What a weekend! IGX Summer Daze went so very well. I can’t overstate how great it was to see so many friends, both old and new, in such a relaxed, open, and fun atmosphere. We chatted, we ate, we celebrated birthdays, we ate, and we gamed!
Thursday night I played For the Queen as the craven, arrogant Keeper of the Royal Jewels. With me in service to Her Majesty were: Seraphina, playing HImbeau, the Queen’s Blade; Andrea, playing a foster/hostage teenager from an enemy kingdom; Lilith playing the Queen’s only true friend; Jim playing the Royal Biographer; and Kat, playing the Bicourtesan to both the King and the Queen. It was a really fun way to start off the weekend.
On Friday morning, Marshall facilitated For the Honor…, a Firebrands-style game inspired by She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. While I haven’t watched the show, I’m familiar enough with its vibe that I was able to play Princeps Cyberra, intent on civilizing this backwater world and adding it to the Legion’s power. Kris played the feisty Captain Bleys of the Resistance. Jim played the cultivated Princess Arboria of the Kingdom of Verdance. Marshall played the ancient, eternally-young trickster, Prince Frosté. The little mini-game scenes were interesting and fun to play out and in three hours we built the beginning of something interesting.
Friday afternoon, I facilitated another Star Trek-inspired session of Pasión de las Pasiones. At the last get-together, I ran Pasiones set in ‘90s-era Trek, the great series Strange New Worlds has breathed new life and perspective on The Original Series era of the 23rd century. The setup was that an enigmatic alien had launched a contest among the various societies, with cosmic power as the prize. Jim played Commander Kov, a half-Vulcan, half-Klingon who commanded the Bird of Prey The Wrath of Surak. Seraphina played Shal Iltiern, a Klingon warrior who had turned his back on the Empire to work undercover for Starfleet Security. Andrea played Dimit Bekin, a mousy Betazoid logistics officer who was in way over her head and pursued by many suitors. Jolene played Subcommander Vinika, a Romulan officer with her fingers in many nefarious pies. Jamey played Velveeta, a transporter clone of Vinika trying to find out her place in the galaxy. We had two former enemies sharing oxygen masks while trapped in an ice cave, Klingons wading into brawls shirtless and wind blowing through their hair, a all-powerful alien posing existential questions, a lover embraced and then spurned by two different lovers played by the same actress in two subsequent scenes. It was a really, really fun game.
Friday night and Saturday morning, I played two linked sessions of Hearts of Wulin, MC’d by Jim. (As an aside, playing five sessions of games with Jim was a treat! Five stars. Highly recommend.) We created a rich Wuxia-style backstory of conflicting obligation. My character, Desert Star, was a young apprentice whose whole family had died in a fire a decade before. Brennan played Lady Widowmaker, an assassin loyal to the Lost Sisters clan, but who was actually my older sister who thought I had died in the fire. Kris played Sentinel Storm, a wanderer and last practitioner of a school of martial arts that had been destroyed decades ago. We had epic fights, tragic defeats, stunning reversals, and triumphant retribution. It was everything I had wanted Hearts of Wulin to be.
Saturday afternoon, I played Xenolanguage with Hakan, Jeff, and Bobbi. I played an “expedition coach” who specialized in training scientists to work in extreme conditions. Jeff’s character was my brilliant, logical scientist wife who loved her work more than me. Bobbi’s character was a more intuitive scientist whose life I had saved on a previous expedition and also Jeff’s character’s estranged brother. We worked on deciphering an alien language, but really managed to transform our relationships with one another. It was an enjoyable, uplifting sort of narration-building game. With its card-based structure, I found it a bit similar to For the Queen, but with straightforward prompts rather than titillating questions. And the alien symbols and music were gorgeous and evocative.
On Saturday evening, I offered a session of InSpectres, which is always reliable for a lot of laughs. Jeff played “Two Week” Waldo, a straight-up cryptid-obsessed weirdo who had never held a job for more than two weeks. Bobbi played Fran “the Bulldog” Franz who was paranoid about getting turned into a werewolf like her late uncle. Tara played Hope Darkmoon, former carnival fortune teller and a “medium” medium who could be possessed by spirits, but not necessarily the ones she called. Michele played MaryLou, who saw dead people and dealt with them always complaining about something. We played through two missions. They exorcized a haunted hedge in a swanky suburb. They got interviewed by Anita Penn, an upcoming anchor who had helped her predecessor into the Great Beyond. And they faced down a diner specializing in authentic food from the Old West, so authentic that anyone who ate the chili got possessed by spirits from 1870! Gunfights with finger-guns in the town square made wounds the bled chili sauce. It was silly, silly fun.
Sunday morning, I was pretty exhausted, but tried to pull my weight in The Art of Power, Brennan’s game of alt-medieval power politics. I played Maurice, head of the stevedores and eager for a place in the house of a duchess who had remembered by name. Tara played the fabulous, fabulous Duchess Giselle Dupree. Brennan played Joquelot, a wealthy timber merchant. Kat played Maque the Knife, an assassin with a mysterious past. Seraphina played Lucien, the beautiful and much-wooed homme fatale. Andrea played Delfeen, the ambitious captain of the city watch. Kris played Lazare, the rising courtesan. I’m not sure that the rules ever quite clicked in my head, but that says more about my old-man mental stamina than about the game.
Thanks to everyone who made this such a wonderful weekend!