Breaking News: Solution To Illinois Budget Crisis!

As you may know, the State of Illinois has been facing a severe budget shortfall and has recently been forced into massive tax hikes. Also, in the 2008 election, then-candidate Mitt Romney accused then-candidate Rudy Giuliani of turning New York City into a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants in order to get more workers and tax revenue. Recently, it appears that Illinois is following this plan, becoming a "sanctuary state" for Democratic politicians who want to avoid voting on bills. Lawmakers have referred to themselves as "refugees", and have been stimulating the Illinois economy by purchasing essential items. There has been speculation about whether police would be able to arrest the rogue legislators and extradite them back to their home states to stand trial. As for me, I am just waiting to see what the Capitol Steps song about it will be like.

Adventure Comes to Champaign-Urbana!

I've already blogged a lot about my adventures in Belegarth and Dungeons & Dragons. But I've also learned that just like in College Park, there's plenty of exciting adventuring action right here in Champaign-Urbana.

First of all, if you're interested in combat-related encounters, there's plenty of those taking place in dark alleys across campus and the surrounding areas. Of course, you will probably want to level up your combat skills first. On the other hand, it might be a better idea to follow the cardinal rule of adventuring and not split the party in the first place.

But just like in Dungeons & Dragons, combat isn't the only way you can get your excitement - there's plenty of non-combat skill challenges that are just as dangerous. Recently, a new alcoholic drink called "Four Loko" has gained popularity among students, despite the fact that it has been referred to as "blackout in a can". One 23.5 ounce can of it has as much alcohol as 6 cans of beer and as much caffeine as 2 cups of coffee - which is dangerous because mixing caffeine and alcohol is not recommended. In a recent encounter, 9 out of 50 drinkers failed their saving throws and had to be hospitalized.

Of course, if you manage to survive the dangers, secret treasure rooms and ancient relics are just waiting to be found. Just be careful not to have your just rewards stolen by greedy leaders, and if you want to go back to a tavern to share drinks with your fellow adventurers, always be on the lookout for evil mayors who want to close them down for their own nefarious purposes.

Origins, Part 1: The Political Intrigue

Probably the most unique, fun, and exciting game I played at Origins was something called the National Security Decision Making Game, or NSDM. This game is a political/military simulation based on real-world politics, and is designed to be similar to actual "wargame" exercises used by the military in real life. The way the game works is that each game (which lasts 4 hours for "fast play" or 8 hours for a "mega-scenario") is set in a different country, or sometimes multiple countries depending on the number of players. At the start of the game, the people running the game (known as the "controllers") give a brief presentation on the basic idea of the game, and then an overview of the situation in whatever country we are running. Then, each player is given a card indicating what person or group of people they are going to play - this could be a particular person (like the President), a political party, or a particular ethnic or interest group. These cards give players a brief overview of their objectives, goals, and capabilities. Then, players break out into their individual "cells" (each country is a "cell") and start making deals and doing stuff in order to achieve their goals. Players can attempt to take actions and pass policies by writing them down on slips of paper and getting the appropriate groups to sign off on them, then turning them in to the controllers. There are no dice rolls and few hard-and-fast rules in this game: mostly, the controllers (many of whom have real-life military experience) decide the results of any actions. However, the meat of the game is not in the military conflicts themselves, but rather in the negotiation and buildup. Also, sometimes the controllers will interject events in the form of "news broadcasts," but players can also instigate things on their own. At the end of the game, there is a debriefing, which is divided into three phases: the "Excuse Generation" phase, the "Mutual Recrimination" phase, and the "What The Hell Were You Thinking?" phase. In the debriefing, the controllers reveal the whole story, ask players about why they made the decisions they did, and give out rewards for the most successful players.

The first game I participated in was set in Indonesia. The controllers gave a brief overview of Indonesia, showing us a map and pointing out the various groups, including the natives of Borneo, who are under threat of being forced off their lands, and the Aceh party, a group who lives in the northwest part of Indonesia (which has lots of reserves of natural gas) and dreams of becoming independent. Another important issue is that the Indonesian military is responsible for a lot of the administrative work (like road work, health inspections, etc.) that is normally performed by the civilian government, and many in Indonesia want more civilian control over these functions. Role cards were distributed, and I was given the President card. The card stated that my goal was to keep power, gain credit for improvements in the country's condition, and assert more civilian control over the military.

As the scenario opened, all the groups started working on their domestic priorities, making deals to advance their groups' interests. The Chinese ethnic group, which consists largely of businessmen and entrepreneurs, went around to other countries (played by the controllers) to solicit foreign investment. Other initiatives included a bill for natural disaster preparation, which led to a player being designated as the "Indonesian FEMA person." The Muslims tried to integrate the goals of promoting their religion and other groups' aims for economic development by proposing the construction of a Muslim-themed amusement park called "Allah World." I focused on the goal of gaining civilian control of the military. I convinced the groups with economic interests to go along with the plan by arguing that more civilian control would reduce the appearance of and possibility of corruption, which would make Indonesia a more attractive place to do business. However, I wasn't able to convince the military to go along with the plan, and although I made several attempts at compromise I couldn't get military support. Then the controllers announced an upcoming election, sending all the political parties into campaign mode. While there were about 15 minutes left until the election and I had spent almost the previous hour unsuccessfully trying to pass my initiative, I started going around to all the interest groups and signing whatever bills they wanted me to sign in order to gain support. During the election, each of the candidates gave brief speeches, then all the groups voted. The non-military groups (except for the opposing political parties) all supported me, and the three military players weren't paying attention during the voting process and forgot to vote, so I won with about 80% of the vote. The military and the opposition parties then began making plans to unseat me.

Soon afterwards, we were faced with our first foreign crisis: a Malaysian vessel caught an Indonesian pirate ship engaged in piracy, chased it all the way back to Indonesian territorial waters, and captured it. As I was trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution, the commander of the Indonesian air force (who was a player who had just walked in and asked to join the game, and was given that role) launched an unauthorized airstrike on the Malaysian vessel. This gave the three other political parties just the excuse they needed to impeach me for "improper military response" to the situation. Seeing the writing on the wall, I resigned without a fight. (Later on, they revealed that their original plan was a military coup, but decided on impeachment instead because part of their goal was to uphold the "trappings of democracy.") In the confusion, however, the Aceh party put its plan into action - it declared independence and stopped all natural gas shipments to the rest of Indonesia. The rest of Indonesia tried a measured response, trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution while preparing for an invasion if necessary. But when Malaysia started sending over troops and military aid to help the rebels, the rest of Indonesia realized they were in for more than they bargained for. As the situation rapidly escalated into full-scale civil war, time was up and the controllers ended the scenario.

At the end of the scenario, the controllers gave out rewards for the two best players. In second place was the Chinese player, who stayed under the radar during all the conflict and gun-running and successfully focused on their economic goals. But the first place reward was for the Aceh player, who spent the entire first half of the game expertly manipulating all of us - convincing the military to pull their troops out of the Aceh region, making secret deals with various parties to buy weapons, and convincing Malaysia to help them in exchange for the Aceh region's vital natural gas resources - and none of us even realized what was going on until it was too late. (In this whole scenario, the only controller-initiated event was the pirate ship thing - everything else was the players' idea.)

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I liked this game so much that a couple days later I participated in another session. This time, I got there early enough that I was able to see a montage of player quotes that happened during previous games. They've been doing this for 20 years, so there are lots of them, such as:

"I need to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Is the Dungeons + Dragons room out of their jurisdiction?"

"When I want your opinion, I'll subpoena you."

"When will the show trial start?"
"It's not a show trial, it's a legitimate legal proceeding."
"Okay, but when will it start?"
"Just as soon as we can manufacture enough evidence."

(After being blown up by a suitcase nuke in a previous game, and later seeing someone not involved with the game wander into the room carrying a suitcase) "Oh no, not another suitcase!"

Anyway, this one had more people, so they split us up into two "cells": South Korea and Japan. I was assigned to the South Korea cell, and my role card said that I represented the farmers' association. At the beginning of the game, our first major issue was how to deal with the threat posed by North Korea. There were a few major options on the table - increase spending on the military and mobilize more troops up to the border, try a more open solution using the carrot rather than the stick, or ask China for help. I suggested that we capitalize on the North Koreans' dependence on food aid from South Korea to use it as leverage, and we eventually decided on a compromise plan that included elements of all three of the plans people had proposed. The first ew minutes of the game were relatively calm, with the exception of Kim Jong Il's player taunting us from the sidelines. But the situation soon escalated, when it was discovered that North Korea was smuggling drugs and counterfeit money through tunnels under the DMZ into South Korea in order to drain money from and destabilize South Korea's economy. As we scrambled to figure out how we would respond, we were hit with yet another crisis - a few days after a radiation leak was discovered in a nuclear sub, a South Korean vessel was attacked by a giant sea monster! This extra crisis turned out to be a false alarm - it was just a publicity stunt by a movie company to promote their new monster movie. (The nuclear accident wasn't part of the stunt; they just capitalized on it to manufacture the "sea monster attack" story.) At this point, I was mostly on the sidelines as my group's main interests were domestic, but it was still exciting to see how the situation would unfold. North Korea got more and more aggressive, sending artillery corps down to the border to get within range to fire on Seoul. We also learned that the internal situation in North Korea was getting more and more unstable, with Kim Jong Il assassinated, his son taking his place as leader, and all contact cut off between the North Korean and South Korean governments. The last straw was when Seoul was hit with a biological attack: a terrorist had contaminated the water supply with botulism, leaving over 1000 citizens dead. We interpreted this as an act of war, and invaded. We had the help of China and Russia, so we thought it would be an easy fight. But as soon as we started to invade, North Korea threatened nuclear retaliation. We thought that China had told us that they had "dealt with" the nukes, so we pressed on. But unfortunately that information was based on faulty intelligence. We called North Korea's bluff - but it wasn't a bluff.

During the debriefing, however, the true identity of the player responsible for the bioterrorism was revealed: it was a rogue general in the Japanese cell! Apparently he had his own ulterior motives, such as increasing his own power, and thought that a biological attack would be the perfect instigating event. We had all just assumed that the North Koreans were responsible because earlier in the scenario, they had kidnapped five Japanese doctors including a virologist, so we thought they were using them to develop the biological weapon. They also gave out rewards for the most successful players (there were going to be six awards this game, due to the larger number of players), but unfortunately I had another game to get to and was not able to stay and see who won. But since the end result was nuclear annihilation of the entire region, it's hard to say that anyone really achieved their goals. And as for the cause of North Korea's belligerence in the first place? We never found out, but the controllers did say that everything North Korea did (remember, there was no North Korea cell in this game except if you count the Kim Jong Il player, so most of this was controller-initiated) was based on what North Korea players "did to themselves" in a previous game.

Geekiness in perspective

Today, I had the following conversation (paraphrased) with a member of my Belegarth group:

Me: I'm confused about the rules for checking arrows to see if they are safe. It says you're supposed to push down on it to see if you can feel the core. But any arrow you can feel the core if you push hard enough. So how do you know how hard you are supposed to push?

Him: There's no way to quantify it. It's not like testing it, like in a lab. Testing the weapons is personal, different people do it differently.

Me: Okay, so clearly the best strategy is to get the arrows tested by a representative sample of weapons checkers, so that it's more likely to pass everywhere (like if you take it to a different group).

Him: Don't worry about that. Everyone does it the same way, they just do it differently.*

Me: Okay, well how about this idea. I can bring a scale and have them push down on the scale with the same force that they push down when checking weapons. Then I will know how hard to push down when I am testing the ones I make.

Him: That's not necessary. People will think you are weird for doing that.

Me: Why? I'm just using quantitative data. Is there something wrong with using quantitative data?

Him: It's geeky as hell.

Me: Let me get this straight. Someone who does live-action role-playing is telling me that it's wrong to be geeky?

Him: Some of the people there don't consider it "role-playing." They're there for the fighting.

Me: Okay, let's rephrase. 'Someone who does foam sword-fighting is telling me that it's wrong to be geeky."

Him: "Not all of them think foam sword-fighting is geeky."


*This sentence, however, is not paraphrased. I distinctly remember him saying "Everyone does it the same way, they just do it differently." I laughed out loud when he said this, though I don't think he realized what was so funny.

More politics as usual in Illinois

Recently, the primary elections were completed. Pat Quinn, the incumbent governor (he was Blagojevich's lieutenant governor) won the Democratic primary. His running mate in the general election was going to be Scott Lee Cohen, but he had to drop out once it was revealed that he had engaged in some less-than-savory action of his own.

Pat Quinn said that he didn't know anything about the incident with Cohen until after they had become running mates. Admittedly he did not choose Cohen to be his running mate; in Illinois there is a separate primary for governor and lieutenant governor, and the winners of each join forces in the general election. Perhaps Cohen was actually a Republican sleeper agent tasked with infiltrating the Democratic primary and winning so as to discredit the Democratic candidate. However, there were five other candidates in the Democratic race, so one would expect that they would have brought Cohen's incident to light in the primary, when they were competing against Cohen. So maybe they are the real sleeper agents. (As you can see, this is another instance of realism in board games. In the Battlestar Galactica board game, players are tasked with finding out which among their number is secretly a Cylon. In real-life politics, politicians have to find out who is really working for them and who is secretly plotting against them, and that is not always simple)

Goings on at school

I have blogged enough about gaming for now so I will telll you what has been going on at school laterly.

I got the grade on my midterm back in Algorithms. I got 96 out of 100 (the highest grade in the class).

Also I am taking the mandatory CS 591-PHD orientation course, where each week they have a different guest speaker. We have had some cool lectures with some very distinguished lecturers, includnig Dan Reed who told us about high performance computing research going on at Microsoft, and Bill Gropp who told us about the new "Blue Waters" project at UIUC. Blue Waters is slated to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world, with the computing power of over 1 million laptops, and is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2011.

One interesting fact: part of the reason they are building Blue Waters at UIUC is because of the cold climate in Illinois. Supercomputers generate large quantities of heat and thus need to be cooled to avoid overheating and burning out, and that costs a lot of energy. Dan Reed also talked about this problem in regards to large corporate data centers. In fact, he told us, some corporations are discovering that in some cases it is actually cheaper to not even bother with extra cooling and simply replace computers as they fail rather than spend lots of electricity cooling them all. (That solution would not work for Blue Waters because unlike data centers that have lots of separate, redundant computers, Blue Waters is all connected and one part failing could ruin any computation that is in progress.)

On the other hand, this is probably not a good cooling solution for any large-scale computing application.

Realism in Dungeons and Dragons

On Dungeons + Dragons websites there are a lot of ideas about how to make the game "more realistic." Some of these discussions are quite comical, such as claims that "it's unrealistic that special power X works against monster Y" when at least one (or in some cases both) of X and Y doesn't even exist in the real world, so it makes no sense to ask whether it is being represented "realistically." But today I played a game of Dungeons and Dragons that was quite realistic - maybe a little too realistic.

The setup was as follows. Our party was a group of missionaries for the deity Sarenrae, who preaches "compassion and peace" as her highest virtues. Our objective was to go into a tribe of gnolls (a type of monster), convert them all to Sarenrae's faith, and kill anyone who refused to convert. Helping us were some gnolls from a rival tribe that had a "blood feud" with the tribe we were trying to convert. During the discussion the DM (Dungeon Master) told us about a "serpent king" or something that all the gnolls were ruled by. When a player asked how the two tribes could fighting each other if they were both under the "serpent king," the DM said that "the Iranians and the Iraqis both worship Allah, but they hate each other."Another thing that came up during this talk was Sarenrae's "holy book" that apparently included a section on "who you're allowed to kill." For example you are allowed to kill someone who refuses to convert, but you have to give them a chance to convert first.

Anyway, we went off to our destination and we had to find Flynn, a "gnoll boss" that was the leader of the town. First we went to a goblin who could tell us where Flynn was. The goblin agreed to tell us where Flynn was only if we promised to kill Flynn. Our party's paladin (a paladin is a holy warrior who must follow a strict code of honor or he loses his special powers and becomes a "fighter without bonus feats") refused to promise to kill Flynn (because we have to give him a chance to convert first, and if he converts we aren't allowed to kill him.) Eventually we just went off and searched on our own and eventually found Flynn's lair. There were four gnoll guards that were guarding the stairs up to the lair. We tried to convert them but they at first refused. Then the paladin offered to give them gold to leave their posts, so we could go to the boss (after all the paladin was looking for the non-violent solution). However they agreed only under the condition that we agreed to kill Flynn (because if Flynn found out the guards had left their posts, he would kill them for their disobedience.) For reasons already discussed our paladin couldn't make that promise. The negotiations continued, and after he doubled the gold offer we were close to a deal, but another of our party members made a preemptive strike and attacked the gnoll guards. He thought he was doing our gnoll allies a favor by killing their mortal enemies, but our gnoll allies saw it differently - he saw the "treachery" and feared that we would kill them next, so our gnoll allies turned on us. Also in the chaos, the guards called Flynn to come down and help them in the fight. So we ended up fighting the gnoll guards, our former allies, and Flynn, all at the same time. When explaining why our gnoll allies had turned on us, the DM explained: "The Sunnis and Shiites hate each other, but when the infidels come, they turn on them."

Fortunately for us, all the gnolls were so weak that they were easily dispatched. Maybe it was for the best that that part of the game didn't turn out too realistic.

Breaking News: Dungeons & Dragons Evidence of Socialist Takeover Plot

Recently, many conservatives have accused President Barack Obama of trying to turn the United States into a socialist country. Although the "liberal-elite" mainstream media have so far refused to report on this shocking development, there's yet another area that has been infiltrated by socialist propaganda - Dungeons and Dragons.

Yesterday during my Dungeons and Dragons game my character got killed. Since the death panel decided that my character's "level of adventuring productivity" wasn't high enough to warrant spending scarce health care resources on resurrecting him*, I had to create a new character. The new character I am planning to create is an "artificer" - a healer class with an unusual healing ability, which requires some explanation. In D+D, each character has a limited number of "healing surges." Most healing powers require the recipient of the healing to spend a healing surge, and once a character runs out of healing surges he can no longer be healed (until he takes an "extended rest" which resets his healing surges)**. The Artificer's healing power works differently - his healing doesn't require the recipient to spend a healing surge, but at the end of the battle the healing power must be recharged, which requires a character (any character in the party) to spend a healing surge. This effectively allows the character to pool healing resources between his party members, similar to a socialized medicine system. (Just like in real life, this socialized medicine system actually works pretty well.)

Also, my college roleplaying club has a "club campaign" of D+D, and anyone who wants to can go to each adventure. But of course this would lead to a problem because people who go to more adventures would go up in level and gain treasure faster, and if you were to start in the middle then you would be at low level and have a hard time contributing to the group. The way they solve this problem is classic socialism. Everyone levels at the same rate regardless of how often they play - on the campaign web site it says what level the characters are so you create a character of that level. There is also an "audit value" that indicates how much treasure you are supposed to have, and if you fall below that amount then you can ask a DM to "audit" your character, which gives you an amount of treasure to get your total treasure value up to the audit level. A similar system is used on a larger scale in the RPGA, which is a set of "official" adventures published by Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes D+D. There are "official RPGA events" where you go to play, and sign in, and after signing in a certain number of times you can get "rewards cards" mailed to you that give you special bonuses in play (like being allowed to reroll a die roll.) Or at least that used to be the way they did it - they eventually changed it so the rewards cards are on a freely downloadable PDF, so you can just print them all out and bring them to the game (although you are only allowed to use a certain number of cards per game, depending on your character's level).

Also one more thing that may be interesting, although only tangentially related to socialism. In D+D there are six character attributes - Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Different character classes require different attributes to work well - for example fighters require Strength, wizards require Intelligence, etc. Additionally, there are different "races" like human, elf, etc. Each race has two attributes that it gets a +2 bonus to (except humans, who only have one +2 bonus but can apply it to any attribute). This means that races that don't have a bonus to a particular character class's attribute are weaker choices for that character class. One common goal of "house rules" discussed on D+D fan sites is aimed at eliminating this disparity by changing how racial stat bonuses are determined, like by allowing players to move one of their stat bonuses to a different stat. In other words, it's like an affirmative action system. And more than that, it's an affirmative action system based on a point system***.

*This isn't the actual reason. In reality the DM told me that I could have the character revived by our party's employer next session, or I could create a new character. I chose to create a new character because I wanted to try out the Artificer class. But I'll still try to use the explanation above as an "in-game" explanation for why my character couldn't get revived.

**This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but there's actually a good reason for it. In the 3rd edition of D+D, there were only two character classes that could do healing, and their healing spells took a "standard action" to cast. (Characters get one standard action per turn, and standard actions are used to do most things like spellcasting and attacking.) This basically meant that you had to have one of those characters in your party to provide healing, but that playing those characters was often uninteresting because in tough fights you would spend most of your actions just healing others rather than doing anything to the enemy - hence they were sometimes called "hit point vending machines." In 4th edition, which is what we are playing, they fixed these problems by giving more classes healing abilities, giving everyone the ability to heal themselves to full at the end of the fight, and making most healing spells a "minor action" which means that you can use a healing spell and attack in the same turn. But of course this created another problem - a party full of healers would be almost unstoppable because they could keep healing each other while still pumping out just as much damage on the enemy. Sot the healing surge system is designed to limit the amount of healing one character can get.

***Another instance of something similar was in Planetside, a massively multiplayer shooter. Players got rewarded with experience points when they participated in a successful assault on an enemy base, so if one side started losing, the players would realize they were unlikely to win and pull out, moving to another front looking for more experience point potential in other areas. This meant that once one side started to win, they would usually continue to win, and it was hard to find a battle in serious contention for very long. The solution? Give the side with fewer people in a particular area bonus health and experience points to encourage them to stay. This of course led to complaints that the game was "becoming most like the University of Michigan every day." (At the time, the University of Michigan was in the news due to its controversial affirmative action policy, later overturned by the courts, that rated applicants according to a point system gave members of underrepresented races bonus points during the admission process.)

Quad Day

This Sunday I went to Quad DAy, which is a day when all the student organizations put up booths to tell you about themselves and try to get you to join. I found lots of organizations that seemed interesting:

- Illini Roleplayers (RPGs and Vampire LARPing)
- Techfront (Science Fiction and Gaming)
- MATRIX (Math Club)
- Pirates of Chambana (Dressing up as pirates, building cardboard pirate ships, and doing "pirate battles")
- Odd Request (Improv Comedy Troupe)

There's going to be a lot of different activities to choose from this weekend. The Illini Roleplayers are doing a gaming convention that lasts all weekend, but there's other activities like tryouts for the Improv Troupe and the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival.

My last day at Amtgard (for now...)

Sunday was my last day at Amtgard before I move out to Illinois. It was also the last day of the current reign period, so we had a coronation, and it was a joint coronation with Bandit Flats East, a park in Delaware. So we had to drive all the way out to Delaware to go to the coronation.

As usual, I ran the kid's quest for the day. My plan was to do a quest based on Greek mythology. The way it was going to work was that there was going to be a series of events where they had to "prove themselves" to the gods in order to get items that would enable them to defeat the evil Minotaur. There were different events based on each god's theme - for example a weapon making tutorial for Hephaestus, an arts and crafts project for Athena, and so on. My original plan was also to spice it up by telling them some of the myths. The problem with this is that most Greek myths are not very kid-friendly, because they involve sex, revenge killing, or both. But I did identify several that were. One that I was planning to use was the story of the contest between Athena and Poseidon. (I think this is a humorous one because it is similar to the modern practice of selling naming rights to sports stadiums, except that they were selling naming rights to a city. In fact there is a Capitol Steps song, a parody of "This Land Is Your Land," that speculates that states will have to begin selling naming rights in order to cover their budget deficits, resulting in states with names like "Okla-Home Depot", "New Texaco", and "North Toyota." Apparently the Greeks had the same idea thousands of years earlier.)

When I got there things did not go out as well as planned. First of all there was a major rainstorm which trapped us in the pavilion. Also, the person who was supposed to help me in the quest, our monarch Perdita, got stuck in traffic and was going to be late. I started the quest anyway, but it was difficult because without an adult to help me, it was hard to get the kids to sit down long enough to listen to the instructions. We finished the arts and crafts and weapon making parts at about 2:00, and we learned that at 4:00 we would have to leave to go to a different site for feast. At about this time I called Perdita to find out where she was. As it turned out she was in Delaware near the park, but got lost because of construction. I gave the phone to someone there who gave her directions. Unfortunately when she got there she was busy with other business and couldn't help in the quest. Fortunately I got someone else to help. Since we were running short on time I had to rush through the rest of the events. I quickly abandoned the idea of telling them the myths when it was clear that after being stuck under the pavilion they just wanted to get up, run around, and fight. At the end, I told them that they had killed the minotaur, and was going to be rewarded with gems, but that robbers had stolen them. I played the robber and when they tried to attack me, I said "you'll never get these gems" and tossed them into a bush as they killed me. What I didn't realize was that the bush had prickly leaves, but fortunately they were able to get the gems out without any cuts. Then I gave them the prizes and let them keep the weapons they had made.

We then went over to feast, which was at a local SPCA office. The only problem with getting there was that only one person knew how to get there, so he had to get out in front an everyone else followed them like a caravan. Of course about half of us had access to GPS (either an in car device or a phone) so if they told us the address we would be able to find it, but they didn't know the address just how to get there. Fortuantely we all arrived without incident. There was a feast and then they gave out awards, of which I received several. There was going to be an auctio nbut it was cancelled due to lack of time and because everyone had to go home.

This week at Amtgard

Today at Amtgard I ran a kid's quest. I hadn't been planning on doing it, but what happened was that there were some kids there and they told me they wanted to "fight the evil ogre." Of course there wasn't any evil ogre before, but there was one now. So I left the base in order to "scout out" the area (i.e. hide the evil ogre's treasure for the kids to find.) The kids said they had a "map" that told them where the ogre was, and that they would "turn me into a crab" so the enemies wouldn't notice me. It took a while to hide all the stuff, so when I came back I said that I was delayed because "it's kind of hard to read a map if you're a crab." The first half of the quest was mostly the kids running around everywhere except where I hid the stuff, making stuff up as they went along. They said their "map" told them where the ogre's "secret weapons" were, but they kept changing their story about where the "secret weapons" were, and never actually found any "secret weapons." (Remember that it was just me and the kids; there were no actual players playing monsters.) Eventually they went over to the area where I hid the stuff. I hid four small pouches and one big bag, and said that the pouches contained the "fire gem," "air gem," "earth gem," and "water gem." They found all the gems except the "air gem" but couldn't find the last one. One of the kids said that maybe the last gem was in the ogre's "main treasure hoard." Of course I knew that I hid it on the ground in the wooded area, but I went to the place I thought I remembered hiding it and it wasn't there. Eventually they found the bag (the "main treasure hoard") and the fourth pouch was in there! (Someone must have been walking through the path in the back of the woods, saw the bag and the pouch, and assumed that the pouch belonged in the bag and so put it there.) At the end I took the ogre mask, put some armor on, and said that the armor was cursed and transformed me into the ogre. Of course they defeated the "ogre" and we all went back to town (the pavilion.) They looked at the treasure and saw lots of potions. I told themthat I had a "magical device that could detect the power of the potions" (i.e. my iPhone, which has an app on it that displays a fake "meter" that you can control by pressing a hidden button) They actually recognized the "magical device" as an iPhone, but went along with it anyway. Overall it was a very fun day, and Colleen rewarded me by giving me a "mithril armor" relic.

Breaking News: University of Maryland Descends into Sin

Just days after showing a porn movie on campus, the University of Maryland has decided to leave prayer out of the commencement ceremony.

Also, just days after the preliminary findings of a report on the history of slavery in building the university came out, the Gemstone Program has decided to raise money with a "date auction" - an auction in which volunteer dates are "sold" to buyers for the night.

Another Funny Link

As this video (first on the list at the time of posting) shows, just because you live in a medieval fantasy world doesn't mean you don't have to make your car payments.

LARP Media Watch #2: Webcomics

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/122-Working-For-The-Man.aspx

The other articles on the web site are pretty funny too.

Not everyone has a dirty mind

I was telling Tanya today about the Capitol Steps performance I went to. The conversation was something like this:

Me: One of the Capitol Steps skits had Barack Obama asking Hillary Clinton if she was happy with her "new position", meaning secretary of state. Then Bill Clinton walks in and says, "New position? Did somebody say something about a new position? Why wasn't I told about this?"

Tanya: I get that joke. It makes sense. I was watching Hillary Clinton on TV, accepting the position as secretary of state, and I could just picture Bill Clinton walking up there, wanting that job.

Me: No, I think the joke was that he thought it was "new position" as in sexual position.

Tanya: Yeah, I guess that works too.