finally settled on Wordpress Mu. I may have to pull some funky stuff to allow PmWiki and Wordpress Mu to share user accounts. Once the new system is up there'll just be the matter of figuring out were to host the damn thing. In between work on the CLAW machine I've been fitting in some work on the L5R campaign which I think is coming along quite nicely now. A fair amount of character background stuff is starting to come out and the players seem to be settling in to their characters. Now to work on making the NPCs a little more distinctive. Currently their personalities feeling a bit like gooey mush. :| This weekend we're off to see Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of Dead at the Labia horror special. Hopefully we'll be able to rent Day of the Dead for afterwards. Flower War FinaleSunday, 16 October 2005 Tonight saw the end of Tim and Dave's Flower War campaign LARP. In traditional LARP style, the night ended with the calling forth of a dark god who rewrote the basic rules governing the world. Bohumir (my character) and Byron (Dave's character) formed a fairly successful vampire power block but eventually chose the wrong group to support. If only our allies had trusted us more! It would really have helped to have Myrrdyn (Lucas' character) to answer a few questions. The campaign debriefing at The One Ring afterwards was a lot of fun. It was great to finally get to hear what other characters were really up to, what specially powers people had and who the secret organisations were. In other news, I have acquired a new (to me) car. It was kinda sad giving up Squeak, my 1970 VW Beetle, but it needed a lot of repairs which I couldn't really justify spending money on. I hope it goes to a good home eventually. My new car, a 1994 Opel Kadett, has been nicknamed Vroom. The Crane Lands campaign had its second session, which was unfortunately without Mike who was working on end of year hand-ins. Otherwise it ran more smoothly than the first session although I'm still struggling with the setting and the rules quite a bit. Hopefully things will get easier as the campaign progresses. Crane Lands Campaign BeginsThursday, 6 October 2005 The Protege course is finally over. I've learnt alot but having to fit some actual work time into a day filled with seven hours of course work has been kinda taxing. The old eVOC webserver crashing three times didn't really help either. We have a new one (the old one is really old, and was a desktop in its previous life) but I'm still in the process of setting it up. Scary things I've learnt about our server room this week include:
Wednesday saw the launch of my Crane Lands L5R campaign. Most of the session was spent going through backstories with individual players but we did get two hours or so of group game play in. I had the characters participate in a short military training exercise just to let us get a feel for the combat system. Oddly, the exercise ended with some tense social interactions between the PCs and the opposing side. There will be repercussions. :) Cart4 October 2005 While driving in this morning I saw a horse-drawn cart on Modderdam Road, which is six lanes wide. This in itself is not unusually. However, on the cart was an old beaten up Datsun. Hanging on to the back of the Datsun, and being towed along, was an old man in a wheelchair. Protege, Raptors3 October 2005 Just finished a very busy weekend and Monday morning. Spent Friday running around Canal Walk looking for batteries for Jo's Roboraptor. Also picked up large amounts of wrapping paper for said raptor and shiny pens and think black paper for card manufacture. Saturday morning was spent sorting out miscellaneous bank details, picking up contact lenses and test driving the Opel Kadette I'm thinking of buying. Saturday afternoon saw a somewhat abortive attempt to fix the bathroom tap. Unfortunately it looks like the tap itself might need replacement. At least we have now acquired a giant adjustable spanner. :) On Saturday evening we resumed games evenings with Kevin and Neil. Unfortunately the data projector is be used for actual research (damn students :), but we played Spree and Captain Park. In Captain Park one plays English gentlemen running around London collecting 'evidence' of their adventures overseas - all the while avoiding being spotted by members of said club and the infamous Captain Park. It's quite tactical and forward planning is advisable. Spree is a lot more whimsical. The characters run around a mall looting shops and shooting other players. It has a cool mechanic which allows you to take extra turns by shooting other players. Ended up chatting and playing Give Me The Brain! until the early hours of the morning. Sunday was Jo's birthday party. Good chicken and springbok potjiekos. The roboraptor conspiracy seemed to go off pretty well although I still need to shake down a few people for money. :) Jo grazed her hand ripping the box off which is probably a sign that it was well appreciated. The end of the weekend was a bit irritating. Had to spent four hours preparing talk on biological ontologies because all my superiors were away and couldn't give it. Also had to get up at 7:00 to give talk. Blerg. Anyway, it wasn't a complete train smash and it's over now. Currently taking advantage of Protege tutorial to update blog. Must keep typing otherwise I will nod off. P.S. Annoyingly firewalled off from SANBI and can't SSH into own machine. Plus have forgotten SANBI password so can't check work email. :| |