MRW 3

This weekend was the third Mega-Roleplaying Weekend Redux, up in Kapiti. I like to call them Kapiti Roleplaying Weekends, since they aren't in the same place, or organised by the same people as the original MRWs. They are certainly in the same spirit though - get a bunch of friends together for the weekend to stay in a house and play a whole bunch of RPGs. We have 2 houses close together in Kapiti, rather than one bach, but the good folks and lots of RPGs elements are the same. This time round I ran one game, played in 3. Every exerience was awesome, and there were a whole lot of cool moments: Price of Freedom First thing Saturday I ran the introductory adventure from Greg Kostikyan's Price of Freedom . It was a cool, OTT game of American Patriotism in the face of evil Soviet invasion, set in the 80s (it was written in the 80s). I had 4 players to start, with 2 additions after the first scene. Debbie and I had spent Saturday morning downloading patriotic mp3s like 'Born in the USA' and the top 10 American Idols singing God Bless America and such. They made a pretty inspirationl backdrop to the game. The game was a lot of fun, with overwrought NPCs, chaos in the streets, and a fun board-game style hex based combat system. It was really quite fun to visit the old skool and really enjoy a well written tunnel-of-fun scenario. I managed to kill 2 of the PCs (one blew himself up with a grenade as a heroic last action - the other was caught and gunned down by Ivans). One noteworthy thing was how much I enjoyed a board-game style combat. It wasn't large in scale, but it had a dice-based tension that was really fun. And it was really clear where characters were in relation to one another, since we could all just look at the map. It reminded me of a lot of combats in games that were very satisfying, and was a strong contrast to a lot of the indie games that I've also enjoyed over the past year. Wonderquest After some chatting and hanging out time, we played a second round of games. I got to play in Donna's Wonderquest game, which I missed out on at Kapcon. It's a game in which 2 magical kingdoms are unexpectedly united by a portal, and one starts sending tourists into the other. I was playing an American tourist, passing through the magic kingdom of Disneyland, into the fantasy world of Reath. 2 of the PCs are tour guides, the rest are tourists, and it's a very cool game. I was playing an IT professional and fantasy buff, hoping to discover my destiny, or even better magic powers, whilst in Reath. Debbie was playing the manliest man around, and there was a lot of conflict between us - enough that I tried to shoot her character with a crossbow at one point. Much hilarity and fun was had, as well as some tasty tequila based cocktails. Very fun, and the walk between houses was awesome too. Best Friends - Superheroes and Villains Big Brother This was the stand-out game of the weekend for me - a fantastically funny and occasionally moving game about a group of heroes and villains living together and forming (or re-examining) friendships. It had some of the best one-liners, and some really awesome characters. Jenni wrote down quotes, so hopefully some of those will show up soon on Stonesoup. My favourite (paraphrased) quotes? Bella Donna (incredibly beautiful villain with poisonous powers, but no smarts): I don't know why I never get chosen for eviction. I'd be a great evicted person. I could represent evicted peoples... Bella Donna, to Stellar, one of the villains up for eviction: If you win, can you tell me what the eviction prize is? I also like that my character, Blue Steele, a robot-like tough-girl with black and white morals, became friendly with most of the villains. She also got an unsuccessful makeover, and got to demolish and eat most of a steam-hut (sauna) in a 'construct a vegetable garden' challenge. The insane 'voice-of-Big-Brother' was awesome too! Frisbee and Hack We spent part of Sunday morning on the now-traditional throwing of frisbees (I'm getting slightly better, though I am still pretty terrible), and kicking of hackey sacks. It was grand fine fun, and it was really hot out in the sun. The hack turned into a silly string of one-liners and jokes that caused several people to miss the hack due to laughing too hard, so that was neat. We discussed marching order and what kind of characters we each were on the way back from the park. We decided that the Andersens were not PCs, but generic followers of a high level character. There were more available, but the two we had weren't a breeding pair. "To get more, you need to kill stuff, take its gold, then take that gold back to the Queen Andersen." Inspectres We finished off the weekend with a game of Inspectres, set in Beaumont, in the 1980s. We played 'Inspectres versus Footloose', essentially, and it was a lot of fun. There were some dark character moments, fairly strongly encouraged by the GM Hix. My character, Town Councillor Thomas Aquinas, turned out to be the father of one of his employees, the teenage 'daughter' of the Reverend. Her brother had died in a car crash, and she was constantly being ignored. Some mean person gave her the characteristic of 'adults don't remember who she is', so even after I found out I was her father (when I rekindled the affair with the Reverend's wife and she walked in on us), I promptly forgot. Debbie's character ended up pretty much insane, Fraser's character was suicidal, I had rekindled an affair that was likely to end my marriage, and the franchise had gone out of business. Jenni's Milly had lost her new dress to the clutches of the zombie, Nick's Jack had been beaten at his own game (Baconning Out - to dance manically in the manner of Kevin Bacon). On the positive side, Paul's wheelchair-bound ex-astronaut had run down the zombified corspe of the drunk driver who put him in a wheelchair (Debbie's character's brother), and felt he finally had closure. It was pretty dark for an Inspectres game. All up, a fantastic weekend, and one which has given my RPG batteries quite a boost. I felt pretty crappy yesterday and took the day off work, but I'm back in the saddle again, and looking forward to running Inspectres myself some time.