Hunter

You Are a Hunter Soul

You are driven and ambitious - totally self motiviated to succeed Actively working to acheive what you want, you are skillful in many areas. You are a natural predator with strong instincts ... and more than a little demanding. You are creative, energetic, and an extremely powerful force. An outdoors person, you like animals and relate to them better than people. You tend to have an explosive personality, but also a good sense of humor. People sometimes see you as arrogant or a know it all. You tend to be a bit of a loner, though you hate to be alone. Souls you are most compatible with: Seeker Soul and Peacemaker Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

And I always forget something! Must be because I do this at obscene hours of morning.

While in his chantry house, Lucius met his old nemesis Roger Botha. Roger has hated Lucius since their first arrival at the chantry and has pulled some really immature practical jokes on Lucius over their time together. However, Roger has also got really lippy about not only Lucius (calling him Luke or sometimes Skywalker and laughing at his every misfortune), but about Marcus as well, saying he deserved what he got when killed by the barrabi Constantine and "had it coming". Lucius got fed up and tried to rot Roger's chair out from under him, but Roger's apparently better because he managed to pop every seam on Lucius' clothes, leaving him naked and pinning the rogue, puppeted Thig Wendy to the floor. Overall, not a good situation to be in, particularly not when an Akashic is trying to mind-connect to you and gets a mental image of that... Anyway, the scary NPC came by with clothes (Roger's best, as it happened) and Roger's parting shot was to destroy Lucius' shoes. Those two are going to hate each other forever.

Workaholic II

I feel like total hell. Swollen glands, achy joints and the bloody headache -- whenever I feel unwell the stupid migraine always feels like it needs to get in on the action. I'd consider going home early but when I didn't respond to Violet's unprecedented "Are you alright?" with an unqualified "yes", she must have seen that I looked under the weather because her reply was to the order of, "Oh, no; not you too. You're not allowed". I don't think I'm getting much sympathy here. I'll stick it out as long as I can but if I still feel this bad tomorrow, no way am I coming in, and Violet can just suck it up.

It's been your basic Monday madness -- some quiet points followed by periods of running about knees bent advancing behaviour. I managed to take advantage of the quiet points by putting together a summary of what's going on with Mage's current London plot; sorry, those of you playing, but when it goes up, it'll go in the GM section. Players find out jack all until they ask the right questions or it comes to bite them in the arse. Let's face it, I threw them a number of curve balls, most of which haven't even hit yet. It'll be amusing to see whether they ask the right questions of the two captive Thig -- well, I say 'captive', but the one that hornswoggled them in the Chelsea regulator barracks at least hasn't been trapped in a vault with two sets of handcuffs, one pair of legirons, oven mitts and a duct tape gag. In fact, she's referred to as being in 'protective custody' because, as Skank put it, "After all, you are a Thig" (though I've never heard so much disdain in a human voice).

Looking at my wall calendar, I'm sort of seeing the sequence going like this:

• 12th December -- 7th Sea
  
• 19th December -- Mage and Christmas present hand-out (except I should give Andy P his and Claire's next weekend if I won't see him until the New Year...)
  
• 26th December -- should be 7th Sea but who games on Boxing Day? That whole week's bad anyway because I know cholten99 is in Newcastle and everyone else is probably seeing family.
  
• 2nd January -- Mage so far as I know; I don't think anybody's going to have huge problems with playing the day after New Year.
  

I am more secretary than any sane gamer needs.

Anyway, the point is that the 19th December session is probably going to mostly be dealing with the Umbral shit and questioning the prisoners, so by the time they get out of that, the 2nd January session will probably mark the beginning of the Convivium. That gives me a month to finish the notes on what's going on in the rest of the post-Restart world for the speeches and what have you, not to mention come up with a game plan for what's going to happen when the SBB storm into the International Convivium (which, as Skank pointed out, basically means "everybody getting along with each other") with a real hate on for Skank's old mentor and every intention of bitch-slapping any Hermetic representative who looks set to take Molly off them (presuming they can get her out of the Umbra unscathed). I'm sure that's more than enough time; I just want to do it all justice because this is going to be priceless.

I should scrub the bathtub and have a hot bath when I get home. It might make me feel better. I just keep putting it off because every time I really need the hot bath, I don't have the energy to do the necessary "scrub the tub because the cat uses it as a litter tray on occasion" thing. Time to stop putting it off and do it, I guess. Oh, and pick up dinner on the way home. God knows what I want to cook, though.

Whooooooore...

So I learn from corone that White Wolf are doing a novel writing contest. He says he's tempted. So was I when I first heard about it. Of course, the temptation got less when I found out that a) you have to basically use the new Vampire and Werewolf stuff, b) you have to include one of the signature characters (all well and good if the Vampire ones I'd seen weren't dry as dust) and c) ... well, read what you have to include in the text:

"I submit my idea voluntarily and on a non-confidential basis, and I understand that this submission by me and its acceptance by White Wolf Publishing, Inc. does not, in whole or in part, establish or create by implication, or otherwise, any relationship between White Wolf and me beyond consideration in Round One of the present contest. I agree that this synopsis becomes the property of White Wolf Publishing, Inc. I further understand that the acceptance by White Wolf of this synopsis neither creates nor implies any confidential relationship, guarantee of secrecy, nor any recognition or acknowledgment of either novelty or originality."

So basically what it's saying is, "Even if we think it's good, there's no confidentiality clause, which basically means that we can hand it to one of our random hacks and your premise becomes our crappy novel in a year or two, and you can do fuck all about it. Basically, we own every word you hand us".

Sorry. No. Even if I worked on a storyline-first basis (which I don't usually), hell fucking no. It really pisses me off, that. I like the gaming systems, basically, but corporate whoredom is not my bag. If I put that kind of work into it, I want it to be my characters, and I want a guarantee that my words stay my words. If they do that at the premise point, what's it going to look like when you get to actual content, for crying out loud?