Content Free Since Term 1!

Being on holiday is not conducive to me blogging. Many exciting things have happened. I will write about 2 of them: Nocturnum Session One I ran the first session of a 19-episode Call of Cthulhu campaign for Debbie, Luke and Sam this week. It was a very Old Skool Cthulhu adventure, complete with shotguns. We spent about 5 hours playing, which is actually a pretty long session for us. Our Thursday games tend to be an action packed 2 and a half hours, so this was a double-hit. The choice of Cthulhu d20 is an interesting one, and one which I am pretty happy with. Fortunately Luke is very familiar with d20, and I've played in enough games to know the basics. It had a couple of distinct advantages over BURPS: - Hit Points. The characters are 4th level, giving them 4d6 hitpoints to start with. This means that they all start around the upper range of what a classic Cthulhu character would have, with attacks doing similar amounts of damage. - Healing. With hospital care the characters regained hit points in a matter of days, when classic Cthulhu would have required months of bedrest. - Leveling Up. At the end of every adventure, the PCs will level up (this is generous - the rulebook recommends every other adventure. However, given that the party is half the size of the usual, twice the advancement seems fair). They will gain improved skills, more HP, feats, stat improvements and such. They'll get tougher as the odds against them get worse. All this means that the characters might actually survive to see the second half of the campaign. This is a great thing, as too many Cthulhu campaigns go from serious to silly as you churn through characters. I had a good time running it, we had a few giggles over one or two 'classic' d20isms (such as briefcases - with traps!), and I'm looking forward to next session. 48 Film Competition I'm super excited about this. We had a meeting yesterday, and it felt good to see that we've learned some stuff from last year. It's also good that there isn't a LARP on the same weekend :) I am on the editing team, and Debbie is going to be the 2nd AD (extra wrangler and general troubleshooter) and hopefully an actor as well (the two should work together fine). We have bagsied a place to sleep at Norman's, just in case the editing of Saturday's footage needs doing overnight. It's a great bunch of people, with some awesome talent to draw on. The challenge is to channel all that fantastic creative energy and good will into something that comes across on screen, on time. I am confident and optimistic and excited. I also feel that we all have the fact that we missed the deadline as one of the tools in our utility-belts: we can all dig deep or push a little harder to get things done because we know we have to. Squee!