Category: General

I ran two Spaceship Zero adventures at the convention last weekend, and I played in a Star Wars game.

On the Friday night was the Drexoll 24 hour game-a-thon, and I played some Fearsome Floors, and a pretty cool game called…Laval or something. I forget. I played it with Sheri and Stephane and another mystery guy. It was kind of a typical German strategy game. I came in second.

The SSZ games were interesting. First I ran “Bring Me the Head of Dr Quisling” which I will tell you about now, unless you’re a SSZ player who hasn’t played the adventure yet – stop reading. But you’re probably not, so I’ll tell you that it involves Hitler’s brain inside a robot body, living in a ruined castle and creating a new nazi army and subjugating hydronauts. The other scenario is called “Web of the Space Bee” and it’s about a group of space pirates in the asteroid field who have contracted a degenerative disease that ruins their body and makes them paranoid. A winning combination! The session of the latter adventure went really well! The group managed to succeed at their mission (no mean feat) without any combat whatsoever (truly miraculous in SSZ). I ran a playtest at home with Marlo and Mike Jackson and Nathan and Taylor and it was kind of a disaster, so it was good to see that it wasn’t entirely my fault.

From the “Oh that hilarious leader of the world’s most powerful nation!” department: President George W. Bush announced the capture of a “major facilitator and chief planner for the Al Qaeda network.” The captured man turned out to be a mid-level Al Qaeda operative named Abu Faraj al-Libbi. “He used to make the coffee and do the photocopying,” said a former associate.

After Marlo and I saw Revenge of the Sith for the second time we realized that R2 and 3PO were responsible for Padme’s death. We wondered, how did the droids move a human body? 3PO is pretty useless and can’t really bend over, and R2D2 can only push a body in front of him, rolling the body over and over, or shoot that grappler thing out the back (which plunges into her rib cage) and then drag the body along. So they probably did that last thing, and her head kept bumping into the walls of the ship. Then R2 reprogrammed the medical droid to say “she simply lost the will to live.”

Recently, while drawing, I’ve been watching Tony Robinson (Baldric from Black Adder) talk about – and do – the worst jobs in history on the History Channel. Not only was it interesting to learn what the oldy timey people did to get by, but I learned the origins of a whole bunch of idioms, like “show you the ropes” and…okay I forget all the other ones. But it’s okay because I taped the entire 6 hour series. The best stuff was in the dark ages.

Down with the pope: Did you know that in 2001, Pope Benedict Whatever ordered Catholic bishops to hide allegations against pedophile priests from the public? Let’s hear it for the church.

Also, A papyrologist at Oxford University announced that new techniques in spectral imaging, which make it possible to decipher previously illegible ink on papyrus fragments, have yielded parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, a novel by Lucian, and an epic poem by Archilochos; researchers also applied the technique to third- and fourth-century manuscripts of the Revelation of Saint John and discovered that the number of the beast, contrary to popular belief, is 616, the area code of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I watched A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi over the past couple of days (while I’ve been drawing, of course) and after having watched Revenge of the Sith, the end of Jedi has a little bit more of a punch.

Also it made me want to watch all my episodes of Samurai Jack.

Tomorrow is the free Drexoll 24-hour game-a-thon at the Marpole Curling Club. What possible reason could you have not to go?

Last night Taylor, Mike Jackson, Nathan, Marlo and I played Spaceship Zero (Web of the Space Bee). It was my playtest for the Cloud City gaming convention this coming weekend. Some of the bits went pretty much exactly as planned, but as always, lack of proper pacing is my downfall. We probably would have gone for another 2 hours (after the prescribed 4 hour block) to finish the scenario properly at the rate we were going, so I’m going to have to make sure I don’t dawdle on periphery when I run it next time. Marlo said that this adventure and the last one (Bring Me the Head of Dr Quisling) were her two favourites so far, so that’s good, and it looks like I’ve made a SSZ convert out of Mike.