- Pirate Hannah and her Pretty Pony got a job offer from an alien called Opik: he needed someone to accompany the child alien Zot on a space ship back to his home planet.  He would give them 3 coins when Zot arrived safely.

- Shortly into the trip alarms began sounding.  A message from Opik said there was some distrubance in the engine room.  With some help from an android called Sassy, Hannah opened the hatch covering a secret ladder down into the workings of the ship.  She made her way to the back of the ship, encountering some space rats, a bubble-gum making bird, and other strange creatures.

- The engine room was being devoured by a metal-eating creature called a Lacer.  When she couldn't talk it into leaving, she tried to scare it off and then beat it up, but it proved too tough for her.

- In the end, Hannah lured the creature out of the engine room, and though it conked her out, Sassy arrived and was able to convince it to eat some of the junk in the storage room instead of gnawing on the engine.

GMs Note:

This scenario from "Uh-Oh Monsters" was REALLY tough for a single PC - and that's AFTER I dialed it back a bit.  In hindsight, instead of using deus-ex and having Sassy talk the Lacer out of eating the engine, I should have had the ship crash on a nearby planet and then Hannah would have to fix the ship to get Zot home - which would have been awesome.  Unfortunately, I didn't think of that at the time.  We'd been going for a while, and I could sense Hannah was running out of ideas, so I was trying to wrap it up.  I'm also not super practiced at running published scenarios.  Oh well, live and game and learn.

The End Of A Saga

As of yesterday, Patrick's epic Star Wars (Saga ed.) game has come to its conclusion.  For those of you following along at home, I joined this game in May 2009, and it had been underway for a few months prior.  So, 3+ years in that campaign.  I don't think I've ever been in a game that's lasted that long.  In some ways, it feels extremely weird that it's over.

Patrick did a good job running the game, too.  The vast majority of the time, it was a ton of fun - and that's saying something.  Any gamer knows that it's hard to run or play in an RPG and keep it from bogging itself down in whatever minutia might be encountered - especially over such a long period of time.  I think this game did pretty well on that score.

I enjoyed my character in that game quite a bit, and he had a nice arc to his development which is something that doesn't always happen with my PCs.  He really changed a lot as a person as the game progressed.

I generally don't go in for "power fantasies" in RPGs, even so, I'm not sure I've ever been as awesome in those terms in an RPG before - including epic-level D&D games.  I haven't played too many high-level games, but this didn't necessarily have to do with ridiculously high abilities (though those were certainly present).  I actually wasn't (I don't think) the most powerful PC in the game on paper, and the Big Bad was numerically better than me at everything I was good at.  I wasn't doing the most damage in combat, nor did I have the best skills or "combos" or whatever.  It was more that my character had an exceptionally strong presence in the game by the end, and some really cool thematic elements and abilities that really sold it.  I really got to play the Jedi Master (what I thought was) true-to-form at the very end, and that was pretty awesome.

Noah, I May Need To Borrow Your Ark

On the way home from Patrick's finale last night, Tony & I had to take a couple of detours around downtown JC.  Seems by later that evening, most of it was under a couple feet of water.  Our house does sit at a higher elevation than elsewhere in town, and our road was basically unaffected...   ...but, alas, we did not escape the rain's wrath.

Although, in our case, I think it was at least partly our fault.  The gutters aren't in the best shape in terms of "clear", and the drain at the back stairwell was covered by a respectable layer of leaves (which seem to end up there despite the best efforts of an antiquated stairwell screen/cover).

So, when Sheri went down to check on some laundry before bed last night, she was, I would say, "surprised" to encounter approximately 1-2 inches of water covering the basement floor.

Have you ever vacuumed 2 inches of water out of an 1100 sq ft basement one 10-gallon-shop-vac-full at a time?

I have.

By the time I was heading upstairs about couple hours later, the basement was still very "wet", but nearly all of that which could be called "standing water" had been convinced to exit the premises.

Also, I may need some new shoes.

I Was Just Curious

So at around 1:30am, after having spent more of the night than I'd have liked conscious and working basement damage control, I sat down at my computer for a few minutes - just to unwind a bit before bed.  I noticed on the bookface that Jerry had posted a link on the Curiosity rover, saying it was scheduled to land in about 7 minutes.  Text beneath his post read "posted 6 minutes ago".  That was some timing.

I popped over to NASA.gov in time to see the last couple minutes of descent being monitored by the ladies & gents at NASA, the resultant cheers when the rover successfully touched down after its wildly outlandish descent scheme was successful, and the first image sent back to earth from its camera - a shot of rocky ground, one of the rover's wheels and a distant, glowing marsian horizon arched by the barrel distortion of the wide lens (see photo) - all pretty much as it happened.

If there was an upside to being kept up so late with a flooded basement, that was certainly it.

~PS