tj_rowe | There was an event! 1318 and Alton Towers (Reply)

Bad stuff:

Getting ill on Saturday night, and having another ill person starting to panick about suddenly being ill right above me at the same time. Luckily, more people came up to bed a minute or so after we both got woken up by The Ill, and they were capable of being competent.

Spending the remainder of Saturday night sitting on a chair in the loos trying to keep down multiple half-cups of water and failing each time, while wrapped up in warm things and getting gradually colder and less brain-possessing. Eventually (at about six in the morning, daylight savings) I decided that I needed to be warm and to sleep a bit more than to be slightly hydrated, and so didn't attempt another cup of water. However, then I tried to climb the stairs back to the bunk room, and I think I got to the first step before having to flee back to the loos again from the effort of moving that far. Maybe not, though. I ended up having my sleeping bag and rollmat brought down and sleeping on the kitchen floor under some beastie kit, with Dave being drunk and Bry not sleeping also on the kitchen floor.

I ended up making people who were there for a good time and not to be in charge have to be responsible and stressed. I'm sorry for that.

The Sunday night in the tent, for those of you who saw the other post, was possibly even worse than expected. I think I ended up crying at one point before getting to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn't deal with the fact that I had just woken up in a tent and ended up burying my head in my sleeping bag and managing to convince myself that I was at home in Badger Hill under a duvet and not camping at all. Then I got slightly more awake and realised that I was going to have to get dressed to get OUT of the tent, and so did that. You either carry on and survive or you lie down and die, I guess. I flinched away from returning to the tent once I was out, however, and if I'd thought of it I'd have asked someone to drag my stuff out. That would have required explaination, though. Hmm. And people laughed at my undignified unco-ordinated tent-fleeing. V_V

Having a brain re-set at Alton Towers. I thought my eyes were shut, but apparently they were open. O_o

Successful things!

I did not throw up on favouredenemy's beastiekit which was pretty much THE thing keeping me warm on Saturday night.

I did not throw up on my new sleeping bag, or my newly-too-short-to-be-tied-back hair.

Coconut flapjack.

I had useful things like a towel and tea-tree-containing shampoo with me, and managed to shower before getting properly ill, and the towel dried off enough for both to be used by another ill person because sick in the hair is not something that I would wish on anyone.

I managed to subsist off of diluted coca-cola and salt from a KFC packet for a day, and felt suprisingly good given what my body had been doing. I was the best looked-after ill person though - one got abandoned upstairs to sleep it off, and the other one was only discoved to be ill when they emerged from their tent at the end of the day after spending the whole time throwing up. I was in the kitchen/GOD room, right next to the loos, and am on medicine which reduces nausea as an effect of what it's supposed to do - once I kept that down on Sunday morning, I didn't get any worse.

Stew. Om nom rice and sweet potato and carrot and peas. My first solid(ish) meal.

And I was with awesome people who are awesome and looked after me really well. Yay for Connor and Tom and Bry (who sat up with me pretty much constantly) and Paul and Drake (who held my hair back when I collapsed and was ill upstairs) and Dave (who talked to me on Saturday night and supplied hugs and held me up and carried my things on Monday) and Jonrad and pretty much all the other people who were there.

More awesome things, actually about the event this time:

Playing an NPC that, most of the time, was quite fun to play. Friday night I hadn't really got into my stride, but during the course of Saturday I managed to piss off at least one faction of the players by being a gigantic racist against green people (I distinctly remember screaming 'Unhand me, you, you creature!' at such a volume that the player attempting to drag me out of the room actually winced - and was then backed up by the rest of the green people in the room), by making comments about people with cybernetic implants, and by flouncing away from them to go and hang out with a genteel murderer (well, attempted murderer) because he was less uncouth company.

Also getting drunk IC on the Saturday night and telling all of the players exactly what I thought of them. This resulted in both character development (though one of the PCs I was interacting with most ended up dying later on that night - sad) and my tea getting drugged by one of the doctors. XD And then the players put me to bed (after irradiating the blanket) and I timed out ten minutes before the camp got attacked and ended up walking back across the site, though the woods, in the dark, alone, while drunk and (though I didn't realise yet) starting to feel ill. That was a fun walk. XD

Playing elfs sneaking through the woods and going about our business while trying to avoid the players and the elfs with different facepaint so as not to die. Apparently the players didn't quite realise that there were monsters all over the woods doing things and roleplaying amongst ourselves and not just spawning outside their camp to attack them - they were quite confused when they spotted our group of five or six from the other side of the ravine and we went 'oh no, invaders! ...We'll see if they come after us, we've got a clearer path ahead than they do' and walked off.

Also, me and Jonrad getting separated from the rest of our foraging party and realising that neither of us was a herbalist, and neither of us was a healer, so having to sneaky-sneaky-sneaky to get back to the monster camp alive. And seeing Jeff across the river and sitting really-really still and hoping he didn't see us, while he was going 'argh, there are two of them and one of me, I hope they don't attack' and pretending that he didn't see us. And us going 'um, we'll go away from the direction he went in while still looping back around and hoping we find the others' and landing in a bog and having to walk on fallen trees to get through it. *facepalm*

And then we ended up climbing up the slippery, leaf-strewn, steep and muddy and brambly side of the ravine and coming at the monster camp from entirely the wrong direction because I picked the wrong road once we found somewhere we recognised. I should have listened to Jon!

The death system at 1318 took a bit of getting used to, because there are so many ways that you can get killed or injured - Coue, Execution, Mortal calls, being taken to zero hits (though I'm still not sure what happens with that except that you don't die from it), but once I'd experienced a few of them (and inflicted a few of them) and been surgerised, it made a lot more sense. I think I like the system over all - it's fairly realistic (not so good for a very high combat system if you want your fighty PCs to live for ages), I liked the 'potential for complications in surgery' aspect, and if I ever run a system I'd consider adopting it - after all, in a higher magic-higher-combat system, you can have the mundane surgery with its complications and imperfections AS WELL AS the potential for magical healing.

... And here's me about to derail this post by going into why this death system would work awesomely well for the idea that I do have for a larp. Going to stop it now, because I haven't worked out how to pitch it without revealing all the foip.

The Southern Elfs! Gemma yelling 'It was all Dart's idea! Ask Dart, not me!' just as I (who was playing Dart) bled out, was a very amusing moment and I think I giggled. That whole encounter was really fun, actually, and I'm not sure how much is foip. I think we confused the players a great deal. And of course, given that I dealt out three or four mortal calls while we were trying to run away and they only had three surgeons, I think we did give some other monsters a tactical advantage in that all the surgeons and hard people had to run up the hill back to the camp at a yell of 'INCOMING!' as me and Gemma stopped physrepping our bodies and walked off giggling.

And now I'm tired again, so I shall save the rest of the awesome for the froth that shall hopefully happen later this week, and go to the pub for my traditional post-event gammon steak (because anything made of salt following a larp event tastes like heaven). Maybe after a brief lie-down...

But yeah, larpwise this was an awesome event and I wish I'd seen more of it, and it's definitely a monster-heavy system just because the players are a very small number of the people/things hanging around the area that the players are in.