The outdoors seem to hate me.  If it's not the fauna, it's the weather.

I drove Liz and myself up the mountain, discussing various LARP and non-LARP related topics.  Didn't have any problem navigating my way up the mountain, but we ran into a snag navigating the dirt roads once we were up there.  There were conveniently placed signs that read "ApocaLARP: The End is Here" and red arrows.  In the fading light, the red arrows were easier to follow, so we did.  Then we ran into a hill that my car couldn't traverse.  My car is a bit low to the ground, so I thought that I was just doing mountain trails wrong.  Liz and I decided to get out of the car and walk for a bit, to see if there was some help to be had.  Well, the path narrowed considerably about fifty feet after where we got stuck.  It turns out that we were following the arrows for a bike race, not the LARP.  Despite the dwindling light, we found the trail again and arrived at the game site.

Liz pointed out that we made the classic horror movie mistake: we left the car.  I pointed out that I locked the car doors, before we walked away, but that doesn't seem to matter.

It was cold at the campsite.  Really cold.  As in below freezing, ice crystals forming in your watter bottle cold.  Later that night, Meg (Meg has a harrowing story about her arrival that I will leave to her to tell), Davy, and his girlfriend arrived, all of who were NPCs.  We spend some time bantering about trivialities as "what if we held a LARP and no PCs showed up?"

Now, this is a retort to Machiavelli's famous question: what if there was a war and only one side showed up?  It's not a very good retort either, since the answer is obvious: we pack up and go to Denny's early.

That night, it SNOWED on us, and the temperature was 25F.  Weather.com is useless.  They predicted 0% chance of precipitation on Friady, 10% chance on Saturday, and 0% on Sunday.  I advise against using their website for planning.  Meg was kind enough to share her tent and heater with me, but it was still fricken freezing.  Note to self: Do not LARP in Big Bear between the months of September and April.

Game itself was good.  It consisted of several mods, in which I got to play the city's mayor.  I recrited some PCs to be the city's police force.  They decided they didn't like the mayor and killed him.  I'm not sure how much, if any, this alters Rob's plans for the game.  We'll have to see how this unfolds.

The game features factions heavily, and in fact there are territories that your faction can control and gain benefits from.  The supermarket, for example, allows you to scrounge food every so often.  I didn't check what the other territories did, but I think this is a cool idea.  I'd like to see turf wars erupting, but for this to happen, there needs to be either more factions than territories or one faction needs to be able to hold multiple buildings.

The game also featured a robot assault.  Some military robots went hayware and started attacking the village.  They're tough (but not super tough), and fight hand to hand like boxers.  The costumes are admittedly a little cheesy (red duct tape and cardboard) and the helmets are really difficult to see out of.

We decided to strike the set early and leave Saturday evening instead of waiting for Sunday morning, I don't think any of us could have taken another night in the cold.  I enjoyed the game, but next time we've gotta find someplace a little warmer to play!

Another ambitious production, at least relative to what they've done so far.  Up until last weekend, Dying Kingdoms has just done day games, but the most recent game was a full on camping event.  Unfortunately, I could not be there for Friday because of work related concerns, and I wanted to watch the presidential debate.  However, I arrived early Saturday morning, and set up my tent at NPC Central.

Now, this is significant.  There was no one set up at NPC Central at the time, but I thought to myself "meh, other NPCs will show up and set up shop around me."  However, this didn't happen, and I found myself sleeping alone at NPC Central, since even Jesse has his tent set up at PC Central.  The fact that this was a problem would not occur to me until ~4 AM, when I woke up to the sound of a coyote calling, and I had to go to the bathroom really badly.  Well...humans are bigger and heavier that coyotes, and one on one, I could fight off a coyote.  Yeah the coyote call  was creepy, and getting closer, but I really had to go.  It wasn't until I was back in my tent that the other mental shoe dropped.  "Wait...there are more dangerous things in the Santa Monica mountains than coyotes."  Now, what I SHOULD have done is grabbed my sleeping bag and mattress pad, the lantern, and stumble my way to PC Central and finish the night under the stars.  However, a combination of fear and tiredness paralyzed my mind, and this didn't occur to me.  Somehow I thought that staying put was a better idea.  Remember people, set up your tent next to everyone else's!

Back to the game.  The story behind this game was that a silver town by the name of Tet-un-Namat was being repopulated on account of, well, the silver.  Naturally the PCs show up too.  Rob used his tavern setup to make a mine, which was populated by creatures called "nockers."  These creatures are quite similar to D&D kobolds in temperment, but are much stronger.  I was one of these creatures, and fought a group that included Diana and Ian from Live Effects.  (Yay for LARP groups intermixing!)  We stuck silver ore as treasure in the bungee cords that held the structure together, which I thought was a clever idea.  The PCs were about to leave the room empty handed, but one of them had mining, and Jesse decided that was good enough to point out the ore to the PCs, so they didn't walk away empty handed after all.  Since we were so short on NPCs, we had the PCs who ran the mod first switch off to NPC duty while the batch of regular NPCs went and did something else.

Then came what was the highlight of the game for me, which was my appearance as Ma'nakhtuf, corrupter of dreams, rightful ruler of Ikhten &c. &c.  I had a nice chat with Antonius about the possibility of us workinging togehter, but he didn't seem interested.  At first, he didn't even want to talk to me, much less negotiate.  I spoke of my respect for the power of the Illumin legions and their heavy infantry, (some Becchan barbarian sneered at me calling the Illumin legions "heavy infantry," and I was too annoyed to clarify that I meant "heavy infantry that I actually need to worry about") and advised him to take that legion that was marauding around my desert and pull it back to the border so that they could establish Illumin law in another lawless territory.  Too bad they didn't.  I even offered to assassinate the legion's leader so Antonius could take charge.  Oh well, he'll come around sooner or later, even if it's after it kills him. 

I also brought one of my vassals with me.  Fortunately for the PCs, none of them decided to attack her.  That would have been bad for them.  Really bad.  I really do care a lot for my vassals.  A lot of time and energy goes into them.

I wanted a chance to confront Liz about brandishing a silver weapon at me last time I was at Iron Gorge, but Antonius intervened on her behalf.  I decided that the slim hope that Antonius would side with me was worth giving up the pleasure of taunting the poor Elf girl.  I am, however, getting a little impatient with this solid wall of opposition I'm running up against.  I tried being nice and negotiating with the current powers.  It's time for the less subtle approach.

Speaking of my army, it's coming along nicely at my capital city of Hieratis.  I look forward to taking Tet-un-Namat.  It will be the first of many victories.

That wrapped up Ma'nakhtuf's section of the game, and by this time it was getting quite late.  I joined Meg for a trip to McDonald's, and we also scored some booze from Ralph's.  We ran another mod where one of Ma'nakhtuf's minions assaulted the town and caused some consternation, which was great.  Davy Krieger did a great job of being Ma'nakhtuf's minion.

Then we had some booze and went to bed.  I don't know what else you could ask for in a successful LARP weekend.  Here's to a long and successful DK campaign.