Long Live the King

gabriel_le and I ran a game of Long Live the King starting at 2pm yesterday. Despite White Wolf's estimate of 4 hours for the game, it actually ran until close to 10pm, though we did take a little over an hour off for dinner.

Many people came in costume, and ilanikhan kindly brought costuming materials for the rest of us, so we managed to have all of our players in some kind of costume, even if they weren't neccessary all of anything like the same period. It still definitely added to the atmosphere.

The rules themselves leave a LOT of holes and lack of clarity, so there were a lot of judgement calls to be made on exactly how things worked, and luckily we didn't hit a victory condition discrepancy that we spotted near the end.

I took the King role, which was essentially the game master role, with gabriel_le as my scribe and able assistant. We had players for all of the 7 main roles, and 3 supporting actors to take on the minor roles as required.

The game was busy, hectic, fun, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. I'm glad we did it, but I'm not ready to do it again for a while.

That was a busy weekend!

I managed to double-book last weekend with Penguicon in Detroit and running Long Live the King at my house on the Sunday. The only solution was to fly! Luckily, I had enough points to fly really cheaply on Northwest which also, conveniently, has direct Ottawa-Detroit (and return) flights.

So, Friday around noon, I get on the plane for Detroit, get there, get to the hotel relatively smoothly, get room...then I'm supposed to be working staff for at-con registration. Massive SNAFU! At-con registration table... 10 minutes before opening... a couple boxes of stuff, a couple monitors, and me looking for the boss. Occasional wandering con-com are accosted as the line up grows, and grows. Even by 4:30, the guy running registration hasn't shown up, and the con-chair is also off sight. We're about to throw together some sort of ad-hoc registration process, when the boss finally shows up. We bail from the planned computer-based registration to a somewhat broken (no receipts, no copies, poor records) manual plan, but succeed by dint of speedy work to get the line back under control.

After finishing reg at 8pm, I have dinner with no-longer-LJ-less redrunn, and discuss motorcycle routes between Detroit and Ottawa. (401 until after Toronto, then decide when to head north... option being 115 through Peterborough, 37 through Tweed, county road 10 (Old Perth Road) from Kingston through Perth, or the 416. Then an evening of wandering around various parties and hanging out with friends.

Saturday, up and did registration again from 12pm until 4pm. We ran out of everything... Saturday day-passes( me: "we're almost out of Saturday one-day passes", concom member: "that never happens", me: "we're almost out of Saturday one-day memberships", CCm: "that never happens", me: "see, I've only got one left", CCm: "that never happens... I guess I'd better print some more"), full-weekend passes, program booklets (emergency printing of pocket-program equivalents ensues), etc. I would say that Penguicon did extremely well on membership, and it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't over 900 people. (I handed out badge number 1042 around 4pm, we started number at-doors at 500, I don't know what the pre-reg and such numbering ended at.)

Had dinner with tammylc, jeffreyab, and a couple friends of tammylc's at an Indian place not too far away. Wasn't impressed with my food, though a couple of the dishes (I had a tali) were good, and the carrot halva (dessert) was really good. Then an evening of partying, where I got to bed way too late -- some time after 4am because...

I had to get up at 7am to get to my 10am flight home. I succeeded, and got on the plane and home in time.

From 1pm to 10pm, ran Long Live the King. That was busy... luckily the king was supposed to be aging and tired and sleepy -- so I felt typecast for that part of the role. Still, lots of decisions to be made for this game, the rules are self-contradictory in some places and unclear in many.

I slept really well last night. :)