Majcher.com

I just ran my first RPG session in about ten years - Seven Leagues, by our very own Renegade, Francois. We played for about four hours, and threw together the beginning of a fairy tale on the fly that involved (as player characters) a traumatized giant that crushes deities under mountains and is afraid of the dark, a dragon that had been transformed into a hero with a mask because he fell in love with the princess he was guarding, the Queen of Cockroaches, who emerged into the world from the hero's dream, and, of course, the God of Sleep and Goddess of Despair, who are brother and sister, trying to prevent their little brother Nightmare from taking over Uncle Hate's station - since he's been trapped under a mountain for some time now...

So yeah, fun. Even better, I didn't have time beforehand to put together a scenario/story/whatever to run through, so I put some of that improv training to work, and tried to get everyone to put the story together on the fly. After everyone made up their characters, we decided on a Mesoamerican (Aztec/Mayan) theme for the region of Faerie that we were playing in, and went to it. I started them off by sending the hero (who had a taboo preventing him from initiating combat) off to slay the giant (skittish Thred, above) who had "kidnapped" the local high priest's youngest daughter. I'll spare y'all the details, but once we got going, it was a hoot. And the best part - over the course of four hours of storytelling, dice were only rolled once, and the results were discarded due to a little turn of narration by Mischa's goddess, anyway. I think I'm slowly infecting my RPG buddies with improv, as I'm trying to infect my improv buddies with roleplaying. Woo! Crossing the streams!

Speaking of improv, we caught the "season premiere" of The Great Mundane last night at the Hideout, and it was freakin' awesome. I was really looking forward to seeing how they'd pull it off, and they pulled it off better than anyone had expected, I think. They're doing what they're calling "serial long-form", which means that they go out and make stuff up out of nothing and generally kick ass for an hour, and then next show, they keep going with that world and those characters, for six "episodes". Making a written-and-rehearsed show interesting to watch for six episodes is hard enough, and this is all totally improvised, and it looks like it's working. I'm very eager to see how things progress.

I also got back on my bike again today, for the first time since winter kind of kicked in over here. Yeah. Time to get my fast ass back into that. But first, stuff to do. Today: some writing, and then the rollerderby. Tomorrow: work, and then our first improv show. Then back to the regular cycle of work, preparing for and teaching class, and rehearsal, until south by southwest, I guess. Oh! And our floor is back on! We can walk around in the office with only the normal level of peril now! Tomorrow, a real floor gets put back on top of the underlayment, and then the trim and whatnot goes on, and then a little more painting, and I think we're done! Wooo! And then we can move out of the front room, and start living like normal people again! As far as "normal" goes around here, anyway...