The Weekend

Well, the two part Nest adventure went far better than I could have hoped for, in the end. The dinner part was probably the most successful political one we've ever done. It got off to a bit of a slow start for the NPCs, as the party had a deAngsting (a despair spell, not the average and impossible kind) and some personal politics to deal with, but by and large the whole thing swung beautifully. newworlwoodsman, mist_and_gold and glasgowphill are luckily wonderfully experienced RPers who should be able to do political manueverings in their various sleeps these days, but I was equally impressed with Calum and Garrick, who carried off two rather vital parts with equal subtlety and less experience, drawing the players in beautifully. It's a wonderful thing for any GM when a night begins to take on a life of its own, and you're nothing more than a facilitator, especially when such huge gameworld events are going on. The looks of utter horror at the shock ending and cassies_file's wonderful semi-Ic sobs of "We had it fixed! We had it fixed!" were sweet sweet music to my ears.

Part two actually seemed to come off equally well. Despite one or two hiccups in the way of terrain problems, the public and slightly dodgily-functioning walkie-talkies, I thought the real-time format worked just about as well as we could have wished. Ideally, better weather and a larger monster crew would have been absolutely ideal, and I had the usual Monster GM regrets that I couldn't see the party's reaction to about half our lovely scenes, but the party seemed to enjoy it, the monsters seemed to enjoy it and there was considerably less faff than usual, which let splebit head for home well before dark and let there be minimal standing about in the cold for the rest of us.

So, that was good.

Only downside was that I ended up spending all of Saturday in bed throwing up, having somehow picked up a random plague, and probably really shouldn't have been out in Mugdock running about like a loon, as I ended up close to hallucinating by the time we were done. Baseball caps do look a lot like mokosh muzzles, though! Upshot was that I've ended up taking today as annual leave, since I have tons of the things to use before the end of March or lose anyhow, and am spending some quality time in my bed with tea and old Sharkwar fic. I may brave the snow to wander out later on, though, assuming I feel like it, as sadly the honey has been forced to work.