Sunday, April 23, 2006

Casual Jeans Sunday! Casual Jeans Sunday!
Yesterday was extremely geeky. I started off the day by burning a couple of podcasts onto CD so that I can listen to them in the car. I took a break from the geeky to visit my family who were working a charity garage sale. Having no charitable urge myself, I traveled north from there to attend a coral frag swap sponsored by my reef club to stock my aquarium.
After that, I headed home to place my new corals (and fish and a clam - w00+!) in the tank and prepare for Saturday game night.
My friends arrived for a session of Werewolf: The Forsaken (still the best game to abbreviate) and I set about trying to fix my character from the damage done the last time we played.
In case you didn't follow the link back to the old post, I'll summarize. If you did follow the link, skip ahead a few lines now.
I worked a long time developing a character concept for a big intimidating werewolf and spent my remaining creation points on being good-looking. Then, when confronted with the need for cash, my character immediately flaked out on everything and became a male underwear model.
Again, Darrell handled my potentially game-breaking side plot with style and even managed to add it into the overall plot so that it made sense. I still had an urge to "goth up" my character. This is the World of Darkness campaign setting, after all. Everything is supposed to be creepy and scary. Not just the usual creepy and scary of any male model, but seriously creepy. Like mimes with spikes. Ewwww!
My character was given a condo by his agency, so I set about making it creepy World of Darkness style. Aside from the rooms with plumbing, there was a living area, a bedroom and a study, all sparsely furnished. Step one in frightening up the place was to put a Nagel in the living room. Since the game is set in 1990, these are still pretty easy to find. And nothing screams "scary male model werewolf" quite like a Nagel.
The end result, while sad, was not goth scary enough. Remember, I'm trying to put more intimidating and scary back into my tragically-impossible-to-take-seriously character. On to the study!
How to make this room scary? Just like the real world, the steps to making any room scary go like this:

1. Remove all furniture
2. Cover the windows with aluminum foil
3. Use garbage bags to coat the walls, floor and ceiling
4. Replace the bulb in the fixture with a black light
5. Wire up an old car stereo, tuned to AM radio and connect about a hundred salvaged automotive speakers in series behind the garbage bags so that there is a weird, non-directional "HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM" everywhere
6. Refer to this space as the "guest bedroom" and invite anyone and everyone to stay over

Even I was creeped out by that. But somehow it still misses the target type of creepy.
Later on, my character was forced to start a fight to defend his pack's territory. At the end of the day, violence seemed to re-establish the gravity and spookiness. We'll see if it sticks.
This week I'm going to try to NOT apply this lesson at work. In real life, violence probably creates more problems than it solves. Probably.
As we were wrapping up, at about 1:15 this morning, my phone rang. It was work. I turned off my phone and went to bed. I think I'm done with answering those calls.

1 comment:

Darrell Davis said...

Ok, as for the Creepy part.. Eric is way moore warped than I would have ever hoped. Mix in a weird sense of duty at totally an unexpected time, and to be honest Eric scares me. Not to worry through.. Beauty never dies!
It just gets desperate.