My parents gave me a new phone. It has a digital camera in it. I have semi- constant uncontrollable trembling, so most of my pictures are blurry because, well, I am holding the camera as steady as I can without actually devoting too much time (hey, I've got work, too, right?) to trying to get a steady shot. On that note:

Work is busy. This image (to the right) is a shot of most of the boxes that I've received for the Book Group Expo on the 8th through the 10th of June. (There's another stack of mostly larger boxes I didn't think to take a picture of.) It is only an eighth of the total boxes, but I'm doing this in addition to my normal workload.

Now, my workplace has relatively strict rules about overtime (we're not allowed to have any), so I have to really work myself to get a handle on this stuff. Especially since sometimes it seems that the boxes are coming in faster than we can really handle them.

Did I say we? I meant I.

I'm doing this alone. Don't get me wrong -- our buyer is trying to help, giving me printed lists and so on of what to expect. So I can check totals and cross things off lists. That lets me know how close I am to finishing (not halfway, yet).

Because today, things kept happening. Now, the leftmost stack of boxes here (with the writing in black magic marker on them), are returns. Those are books that the ruler (Lord High Manager and Awesome Guy: Eric) has declared unfit to remain in our fair kingdom. Sheriff Joan and her constabulary rounded them up, and it's my duty to send them beyond the seventh wave.

So those don't count (except that, I guess, they are some of my workload). The other boxes -- to the right, in front of the magazine crates (that's what those blue things are) are normal receiving, with some BGE thrown in just for kicks. Heh. Fun stuff.

Those pictures are from a few days ago -- I'll try and get another one tomorrow with the added boxes thrown in (from multiple locations, I guess; they don't all fit there anymore).

Now, this was today's morning greeting. Those stacks are all BGE, and the papers attached to them are my boss's (supervisor, technically, but we don't mince words; she's the one who would get me fired if it were going to happen) notes to tell me where the books go.

Oh, right. Forgot to explain that part. After I receive the books in those heavy, but easier to manage boxes, I have to repackage them -- separately. Different titles will be shuttled around to different places at the actual Expo, and I have to put them in boxes labeled specifically for the time and room they'll be showing up in. Think of them as guests of honor at a book convention. Because that's pretty much exactly what they are.

That's not too bad. The only really painful part of this process is that each box must be labeled with its contents (author/title [quantity]). In triplicate. My wrists, they are killing me. :(

Oh, well. I suppose the volume might be a slight issue, too. This shot is directly behind my chair, exactly opposite the 'randomencounter' image.

What really sucks, is that this isn't taking into account the 15 boxes that showed up while I was trying to receive the first batch. And then 7 boxes from Ingram (mixed standard and BGE, so extra sorting, yay). And then the Fed-Ex order, which was slight in comparison (merely eight boxes, and I got to ignore two of them).

So, yeah. I'm working hard. It's a challenge. It's draining.

But you know what really sucks?

I love my job. It is, in fact, the highest point of my day. I may be whining a lot (or seem like it), but I enjoy what I do. Sure, I do mostly manual labor. But I do it without having to talk to people I don't have good faction with. I don't have to deal with strangers except on rare occasions, and right now I've been given the green light to shove customers at my less-busy co-workers, so that's pretty much gravy, too (not that I don't, on occasion have to pick up slack there -- answering the phones or cashiering for a customer because my co-workers are ... where, exactly? I don't know, but not at the till. (Supervisor Joan is exempt from this; she's the buyer so has to work in the office, and Manager Eric should be exempt for similar (identical (ah, parenthetical asides, you're my true love (I feel safe in your embrace!)) reasons, actually) but more often than not he's there, covering for lazy slackers.) This is the only time I am vulnerable to random encounters, except for the rare occasions when a customer accidentally wanders into my workspace. Most of them are 3-4 year-old children, which only bothers me because my workspace is filled with blades of all sorts).

But then I get home.

And Peter is there.

Now, it's not that Peter's a bad person. (I will now proceed to demonstrate exactly the opposite, showcasing my self-denial. Tee-hee!) Sure, I mean, he neglects poor Punk. (Oh, kitty, who will take care of you when Jim and I leave?) Sure, he is a raging rules-lawyer who makes gaming less pleasant for everyone else. Sure, he has basically to opinions: "I hate it (insert diatribe here)" and "I loved Terminator 2". Sure, he's so selfish that he doesn't even try and mask his, "What's in it for me?" philosophy behind more than the thinnest veneer of politesse.

But beneath that, he's.... He.... Huh.

Well, he's not a bad person. He's decent in small doses. He's just not a great roommate.

Anyway. It's always going to be something with him, from, "What can I buy that you will cook for me?" since I am the only roommate who has the cooking skill (apparently), to, "I don't like your choice to overrule rule X from Game." Which draws us to the locus of the issue!

I run a Mage: the Awakening campaign on Sunday, and theoretically, I have 6 players. Wallace, Cheri, Matt, Jim, Peter, and Mike.

Now, Mike vanished. His character is currently apparently being used as a sexual play-toy (the group came up with the gag, I just decided not to deny it) by Fortune's Favored. Fortune's Favored is a near-oracle level Fate Mage from El Mesa Diablo's neighboring city of Destur -- and is, in fact, their Herald, so she shows up at the local Council meetings all the time.

So really, I've got just five players. Which isn't so bad. We're all still learning the ropes. Basically, I learned WOD combat and enough to hammer together dramatic systems and run scenes, and decided that we'd all learn the rest as we got to it. For the mostpart, this has been awesome, we've had fun explorations, and the game has become very social -- my players are learning the ins and outs of Mage society, are making a name for themselves, and are slowly figuring out what the limits of their powers are.

I jokingly refer to the game as Mage: the Tutorial, because that's what most of the group's quests are: "Go into the basement of the house you've been given. Le gasp! Ghosts!" "Can I use Spirit on them?" "Nope, you need Death -- but there is a spirit there! And it's keeping the Ghosts prisoner!" "Waaaugh! Panic mode!"

And educational hijinks ensue: the spirit was feeding on the ghosts of people who'd been murdered in the house in the past; the players figured out that the spirit was weak enough that it couldn't manifest in the light, so they used Death to move all the shadows into a single corner, Spirit to empower their physical combatant and the con-man's gun to damage it, and then they used Death and Space to make a portal to let the ghosts out.

Sure, they didn't kill the spirit (it ran away into the Twilight), but they had neighbors who were all about murdering the supernatural, so The Hunt gave the players a jar with a very hateful spirit in it that couldn't get our. On occasion they shake it to piss it off, but mostly it's a paper-weight.

And I think a good time was had by all. We had a resonance tutorial, where the players learned how to scrutinize magical effects to determine how they were made, who made them, what they were intended to do ... and unintentionally uncovered a Seer of the Throne manipulating a Banisher into trying to awaken a Genocide spirit! Complex plot; they came in seeing that it was a murder. Then they found out that whoever the murderer was, they were using Time magic to block the crime scene so they couldn't be caught. After tracking down the murderer, they found that someone had used Mind to remove all of his memories, and 'covered' their tracks as a heroin overdose. But the magical resonance led to an interesting bit of detective work. At least, I hope it was interesting.

The players met a 'friendly' Fang of Mara, and found out that people who can stare acamothii in the eye are scary, but not -- necessarily evil. Though, some of them are, especially when they try to summon an acamoth into the city center (this plot, the players cleverly blocked (along with scaring six poor vampires with 30 mages, but that's an aside)).

But.

BUT.

Peter's not content to stop there. He doesn't want to sit with the curve; he wants to learn the rules I haven't looked at yet (because we don't need them!) and look for breaks to make magical items and stuff. Which doesn't bother me too much. It is annoying, though, when everyone else is going, 'plotplotplot!' and he's still going, 'powergameplotpowergame!' I guess I shouldn't be too bitter. He is RPing a little. Just ... I think his level of focus on the mechanics is a severely detracting factor, and he's turning the game into a real chore for me as I have to decide all the mechanics questions for him right now, when Cheri's trying to figure out if she can heal bashing levels of damage, and which spells she's actually bought as Rotes.

And now it's escalated.

Now, I don't consider Matt a powergamer. Sure, he does roll twenties. But he's a good guy, and he's got a neat character -- an antique shop owner. He's got Death and Matter primarily.

In the last session, when the group encountered the vampires, they arranged to take two other entire cabals with them; the Byzantine Exchange, and The Hunt. The former are a bunch of archaeologists-cum-cryptoanalysts, except that they're Free Council and think that the Mysterium and the Guardians of the Veil are dicks (which, they can be). The Hunt is a cabal of Adamantine Arrows who love to kill evil supernatural beings.

When the encounter went down, all but two of the Hunt and the Exchange were invisible. So, some of the vampires had Auspex, and saw through it. You don't just ignore 18 invisible dudes with weapons, glowing with aurae that scream 'non-vampires, and powerful, too'. So the vampires are polite, reasonable, and do whatever they can to make the angry glowing people go away. The Exchange wants to know how vampires work. The Hunt is there hoping that the vampires will justify some combat.

What no one expects is that the vampires dug up an Atlantean artifact (a mirror that is also a Space portal, theoretically with the power to go directly to the Supernal Realm (this is an instant win, in Mage)). Of course, the vampires are just selling it. To a Fang of Mara, who walks in with a human hostage and says, "Give me the mirror or she dies."

So, some stuff happens, there's a lot of mages involved, the vampires go to hide, the Exchange jumps outside and Space seals the entire building after another Fang of Mara and the Council's Sentinel (Indra's Arrow) show up. The Hunt and Indra's Arrow take down the paradox-imp that Peter spawns, and none of the PCs have to do anything but damage control and seize the mirror (after they rescue the girl).

Everyone tells me to my face that it was awesome, they had fun, and it was great. The Council meeting following the mirror discovery saw both an upper council member and a lower provostii dismissed for their involvement in the Fangs of Mara (one for hiding the 'good' one, one for getting a dementia when she tried to scry on the FoM and saw an acamoth). And then....

Then Matt and Peter spend hours discussing the use of the Matter 3 rote, Jury- Rig. Jury-Rig allows the caster to combine two items and take properties from one, then add them to the other. Combining a flashlight and a pen gives you a pen that illuminates -- or a flashlight that writes. Combining a machine gun and a grenade launcher gives you a machine gun that fires explosive rounds. At Matter 4, you can extend the range of this spell (which is covert, and allows no resistance), to sensory range. Ie., if you see a piece of packing foam and someone's gun, you can combine them, to give the gun's ammo the 'soft' property.

This came about because (somehow) it was decided that Matt needed to be more combat capable. Why, I don't know. Why he chose to follow a route that specifically deals with the one type of threat the group has never encountered is also beyond me.

But this means that this morning, before I got to go to work (my happy place!) I was basically assaulted by Peter demanding clarification on how this worked, and what the penalties involved would be, and how useful it would be. I mean, crap. The game's enough of a chore for me with Peter demanding me answer questions that he can't answer because the book is vague; it leaves a lot to be determined because the game is supposed to be fun. Peter can't handle this. He needs hard rules, so he continually pesters me to fill in the blanks for him.

And now he's extending it to other players? Or does Matt think that he needs to be combat capable for some reason? Yeah, I realize it's a role playing game, and people are used to fighting in role playing games. But hey, this is El Mesa Diablo, a New York sized city. What, do they want me to throw them into raging battles against drug-runners with machine guns? Or goblins?

Damn it! The game can go on with the players talking their way out of things -- in fact, I was under the impression that this was the reason Matt initially built his character with no combat abilities! And now he wants to counter a threat that's never been an issue?

And I have to deal with reading through the book to glean enough information to make a ruling on this for my freaking lunch break?

Ugh.

At least I have work tomorrow, and don't need to run the game until Sunday. Though, with Jim complaining about not getting enough screen-time in the last session (an irony; I don't think he's aware of how much spot-light-hogging he does, or how often he edges other players out of participating, yet he's really unhappy when the other players do it back.... An issue for another blog post, however. The real complaint is Peter, here).

I just wish I had more days of the week to practice my block-puzzle-mastery (work) before game.

And that right there tells me something is seriously wrong.

Anyway. Here's the letter being posted to the gaming group tonight:

Matter 4, and YOU.

According to the rules of the game, the Matter 3 rote 'Jury Rig' can be used at sensory range with Matter 4. Furthermore, by the rules, no contested or resistance roll is allowed for the device being altered. It's also covert, so not likely to cause Improbability unless it's used in a vulgar fashion. If the property of a sidewalk's inertness is applied to the bullets of a gun, then it's not going to fire.

If anyone wants to get Matter 4 and learn the rote spell, 'Total Threat Invalidation', go for it.

But before you do, please consider how often being shot at has been an issue. Further questions can be addressed to me on spellcasting, etc., here. I guess I don't have too much better to do with my lunchtimes than figure it out.