Mr. Stretchypants

It was a nice summer holiday afternoon, the like that makes you either pop open a beer can or get a really bad idea. Well, I had no beer so it was: Welcome Really Bad Idea! About half an hour later I found out that I had enrolled to a yoga class in the autumn. Crap! Should always have some reserve beer handy. Yeah... I had some hazy memories on calling the yoga lady with my manly Mr. Ass van Dickery voice and her ending the conversion all doubtful like: "Yeah... Umm.. Welcome to the class to.. umm.. see if this really is your thing." Apparently there's something in my phone voice that makes people suspect that I'm trying to sell them some nasty, shady brand of pirated hemorrhoid ointment.

So after angstily anticipating the "Deed" (as I had come to call this folly in my mind) for two months, the day of the "Deed" finally came. I womaned up and ventured to the cave of the beast. The travelling guru of a basic course instructor, that I'll refer as mr. Dulcet Sells-Ya-Bridges, was a well-tanned finnish-swede with flashy white teeth and knees blotted with the lipstick of teenage yoga bitches. Some relaxed jokes, easy-going light workout and gentle phosphate-free brainwashing later the three day course was over. Well that wasn't so bad, I thought naively. And looky! They even included 8 free practice sessions in the price! Well why not use them, as this ain't exactly laborous or any-shit, I thought.

So to a practice session I went, happily as a lark (don't really know if they are happy or miserable as shit, hard to tell from that kind of animal, they do have that distinct look of sleep-depraved amphetamine users, but you get the gist). I was all relaxation and goofy non-stretching stretches that all amateurs do when they expect to attend to some non-sporty sport and have a few minutes of doing exactly nothing, apart from looking real stupid and mr. Beany.

Then our local instructor came and the practice begun. There were no jokes, no brainwashing, and what had been three days of easy-going light workout was condensed into one hour of what the CIA refers as 'interrogation stress positions' following each other in rapid staccato, with the added bonus on having rigid set of rules on when and how to breathe. My brain and body were instantly on each others' throats:

"Now just do as the nice instructor lady tells you and breathe out and bend over to..."

"Fuck you! That is NOT possible!"

"But that string-armed lil' girl is doing it..."

"I don't CARE! It HURTS! Also FUCK YOU!"

"Now-now, this should be easy, now why don't you just take your right leg and lift it to..."

"Hey I have a better idea, mr. Brain, why don't I take a rusty seven inch nail and stick it into you through the EAR instead, MUTHER... FUCKER!"

So if the more dirty-minded and juvenile of you have wondered how it feels like to be in a room-full of spandex-clad ass bending over to your direction, the answer is: it don't feel like shit 'cause there's no TIME for visual input to enter from your eyes to your brain! No embarrassment, no difficulty in finding non-creepy directions for your eyes, no NOTHING! Also, your body and brain hate each other with the intensity of acclaimed and award-winning mr. Al Pacino in the final stages of rabies and most of the positions specifically state that as an bonus-torture you have to look at the tip of your nose. And even if I was mr. Snake Gandhi, my eyes were full of sweat (as was every other place and this is no hyperbole: the floor was having puddles of the stuff and I had to be REAL careful not to kill meself slipping on my OWN SWEAT!) It was a fucking Abu Ghraib, I tell ya! So even if I was an ogling pervert, there would be nothing to see.

And then the training ended and it was time for the few minutes of relaxing after which we sat up and the kick hit me. Wowza! I had to resist checking if I had unknowingly creamed my pants during the exercise as the feeling was... just wowza! It was like gaining that post-coital glow plus at the fucking first time in my life be able to BREATH properly. When I left the training hall I had the biggest grin on my face and all my joints were bendy and muscles un-clenched and I had to fucking learn to walk again without all those unconscious muscle cramps and shit. I was like a limpening giant dick teetering towards my car. (Edit: Like this.)

So nowadays I go there WITHOUT ANYONE POINTING A .44 AT ME and voluntarily torture myself for an hour at a time, SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK! It's sick man! This yoga stuff should be ILLEGAL! I'm like an earthworm on a hook, but I fuckin LIKE IT. Oh man, I'm a goner now...

Trading Rogue, mon!

So ya'll know these in-character RPG session reports that nerds like me like to churn out not altogether unlike the hippopotamusii are driven by instinct to defecate steaming piles of hippo-manure and then kick them around for maximum effect? You do know that nobody reads them (the session reports man, smelling hippo shit is not optional if you find yourself near the species)? Yeah, they are like embarrassingly teary teen diaries full of lines sending the reader into convulsing fits of "Oh my God we are swimming in the same fucking gene pool?? I need a shower, bleargh." and confessions on how the writer of said document got a hard-on when he saw inside the hot substitute teachers sweater. But anyway, fuck it. The internet is here for my amusement so here you go:

"20B0827.1

I don't know what dirt our captain has against a certain Quadrant Big Shot, but there must be plenty of it. After all, it got the Big Shot to ask a favor from my Mentor - a high-ranking member of Adeptus Mechanicus - Thaddeus Mann. That's just as well, as Technocratius Mann likes to collect favors, it kinda being his hobby. And a quite lucrative one - for Omnissiah and Machine God, obviously.

My very existence is one such favor and one of the payments for that favor is my participation on this exploration, A Swan Song for a Troubled Rogue Trader, as I've begun to reference it in my mind (the mission officially being called rather not less ominously "WARP DOGS"). One of my tasks is to offer the services of Adeptus Mechanicus to our captain against a suitable fee and provision, but my primary allegiance lies of course to our Brotherhoods greater task of Furthering the Collection of STC's and Archeotec for the Glory And Furtherment of the Cause of the Machine God and Omnissiah."

So there we were: five habitual gamer geeks with our beards, spectacles, beer guts of varying sizes, pencils, juvenile humor and our pristine character sheets like some bizarre 1st graders on our first school day. We had created our characters previously on IRC and were hungry to blow some shit up. In the beginning GM's girlfriend was also present though not playing (and as such things are written to be in the Laws of Nature: was sufficiently bored by our game to not pay any attention to it), me and Jaakko were on a soda diet (a combination of freak accident, logistics and feebleness of old age) while the rest of the gang enjoyed a healthy diet of wine, cider, beer and stiff spirits. Though all that in depressing moderation, so no mooning out of windows or game room brawls ensued.

Shit, I almost forgot I was going to vomit some more sub-mediocre in-character prose down you throats, so ere kiddies:

"20B0827.2
Our ship, The Trickster, has a Machine Spirit that is less than co-operative, and the mysterious loss of certain log files concerning warp travel temporal anomalies while I was investigating them makes me suspect that Trickster hides or - Omnissiah Protect! - deletes Knowledge. Something has angered the Machine Spirit and I've yet to have success in appeasing It."

In the beginning the going was kinda stiff and the transition from off-game banter to playing a role was slow and incomplete. Jaakko had some understandable difficulties in injecting his character to the interaction scenes ashe played a spooky three-eyed Navigator with the outer appearance of both Nosferatu and the Bogey Man under your bed (you know, the kind that does not take a restraining order for an answer). Tommi, being in real life a bit on the untactful side, struggled also with his slippery Seneschal, but Toni was a perfect match with his jovially boisterous though a bit bossy Rogue Trader.

I must confess that I did not help much there, as I was too busy flash-backing in to the mode of our Descent sessions where the poo still is funniest substance known to man and there hardly is an utterance without the obligatory reference to Mad Carthoses naughty bits (namely his reproductive organs, cloaca and... well all the other parts of his body). Looking back I even committed the onanistical sin of playing myself: a disgruntled and bitter data miner with a streak of quenched wanderlust and prone to (although lacking in aptitude towards) poetic artsy-fartsyness. We've all done it and we all know it's not healthy. You'll go blind playing yerselfh fer chrissake!

Speaking of that old chestnut, I think we saw a GMs pet NPC out there. Something I can't quite put any of my protruding bits to suggested to me that this could be an NPC that has been created from the bits of GM's own real life and perceived character. Anyone who has GM'ed has done this at one point or another, and apart from going blind or developing a wang rash there really is no harm in it. Hell, my WFRP campaign was famous for it! (The pet NPC's, not much wang rash there, it was more of a diarrhoea stopped with blood sausages type of campaign.) The only danger is that you fall in love with the avatar of thyneself and the whole thing becomes a massive nuisance when your avatar begins to stalk the group and soon there's all sorts of crazy about. Police will be called and restraining orders start to fly and pretty soon some asshole rats the whole thing to Iltalehti.

But I digress. I think Toni sensed something too as he played his character quite gingerly around this NPC. No stomping on GMs soul, man. I think that it was not necessary (Although appropriate to the in-game situation so I could, as usual, speak from my ass. Should develop a party trick from that...) as what I've gathered from Henkka, he may well have the cojones to not let a Player Character crossing you very soul affect his judgement. Better man than me there, as the Fury of Crooked Fortuna would surely flash her toothless smile to a PC foolish enough to start humping the leg of My Facetiously Augmented Imagination of Self. MUAHAHAHAHAH!

And now some more of that delicioso hippo-dung:

"20B0827.3
Mutiny on board and a broken Thwine Superconductor left us stranded in a system with a shabby space station that was rapidly losing a battle for existence. There was lots gabbling about that the surface dwellers like to call 'diplomacy' that I like to call 'ventilating your gills and farting discreetly'. I got bored so I hacked the space station's memory banks. It seemed that the station scraped its sustenance by dealing with xenos and pirates, but alas not dealing any Thwine Superconductors. I also gathered that there was a sizable Tau minority on board, so that may well mean that region's archeotec, if any exist, is polluted by xeno influence.

I managed to fix the ships warp drive by bypassing the Superconductors but that cut our warp distance to six days. Without new Thwine Superconductors the situation looked exactly as bleak as it only can be on a ship scourged by a Captain born in a gravity well."

There was not much blowing shit up, but the story was interesting enough. I sensed some railroads and inflexibility on the plot and a hint of incoherencies, but nothing overt. Some parts were unnecessary or poorly rooted (the bit about our original mission that we never got even near to was fleshed out in unnecessary detail - that is if we do not return to it later on in the campaign) but on the whole there seemed to be a sound structure and a potent plot. I really hope that the GM does not grow overtly enamoured with his plot (As I frequently do. I even buy flowers to my plots sometimes and then try to grope them in the darkness.) so that he cannot anymore roll with the punches and starts God-hammering us around, but that is something that happens or does not.

"I'm not sure if it is the damage done to warp drives, the damage our navigator has suffered as a delicate child or just plain mischievousness on the part of Trickster, but something went horribly wrong as we were warping to a vicinity of trigger happy pirate space station (hunting for the Thwine Superconductors, of course!). You see, we arrived several days before we had left (!) and had sent a coded "Please don't shoot us, we come in peace"- message via our astropath. So when we arrived, it was all "To Battle Stations!" and "By God-Emperor there's hordes of them bloody pirates!""

And then a cliffhanger. All in all I'm waiting eagerly our next session. The setting is industrial grade adamantine, the characters will be interesting once we all get the hang of it and the story has all the potential to deliver.

Abjudication for GW and Other Maddness

Phew, it's been a long time. Let's try this again, shall we?

When I look at my past blogginses, I see that at that phase I was a blabbering GW fanboy. After that phase there have been other phases such as: "GW!! You Money-Gorging, Blueballing Vampiric Bitch!!", "GW And I are separated but still friends", "GW, WTF??", "GW, you are but a meh'siah to me" and the present one of "GW, you suck. But in feels kinda nice in my junk."

So, at present I am playing with my drunk viking spess mehreens again, but mainly only due to Toni's brilliant campaign. You see, I've discovered that I really do not care very much about the 'tactical' in tactical war games (maybe because I suck at it or maybe I suck at it because I do not care, cannot know), but I like the crafting, fabricating and enacting a nice solid story. Don't get me wrong, I like winning, but apparently not enough that I would be arsed to be careful enough to not make globvious huge fucking mistakes. No, really. Most of the time I know what I did wrong or what rules I forgot just seconds after the fact.

The same goes with board games too. As I've blogged earlier, I really only like games where the winning mechanic is hidden and you have to go by the feel of your seat. This means I hatehatehate! games like Chess or Samurai. However, there has to be a mechanic, it just must be such that you must trust your intuition and experience and not pure logic or mathematics.

Recently we have been having a go with Descent. Nice game, but I give a big blow of my ass-trumpet for the tactical aspects. Or in other words, I do not like them very much, as they are boring and un-interesting. I do however enjoy the unprintable banter at the game table and imagining my morally challenged hero hitting shit with a stick in a cave. I guess I'm just that kind of a guy.

Taking about curing one shelf from fanboyism: Twilight 2013. A game I love to read and hate to play. Because, the ideas are in principle very interesting, but totally in-un-fuckably un-playable. If the structure of the book requires you to use all of your fingers plus cock as a bookmark while playing, even the most dense mouthbreather-just-evolved-to-ambulate-on-hind-legs True Finns of you would get the clue, right? Not me and my masochism. Would make a nicest computer game no-one but me would buy ever made, though. Anyway, we finished the campaign and it was like anally giving birth to a angry hedge-hog. Just, it was legal and shit.

The painful campaign with T2k13 made me reconsider my stances with game system 'Crunch' versus 'Freedom' and the Freedom just bodyslammed the Crunches crotch and I think it's going for a Kimura right now. I'm afraid my Crunch won't have a functioning elbow very long. Or then this is just a setup for a rear-naked choke and some prison rules fun, but either way: Crunch is fucked. Anyway, the next game I myself am going to GM, is going to be either something with Vuorela's Flow or some light retro-clone fun. It just is kinda sad that somehow I've lost my Gamers Asperger's required for memorizing and internalizing complicated monster systems. (Judging by the increasing Profanity Count, I may have switched it for Internet Tourette's.)

So consider me surprised that the campaign I'm currently playing is vanilla, honest-to-god-emperor, crunchy-ass Rogue Trader. And I even liked the convoluted character+ship+crew creation. But I think it is mainly because of the rich story the premise and pitch makes it possible to spin. We shall see how it plays. I think it goes the better the more our GM is willing to or is capable of to wing in in a credible and fun way.

Henkka, our GM had a promising start with his previous attempt at a Dark Heresy campaign, but the game stalled and died silently bleeding and possibly crying for mama for whatever reason. I just hope the GM has the stamina and creative balls to pull through this time as there is some real good shit lurking in the dark places of this campaign. Plus my machine-man Explorator is just that fucking cool. We actually have already played one session and I think imma even write some report or such shit in this blog about it.