Journeyman Restaurant

A while back me and michele_blue had a lovely dinner at a nice couple's house. It was very tasty. Said couple is now opening a restaurant called Journeyman in Union Square. Chances are it will be completely awesome and I recommend checking it out when it opens.

LFR in January

I spent this weekend with michele_blue at DDXP, the big RPGA convention. Big is a relative term -- it's like a few hundred people. All the gaming happens in one ballroom, which also houses a few vendors, and then there's a seminar room down the hall. But it's one of the places WotC announces new product, and it's a huge deal for Living Forgotten Realms. It marks the start of the new LFR year, and they try new stuff there, and so on.

The big new shiny thing this year was LFR's first Battle Interactive, entitled The Paladins' Plague. Apparently they did these a lot for Living Greyhawk, but this was the first one for LFR. They ran it twice, once on Friday and once on Saturday. We played on Friday, after we'd gotten our characters into the level 7-10 band, which is where we wanted to play it.

The way it worked: there were like 35-40 tables, all playing the same scenario. All 200 or so PCs were in the same place at the same time. There's this city in the Forgotten Realms, Elturgard, and it was under siege by some horrendous things I won't spoil just in case.

Our collective job was to do something about it. So one guy, the author, stood up in the middle of the hall and described the scene: all of us, gathered with the paladins of Elturgard, and a speech being delivered, and something bad happening in the middle of it. Panic in the streets. We were charged with protecting the citizens of the city. Each table's GM put down the same map, and we had like an hour and fifteen minutes to go running around trying to keep monsters from breaking into houses and killing the innocents inside.

Our table saved 10 out of 12 citizens, which was a total success. An hour and fifteen minutes later, the whole room stopped playing no matter where they were and they totaled up all the citizens saved, and described the results based on the numbers. Then we went on to another mission with another goal somewhat more complex than just killing the monsters. If one table was doing really well, they could offer help, and another table could accept it, which would move some monsters from the troubled table to the successful table. I.e., reinforcements.

So we all played from 1 PM to 6 PM, then took an hour break for dinner, then everyone came back and we kept on going. One of the missions was really, really close -- we got exactly the number of successful outcomes we needed. One table doing a little bit worse would have been really bad. That ramped up the tension some.

At one point we were faced with a choice: take a rather dubious alliance, or go it alone? There was some argument, and everyone voted, and the majority ruled. There was a bit where we could sacrifice some life force to power a ritual, and if not enough people sacrificed enough life force, the ritual wouldn't work. There were some interesting consequences later on as a result, no matter which way we went. And in the end, around 11:30 PM, we saved the day and hurled back the invaders.

My little sorcerer, Reed, now has an official title: he is Reed Essinger, Defender of Elturgard. There is a monument named after him, no kidding. If I'm ever playing a scenario set in Elturgard I can say "oh, we'll hang out at the Reed Essinger Gilded Obelisk" and that's a true thing. (It could have been any public works project, or an orphanage, or whatever. I wanted an obelisk.) I have a piece of paper from Wizards of the Coast explaining all this.

This shared world stuff is pretty cool.

There were also a bunch of special adventures designed as preludes to The Paladins' Plague; we wound up playing ours after we played the main event, which was weird but we pretended it happened beforehand. So the whole weekend had a big storyline to it.

In the month of January, 8 different people GMed for me, and I GMed for 15 people. I played with 26 people. That's 38 people total, since there's some overlap there. It's an atypical month given that I went to a four day con, but I gotta say, this LFR stuff is really giving me a ton of variety and introducing me to a lot of people.

Interesting stuff. And The Paladins' Plague was not something I'd ever have gotten in any other roleplaying context.