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Bar-Hopping

10/27/2005: In terms of real-world logistics, tonight was not a display of our best work. Our GM/host had decided to call it off but had forgotten to notify the players -- only three of whom showed up anyway. And needless to say, tonight was not the debut of remote gaming with Virtual Bill from Indianapolis; we had neither the required laptop nor our best techie guy to pave the way. Nor was Analog Bill in place on his end of the webcam connection, as far as I know. And if by chance he was -- sorry, dude.

("Virtual Bill from Indianapolis" is an awful lot to type. Maybe "VBI"? No, wait, I've got it: eBill.)

But anyway, we made do with three players, so back to the story. After we mopped up from the bar fight, we were persuaded by one of the NPCs to accompany him in the direction of a nearby elven tribe. Craig and Tony, as elves whose village was wiped out by orcs, were certainly game, and the rest of us came along for lack of anything better to do.

Our stopover along the way took the form of another tavern, this one owned by a jolly (and unusually bright) half-ogre. Local rednecks didn't much care to see a successful business run by, for lack of a better word, a monster, so he was dealing with sporadic low-level harassment. The stakes were raised by an arson attempt aimed at the inn's stables, which was being used for lodging by our centaur friend. Coincidence, in this town without pity on non-humans, or a deliberate attempt against our semi-equine friend's life?

New Digs

It's not that I don't like working with TextPad. (I do.) And it's not that I don't like navigating my way through twelve layers of GeoCities interface every time I want to write something. (I don't. I really, really don't.)

It's just that I've been spending the past several years faithfully (if intermittently) doing little diary entries about our nerdly pursuits, and now that there are websites and technological advances specifically devoted to this sort of journal-keeping . . . it just makes sense to start using them.

Thus, here we are. Although I am the epitome of the performer playing to an empty room (on the GeoCities site, the only thing more rare than contributions from me was visits from people I didn't know), we'll set up shop here, at least for the sorta-weekly updates.

The old game resources -- the settings, the character stats, the magical items -- are still over at the old place (see sidebar), and they'll stay there until Yahoo! gets tired of maintaining the ever-dwindling GeoCities. Inevitably, we're going to come up with new things to share, and I'm not sure what we'll do with those; maybe I'll create a Yahoo! Group and post the login information here.

Appropriately for this new venue, we started a new adventure arc last week, and we did it old-school: the first real bar-brawl for these still-green adventurers. Several of us are huge and/or scary, so being outnumbered wasn't a huge problem. Best of all (at least from my perspective), my Bard finally used magic in an effective way, Air Jetting a couple of foes a good distance across the room. Okay, it was two yards apiece, but still.

The bar brawl lasted until it was time to go home, so we haven't an inkling about why (or even whether) it was important for the story ahead, but the scattered NPCs around the room must have something to do with it. In the meantime, we'll take the senseless violence for what it was worth.