More geekery. I had a really cool dream last night. Most of my really fun dreams involve my participating in a Live-Action Roleplaying game, and this one was one of the better ones (that is to say, aside from being fun and exciting as I was dreaming it, it still made sense when I woke up and thought about it afterward).

Okay, so the dream started out being something about how Marilyn and I have kids - a son and a daughter - and we're staying in a cabin somewhere, on vacation. Before long, the dream starts morphing into a Campaign game. Marilyn and I are playing Dwarf characters, and someone else is playing our daughter (couldn't tell you who it was, though). For reasons I don't remember now, I knew that there was a cult of necromancers afoot in the area, and I uncharacteristically had awakened before dawn. I realized that my "daughter" was no longer in the room, and I heard murmuring and whispering outside the door. I laid there waiting until a person snuck into the room, and saw that they had a dagger in hand. I waited until the mystery intruder loomed over me as I lay there in bed, and then I reached up and grabbed them, strangling the life from them. This being Campaign, this meant I grabbed their shoulders and started counting off, "Strangling you once, strangling you twice, strangling you three times..." They dropped at about five hit points of damage, at which point I discovered that my assailant was none other than my own daughter, converted to the necromancers' cause. Oh, the humanity...or, dwarf-anity. Morbid, sure, but I figure Dwarves are pretty sensitive to the whole necromancy thing as a matter of principle, not to mention patricide. Anyway, being a Dwarf character I get really steamed about this state of affairs and do what any red-blooded Dwarf would do: awaken the wife and grab the axe. There are still whispers at the door, so we get up and stand in front of the closet, next to the hallway where the door is. By this time, the cabin has morphed into the bedroom my brother and I shared back in our old house in Crestline (which is apparently the standard "House" template in my dreams), so if my brother is reading this, he'll know which room I'm describing. What happens next I can only describe as a live-action siege, as NPC after NPC starts filing into the little hallway, trying to get into the room, while Dwarf-Marilyn and I hack away at them from around the corner. It's a pretty big group. The hallway is narrow enough that only about two at a time can squeeze through, but their armor and weapons make it difficult for them, giving us enough time to bash the hit points out of them before they can get room to maneuver. This being Campaign, a "pretty big group" means there's about six of them, total. My favorite moment in this dream was when I picked up a hacky sack and tossed it into the hallway, calling out something like "FIREBOMB, Two Points!" I guess that, in the dream-game, I knew that this was like a mixture of BLAST and FIREBALL, figuring that I'd made some sort of Dwarfy bomb-type thing that would deal damage as well as knocking people down. Of course, there's no gunpowder in Campaign, so it technically would be kind of illegal, rules-wise, but it was still kinda cool. The neat part about it was how everyone roleplayed along with it. My brother, playing one of the last of the assailants still in the hallway, roleplayed the blast, throwing himself out of the hallway and flat on his face in the middle of the room. Michael Slusser was the last one there, playing the lead necromancer himself, with hair dyed black and dark circles painted, skull-like, around his eyes. He looked pretty creepy. He cursed us and made a generally villainy statement about vengeance. I assume his next action would have been to raise all of the thugs we'd just killed as zombies to attack us again, but that's when I woke up.

Okay, two things come to mind as I type this all out. First, as Slusser has correctly pointed out, live-action roleplaying is definitely one of those things that you really have to be participating in before you can appreciate it; you can't watch it from afar and really get the dramatic rush that you get when you're immersed in it. If you actually were to go so far as to film the thing, getting it on video or something, I can only imagine how lame it would look. When you're actually playing, the whole shared illusion of it just seems a whole lot cooler and bigger than it really is when you drop the charade and see it for what it really is - a bunch of adults running around in the woods in costumes. That probably sounds all mystical or something, but it's not - don't go all Jack Chick on me, it's good clean fun.

Second, I don't think I've posted something that was this thoroughly geeky for a very, very long time. Knowing that Pat's going to read this... well, let's just say that I expect to pay for it later.

Perhaps in my next post I can go on at length about something even more geeky, which even fewer people will understand. I'll have to think about what that would involve.