"The Smiling Cat" Carnage 2011, part 4

Saturday, 5. Nov. (continued)
Upon entering Andre's Billiards Room of Doom, I entered the cozy after-party that I've been hanging out at for the last two years. Stevie-D and Zach were actually new additions, but Ben from Schenectady, Andre (obviously) and CCrabb are my after hours gang. Stevie-D faded first, and Zach went out for a cigarette to never return. At around 3am, Ben bid everyone adieu. At that point I usually head home, but this time around, I decided to "go for bro" , so I pressed onward into the realms of sleepless debauchery. And debauch it was; Andre treated CCrabb and me to his death metal collection. CCrabb got poky and admitted that even editors have creative thoughts every now and then. I think Andre and I were arguing about the Randolph Carter cycle, Christi metaphorically passed away long before, when suddenly we were talking about doing a small horror get-together-- "One your Hoot things." was his choice of words. And just as I was about to go into details as to how these "hoot things" occur, the cognac hit in and I got dizzy and noticed it was after 5am. with promises to return, I left an equally dizzy Andre to straighten up his den of death and death-metal before he stumbled to his own bed.

So there I was, back in my room, everyone mildly snoring, and me staggering ass drunk at about 5:24am. I just knew I was going to sleep until 11am, maybe even past noon. Maybe people were going to have to shake me awake ten minutes before my afternoon games! 9:14am Pery sits up and sneezes, I am awake for the rest of the day and I know it.

Once again Monk and K Bell were up for the walk into town, or at least along the gas station and greasy spoon strip next to the New Hampshire border. The fresh air did me well. And I was ready for my upcoming events.

Coming into the resort, I saw the line for next year's reservations underway. Seemed kind of depressing to me, so we sent K Bell up to stand in line for us.

After some dork swiped two tables in the role-playing room, the Carnage Passchendale as I like to call it, I had to head into the main dining room. But hat tip to Tyler, the executive decision was handled with less than a second's indecision, and his place I would have done the same thing. That said, I hope something will be said to the table-grubber about his being a DICK in a hobby where everyone actually tries to get along. My T&T game "The Mines of Naram-Sin" still filled up, with an extended family of five (headed by Ari and Chris(?)), and Michael Behrman, I say his name just because anybody with the name "Bear-Man" is just kewl beyond normal bounds. The game went a little over, I blame myself, as well the party taking an hour to approach the entrance of the tunnels I had for them, and the final encounter ended up with a "total party kill" event" which I didn't engineer. Still it was a good game, and the family angle keeps my public-speaking skills well practiced.

Had dinner with Pery, Andre and Zsuzsa and then Monk and K Bell. I couldn't stick around because I had to work my characters for my CoC game coming up. No room hijinx, just me forgetting a great costume that I was going to outdo Dr. Nik with this year.

My "Castle of the Moth" for CoC was one awesome event for me, if no one else. Zach and Derek showed up. I saw Heather and Patrick across the room, yet again avoiding actually playing one of my games, the scalawags that they are. But Dan and Dan, two true Lovecraft fans, and Lucas, also a man who knows a good Cthulhu tale when he hears one, showed up to fill out the table. Now while the plot never got around to the deep Mythos knowledge that I had in store, I felt like I was watching a movie. The characters were a disparate collection of people with separate interests as to why they were in the scenario I presented. In the end, with a couple of "character feeds" (The GM tells the Player what his PC should do), I had a nice gruesome yarn unfolding in front of me. The was only a "Bigfoot" of a CoC game for me, next year will be better. But after the high caliber performance of the players involved, I am not sure it will open to the public.

The after-party started innocently enough. I bought my Castle Moth players a drink of their choice, except Lucas, who abstained. The next thing I know Ray was sitting on my lap, where I was keeping the camera in my front pocket. After pushing him off, I forcibly told him, "The Story is that it was a hot chick that broke the camera!" I mean if I was going to get in trouble for breaking a piece of technology with Pery, it had better be worth it.

I actually found Pery, and a room full of others already in Andre's Den of Iniquity and Villainy...