Freckles & Doubt

It's bucketing down outside, and in the interstices between lectures the foyer of my building is filled with damp-puppy students staring dolefully out into the downpour amid the smell of wet hair. We are clearly in autumn, a season of pleasing damp and benevolent chill, and I have broken out the first boots of the season. I am happy. I am, however, also faintly worried to consider the inexorable drift of my language vis à vis students towards dehumanising diminutives - when they're not gazelles, they're puppies. The latter is perhaps a more healthy characterisation along the maternal/cute axis than than the former, which has a lurking hint of the predatory. I do, of course, owe the "gazelles" designation to starmadeshadow, who views the quivering herds from the vantage point of her own leopard-like stalk. She is planning on returning her big-cat self to Cape Town more permanently in the near future, causing much callooing and, for that matter, callaying in the ranks.

I have spent the morning immersed in the inevitable realities of my working life, viz. checking student transcripts. This has vouchsafed to me several insights, most notably (a) that my advisors, train I them never so carefully, are bloody useless at checking course pre-requisites despite repeated reminders and pointed inscriptions on lists of "common advisor mistakes". Insight (b) is, however, more interesting and rather less depressing. Honestly, the skills and experience on which I draw most frequently in this job are those of my frivolous role-playing proclivities. I spend my days wrangling student character sheets, the lists of numbers which quantify experience and achievement, each individual mapped carefully within the constraints of the system. I am alert to rule-breaking, to player dissatisfaction and lack of success, to the judicious balance between challenge and reward, test and fulfilment. I also rely heavily on the experience gained from DMing players like rumint, whose control of the system and its potential exploits is absolute and terrifying. It's all one in the eye, really, to anyone who thinks of D&D and beyond as a waste of time. Not only is play intrinsically about experimentation and learning in a low-stakes environment, it's about understanding the shaping of behaviour through structure. Which also explains, I suppose, why I've drifted inexorably into genre theory in my academic life.

Talking about genre: David Bowie is busy releasing his first album in about ten years. The one single, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", and particularly its video, is an utterly fascinating disquisition on fame, identity, androgyny, and an explicit and rather wry dialogue with his own past. Also, Tilda Swinton. The music is very Reality-era, which works for me.

I have a New Resolution for today. When the Dear Little Students knock on the door, I will attempt to school my inevitable, snarling gut-reaction into a welcoming smile. If it kills me. It may be more of a terrifying grimace, in which case score, they'll all run away and never come back, but hopefully it will, via strict behaviourist principles in which I do not believe owing to early romantic conditioning, at least modify my behaviour slightly towards the "sweetness and light" end of the spectrum. Maybe.

I've been at home for two days, wrapped in the loathsome embrace of Sid the Sinus Headache, and while I'm back at work today, I still feel as though some bastard snuck in and packed my skull with hot cement. It is not unlikely that this is affecting the tendency to red rage. I also think my hormones are horribly out of whack, the homicidal urges seem to be fairly cyclical, so seeing my Nice Doctor is high on the agenda. That would be the agenda labelled "Let's Not Kill Students Today and, Incidentally, Remain Employed". My incredibly lovely boss is very cool about me working at home fairly regularly, she says because she's not sure the university insurance will cover it if I dismember anyone. This means she is noticing the snarling. Busted. Oops.

In other news mostly unrelated to my decomposing state of health, we finished the Lady Blackbird game last night. This was completely indecent amounts of fun, at least as much because of the composition of the group as because of the game ethos and setting, and the fact that Lady Blackbird herself was a deluded and flamboyant narcissist who I could only play while drunk. The player input to the scenario is fascinating and, in our hands, completely demented. Example: I do a sort of general magical sense thing to see how many people are in the three pirate ships parked on the asteroid for our rendezvous. I randomly come up with:
(a) one ship with 37 people on board;
(b) one ship with only four people on board, only they're extra large; and
(c) one normal pirate crew complement of 12.
The rest of the group refine this into
(a) the Raven, crewed by Captain Emeritus Fop and his 36 dandyish, effeminate, bureaucratic incompetents;
(b) the Potato Chip, crewed by four cyclopses, who are very large and very fearsome fighters with high squeaky voices; and
(c) the Knotted Pine, crewed by Captain Jack Table, who is efficient and manly and completely backstabbed us at the last minute, the bastard.
The scenario finally ended on a large scale, with betrayals, revelations, disillusionments, rejections, realisations, hostage scenarios, allegiance shifts, lightning bolt attacks, an enormous space battle between the pirates and the Imperium, and a successful annexure of the pirate kingdom by librsa's character, more or less accidentally. Ten minutes before the end the DM was planning to suggest we made this into a campaign. Ten minutes later we'd utterly stuffed that by bombshelling the party in all directions while role-playing to the hilt. It was epic. And enormously good fun. I want to play more with that group of people and with that particularly open-ended contribution thing. It made me realise that actually DMs and LARP designers are wasted as players.

Finally, since we're working this "a propos of nothing" theme, here is China Miéville being blackly funny about Britain's current state of political incompetence. Now with added political superheroes.

Yesterday was all misty and moisty, with that kind of light, persistent rain that drifts gently sideways in the wind but doesn't let that distract it from implementing a fairly relentless soaking policy. My garden is all happy and damp, if somewhat buried under plane tree leaves because I've been too busy playing Dragon Age to actually do any raking. (There's a long post in my future about the narrative structure and principles of Dragon Age. You have been warned). Today is clear and cold, and the cats ran screaming through the house when I emerged from my bedroom in the first boots of the season. You'd think they'd learn that I metamorphose into a sort of clumpy, jackbooted thing punctually every year and no-one ever actually dies, but no, the annual ritual is fear and trembling for several weeks as my feet inexplicably morph. Dear little twits.

In fact, it's autumn, and winter is breathing down its neck. I am a happy bunny. Also, memo to self, acquire new umbrella, those bastards who broke into my car that one time nicked it.

The Dragon Age fixation means I'm not good for much in the Interesting Life department, because second-hand rehashes of someone's gaming experience are not of blinding interest to the onlooker. (I assume. If you'd be blindingly interested, do let me know and I shall unleash the wittering accordingly). I did, however, cook dinner for strawberryfrog on Tuesday, which was fun, and stretched my catering-for-vegetarians muscles a bit, as well as allowing the Frog to photograph my cats in a variety of contorted positions (both him and them). There was also a Lady Blackbird gaming session last night, which is evincing more and more bizarre twists as we get right into the swing of the DMless format in providing our own challenges. (Giant space jellyfish! Three giant space jellyfish! And an Imperial fleet!). It's been an interesting roleplaying experience because I'm playing a character I frankly dislike - she's a privileged, sheltered, narcissistic twit, and I'm only able to access the necessary mode of flamboyant self-centredness if I'm slightly sloshed. On the upside, fated love triangles, and she blows things up with lightning, which is always amusing. Also, parrot!

I also posted a new Microfiction. You are probably bored with me saying that I don't like my own writing and never feel it succeeds, but this one felt particularly slight to me. I was weirded and confused when a fellow writer mentioned they really liked it. For a highly trained literary critic I have absolutely no discernment, apparently.

Finally, today is my last day of work before an 11-day break, sparked by the inescapable elegance of taking three days off around the mad Easter holidays. *dances around office on tip-tips of toes*

I can't make chocolate chip cookies without remembering the first Jo'burg roleplaying tournament I ever played, which was one run by the Wits crew, way before ICON was even a twinkle in Grant's eye. It was a cute tournament. We played pygmies, members of the Tchokka Cheep tribe, tasked with dealing with a crashed spaceship in our jungle. I was in the 'B' team, having had all of about two years of roleplaying experience by then, and we dismally and totally failed to do anything meaningful to the module. I don't even remember who else was in the team - Mike, certainly, possibly Anton? Carlo? I was probably 22, it's a hell of a long time ago now. It was fun. But it's the "Tchokka Cheep! Tchokka Cheep!" chant which stays with me, for some reason.

All of which is an unlikely segue into the fact that wolverine_nun asked me for my chocolate chip cookie recipe. Since I am still sinusy and pretty much without brain after a blissful four days of doing damn near nothing, I am delighted to oblige her and incidentally achieve a free blog post without needing to think about it.

TCHOKKA CHEEP COOKIES

(This recipe is based on the Quick Oatmeal Cookies one from The Joy of Cooking, with variations. I think if you stood over me with a whip you might persuade me not to fiddle with a recipe for the space of a single iteration, but it's a long shot).

• 125ml soft brown sugar (they're currently selling it as treacle sugar, for no adequately defined reason)
  
• 125ml brown sugar (i.e. the yellow-brown unrefined sugar with the same granule size as normal sugar)
  
• 110g butter (not marg, it does affect the flavour)
  
• 1 egg
  
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
  
• 1 tblsp milk
  
• 250ml cake flour
  
• 1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
  
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
  
• 1/2 tsp salt
  
• 1 tsp ground ginger (optional, but I think it improves it - you can also stuff around with allspice and cloves if you feel so impelled)
  
• 250 ml uncooked quick-cook rolled oats
  
• 2 bars Bournville Dark (the 90g slab. And when did those start being 90g instead of 100g? Rotten swizz, if you ask me).
  
• 100g pecan nuts

Right, so for various arcane reasons this recipe is much easier to make when the weather's hot, particularly since I just burned the motor out of my hand mixer. To start with, preheat the oven to 350/180, and leave the butter out on the counter for half an hour so it's a bit soft and you don't have to start the process with an ice-pick.

Either sling the butter and both sugars into your food processor and process the hell out of them with the normal blade, OR mix with a hand mixer, OR assault it sadistically with a wooden spoon. By whichever method, or preferred substitute (place in large tub and dance upon with clean wooden clogs?), you want the butter/sugar mix all creamy and slightly light. Add the egg, vanilla and milk to it and give it another whirl so it's even lighter and creamier.

If you're using the processor, at this stage use a rubber spatula to remove the mix and put it into a large bowl. If you're using a wooden spoon or hand mixer you should already be using a large bowl. Oops. Go back and use a larger bowl.

Right, now sift the flour, bicarb, baking powder, salt and spices into the creamed mix. Secret confession: I don't usually bother to sift them. The skies have not yet fallen, nor have the biscuits. Mix it all in, either by hand or by machine - it should be a slightly sludgy batter. Now sling in the oats and mix with a wooden spoon - trying to use a machine at this stage will burn out the motor, see above. You'll end up with a sort of crumbly oaty consistency, not a smooth batter.

Unwrap the two slabs of Bournville Dark and place them lovingly on a chopping board. Take a large, broad-bladed knife, a sharp one, and pray it's a warm day, softening the choc just enough to cut it easily. (Bournville Dark is very hard indeed in temperate climes. See ice-pick, above). Slice the bar in a grid both ways, so that each block is cut into two both lengthways and widthways. The best way to do this is to put the knife across the line you want to cut and lean on it heavily - as I say, works better if the weather is warmer. You could cheat like hell here and use commercial chocolate chips, but I don't like the grade of chocolate they use. Feel free to ignore my chocolate snobbery. Your delicate bar-hackery process should end up with a whole bunch of semi-regular chocolate blocks plus a whole bunch of shavings, bits and what have you. Fling the whole lot into the biscuit mix.

Coarsely chop the pecan nuts - I usually aim to cut them approximately in half down the length and in three bits the other way, but this is not an exact science. You want chunks of pecan nut of a pleasing size to bite upon unexpectedly in a cookie. Sling them into the mix.

Mix the mix a bit with a wooden spoon to make sure everything is more or less distributed. Your texture here should be a sort of sticky-together oatmealy not-quite-batter full of pleasing nutty/choccy chunks, i.e. it's not smooth. It shouldn't be smooth. It can't be smooth. Abandon smoothness all ye who enter here.

Chocolate chips in cookies melt and stick like evil-minded glue demons, so if you have teflon-coated baking sheets I strongly recommend you put down a layer of baking paper, or else the burned chocolate bits will lift the coating off the sheet. Take teaspoonfulls of the mixture and plop onto the paper in rows, leaving a good 5cm between dollops - they spread. I find the biscuits are a bit more regular and morphous (as in, not amorphous) if you very vaguely shape the dollop with your fingers before you drop it, so it's a sort of roughly spheroid thingy. Alternatively, cookie shoggoths are a valid lifestyle choice.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until they are starting to brown. They'll be a bit soft as they come out the oven, but harden and become crispy as they cool. The optimum time to nosh them is about ten minutes after they've emerged from the oven, when the chocolate is still soft but won't actually take the roof off your mouth.

Ways to mess with the recipe: responds well to flavour modulation, e.g. orange zest instead of the ginger, or fresh ginger in addition to the ginger. The original recipe doesn't include nuts and says the chocolate chips are optional, but they're not, trust me.

Let me know how they turn out!

Fiasco! is my new favourite roleplaying experience. I'm addicted. I spent most of Sunday being the fake-twin bubblegum-pop-fake-hard-rock lead singer to Jo's version of my fake twin sister (she was the emo one, I was the poppy one, we had catfights and no brain worth mentioning and did drugs and drummers in equal quantities). Our rock band was called Unicorn Bloodsports. The final song in the stadium performance featured a live bear and fireworks. Highjinks were going to ensue even before the crazy mixups with the extra gunpowder, the PCP, swapping the mostly trained bear for the mostly untrained bear, the bit where our tame reporter punched the guy from Rolling Stone, and the convoluted insurance scam with the secret abortion and the fake bear attack. It was a complete fiasco, and deeply satisfying on a rather cinematic narrative level.

I am going to try and do Fiasco! sessions at approximately two-weekly intervals until further notice, let me know if you want to be on the mailing list for the "I want to play this Saturday/Sunday, first sign-ups get the places" mails.

Fiasco! is completely necessary to distract me from the horrible patchwork quilt of training, meetings, training for meetings, board schedule checking, student angst and orientation planning which makes up the end of the year. This is my second ten-hour day without a break. Thank the involved and arbitrary gods of bureaucracy, it calms down after the final, giant, culminatory meeting tomorrow. The Dean is saying nice things about my work for the year, but I still feel I haven't beaten this giant, tottering system into anything like the clockwork efficiency demanded by my inner jackbooted fascist, and it annoys me.

Now I am going to go home and play mindless computer games in a spirit of "aargh I have no brain". And probably eat ice-cream for supper, because I've earned it. Dammit.

Ooh, interesting, another phishing spam mutation. I'm receiving increased amounts of spam at my work address at the moment, which is mildly annoying as you'd think my Cherished Institution would be more alert on the spam filter front (although, to be fair, it's a particularly long, nasty and ragged front). A lot of them are from "Standard Bank", plaintively requiring me to log onto my bank account to change details/because it's expired/because they've updated the login software, whatever. Not badly written, as spam goes, and only almost completely implausible, not least because I don't actually have a Standard Bank account. Today's one was different:

Due to the recent Malware and Phishing attacks encountered by our customers, Standard Bank has made it mandatory to all Customers to download the Rapport Software that will help fight against it. Our system shows that you haven't downloaded the latest version of this software that was introduced on 03-09-2010. It's your responsibility to protect your account by installing this new patch as a precautionary measure. If you do not log on to download this software now, Standard bank will not be liable for any theft that may occur on your account.

Click here [links to kntfab.com/standardbank-security/index.php] to download the Rapport software immediately.

This is interesting because it's surprisingly free of grammatical errors - bonus points for the correct use of "it's", although the Random Eighteenth-century Capitalisations are a bit of a red flag. Mostly, though, I'm impressed by its self-referentiality: it rather neatly attempts to stampede the naive reader into succumbing to a phishing scam by semi-plausibly representing its phishing scam as a protection from phishing scams. A horrible circularity results: save yourself from malware by downloading this handy piece of malware! Further fear factor arises in the refusal of indemnity for phishing if you don't. In linguistic terms "patch" is good, people are lulled into thinking of patches as necessary and inevitable owing to the hideous Windows tendency to spray them out like Cape Town's pollen. I actually think this one might get people, even in this more virus-aware age: I still remember the number of innocent campus denizens who were taken in by the Windows SULFNBK.EXE hoax (delete it! it's a virus!) in the early 2000s. Even worse, Phishing Spammers May Be Acquiring A Clue. News at 11!

It's all particularly horribly relevant at the moment because smoczek is running a Paranoia game, and we're bumbling manically and paranoidly around trying to unravel a convoluted plot involving spammers, hideous revenge against same, and virus-infected scrub bots killing people. I'd forgotten how much fun Paranoia can be. And how horrible the puns.

I started playing D&D in my first year of university, which was not a good year: I was very shy, very introverted, horribly homesick, and pathologically incapable of striking up new friendships owing to all of the above. I was dragged off to a regular D&D game by the first-year med student who lived across the road from my aunt, and acquiesced, I suspect, mostly because I couldn't think up a plausible reason to refuse. The group was the usual crew of cheerful eccentrics who took happily for granted my inclusion in the game, and assisted me to roll up the usual designated starter cliché, a half-elven ranger who was almost killed by ghouls in a graveyard in her first combat. (I think I date my ongoing roleplaying fondness for staying at the back of the group with arrows and/or magic from this rather vividly-remembered moment). The game was DMed by an Honours student in theoretical physics, on whom I developed a minor crush, and who is probably responsible for infecting me with my predilection for Earl Grey, which I still associate with those sessions. The group played absolutely standard AD&D, hacking our way through several levels of the Temple of Elemental Evil during that first year I played: it was rote, standard, unexamined adherence to the tropes, and I loved it unconditionally.

From there, of course, the rest is history: contact with the motley hordes of CLAW and their far more wide-ranging and exploratory take on roleplaying in my second year, and very quick eradication of the shyness in the face of the completely mind-bending experience of being one of approximately two and a half girls in an otherwise all-male role-playing group. I'm not really sure if it was the confidence boost of this, or the powerful shields afforded by a role-playing persona, which kick-started the transformation from pastel schoolgirl mouse into something more in possession of a personality. But it wouldn't have been possible without that year of exposure to AD&D in its most standard form; that first game was lame and grotty and, in an odd sort of way, profoundly unimaginative, and it met a need I didn't even know I had.

So it's not really surprising that every now and then I still randomly develop a sudden, deep, alarming desire for something D&Dish. This is difficult to fulfil in this day and age, even with the high concentration of roleplayers in my immediate social circle, as everyone's moved on to other systems, or their own systems, or families and work. (bumpycat's late lamented D&D game was enormously retro fun and I still miss it passionately. Barbarian clerics ftw!). But for the moments when the jones is paramount, there's Munchkin. Munchkin is perfect because it speaks to our juvenile experiences of D&D: it's firmly embedded in the paradigm, the in-jokes¹ and tactical nastinesses and sneaky min-maxing and lame system features. It knows the gazebo joke. But it's also ironic, distanced, self-consciously condemnatory as much as it's affectionate: we are invited, playing Munchkin, to celebrate both our unsophisticated enjoyment of a dungeon hack, and our graduation to something better.

By the end of last night's game I had a surprisingly coherent character: a dwarven cleric with a Talking Horse, Leather Armour (picture: busty brunette in skimpy corset and thigh-high boots), Pantyhose of Giant Strength, and Broad Sword (usable only by female players). Munchkin is a profoundly nostalgic pleasure if only because there aren't many women who enjoy playing it in our crowd (me and smoczek, and she's still in Madagascar), and you can trade shamelessly to end up with all the items useable only by females and thus useless to the rest of the group without a quick sex change. It's quite like old times. The session took over four hours and ended with all five players on 9 hit points, needing just one combat to win, and staving off the inevitable victory for a random one of us for three rounds by serially preventing, in a desperate, marginal and happenstance way depending on the fall of cards, our opponents' success in combat. I didn't win, alas, as the bastard elves ganged up to use their sneaky helping-someone-else-to-win-a-combat bonus, causing game end in a tie, but it was bloody good fun and completely worth staggering off to bed somewhere around midnight. I'm just sad I didn't get a chance to use my Kneepads of Allure.

---

¹ They have a Level One Potted Plant as a monster! I recall affectionately the early days of CLAWs, when one of the in-jokes was the Party Potplant ("DM! DM! I rustle my leaves!"). And a Large Angry Chicken! Do you remember the ongoing gag about the Rolemaster sheep?

Perfect birthday! wake up to bucketing rain and high winds, lie in bed enjoying it without having to dash off to work. When maxbarners arrives, tragically without smoczek because her work is being evil, hijack his plan to go out for a birthday breakfast and instead use him as an excuse to make waffles. With chocolate ice cream, because that's all that was in the house. Consume vast and unlikely quantities of same.

Read multitudinous birthday messages on Twitter and Facebook and email, being touched and surprised that so many people remembered. Realise that both Facebook and LJ send out reminders if you tell them your birthday, which I apparently did. Be touched and happy anyway.

Spend the afternoon in a warm kitchen with cats and tea and loud rock music, cooking enormous meals and chocolate cake for my favourite group of role-playing lunatics this evening. Why, yes, role-playing is my idea of a perfect way to spend a birthday evening. Why, yes, I am an enormous geek.

That Dreaded Age has apparently found me still firmly in the Cooking Huge Meals For Friends camp, to which I say, damn straight. It's also given me a bit of a warning about doddering dillyness, being as how I accidentally left my wallet on the counter in the liquor store this afternoon, necessitating one of those embarassing groping sessions at the Woolies checkout, immediately followed by fleeing the store without paying. On the upside, the Cosmic Wossnames dictate that I wasn't actually pickpocketed, and didn't drop the wretched thing in the street, and that the liquor store clerk returned it to me with the minimum of mockery, so I think we're ahead.

My subconscious seems to be firmly convinced that this is just another birthday and I'm really no more than a day older now than I was yesterday, so I seem refreshingly free of Milestone Angst. Thanks to everyone for wishes, will reply individually, eventually, but for now know that there's a Warm Glow that's not entirely about the Earl Grey. Also, looking forward to seeing a pleasing proportion of you on Saturday.

Gosh, look, another day in which I have to retreat into Red Bull as a viable alternative to curling up in a corner and whimpering until it all goes away. I have just wasted 20 minutes of my time trying to patiently talk the twitchy parent of an excluded student through finding the relevant appeal forms on my Cherished Institution's website. Said website uses funky drop-down menus which randomly and unreliably futz out at intervals, depending on your browser, traffic levels, the phase of the moon, wibbles in the space-time continuum or the flapping of Cory Doctorow's cloak. There are no actual linkage alternatives to the drop-down menus, a gesture of confidence I cannot help but feel is sadly misplaced. Said parent was unable to take my dictation into the location bar owing, I suspect, to basic absence of internet-grokkage. After twenty minutes with one eye on the patiently-waiting student in my office and the other three queuing outside my door, I told him to wait for the bloody letter with the form in it. (Only more politely).

I am now Red Bullish and bouncing off the walls. *bounce*. This bodes slightly better for Jo's game this evening, there being a good chance I would otherwise have spent it curled up in a corner and whimpering until it all went away. Since we're currently fleeing the epic and apocalyptic rising of the stupendously powerful alien race whose balanced truce with our own gods we have just dismally failed to protect from sabotage, cowering and whimpering may actually have been the appropriate mode of response, but I can't help feeling the Red Bullishness may be more practical. Or, at the very least, allow us to run faster. Why does this suddenly feel like a CoC campaign? Iä! Iä!

In between bouncing off the walls I console myself with Random Linkery. MightyGodKing is entertainingly rude about pulp sf/fantasy, particularly Twilight (the last one in Part 2).

Jo's game is The Fun, but I swear our roleplaying group is the most dysfunctional, incoherent bunch of wild individualists with whom I have ever had the (mostly) pleasure of playing. I mean, we make my Falkenstein group look like a well-oiled machine. If an action is worth taking, it's worth taking after two and a half hours of argument, false starts, lone and eccentric forays wholly without consultation, and wildly inappropriate planning which we will subsequently abandon completely in favour of reacting on the fly. I honestly don't know how we've got this far. If our planning skills are any indication we should long since have ended up painted blue and buried alive in a lead-lined box full of rabid gnats.

So, last night's game (a short session owing to my state of lurgy) was distinguished by the need to rescue a party comrade from a small island in the middle of a lake in the middle of a zoo in the middle of a highly over-regimented squeaky-clean Big Brother city. This bloody city cripples us: we can't use any of our (considerable) magical abilities without being detected, squashed, sat upon and neutralised by several scores of Official Wizards who then drug us and ship us off to the mad prince in the crazy south where we Do Not Wish To Go.

librsa's character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by means of forty metres of rope ladder constructed from the disassembled fragments of three stepladders, which he's subsequently packed into a barrel which is too large for him to carry alone, and none of us will help because we think it's a silly plan. After considerable argument while we sneak through the sleeping streets he has to stash the Suspicious Bloody Great Barrel in an alley somewhere before the unnaturally polite city police start asking inconvenient questions. Despite all this we arrive at the zoo undetected and break in using the one teeny bit of magic ability this bloody city doesn't detect, and which we're all crap at, and make our way to said island.

khoi_boi's character, the notorious Snow Owl, is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by draining the lake. There is no evidence that there is, in fact, a way of draining the lake, but he's adamant there must be a giant plug somewhere, detectable by swimming. The lake is murky and disgusting. We persuade him, after much argument, that draining the lake is unfeasible and if he must swim, rather swim out to the island with a rope so we can construct a rope bridge. He does so, arriving bleeding and exhausted as it transpires that the lake is filled with carnivorous fish who make a spirited attempt to remove his leg while he swims. The person we are trying to rescue declines to go back across the rope bridge, being pathologically afraid of water. Rescuee and bleeding rescuer remain on the island, arguing.

Jean's character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by using a carriage as a boat. Hearing a carriage clatter through the zoo, she dashes after it, critically fails her sneak check, and falls into a pit which turns out to contain an angry gorilla and his two wives. After a brief, painful interlude she has two cracked ribs, considerable bruising and a dead gorilla. The two female gorillas steal two-thirds of her rope, which is the only rope left after Snow Owl's island swimming adventure. She is subsequently too exhausted to throw the remnants of the rope up for rescue by librsa's character, who has arrived late to the party as a result of fumbling his attempt to hear where she'd gone, and starting off in the opposite direction at speed. She is eventually extracted with difficulty from the pit, and returns to the lake shore to recover within recrimination distance of the bleeding Snow Owl. By popular consent, a natural 20 (critical fumble in this system) is henceforth dubbed an "angry gorilla".

My character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by improvising a raft out of materials at hand. She spends most of the session sneaking around the zoo and discovering that there are no materials at hand.

As the curtain falls on this sorry episode, my character and librsa's are planning an assault on a food storage shed with his handy pickaxe, for purposes of stealing four barrels and the door to construct a raft with. In the intervening week before we play again, each member of the group will infallibly concoct a plan which we will then argue about for two hours before doing something completely different which has far more potential for going entertainingly wrong.

I love this game. Probably not as much as the sadistic DM does, though.