On Monday, I let my freak flag fly and attended a Shadowrun RPG.

A role playing game, yes! I haven’t played a role-playing game since I was maybe 14 and in Oregon at my grandparent’s house. Let me set the scene for you. Earlier in the day, we went crawdad’ing in the crick. My aunt by marriage’s nephew was there and he threw a crawdad at a tree and bashed its brains out. I decided I hated him. Back at Grandpa’s, me, my cousins John and James and this jerkwad sat around the pool table playing some D&D. Jerkwad kept trying to tie me up with rope in the game. It was a toss up between being flattered or disgusted. I erred on the side of horror. I could still see the poor crawdad. I mean, I can still see the poor thing. This story has hit a low note. Ok, the point is that I last did a RPG many many years ago. I’m not telling you how many. And everyone involved was 16 or younger so we weren’t super great at it. My review of this experience was, “Meh. Gross boys wanting to tie me up. Won’t be doing that again.” But then a couple months ago, Jacob was looking for people to join a game and I thought, “I might not mind some rope burns…”

We spent many hours making characters. More hours than I would have thought possible. At the end of all these hours, I had created an alter-ego. Let me tell you about her! She’s 32, her name is Emmy, and she’s a metahuman Troll Physical Adept. Seven feet tall, +1 reach, dermal body armor, thermographic vision. Let’s be clear here, she KICKS ASS. She’s crazy powerful and I expended a lot of points buying agility and stealth skills so she’s also flexible unlike a normal troll. My backstory is that she grew up in a circus with a famous trapeze artist mother and martial arts father. Best of both worlds.

I had some favorite moments from the first day in the campaign. The first part happened in San Francisco and we were kind of wandering around trying to figure some things out. And mostly just mocking ourselves and each other.

So, favorites quotes from that:

Alfred (Aaron): Do you want to go sailing?

(Alfred lives on a yacht at the yacht club and dresses like a preppie golf aficionado in Burberry. Sailing is now a running joke. Evidence again when I changed our audio aid from the bumping club mix for classical Vivaldi when we moved to the yacht.)

Smoky (Ivan): I don’t think the library is open.

(Mocking Gene’s desire to go use the internet at the public library at midnight because none of us had a smartphone)

Rusty (Gene): This community college is *awesome*.

(A comment directed at Smoky’s awesome dice rolling to achieve internet searches, which, you know, he learned at CC).

Next we were planning an attack:

Scott (Adam): Let’s send our troll thing down.

Me: Thing?!?

Smoky: Watch out. You’ll hurt its feelings.

Me: IT?!?!

We were in a fight where I threw a hick bandit at two other bandits and killed all three of them (and caused two of their heads to explode into fine mist). Aaron had been planning on doing some magic against the foes, instead:

Alfred: I change my action to a slow golf clap.

Gene shoots a 20 foot bear with a loaded cannon.

Me: Would there be treasure in the bear if I ripped it open and searched?

GM (Jacob): You really want loot, don’t you?

Me: Shiny things are my favorite!

Then we got attacked by some half-man, half-ant/centipede things and I jumped off the roof of a building on to one, putting my knee through its back and my fist through it’s skull. I made that bitch my hand-puppet. Suck on that, Pinocchio.

TO BE CONTINUED…