Aside from the annoying and somewhat painful trip to and from KC, yesterday went swimmingly.

Two good to excellent modules, played with three people I know and like, and two who at least weren't actively bad, plus one decent judge with a real flair for making the players think they're completely fucked, and one good judge with above average improvisational skills, and who managed to deal amazingly well with my very, VERY unusual PC.

In conclusion: Fuck yeah, a good weekend, finally.

Tomorrow, I'm day tripping to KC with Cham and Mecha to play Heroes of Rokugan.

I'm going to have fun this weekend. I'm absolutely not going to think about work. Thinking about work is unacceptable.

And now I have to go to bed, because I need to be up at 4 AM to get ready.

Work is making me crazy. Completely insane.

I lost all my driving challenge progress in Gran Turismo tonight. The game crashed, and it turns out it only autosaves when you exit the driving challenges completely. I was -almost done-. So now I've moved on to Fate/Unlimited Codes, and also Persona.

In conclusion: Fuck you, GT guys.

Five PCs took down 3500 XP worth of monsters, most of it in a single massive batch. I am fucking amazed, even if my dice WERE cold.

Okay, so here's the situation. My players barged into a room. This room had an elite artillery/controller, two long range skirmisher demons, and a couple grunts to tank.

They proceeded to do incredibly poorly, burning almost all their healing and generally being in terrible shape by the end... when the last remaining grunt broke, ran, and triggered the boss fight.

The party, in response, -closed and barred the doors behind them-, allowing that guy to run down the hall and trigger -another- encounter, bringing an ogre and some orcs down the hall to help by bashing the door down.

So they completely improbably manage to hold the door against the ogre for a couple rounds, when the boss and -his- encounter come running out a secret door and start wreaking havoc. They abandon the door, throw up their hottest moves, and start fucking some bitches up.

They would probably all have died, though, if it weren't for one of the cleric dailies out of Divine Power, which was giving them ALL Resist 5(all) sustainable, and I didn't have a way to keep the cleric from sustaining it, aside from just pounding him into unconsciousness, which I didn't have much opportunity to do.

In the end, a bunch of people got pushed into pits, including a couple PCs, and only one PC, the monk who drops in every other combat, went down at all, and that wasn't until the last round of the fight. Literally. He made one death save and then the next guy up killed the boss, and a couple people jumped 20 feet down and stabilized him.

In conclusion: 3500 XP in one encounter. That's more than the final encounter of the mod.

So I've been playing PBEM games of Dominions 3 with Schneeble.

It's been great and all, but we've never made it to the endgame without one of us being a clear inferior to the other, until this past week, when we'd been working up to a climactic battle of climacticness.

I had an army of 150 casters and 2000 troops, in a game where 20 casters/commanders and 200 troops is considered a significantly large army.

Schneeble had a much more sedate army of about 200 troops and twenty or thirty commanders.

I had my casters set up to pelt him with area effects, including Confusion and such to turn his soldiers on each other, and whatnot. (You don't get to command combat directly, only give dudes orders and watch as they're carried out or not.)

Then we get into battle and one of schneeb's mages summons the Morrigans, which handily pop up in and around my army.

And all 150 of my fucking mages decide to pelt them with area effects, turning all my troops on each other, because the AI in this game is fucking worthless.

I am a sad, sad man. I have no games to play in. I am running one game a week, and running another game once a month or so, yet I am playing in one that runs sporadically and moves slowly. I am going insane.

This is unacceptable.

It's always been somewhat vexing to me how most L5R PCs are absolutely unprovokable.

Unfortunately, had to cut short the game tonight, and we didn't get very far anyway, and two new PCs had to be introduced. Luckily, this adventure is pretty short, we might still be able to finish it next week. We'll see.

Went grocery shopping this morning. Felt startlingly weak after being the next best thing to bedridden for half a fucking week. I do not approve of this bullshit.

I finished The Gathering Storm. I think I will be picking up Mister Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy sooner or later.

Well, we'll see. I'm onto challenge group F in Gran Turismo. High speed driving challenges. It's on a whole other level!

So our heroes made it out of the shadowlands successfully, have made a couple new friends, and didn't even get tainted for the trouble.

Next time, they can do it without jade!

Well, whenever I next run the work game, it'll at least be interesting, no matter what happens. Fighting for your life against impossible odds is almost always awesome.

This weekend has been spent mostly in sleep, and I'm still tired. The next week at work is probably going to be spent mainly on integration of our project with another project, which is always a fucking pain.

And then I just have to get through a 3 day week and I will have four days off in a row, because I'm taking a short vacation while we're between projects.

Ran D&D at work. Holy fucking shit. The party lost their defender to a job change and move across the state, so Mecha joined as an assault swordmage. They proceeded to run face first into a sub-boss encounter that tore them the fuck up... and then one little dude from the encounter ran a bit down the map... and triggered the boss room.

Then I called it, snapped a picture of the map for posterity, and the next time we play, they have to try to survive. It won't be easy, if they can manage it at all.

Herculean effort managed to get the mod scheduled for yesterday running today instead... which we promptly dismantled like nothing. Dungeon crawls work hella different in L5R with everybody having 2-5 ranks of Investigation to search for shit, instead of one poor sap being saddled with trapfinding duty.

I made it through a dirt track challenge in a few hours today instead of the four days or so the last one took me, and now I'm on to a high speed turning challenge that is seriously kicking my ass. Normal track, fast car, I just don't have enough time or traction. Oy.\

In conclusion: I still haven't touched A Witch's Tale, Persona, or Fate/Unlimited Codes.

I seem to have fucked up my right knee, or maybe the area just below it.

Was trying to arrange a table of HoR2 for today, but it fell through, but managed to reschedule it for tomorrow (almost today) so we can all go out and die to a horrifically deadly mod with shitty rewards that everybody wants to play nontheless.

Recurring villains don't die every day, you know.

So I was sorta looking forward to playing tonight. And then the hours stretched on, and there was nobody but Maha.

So I'm going to bed.

Nothing to do tonight, and Gran Turismo's latest driving challenge, the technical section of Opera Paris, is frustrating the hell out of me. I'm gonna go to bed, do a bit of reading, and try to get a decent night's sleep.

An unfortunately short session tonight, but our heroes are into the shadowlands, and had their first two encounters. One with a muck monster that ate a shugenja and was destroyed just in the nick of time before it could start digesting him, and one with a goblin standing watch on the parapets of Hiruma Castle.

Wish these poor bastards luck, it only gets worse from here.

I have spent most of my evening installing a new memcard in my PSP, trying to get the goddamn PSN to take my money so I could get Fate/Unlimited Codes, and then trying to get my own music working in Gran Turismo.

It was absurdly difficult to get sony to take my damn money.

I hate dirt tracks with a burning passion.
I hate skidding all over the damn place.
I hate the incessant grinding of the engine as I futilely try to find any traction.
I hate having no control over where I'm going because I'M IN THE AIR.

I hate dirt tracks.

Bayushi Katsu, who previously was seen telling a bunch of samurai they were fucking crazy going into the shadowlands on a fool's mission, decided to use his free time to crash a Kakita dojo.

He proceeded to beat all eight students present, even the ones that were his superior in dueling stats, took their dojo sign, and declined to ransom it back, earning him the enmity of every Kakita Bushi in the empire.

In conclusion: Congratulations, and I hope you can survive this, Katsu!