Birthdays and Old Ones and Orcs, oh my!
It's been another good weekend, and I just know you want to hear all about it, so without further ado:
Friday was the day we decided to celebrate Michele's birthday, since I'll be away at a conference this week when her actual birthday takes place. Much fun was had by all, and I ate a shockingly large amount of Chinese food at the restaurant to which we went to celebrate. Yay for birthdays!
We also watched the "making of Return of the King" featurette on the Two Towers DVD, which was excellent. When the ten-minute "making of" video has enough emotional punch to bring me nearly to tears, I know I'm in for a good film...
On Saturday, after taking care of the usual Saturday mundane household chores, we played a game of Call of Cthulhu (the d20 version), which was extremely fun. One thing we did differently this time was to experiment quite a bit with props and lighting to enhance the game's spookiness factor. Since the adventure had a fairly archaeological focus, Michele and I gathered up a variety of archaeology tomes and pieces of equipment from around the apartment (including a genuine full-size archaeology shovel) and placed them around the room; at M's suggestion, I used a wall of intimidating tomes as a DM's screen instead of the usual cardboard screen. We also played around with lighting a bit--at one point, as the players explored a pitch-black underground tunnel, we turned off the lights and played by candlelight to simulate the poor, flickering lighting of the character's lanterns. It was good fun, and helped a good bit with the immersion factor--an important consideration in a game like CoC where not being in the proper mood can really hurt the adventure.
Oh, and nobody's character went completely insane this time around. Weird!
Sunday, which is technically still underway at the time of this writing, has been as relaxing as a good Sunday ought to be. I spent most of the afternoon painting Lord of the Rings orc miniatures. That is, I painted patches of suitably sickly-green colored skin onto eight orc figures; I'll give 'em a few hours to dry before starting in on painting their armor and weaponry. You would be surprised how relaxing it can be to sit down at a table for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon and go crazy with paints and brushes. I figure these guys'll make perfect props for roleplaying games once I get them finished up. Painting them has also given me a chance to ask some of those troubling questions that Tolkien mysteriously left unanswered, such as "what color is an orc's butt?" (The answer is "green," if you must know.)
Hope your weekend was as enjoyable. Enjoy the precious few hours of freedom left to you before Monday morning arrives!