Slightly Earlier Sunday Update
May. 1st, 2022 11:30 pmYeah, managed to keep the schedule slip better under control tonight -- though it helped that Jon's video was a one-off, and I didn't have a lot going on at Valice Multiverse afterwards. Also helped that we had less house reno nonsense happening today (my parents are finishing up the hallway tomorrow, having chosen to do some garden stuff today as it was nice). So I had a nice, productive Sunday:
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – wrote this up after beanbags. Victor and Piper spent most of their day just creeping around the city trying to avoid running into Gunners (which is better than poor Victor did in the actual play session, as you’ll see below) – though they did end up having a nice night hanging out together in the South Boston Police Station, swapping stories about their lives. :) So that’s something! Also, decided that D.B. Technical High School is Victor’s old high school, because – hell, why not? He had to go SOMEWHERE, and it fits with him being a more techy sort in this universe. Though I’ll have to double-check whatever lore you can find in there about what was going on with the students – is that the one where the kids were taking Mentats, and one ended up blackmailing the principal, or was that another school? Hmm. . .
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's Fallout Sunday video: Check – one bonus, one Subs, one Jon –
A) Actually started with a video from my Recommendeds – “Sponsored Roller Coasters & Rides - A Look Back,” by Theme Park Crazy. Why was I interested in this video?
The sponsorship of Oblivion in Alton Towers by the Fanta brand of sodas. I’ve heard about this, and I was wondering what it looked like – obnoxious, basically. They plastered the whole ride with those ads, to the point where Towers Times, one of the fansites, sent a petition to the CEO of Merlin asking him to tone it down. To my shock, this actually resulted in the CEO going to see what was happening and agreeing with the fans, and now the ads aren’t there anymore (or, at least, they’re not directly on the ride). There was also a lot of discussion about other sponsored rides, namely Disney’s corporate partners over the years (did you know that one of the earliest sponsored attractions was a LINGERIE company on main street? Complete with a history of women’s underwear exhibit, featuring the Wonderful Wizard of Bras?) and Six Flags’s love of sponsorship, to the point of doing wrap-around ads on their coasters. There’s also a Pepsi-sponsored coaster in Blackpool with a soda-can tunnel! It was pretty interesting stuff, not gonna lie. Though it did kind of make me want a Kit-Kat when they showed off that sponsored coaster. XD
B) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! Featuring another bottle flip with the ability to die, become a bottle, and possibly even win (and, if you’re Gray, find a way to stand a bottle or three on the circular “ledge” declaring he will find a way); a pogo “harpoon dodge” with multiple wins (two requiring Gray to pogo for ages before either dropping onto a win or being yeeted into a coin and spikes; the third requiring him to survive having various NPCs shot at him at fifty million miles per hour); a simple board where Nixon used one stick figure to kill four others before going to bed; a simple turquoise rope swing where Gray had to make it through a yeety thumbnail hole and grab the conveyor belt WITHOUT being dragged into the rotating spikes of doom (took a couple of tries, but he did it); a simple grayscale spike fall with both a secret win and a regular win (one resulted in Gray getting lightly minced, but it still counted); a beautiful grassy obstacle course where easy was carefully navigating over the spinning vegan Doritos without getting spiked in the head, medium was avoiding harpoons up the butt, and hard was doing a VERTICAL CLIMB BOTTLE RUN (and that was AFTER having to avoid being land-mined into battle axes); the world’s speediest stair run (another one where Gray ended up lightly minced but still alive for the win); a brief trip through space for Nixon (where I guess the goal was just to get into the little tube so you could drop onto the win and not float away into the stars – apparently harder than it looked!); and finally Hobo Guy playing paper toss in an elementary school class (with a special ending if you nailed the teacher in the nuts). As usual, the community is mental and I love it. XD
C) And finally, Jon’s one-off Fallout video for this Sunday: “Fallout 4: War of the Commonwealth - Chaotic Good!” “War Of The Commonwealth” is a mod for FO4 that allows you to configure spawns and spawn points for enemies and allies in the game – you can set it to have a few more tough enemies hanging around, or spawn a few more friendly faction patrols if you need it. Basically, it allows you to configure how easy or hard you find wandering around the Commonwealth.
Jon set everything to absolute maximum and made a brand new character, Oh No Run, to take through the Commonwealth. His chosen goal? Basically cross the map – go from Vault 111 to the Warwick Homestead. He could sneak around fights at his leisure, but Oh No was not allowed to take to the water and just swim there at any point – she had to travel by land.
You know a video’s going to be chaotic when the Vault Doors open above John’s character, allowing her to rise into the shining possibility of a new day – to hear a super mutant roar “TIME TO DIE!” XD Yeah, first death was within the first couple of minutes of the video. Fortunately, Jon was able to get past the mobs the second time around and make it to Sanctuary, which was spared any nastiness – and even more fortunately, he was able to find some frag grenades, some Military Fatigues, and a Sea Captain Hat there to boost up her already-high Endurance (along with the “You’re SPECIAL” book). From there, it was basically “Jon hits a number of notable Commonwealth landmarks and ends up leaving the NPCs there to suffer notably.” Except maybe Dogmeat, though I don’t know how many raiders she killed between Sanctuary and the Red Rocket before leaving him there. But Preston Garvey? Well, Oh No DID kill most of the vanilla raiders in Concord, but I’m pretty sure most of the Rust Devils who spawned in there were still out there – and I KNOW she left him to deal with an absolute fuck-ton of ghouls. Paladin Danse? Oh No used the secret coward’s spot at the Cambridge Police Station to take care of the ghouls, but then left him to run to ArcJet on his own through dozens of deadly robots while she went in an entirely different direction. Piper and the guards at Diamond City? Oh No took advantage of the fact that Piper getting hurt will auto-trigger the gate to open (interesting – maybe Danny panics and thinks he can’t actually leave her out there to die?) to hide inside the security office and lend an occasional, very pathetic hand with her 10mm while pretty much all of Diamond City Security died. And then took advantage of the chaos outside to loot the bodies and get a nice Railroad Armored Coat and a Railway Rifle with spikes. Traveling merchant Cricket? Oh No was only too happy to let her take the heat from various enemy spawns. The Atom Cats in their garage? Oh No led a ton of Mirelurks to them, then cut and run as it became obvious they were all dying to the monsters – though in THIS case, she actually ended up suffering some very weird karma, as she escaped the garage –
With 0 hit points. Yeah, the game can’t show fractions, so she was essentially a dead woman walking. Jon had to navigate the final strip of land to the Warwick Homestead a hair away from death, with no stimpacks. Between roving packs of mirelurks, raiders, and feral ghouls. All with Oh No’s heartbeat pounding in her ears. It took two attempts, but he did in fact make it in the end. Having died at least four times in total, and never really getting above level 7. XD Whew! You have not lived until you’ve seen the Commonwealth light up with sentry bots shooting raiders shooting ghouls clawing at bugs, let me tell you. It was a nightmare and it makes me glad my FO4 game is pretty damn normal. XD (Certainly puts my attempts to get past that one Gunner Gutsy today in perspective!)
3. Play Fallout 4 and continue on with Piper: Check, although I should admit the theme of today’s session was kind of “Victor gets lost and gets killed by Gunners.” ^^; My INTENT was to get Victor and Piper on the road that would lead to Goodneighbor, even if I didn’t want to go immediately there (according to my rough fanfic timeline, they’ve got to hit the New Statehouse first so they can find Alice). However, GETTING there was a bit of a problem. I started by having them sneak down some side streets, following the map to the big road that apparently led to Goodneighbor, which led to Victor finding the Medical Center Metro building and an empty Pulowski Shelter – and, when he took a few more steps forward, a bunch of Gunners, including a Mr. Gutsy that just WRECKED poor Victor. Okay, so I reloaded, tagged the building, and then went to the RIGHT instead. This took the pair by the side of D.B. Technical High School. They snuck into the basketball court, took care of the turret and the trap in there, picked up some loot – but there was no way OUT of the little court, and the only door into the high school itself was locked behind an Expert lock – Victor can’t pick those yet. On the plus side, organizing the goodies they picked up reminded me to put Victor back in his Minutemen Outfit again for those bonuses. So I turned around and had them head slightly left, which led them to a little plaza occupied by a ghoul named Slim – a chems dealer, it turned out. Victor took his purified water and ammo and sold him a few of the drugs he’d picked up in return. Then he and Piper went to leave, taking the left road again –
Same damn Gunner Gutsy, same damn Victor death. *grumbles* Okay, fortunately I’d saved right before talking to Slim, so Victor just repeated the interaction and then he and Piper went RIGHT after taking a few things from the dumpsters and whatnot around (not marked as stealing, so. . .). That led them by the highway, with some raiders overlooking it – Victor was able to grab some goodies from a toolbox in the back of an old truck, and from the corpse of a man who was living under the crisscrossing highways. I took a moment there to reorient myself –
And discover I was sending Victor and Piper back toward Layton Towers, aka in a loop. So I had them turn the other way and proceed up the busted highway for a while (Victor popping a Rad-X to get around a radioactive bus). They got off the highway around the onramp to the elevated portions (which should be major Gunner territory), and Piper immediately took offense to some garbage squirrels, leading to a brief but merry chase. XD This fortunately also took us away from the Gunners, who were fighting someone else now – Victor and Piper continued on a side street until they found South Boston Military Checkpoint, then – upon finding another Gunner sleeping in a nearby truck – turned left and proceeded past Andrew Station, to a house right next to South Boston Police Station (close enough to tag the location, in fact). After a brief radstorm (forcing Victor to pop more Rad-X), Victor hopped the fence and found the door to the station, wherein followed much looting of items, reading the terminal Victor could get into (apparently some guy was running around as Grognak before the apocalypse even started XD), getting attacked by two dogs when they tried to go upstairs, more looting, finding a creepy mannequin standing over a gun, cracking the Protectron terminal just for the XP, finding Winter Holotape #7 (about the death of Safety Inspector Alice Lansky, and how the mob is not really good at funding public works projects), and finally me setting up the portable workbench so Victor could scrap a bunch of junk, finally get pockets on the nice combat armor left leg he’d picked up to keep his carry capacity high, and improve his sniper rifle a little bit before heading downstairs to sleep over in the station. Also, his port-a-potty got kicked under the interrogation room table briefly, but fortunately I was able to knock it back free and upright with a radroach corpse. It’s the little things! XD Left it off with him and Piper back outside and ready to keep wandering around together. Adventure ho! Maybe next time we’ll find the statehouse.
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – got an early start on this last night for Victor Luvs Alice, with getting the pictures ready for the Smiler Chill Save update (three posts worth this time), then discovering the Wyrd Sisters Podcast tumblr had posted both episodes 37 (Unseen Academicals) and 38 (I Shall Wear Midnight) on their blog, so I could add those to my drafts for the next couple of Saturdays, yay. :) Then, before lunch today, I got the Chill Save posts all sorted, so that’s Wednesday good! And just two ask replies over on Valice Multiverse tonight, so that’s all set too, yaaay.
5. Get in a workout: Check! Look at me, getting on the bike on a Sunday. . .anyway, today was the start of the next Oxventure Stream, “Elf Hazard!” This picked up with the gang still in Barrowmere, recovering from the weirdness of some rich guy kidnapping them so they could be hunted, and then the chaos of Dob’s friend Robin’s daughter’s wedding. Their chosen method of recovery was to hit up the tavern for its bottomless brunch for beer and a variety of mimosas of good, neutral, and evil varieties (the evil one is full of screaming tar!). While Egbert decided to try out his new spell “Find Steed” and sat for ten minutes with his eyes closed concentrating on summoning said steed to this realm of existence, the rest of the gang was rather distracted by the sight of a giant tortoise SLOOOOWLY coming up to their table and delivering a scroll on fine silvery birch parchment. Upon finding it was in Elvish, Corazon was ready to fling it away, but Merilwen managed to grab it and – lo and behold, it was for her! Seems that her very belated naming ceremony invitation (penned by her cousin Adarel, formerly Lily) had finally arrived! She had – very mixed feelings about this, which only became more mixed as Egbert finished summoning his giant mastiff steed, Dogbert (who proceeded to try and bite the tortoise) and Corazon, seeing everyone was now interested in the parchment, grabbed it back and used “Comprehend Languages” on it to read it to everyone. XD After some confusion, Merilwen managed to explain that the naming ceremony was sort of a thing for an elf when they reached 100 years old and became an official adult – then had to clarify that hers was late (probably due to being delivered by tortoise) when the others started trying to take her alcohol away (“I was 99 when I started adventuring with you!”) Apparently when they reach official Elf Adulthood, they receive a new name, either self-chosen or picked by their families. The others were only too happy to start coming up with new names for her (Corazon openly saying he didn’t like “Merilwen” and that getting a new name worked out great for HIM – remember, his birth name is Percival Milquetoast), but Merilwen protested that she LIKES her name, and pointed out Adarel’s new name as an example of the kind of bullshit she could be stuck with (Egbert agreed that that wasn’t great, saying it sounded like a headache medication). No matter what, though, she kind of had to attend, and the invite gave her a potential +6, so all her friends, plus Seal Gaiman and Dogbert, could come along. Though she did warn them that her family could be a little snobbish and suggested the gang try to “kill them with kindness.” (Obviously there was some confusion about if they should just plain "kill" them.) Dob agreed to wash his clothes before going as a present to her, while Prudence promised to bring alcohol (the bartender – voiced hilariously with a Dracula accent by Johnny – even giving her the leftover “evil” because they couldn’t shift it otherwise) and Corazon pretended to get all his mocking imitations of elves out of the way early (nobody bought that he was getting them ALL out of his system).
And so the group made the journey to the Old Thicket, which Johnny explicitly had them “fast travel” to via elfish magic and Dogbert because otherwise they would have been in “journey montage” mode for ages. The Old Thicket was a truly lovely place, though the others kind of went a little overboard on praising it – overboard here meaning “they started being a little mocking about the taste of the morning dew on the leaves.” XD Dob Prestidigitated up some fancy hair jewelry for the team (except Egbert, who got a nose ring as he has no hair), and Corazon started making up a song about the woods. To Merilwen’s annoyance, he did well enough that the local pixies and squirrels started admiring his beautiful voice. XD They continued on until they came to a nice clearing, with a shimmering silver lake in the middle. Dob happily went and stuck his feet in, getting an instant joyful buzz from the water.
Everyone else, having done WELL on their wisdom/perception checks, noticed that the place was surrounded by dryads – Corazon in particular, having rolled a nat 20, seeing that a bunch of them in the higher trees were reaching for bows to point at Dob. They got Dob to remove his feet from the pool (Dob, in fact, went whole hog and turned them invisible to try and pretend they’d never been in there), and another dryad waved him away from the water, fortunately causing those ready to shoot to relax. I’ve left it off with Merilwen going to try and talk to them (as she doesn’t remember this from her time living in the Old Thicket) – this is gonna be interesting, I’m sure! And I’m looking forward to figuring out what baggage she might have with her family, as she seemed – iffy about seeing her parents again. (Though, to be fair, that might just be because she has to figure out how to introduce THIS lot to them. XD)
Additionally:
-->More than nice enough to play beanbags today – and while Dad dominated the game, I managed to pull out a couple of close wins (especially on the third game, which saw us all REALLY close straight up to the end). End scores were me 2-2-W-3-W; Dad W-W-2-W-2; Mom 3-3-3-2-3. Yeaaaah, not a great day for Mom – we’ll see if she does better tomorrow (or whenever the next time we play is!)
Not bad, not bad at all. :) And now it's time to head to bed because it's back to work tomorrow, meh. Ah well. . .at least I also have starting "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" to look forward to as well? Hopefully it doesn't give me much trouble at the start. . .night all!
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – wrote this up after beanbags. Victor and Piper spent most of their day just creeping around the city trying to avoid running into Gunners (which is better than poor Victor did in the actual play session, as you’ll see below) – though they did end up having a nice night hanging out together in the South Boston Police Station, swapping stories about their lives. :) So that’s something! Also, decided that D.B. Technical High School is Victor’s old high school, because – hell, why not? He had to go SOMEWHERE, and it fits with him being a more techy sort in this universe. Though I’ll have to double-check whatever lore you can find in there about what was going on with the students – is that the one where the kids were taking Mentats, and one ended up blackmailing the principal, or was that another school? Hmm. . .
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's Fallout Sunday video: Check – one bonus, one Subs, one Jon –
A) Actually started with a video from my Recommendeds – “Sponsored Roller Coasters & Rides - A Look Back,” by Theme Park Crazy. Why was I interested in this video?
The sponsorship of Oblivion in Alton Towers by the Fanta brand of sodas. I’ve heard about this, and I was wondering what it looked like – obnoxious, basically. They plastered the whole ride with those ads, to the point where Towers Times, one of the fansites, sent a petition to the CEO of Merlin asking him to tone it down. To my shock, this actually resulted in the CEO going to see what was happening and agreeing with the fans, and now the ads aren’t there anymore (or, at least, they’re not directly on the ride). There was also a lot of discussion about other sponsored rides, namely Disney’s corporate partners over the years (did you know that one of the earliest sponsored attractions was a LINGERIE company on main street? Complete with a history of women’s underwear exhibit, featuring the Wonderful Wizard of Bras?) and Six Flags’s love of sponsorship, to the point of doing wrap-around ads on their coasters. There’s also a Pepsi-sponsored coaster in Blackpool with a soda-can tunnel! It was pretty interesting stuff, not gonna lie. Though it did kind of make me want a Kit-Kat when they showed off that sponsored coaster. XD
B) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! Featuring another bottle flip with the ability to die, become a bottle, and possibly even win (and, if you’re Gray, find a way to stand a bottle or three on the circular “ledge” declaring he will find a way); a pogo “harpoon dodge” with multiple wins (two requiring Gray to pogo for ages before either dropping onto a win or being yeeted into a coin and spikes; the third requiring him to survive having various NPCs shot at him at fifty million miles per hour); a simple board where Nixon used one stick figure to kill four others before going to bed; a simple turquoise rope swing where Gray had to make it through a yeety thumbnail hole and grab the conveyor belt WITHOUT being dragged into the rotating spikes of doom (took a couple of tries, but he did it); a simple grayscale spike fall with both a secret win and a regular win (one resulted in Gray getting lightly minced, but it still counted); a beautiful grassy obstacle course where easy was carefully navigating over the spinning vegan Doritos without getting spiked in the head, medium was avoiding harpoons up the butt, and hard was doing a VERTICAL CLIMB BOTTLE RUN (and that was AFTER having to avoid being land-mined into battle axes); the world’s speediest stair run (another one where Gray ended up lightly minced but still alive for the win); a brief trip through space for Nixon (where I guess the goal was just to get into the little tube so you could drop onto the win and not float away into the stars – apparently harder than it looked!); and finally Hobo Guy playing paper toss in an elementary school class (with a special ending if you nailed the teacher in the nuts). As usual, the community is mental and I love it. XD
C) And finally, Jon’s one-off Fallout video for this Sunday: “Fallout 4: War of the Commonwealth - Chaotic Good!” “War Of The Commonwealth” is a mod for FO4 that allows you to configure spawns and spawn points for enemies and allies in the game – you can set it to have a few more tough enemies hanging around, or spawn a few more friendly faction patrols if you need it. Basically, it allows you to configure how easy or hard you find wandering around the Commonwealth.
Jon set everything to absolute maximum and made a brand new character, Oh No Run, to take through the Commonwealth. His chosen goal? Basically cross the map – go from Vault 111 to the Warwick Homestead. He could sneak around fights at his leisure, but Oh No was not allowed to take to the water and just swim there at any point – she had to travel by land.
You know a video’s going to be chaotic when the Vault Doors open above John’s character, allowing her to rise into the shining possibility of a new day – to hear a super mutant roar “TIME TO DIE!” XD Yeah, first death was within the first couple of minutes of the video. Fortunately, Jon was able to get past the mobs the second time around and make it to Sanctuary, which was spared any nastiness – and even more fortunately, he was able to find some frag grenades, some Military Fatigues, and a Sea Captain Hat there to boost up her already-high Endurance (along with the “You’re SPECIAL” book). From there, it was basically “Jon hits a number of notable Commonwealth landmarks and ends up leaving the NPCs there to suffer notably.” Except maybe Dogmeat, though I don’t know how many raiders she killed between Sanctuary and the Red Rocket before leaving him there. But Preston Garvey? Well, Oh No DID kill most of the vanilla raiders in Concord, but I’m pretty sure most of the Rust Devils who spawned in there were still out there – and I KNOW she left him to deal with an absolute fuck-ton of ghouls. Paladin Danse? Oh No used the secret coward’s spot at the Cambridge Police Station to take care of the ghouls, but then left him to run to ArcJet on his own through dozens of deadly robots while she went in an entirely different direction. Piper and the guards at Diamond City? Oh No took advantage of the fact that Piper getting hurt will auto-trigger the gate to open (interesting – maybe Danny panics and thinks he can’t actually leave her out there to die?) to hide inside the security office and lend an occasional, very pathetic hand with her 10mm while pretty much all of Diamond City Security died. And then took advantage of the chaos outside to loot the bodies and get a nice Railroad Armored Coat and a Railway Rifle with spikes. Traveling merchant Cricket? Oh No was only too happy to let her take the heat from various enemy spawns. The Atom Cats in their garage? Oh No led a ton of Mirelurks to them, then cut and run as it became obvious they were all dying to the monsters – though in THIS case, she actually ended up suffering some very weird karma, as she escaped the garage –
With 0 hit points. Yeah, the game can’t show fractions, so she was essentially a dead woman walking. Jon had to navigate the final strip of land to the Warwick Homestead a hair away from death, with no stimpacks. Between roving packs of mirelurks, raiders, and feral ghouls. All with Oh No’s heartbeat pounding in her ears. It took two attempts, but he did in fact make it in the end. Having died at least four times in total, and never really getting above level 7. XD Whew! You have not lived until you’ve seen the Commonwealth light up with sentry bots shooting raiders shooting ghouls clawing at bugs, let me tell you. It was a nightmare and it makes me glad my FO4 game is pretty damn normal. XD (Certainly puts my attempts to get past that one Gunner Gutsy today in perspective!)
3. Play Fallout 4 and continue on with Piper: Check, although I should admit the theme of today’s session was kind of “Victor gets lost and gets killed by Gunners.” ^^; My INTENT was to get Victor and Piper on the road that would lead to Goodneighbor, even if I didn’t want to go immediately there (according to my rough fanfic timeline, they’ve got to hit the New Statehouse first so they can find Alice). However, GETTING there was a bit of a problem. I started by having them sneak down some side streets, following the map to the big road that apparently led to Goodneighbor, which led to Victor finding the Medical Center Metro building and an empty Pulowski Shelter – and, when he took a few more steps forward, a bunch of Gunners, including a Mr. Gutsy that just WRECKED poor Victor. Okay, so I reloaded, tagged the building, and then went to the RIGHT instead. This took the pair by the side of D.B. Technical High School. They snuck into the basketball court, took care of the turret and the trap in there, picked up some loot – but there was no way OUT of the little court, and the only door into the high school itself was locked behind an Expert lock – Victor can’t pick those yet. On the plus side, organizing the goodies they picked up reminded me to put Victor back in his Minutemen Outfit again for those bonuses. So I turned around and had them head slightly left, which led them to a little plaza occupied by a ghoul named Slim – a chems dealer, it turned out. Victor took his purified water and ammo and sold him a few of the drugs he’d picked up in return. Then he and Piper went to leave, taking the left road again –
Same damn Gunner Gutsy, same damn Victor death. *grumbles* Okay, fortunately I’d saved right before talking to Slim, so Victor just repeated the interaction and then he and Piper went RIGHT after taking a few things from the dumpsters and whatnot around (not marked as stealing, so. . .). That led them by the highway, with some raiders overlooking it – Victor was able to grab some goodies from a toolbox in the back of an old truck, and from the corpse of a man who was living under the crisscrossing highways. I took a moment there to reorient myself –
And discover I was sending Victor and Piper back toward Layton Towers, aka in a loop. So I had them turn the other way and proceed up the busted highway for a while (Victor popping a Rad-X to get around a radioactive bus). They got off the highway around the onramp to the elevated portions (which should be major Gunner territory), and Piper immediately took offense to some garbage squirrels, leading to a brief but merry chase. XD This fortunately also took us away from the Gunners, who were fighting someone else now – Victor and Piper continued on a side street until they found South Boston Military Checkpoint, then – upon finding another Gunner sleeping in a nearby truck – turned left and proceeded past Andrew Station, to a house right next to South Boston Police Station (close enough to tag the location, in fact). After a brief radstorm (forcing Victor to pop more Rad-X), Victor hopped the fence and found the door to the station, wherein followed much looting of items, reading the terminal Victor could get into (apparently some guy was running around as Grognak before the apocalypse even started XD), getting attacked by two dogs when they tried to go upstairs, more looting, finding a creepy mannequin standing over a gun, cracking the Protectron terminal just for the XP, finding Winter Holotape #7 (about the death of Safety Inspector Alice Lansky, and how the mob is not really good at funding public works projects), and finally me setting up the portable workbench so Victor could scrap a bunch of junk, finally get pockets on the nice combat armor left leg he’d picked up to keep his carry capacity high, and improve his sniper rifle a little bit before heading downstairs to sleep over in the station. Also, his port-a-potty got kicked under the interrogation room table briefly, but fortunately I was able to knock it back free and upright with a radroach corpse. It’s the little things! XD Left it off with him and Piper back outside and ready to keep wandering around together. Adventure ho! Maybe next time we’ll find the statehouse.
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – got an early start on this last night for Victor Luvs Alice, with getting the pictures ready for the Smiler Chill Save update (three posts worth this time), then discovering the Wyrd Sisters Podcast tumblr had posted both episodes 37 (Unseen Academicals) and 38 (I Shall Wear Midnight) on their blog, so I could add those to my drafts for the next couple of Saturdays, yay. :) Then, before lunch today, I got the Chill Save posts all sorted, so that’s Wednesday good! And just two ask replies over on Valice Multiverse tonight, so that’s all set too, yaaay.
5. Get in a workout: Check! Look at me, getting on the bike on a Sunday. . .anyway, today was the start of the next Oxventure Stream, “Elf Hazard!” This picked up with the gang still in Barrowmere, recovering from the weirdness of some rich guy kidnapping them so they could be hunted, and then the chaos of Dob’s friend Robin’s daughter’s wedding. Their chosen method of recovery was to hit up the tavern for its bottomless brunch for beer and a variety of mimosas of good, neutral, and evil varieties (the evil one is full of screaming tar!). While Egbert decided to try out his new spell “Find Steed” and sat for ten minutes with his eyes closed concentrating on summoning said steed to this realm of existence, the rest of the gang was rather distracted by the sight of a giant tortoise SLOOOOWLY coming up to their table and delivering a scroll on fine silvery birch parchment. Upon finding it was in Elvish, Corazon was ready to fling it away, but Merilwen managed to grab it and – lo and behold, it was for her! Seems that her very belated naming ceremony invitation (penned by her cousin Adarel, formerly Lily) had finally arrived! She had – very mixed feelings about this, which only became more mixed as Egbert finished summoning his giant mastiff steed, Dogbert (who proceeded to try and bite the tortoise) and Corazon, seeing everyone was now interested in the parchment, grabbed it back and used “Comprehend Languages” on it to read it to everyone. XD After some confusion, Merilwen managed to explain that the naming ceremony was sort of a thing for an elf when they reached 100 years old and became an official adult – then had to clarify that hers was late (probably due to being delivered by tortoise) when the others started trying to take her alcohol away (“I was 99 when I started adventuring with you!”) Apparently when they reach official Elf Adulthood, they receive a new name, either self-chosen or picked by their families. The others were only too happy to start coming up with new names for her (Corazon openly saying he didn’t like “Merilwen” and that getting a new name worked out great for HIM – remember, his birth name is Percival Milquetoast), but Merilwen protested that she LIKES her name, and pointed out Adarel’s new name as an example of the kind of bullshit she could be stuck with (Egbert agreed that that wasn’t great, saying it sounded like a headache medication). No matter what, though, she kind of had to attend, and the invite gave her a potential +6, so all her friends, plus Seal Gaiman and Dogbert, could come along. Though she did warn them that her family could be a little snobbish and suggested the gang try to “kill them with kindness.” (Obviously there was some confusion about if they should just plain "kill" them.) Dob agreed to wash his clothes before going as a present to her, while Prudence promised to bring alcohol (the bartender – voiced hilariously with a Dracula accent by Johnny – even giving her the leftover “evil” because they couldn’t shift it otherwise) and Corazon pretended to get all his mocking imitations of elves out of the way early (nobody bought that he was getting them ALL out of his system).
And so the group made the journey to the Old Thicket, which Johnny explicitly had them “fast travel” to via elfish magic and Dogbert because otherwise they would have been in “journey montage” mode for ages. The Old Thicket was a truly lovely place, though the others kind of went a little overboard on praising it – overboard here meaning “they started being a little mocking about the taste of the morning dew on the leaves.” XD Dob Prestidigitated up some fancy hair jewelry for the team (except Egbert, who got a nose ring as he has no hair), and Corazon started making up a song about the woods. To Merilwen’s annoyance, he did well enough that the local pixies and squirrels started admiring his beautiful voice. XD They continued on until they came to a nice clearing, with a shimmering silver lake in the middle. Dob happily went and stuck his feet in, getting an instant joyful buzz from the water.
Everyone else, having done WELL on their wisdom/perception checks, noticed that the place was surrounded by dryads – Corazon in particular, having rolled a nat 20, seeing that a bunch of them in the higher trees were reaching for bows to point at Dob. They got Dob to remove his feet from the pool (Dob, in fact, went whole hog and turned them invisible to try and pretend they’d never been in there), and another dryad waved him away from the water, fortunately causing those ready to shoot to relax. I’ve left it off with Merilwen going to try and talk to them (as she doesn’t remember this from her time living in the Old Thicket) – this is gonna be interesting, I’m sure! And I’m looking forward to figuring out what baggage she might have with her family, as she seemed – iffy about seeing her parents again. (Though, to be fair, that might just be because she has to figure out how to introduce THIS lot to them. XD)
Additionally:
-->More than nice enough to play beanbags today – and while Dad dominated the game, I managed to pull out a couple of close wins (especially on the third game, which saw us all REALLY close straight up to the end). End scores were me 2-2-W-3-W; Dad W-W-2-W-2; Mom 3-3-3-2-3. Yeaaaah, not a great day for Mom – we’ll see if she does better tomorrow (or whenever the next time we play is!)
Not bad, not bad at all. :) And now it's time to head to bed because it's back to work tomorrow, meh. Ah well. . .at least I also have starting "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" to look forward to as well? Hopefully it doesn't give me much trouble at the start. . .night all!
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Date: 2022-05-02 10:20 pm (UTC)I started a Gangrel run of VtmB? I mean yeah I did but started and started playing are two different things for me. I did name her Galen though.
I made a haunted house in Sims with a Sim named Icey Dedppl and having her romance Guidry? Yeah but, again, not really important.
Dangit. Oh well. May come to me later or that train of thought derailed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Date: 2022-05-03 03:43 am (UTC)I am pleased to hear you've started a Gangrel run! Gangrel was my very first clan in VTMB, though I actually played as the male model -- dude was named Harry. Fortitude is VERY USEFUL, let me tell you.
*snork* That's fun too. I've been going down some mod rabbit holes with Sims lately and keep wanting to make a new save file so I can have all of them active from the beginning. . .want to at least get Smiler, Victor, and Alice established in their farmhouse first, though!
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Date: 2022-05-04 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-04 03:40 am (UTC)