No One's Been Poisoned and Nothing's On Fire: Strange Tales from the Road (ZenKaiKon 2013) Conclusion!

              

          Sunday began and after a brief scene, I was locked in combat with a Sudoku puzzle for the fate of Johan's story. Quite literally. Upon entering the room, I explained to the GMs what had happened the previous night and that Johan's plan simply refused to work. After a brief scene with the main villain where Johan snarked at him for losing control of the story ("Well then you should have thought of that before giving your villain a soul", I believe was the line), the following exchange occurred:

"So, Caius, how much do you like puzzles?"

"I...like 'em enough..."

              Some background: The previous night, a team had led an assault on the clock tower and the bath house where the villains of the setting had their bases of operations. I can't speak for the bath house, though from what I saw it was a combination of Betrayal at House on the Hill and a dungeon crawl. The clock tower dungeon was a bit different, being a series of puzzles one had to get through to get to the top and confront the eccentric man who built the thing in the first place. Having been closer to where the puzzle dungeon was run the previous night, I had heard horror stories of the kind of things they faced. But the one I'd heard the most ranting about was a Sudoku puzzle in the final room. 

             "Long as it isn't Sudoku." I added hastily.

No One's Been Poisoned and Nothing's On Fire: Strange Tales on the Road (ZenKaiKon 2013) Pt. 2

When we last left our hero, he was trapped in the mind of a soul-eating sociopath and tweaking like there was no tomorrow...

                    Saturday began with another scramble for me to set up plans. I scrambled a lot during this, partially because Johan is an active character, not a reactive one. When you're the one setting up the plans, it's a lot harder to keep them all spinning, especially with about thirty or forty other people running their plans both concurrently and counter to your own. Despite the conversation of the previous night, I had found out that Abby had once again been flung headlong into a plot with me, one more sign that someone, be it GMs or the universe or whatever it is has a sense of humor. So now Abby's character, Kallen, who had been thrown into the same fairy tale as I/Johan was and cast as the Princess, now had a creepy sociopath looming over her and offering his "help" to finish the story she hadn't wanted to be part of in the first place. I'd say I didn't have fun stalking Abby and the players in her plot around. I would really like to. 

I would be lying straight through my teeth. 

No One's Been Poisoned and Nothing's On Fire: Strange Tales On The Road (ZenKaiKon 2013) Part 1

               Start of play begins and I have no idea what the hell I am doing. Normally this is a good thing. Time to pull a few threads, tease a few things out, see what happens. But that's not coming this time, for one big reason: I am scared of the Drop. I am fighting it every chance I get. Silently, I curse my ambition, but I'm not about to back down. I will either do the best damn job I can, or I will lose both sanity and identity in the attempt. No going back now, just forward towards whatever the hell is at the end of this. And for the first time, I'm actually frightened of what I do during roleplay. Walking around in this guy's head would be like hanging out in the hospital from Jacob's Ladder. But at this point, there's nothing else to be done. So I take a deep breath, and go find someone I can traumatize.

Post over at Study of Anime

                 So occasionally I do write for other places than here. A friend on the con circuit, Charles Dunbar, has a site he writes for over at Study of Anime and asked me to do a post on fandom and identity for his project. Being that most of what I do kind of falls under some kind of fandom, both he and his site are awesome, and it's cool that my work would get other places, I jumped at the chance and wrote up an essay about my very strange relationship with fandoms and their dark sides. The post is here, and please do check out the rest of his site and work. He's well worth the time. 

Community Stuff

So I'm participating in this thing called the Book Blogger Hop this weekend, in the hopes that I can get things out into the community. There are some pretty interesting blogs on here, but I'm not going to play favorites or point them out, as the best stuff is discovered by chance or accident. 


In any case, their question was "Do you use a ratings system for your reviews, and if so, what is it and why?"

I don't use a ratings system. I used to when this blog was still a twinkle in the milkman's eye, but when I started doing books almost exclusively, I dropped it. I figured I was already telling someone whether the book was bad or good, so I didn't need to put a summation up quantifying exactly how bad or good the book was. If it was good, it was good. If it was bad, it was bad.