A visit to Athfuashhok'kh

[bunn]

I don't know why science fictional role playing destinations need to have so many apostrophes and generally unpronounceable hiccups. But Athfuashhok'kh was where we were going, and Athfuashhok'kh was where we went.

Anyway, the party solved (mostly) a problem involving Space Spores, which reminded me (though oddly not the GM of the adventure) of one of the works of Andre Norton...' Plague Ship' is it?  Sadly Bacchus was unable to attend due to a mixup with dates, but was at least able to attend a couple of days by Skype, but PwwbBihhaLJ, LoA and Pellinor were there for the whole thing, tripping over dogs and arguing fiercely as has become habitual....

We visited a spectacular desert planet where my Ithklur character 'Ass' became a sort of lizard version of Lawrence of Arabia (including learning to ride a three legged camel) while the duller and more hardworking members of the party fought off a fleet of clone warriors and did political things that my character didn't really understand (well, he did leave primary school prematurely: the whole political thing was a bit beyond him).  

I was most amused that in both adventures we'd managed to overlook something fairly huge.  Most of the time I was deliberately playing dumb, so didn't feel at all miffed.  It would have been quite out of character for me to have worked out the puzzles, after all.  It was quite nice that all the clever characters totally failed to notice that the Desert Natives we were talking to were actually all robots though.  Very restful to the brain to be playing a character with very little of it...   

For some reason in 'Traveller' if your education is poor then you are permanently handicapped even in skills like 'brawling' which are not generally taught at school (though actually thinking about it, primary school is probably the time of my life when I got experience of 'brawling' if ever...   Hurray for indifferent state primary schools!)

Anyway, a good time was had by all: possibly a bit too good, on the last night three of us foolishly drank cocktails concocted by philmophlegm. We really should know better by now.

I reckon they would have been pretty lethal on a healthy metabolism, but I'd had a sort of lurking cold all week. This took advantage of the hangover to give me a horrible case of the lurgi which had me in bed shivering and groaning for two days. One bright side though. I ate far too much last week, so eating nothing at all from Sunday to Tuesday was a good counterbalance!

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Was Ass the joke character created for you by the rest of us? I've been trying to remember who that was. Since we were trying to create characters that were the complete opposite of everyone's preferred type, I would have expected us to have made you a boring human, not an interesting Ithklur, but I suppose a dumb fighting machine is equally against type, given your aversion to battles.

Something is very wrong if Bethran can be called a "more hardworking member of the party." :-)

[purplecat]

Plague Ship was the first Andre Norton I read and I seem to recall re-reading it avidly for several years! It remains my favourite Norton story.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the joke character was human. Can't remember anything else about him though, I think he was deliberately created to be dull!

I don't think I have a huge problem with battles exactly, I just get bored quickly with dice-rolling, particularly when it is mostly being done by other people. Battles get dull very fast if you are playing a Hiver or a pacifist orangutan, because the only thing you *can* reasonably do in character is run away and hide!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... thinking on, the one time I seem to remember I quite enjoyed the battles was in skordh's monster Starbutts campaign, where I played that rich yuppy jellyfish character. He'd spent some of his loads-of-money on a state of the art armoured jellyfish transportation device, and enjoyed whizzing around shooting things and going PEW PEW PEW!

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Apart from reading (I think) 'Sargasso of Space' when I was still in primary school, I don't think I've ever read any Andre Norton. Maybe I should try some.

I'm currently reading some of Poul Anderson's 'Polesotechnic League' stories. They're good fun and very Traveller-esque. Stongly recommended if you're looking for relatively lightweight space opera.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Researching Norton on wikipedia reveals that she played D&D as early as 1976, at the invitation of Gary Gygax himself! Didn't know that...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I thought that for Butteler 3, we were all told that we would have three characters: 2 new ones plus the joke character. That's why one of my 3 was Bubbles. Pellinor thinks his joke character might have been Archimedes Flux, created in reaction to his "Mad" Mike character, which made everyone think he was all about big guns and shooting. Though I suppose it's possible that we were merely told that one of our 3 could be the joke character, rather than that it had to be. Though I doubt I'd have played Bubbles by choice. (Even though I ended up enjoying playing her very much.) Curse the fallibility of memory!

Oh, let's check LJ! Curses! That's no help. I did write up the character generation (http://ladyofastolat.livejournal.com/79446.html), but with no specifics. I also wrote that Bubbles was 80 and barely able to stand, so I suspect she was tweaked before she became a proper playable character.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

According to my LJ my joke character was 'interesting, though she is human, which is, of course, a bit dull'

Apparently it didn't occur to me that any indication of *how* she was interesting might be useful to my future self*, but that seems to indicate she was not Ass, anyway.

* now of course I know better but I bet I still haven't noted things I will want to know but not be able to remember in 4 years time...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I wonder if she was the one I was referring to when I said: "One character ended up with hopeless stats, and totally failed to learn anything useful in the 16 years of military service that we gave her... but, despite this, got promoted every year, and ended up really high-ranking." A high-ranking idiot might count as "interesting" to play.

Or else as "Bethran." :-)