I Know What I Did Last Weekend

Sometimes stuff happens and it just doesn’t seem to rise to the level of a whole blog post, and so I like to sometimes just do a potpourri post… a post-pourri, I guess.

Dune: Awakening

I finished the Dune: Awakening story so far. There’s still plot items in my inventory that imply more on the way. The story did answer a lot of questions, but it stopped just short of where I’d wanted it to go. I’m not going to post spoilers, but it definitely was in keeping with Dune lore and broadened the scope of the conspiracy of which we are an unwitting part.

In other Dune news, Cal and I have moved to the Deep Desert. I placed a base well into the PvP zone; it’s fortunate that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of, or even any, PvP going on there.

The amount of spice we needed to harvest just to make the machine that processes the high level mats in the desert was insane. I did it, though — spending hours in the Deep Desert hunting down spice blows and quickly trying to harvest spice before a sandworm caught me.

That was made a little easier because of a unique static compactor, the blueprints for which Cal and I found while exploring a research facility in the Deep Desert. It operates very quietly to keep sandworms away. But, sandworms always come, as we found out while scrapping a crashed ship in the Sheol desert. Cal was trying to pick me up in his assault ‘thopter, but it was hard for me to get in the right place for the “Get in the Thopter!” prompt to come up, and so I was swallowed, and so was Cal, and so was the assault thopter, and so was all our gear.

It wasn’t actually as bad as the first time I got swallowed, as I had plenty of backup gear and resources enough to replace the missing stuff. Both of us got on our feet pretty quickly. I even have an assault thopter of my own coming together now at my base. It’s just a frame and a tail, but it’s happening.

Malifaux 4th Edition

We had our first 4th edition Malifaux tournament a couple of weeks back. The new edition is still in beta, so hastily printed crew cards and the rule book cued up on everyone’s phones were the rules of the day. The tournament supported the Trevor Project, a resource for LGBTQ+ youth. We raised over $1,500 to keep the help lines open after the government suicide prevention lines were shut down by the administration. There was an amazing turnout for that worthy cause.

The format was three rounds, unranked. I’ve been playing a lot of the Foundry keyword lately, and based on feedback from me and others, Wyrd Games has been making a lot of great changes to the keyword as they come to the end of beta. Unfortunately for me, Foundry has moved out of my Arcanist faction, and so I opted to come to the tournament with my December crew… where I met another December player. Of course, we managed to face each other in a “Mirror Match”, my Rasputina, Abominable against his Rasputina, Winter’s Teeth.

We had access to the same models, so instead of using Bashe, the albino alligator as he did, I opted to replace it with the Ice Golem. And instead of Blessed of December, I went with Harris J-5. It was a close game all the way through. Though I lost 5-4, it was a narrow thing and it came down to my opponent staking out the center and me being unable to break through.

And speaking of Malifaux, I’m putting together my second Arcanist crew, Performer. This keyword is led by the mistress of ceremonies herself, Colette du Bois. She uses the power of bedazzlement and misdirection to dominate the battlefield. It’s going to be fun to play her. More when they’re painted.

Cruisin’ Main Street

My town had its annual “Cruisin’ Main Street” auto show where they close down Main Street and pack it full of classic cars. My favorite was this armored assault vehicle which the local gendarmerie can apparently bring into play if any of the citizenry become too uppity.

I was just walking by, taking pictures of any VW I could find, and this guy, presumably the owner of the mirror-y racer there, was saying to the onlookers that he was “the sworn enemy of every Democrat”. I don’t know how that came up, but I thought it was pretty odd. Was there some sort of document he had to sign?

Anyway, lots of cool cars. I rode my classic Peugeot road bike down there, but nobody was there to compare old bicycles.

I do like living in Connecticut, but sometimes the people can be a little weird.

HeroQuest

I am really, really liking the new HeroQuest campaign. This one had us start entirely off the board, and we couldn’t leave the way we came, either. It was a true crawl. This adventure was the first where the Elf had a crossbow, and the Wizard was replaced with the Rogue. It came down to a nail-biting finish with everyone low on health and spells, but the gear we’d acquired in the previous few sessions were key. Always happy to see that dragon mini come into play 🙂

Frosthaven

It was terror on the high seas as our underpowered team (the Blink Blade player was traveling and couldn’t be there) looked for more Mystery Coral in the middle of the ocean. Our boat was attacked by Lurkers both above and below decks.

The twist here is that the monsters below decks will happily attack the deck itself if they can’t find a player to hit. If they damage the ship enough, the ship sinks, everyone dies, enjoy your $200 useless box of cardboard.

A couple of well-armored Claw Crushers prevented us from making any headway below decks for quite some time; by the time we made it through, the Doomshaper and Deathwalker were both exhausted; there was just me, two lightning eels and a Wavecrasher. We looked through my remaining cards and figured, card flips willing, that I had enough damage left to do the job. I would have to take rests while things were hitting me in order to get the cards I needed.

And… it worked, Banner Spear saves the day and gets all the ph4t l3wts.

Also, I took one of my cats to the vets. He’s sneezing a lot. My theory: he’s allergic to cats.